Buy Ontario ‘works’

While it worked for Bombardier, Andrea Horwath says the province’s effort to build in Ontario hasn’t gone far enough.

Horwath toured Thunder Bay’s Bombardier plant Friday morning. With workers busy building for the Toronto Transit Commission, Horwath said the plant is proof that buying in Ontario works.

The NDP wants government to buy Ontario as long as the product is within 10 per cent of the price of non-Canadian goods. This would stretch for everything from street cars to food, Horwath said.

"I think it’s absolutely something that makes a lot of sense," she said.

Reporters were quick to bring up a Liberal news release that accused Horwath of voting against the contracts that got Thunder Bay’s Bombardier plant running again. But she said it was the budgets that were included with the plan that made her vote them down.

The NDP leader mostly used the questions as an opportunity to attack Liberal leader Dalton Mcguinty for mud-slinging rather than coming to Northwestern Ontario next week to debate issues.

“When I vote against government budgets it’s because they’re usually full of a whole bunch of things that I don’t support," Howarth said, standing in front of a new subway car on the Bombardier floor.

Liberal Thunder Bay-Atikokan candidate Bill Mauro said he can’t even imagine what Horwath is trying to do by touring a Liberal success story.

"It’s stunning to me that she would even show up given what we’ve done for the plant and the people there," Mauro said.

"There would have been nothing to fight for if our government didn’t (fund the contracts)."
Mauro, who has said that he fought hard to get the contracts to Thunder Bay, added that before 2003 around 250 people worked at Bombardier.

Today there are more than 1,200. While Horwath said she only voted against the budgets those contracts were in, Mauro said he was there when NDP MPPs spoke against the contracts and the need for a subway extension in Toronto instead of the street car initiatives that gave the local plant the TTC contracts in the first place.

"I heard it," Mauro said. "There’s no cover for them on that one."

The Thunder Bay MPP added that he can’t even believe Horwath can talk about a Buy Ontario policy.

The last time the NDP were in power, they stopped sole-sourcing uranium from Elliot Lake.

"They turned it into a ghost town almost overnight," Mauro said.