The two front-runners in the Ontario election campaign presented very different visions of the province's economic future on Tuesday, the same day their fiscal policies came under new criticism.
Liberal Leader Dalton McGuinty made his sixth visit to a clean-energy company to pitch his job-creation machine.
"Here in Ontario, we're on to something really good," he said at the Eclipsall Energy Corp. plant in Scarborough. "We are not prisoners of our present. We are working hard to create a bright future."
But Ontario's path to becoming a leader in renewable energy would be derailed if the Tories win the Oct. 6 election, warned Mr. McGuinty, who is framing the campaign as a choice between moving forward under the Liberals or backward under the opposition.
Mr. McGuinty also suggested a Tory victory would force Ontario to follow in the footsteps of Toronto, which is looking at slashing social programs.
Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak, he noted, is making the same unrealistic pledge as Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, who campaigned in the municipal election last year by saying he would end wasteful spending without cutting services. Less than a year later, Canada's largest city is considering phasing out childcare spaces and closing museums to help erase a $774-million budget shortfall.
Asked by reporters if there is a parallel to be drawn at the provincial level, Mr. McGuinty pointed out that the Tories' campaign platform has a $14-billion hole in it. As a result, he said, a Tory government would have no choice but to cut funding for education and health care, two areas that together account for about 70 per cent of program spending.
Mr. Hudak has also spoken about jobs at most of his campaign stops, but he uses the issue to transition into his plan to reduce taxes for middle-class families.
Speaking in London on Tuesday, he said the province couldn't afford the type of jobs programs the Liberals have implemented, including a $7-billion green-energy pact signed with South Korean industrial giant Samsung Group that is promising to bring 200 new jobs to that city alone.
Mr. Hudak has vowed to kill the program in the past, but spoke more cautiously when asked if he would commit to ending the agreement.
"What I won't do is sign these pie-in-the-sky contracts that are driving hydro rates through the roof," he said.
Any of the leaders' plans could be derailed by a worsening economy. The Conservatives developed their fiscal outlook using GDP growth estimates from last May. Even though the global economy has weakened since then, prompting economists to lower their forecasts, the Tories say they stand by their projections.
The Centre for Policy Alternatives economist Jim Stanford says in a report released Tuesday that the Tory platform contains misleading information, suggesting much of the content is basically "hand-drawn graphs based on invented data."
Mr. McGuinty's policies were also criticized. In a new report, the Fraser Institute ranks him second last among Canada's premiers in three core areas of fiscal policy, including government spending.
For her part, NDP Leader Andrea Horwath was in Windsor, Ont., an ideal place to make a jobs pitch. The hard-hit auto town only ceded its title as Canada's unemployment capital because thousands of unemployed simply gave up looking.
Allen Varcammer knows it: After being laid off at an automotive plant in 2009, the 31-year-old thought he had it made when he landed a gig processing EI claims for the federal government. But he's among dozens of those Windsor-based employees whose contracts are set to expire; the father of two will be jobless again next month.
"I know, at the end of the day, it's our responsibility to get jobs," he said. "But there are a lot of skilled workers out there who can't find work."
At Ms. Horwath's press conference Tuesday morning, the optics were perfect: She stood flanked by her local candidates, in front of a row of orange-helmeted workers in a training centre's concrete hangar.
The messaging, however, was bumpier: She was there to underscore the dire straits of youth unemployment – especially in Ontario's southwest – but had no new policies for youth or the region.
Instead, she reiterated policy pledges she's rolled out already – to provide a 20-per-cent subsidy for all new, permanent, full-time hires; to subsidize on-the-job training by 20 per cent; and to subsidize equipment purchases by 10 per cent.
The three initiatives are expected to cost the government $450-million a year in tax credits paid back to businesses of all sizes – a small price to pay, Ms. Horwath argues, for new-job creation.
"It's simple: If you give someone training on the job, you get a tax break; if you give a young person a job, you get a tax break; if you give a new Canadian a job, you get a tax break."
One of Ms. Horwath's strength in recession-hit manufacturing areas like this is her blue-collar street cred. This becomes clear while she's mainstreeting, winning over a trio of engineers solely because of her family's auto background and her own history working for Hamilton's solid-waste-management committee.
She also made a point, once again, of citing her son Julian Leonetti's search for work.
"My own son … went all summer without a job. And although he's working now, it's part-time. He's facing what so many other young people his age and even into their late 20s are facing. It doesn't have to be this way."