Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.
“But prosperity will prove elusive, unless $12-billion that flows out of Ontario
annually is used at home – to retrain unemployed workers, to expand public transit
in Greater Toronto and to supply the needed roads, energy and Internet without
which Northern Ontario’s Ring of Fire, touted as the most promising Canadian mining
development in a century, will never reach its full potential.” (John Ibbitson)
If it were simply a question of dollars and cents, Ontario should separate from Canada, now. This is emphatically not the conclusion of a new report by the Ontario Chamber of Commerce on the punishment that Ottawa inflicts on Canada’s economic heartland. But so damning is the evidence contained in that report that the sentiment is hard to suppress.
A copy of “A Federal Agenda for Ontario”, released Thursday, was provided in advance to The Globe and Mail. It details the manifold ways in which federal policies punish Ontario workers and the Ontario economy.
‘Twas ever thus, but at least in the past Ontario was wealthy enough to bear the burden. No more. “Ontario needs to think of how it can reinvent itself and reinvent its economy,” Allan O’Dette, president of the Ontario Chamber of Commerce, said in an interview.