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(Nepean, ON) – Ottawa’s unemployment numbers continue to climb, even though the McGuinty Liberals promised 146,000 new jobs for Ontario in their 2009 Budget, says Nepean-Carleton MPP and PC Revenue Critic Lisa MacLeod.
Since the 2009 budget announcement, Ontario has lost another 32,000 jobs. In October alone, Ontario lost 12,000 jobs, skyrocketing the unemployment rate to 9.3%. Meanwhile, the usually stable Ottawa economy saw its unemployment rate increase to 5.4% during this period.
“Today is the one year anniversary since the McGuinty Liberals announced we are a have-not province,” said MacLeod. “Since then, Ontario has lost almost 206,000 jobs. Our deficit is the highest it’s ever been and there is still no plan from the McGuinty Liberals to get our economy back on track!”
As PC Revenue Critic, MacLeod is leading the fight against the McGuinty Liberal plan to raise $3 billion more in taxes from the harmonization of the PST and GST. The PC Caucus outlined a jobs plan just one week ago that included the fight against the HST among 9 initiatives to get Ontario working again.
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Backgrounder
The Ontario PC Caucus Small Business Jobs Plan would encourage jobs now by:
- Repealing the McGuinty government’s job-killing Bill 119, which forces independent operators and sole proprietors into the WSIB system and requires WSIB coverage for office and secretarial staff who will never set foot on a construction site. This bill will cost affected small businesses more than $11,000 in additional taxes each year.
- Ensuring permanent small business representation on the WSIB.
- Implementing a one year payroll tax holiday on new hires that will make it more affordable for businesses to hire new staff;
- Suspending the land-transfer tax for one year, which will make home ownership more affordable for young families – and help create new construction jobs.
- Re-instating a Red Tape Commission that will eliminate the many unnecessary regulations that punish small businesses.
- Implementing a moratorium on new regulations that will impact private sector job creation until the Red Tape Commission is in place to reduce the overall regulatory burden.
- Turning Ontario’s 3:1 journeyman-to-apprentice ratio into a 1:1 ratio. This will help more young tradespeople into the market, and make it more affordable for small businesses to hire new workers.
- Suspending the McGuinty Government’s decision to place 100% of the cost burden for the blue box program on small businesses. This places an unfair and unwarranted cost burden on businesses and manufacturers and will cost jobs. Instead, government should maintain the existing 50-50 split.
- Continuing to use every tool available to stop Dalton McGuinty’s plan to merge the HST and PST into a Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) that will take $3 billion out of the pockets of consumers and kill jobs.
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