Horwath won’t work with party rivals
NDP leader slammed Wynne’s ‘tone deaf’ plea as election draws near
LONDON, ONT. — In the final days of campaigning, NDP Leader Andrea Horwath says voters need to think about life under a Progressive Conservative government and what its $6 billion in “efficiencies” will mean. She added regardless of Thursday’s outcome, she won’t work with the Liberals or Torys.
“Even Kathleen Wynne is not endorsing Kathleen Wynne anymore,” she quipped, refer- ring to the Liberal leader’s concession on the weekend that her party could not win the June 7 election. “But that does leave people with a very obvious choice to make … and I just want to ask people who have not made up their minds to imagine what Friday might look like with Doug Ford at the helm.
“… This election is just a couple of days away, and it is coming down to the wire,” Horwath said at an early morning visit to the campaign office of London North Centre candidate Terence Kernaghan, a seat the NDP hopes to gain from the Liberals, alongside London West incumbent candidate Peggy Sattler.
Horwath had a busy schedule with five stops in southwestern Ontario on Monday alone.
She said the Progressive Conservative plan, which makes spending and tax cut promises without any details on how they will be paid for, will mean billions in cuts to services.
“That’s not what the people of Ontario need or deserve,” she said. The NDP is promising universal pharmacare, child care and injecting billions into hospitals, among other things, and said it will run a deficit to do so.
Although the PCs have been hammering the NDP for “radical candidates,” on Monday allegations surfaced about another Tory candidate facing a number of fraud-related lawsuits.
“Mr. Ford is going to have to speak for his candidates and what they may or may not have done in their lives before becoming candidates for him,” Horwath told reporters. “Let’s remember then that Mr. Ford has no less than 10 different kinds of investigations ongoing into a number of his candidates, and that’s something I think that troubles most Ontarians.
“Whether it’s police investigations into fraudulent nomination meetings, whether it’s the swirling questions that still ex- ist around the 407 stolen data and which candidates have benefited from it … Mr. Ford has a lot to answer to when it comes to those candidates.”
Horwath said that it must have been difficult for Wynne to admit her party had no chance of winning, but slammed her for appealing to voters to keep an NDP or PC government from getting a majority, saying that would only give Liberals balance of power.
That’s “totally tone deaf to what Ontarians have been telling us,” Horwath said, “which is that they don’t want Kathleen Wynne and the Liberals in power anymore.
She also said that while “Kathleen Wynne has given up the fight against Doug Ford and his cuts … I’m not giving up that fight, I’m going to fight right up until Thursday and hopefully on Friday we’ll be in an Ontario where Doug Ford is no longer a f factor.”