{"id":20024,"date":"2018-03-07T16:12:02","date_gmt":"2018-03-07T21:12:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=20024"},"modified":"2018-03-07T16:12:02","modified_gmt":"2018-03-07T21:12:02","slug":"ontario-facing-most-critical-election-in-its-history-doug-ford","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/ontario-facing-most-critical-election-in-its-history-doug-ford\/","title":{"rendered":"Ontario facing \u201cmost critical election\u201d in its history: Doug Ford"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s not about a leadership race, it\u2019s about the movement.
\nSo contends former Toronto councillor Doug Ford as bids to become the next leader of Ontario\u2019s Progressive Conservative party.
\nAhead of Saturday\u2019s vote tally at a leadership convention, Mr. Ford rallied local supporters Monday night in the riding of Aurora-Oak Ridges-Richmond Hill.
\nHe was joined at the rally by Newmarket-Aurora PC candidate Charity McGrath, who endorsed his leadership bid last week, along with a host of other candidates and dignitaries, including Councillors John Abel and Jeff Thom.
\n\u201cIt is not about the leadership race, it is not about this election, it is a movement,\u201d he told PC members at Oakview Terrace. \u201cAs we have been travelling thousands of miles, driving through the night, visiting towns, I have never seen anything like it.\u201d
\nIt is a movement he contents is attracting members of all parties, and even Ontarians who have never held a party affiliation. But, at the end of the day, he said it is all about a choice.
\n\u201cWe\u2019re either going to elect a Liberal, or we\u2019re going to elect someone who is going to respect the taxpayers, challenge and get rid of the political insiders \u2026and we\u2019re going to make sure we\u2019re putting money back into your pocket instead of the government,\u201d said Mr. Ford, namesake of his late father who served as an MPP in the Harris government. \u201cQueen\u2019s Park is corrupt from top to bottom. We\u2019re going to sanitize Queen\u2019s Park. We\u2019re going to make sure we sanitize our own party as well; the same people who have been controlling the party for 30 years and just itching to get back in there and have the status quo.
\n\u201cThe status quo is unacceptable. To the millions of dollars in contracts, the hundreds of millions of dollars, it\u2019s finished. The sole source deals are done. Kathleen Wynne has absolutely zero respect for the taxpayers.\u201d
\nWith the crowd fired up, Mr. Ford got down to business, first taking aim at Ontario\u2019s debt, which he said Ontarians are racking up $12 billion in interest a year. Wasted money, he said, which would come to an end if he takes the helm of the PCs and steers them to election victory. He said the blueprint to this would be following the same format set by his brother, the late Toronto mayor Rob Ford, when he came into power with himself as a council member.
\n\u201cWe have a very simple theory, no matter if it comes to business or if it comes to politics: I surround myself with a lot smarter people than myself in their area of expertise, whether it is healthcare, education or culture.\u201d
\nHealth care improvements were among the major areas Mr. Ford touched upon Monday night, relaying a story of his time spent in hospital with his ailing brother and seeing shortcomings in the system firsthand. He says Ontario\u2019s healthcare system is \u201cabsolutely broken\u201d despite the Province having \u201cthe greatest doctors in the world.\u201d The same, he said, goes for \u201cnurses, healthcare-givers and frontline workers\u201d but these people are \u201cfrustrated.\u201d
\n\u201cWhat we will do to reduce wait times in hospitals and make sure the system starts moving quicker, we will get more nurses to take over from the EMS to allow them to get back on the road,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen I have travelled and cross-crossed the province and talked to tens of thousands of people, one example that stands out is Peterborough [where] there are 7,000 residents that do not have a general practitioner.\u201d
\nStating he would give doctors incentives to go to Ontario\u2019s more remote areas, he added: \u201cUntil you talk to these people, you don\u2019t realise how desperate they are for healthcare. Whatever it takes to get doctors up there, reducing their taxes, putting in a little medical building for them where people need the help, nothing is more important than our health. Help is on the way, resources are on its way, and most importantly, we\u2019re going to listen to the people.\u201d
\nListening to the people, whether they are doctors, business owners, parents, or just voters in general was a common theme in Monday\u2019s speech.
\nParents, he contended, were not listened to when Ontario developed its current sex-ed curriculum, which Mr. Ford said would be repealed in a PC government and replaced with curriculum he said would be \u201cage appropriate.\u201d
\n\u201cWe will make sure parents are consulted\u2026we\u2019re going to make sure teachers are consulted and the experts are consulted,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re going to make sure teachers are consulted and the experts are consulted. We\u2019re going to make sure it is age appropriate and we\u2019re going to start listening to families. If anyone ever said this in our party a few months ago, even mentioned the word \u2018sex ed\u2019 you were not allowed to run. It is a big, deep secret. I didn\u2019t have to take a focus group or an opinion poll to figure this out.\u201d
\nA path forward for Ontario business was also something he said was perfectly clear.
\nCiting a loss of 300,000 manufacturing jobs, Mr. Ford looked to the recent corporate tax cuts of the Trump administration as a way to bring these jobs back to Ontario.
\nThe carbon tax outlined in the PC\u2019s People\u2019s guarantee is done, and PC government under his leadership would open up the Ring of Fire, and the cap and trade system would be cut, keeping over $450 million in Ontario.
\n\u201cCharities are going to start here in Ontario \u2013 we\u2019re going to take care of the people first before we take care of anyone else,\u201d he said, wondering aloud what would happen if people question potential backlash from the Federal Government. \u201cAs [Justin Trudeau\u2019s] father said, \u2018Just watch us.\u2019 We will first negotiate hard. Secondly, we will go to the Supreme Court because personally we (Alberta Conservative leader Jason Kenney) don\u2019t think it is constitutional to force down our throats the Liberal ideology that we have being seeing throughout the Province\u2026the indoctrination of values a lot of families don\u2019t share. But, we will challenge them. We will win, and we will have the independence to thrive again.\u201d<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s not about a leadership race, it\u2019s about the movement.
\nSo contends former Toronto councillor Doug Ford as bids to become the next leader of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":20025,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/2018-03-08-05.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-5cY","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-04 05:41:59","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20024"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20024\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}