Freedom Party of Ontario

MEDIA RELEASE

e-mail subject: Ontario Balanced Budget Plan Released - Healthcare Elephant in Room

February 4, 2014 Toronto –  When it comes to balancing Ontario's mammoth budget deficit, Ontario's government health insurance monopoly is the elephant in the room.  That is the central message of a 2014 "Opposition Budget" released today by the Freedom Party of Ontario.  It is the only balanced budget plan released by any registered political party in the province.

Click on image, or here, to read the 2014 Opposition Budget

"The single-payer health insurance monopoly in Ontario is at the heart of Ontario's budget deficit, which by all credible reports is set to balloon in the coming years", says Freedom Party leader Paul McKeever.  "In this Opposition Budget, we demonstrate that the budget simply cannot be balanced if healthcare is treated as an untouchable.  The time has come to take health care off-budget, to end the government health insurance monopoly imposed by the PC government in 1969, and to subject OHIP to competition from the private sector."

"Right now, health care is consuming approximately 60% of all Ontario provincial tax revenues.  Education and interest payments on the debt consume more than the remaining 40%.  All other government functions - 23 other ministries - are paid for with non-tax revenues, with federal transfers, or with debt.  To understand the immensity of the crisis, consider that, to balance the budget while treating health care, education and welfare as untouchables, the government could cut the budgets of all other ministries by 38 percent, or close entirely 18 of the government's least expensive ministries, leaving only 8 remaining ministries in total.

"We are in a crisis situation, yet the Liberal, NDP, and PC parties are all promising not to balance the budget in 2014: all have promised to balance the budget only years after the next general election.  'Somehow, sometime down the road' is neither a credible nor an acceptable response from those three parties.  It is an utterly irresponsible and politically-driven abdication of responsibility, and it is setting up Ontario to be an economic basket case.  Freedom Party's Opposition Budget is the first and only plan to remedy the problem and secure a hopeful future for Ontario's earners and patients".

Freedom Party's 2014 Opposition Budget proposes a distinctly different course of action than that which otherwise might be proposed in the government's spring budget: 

- a balanced budget in 2014 and thereafter; 

- competition and efficiency in health care insurance and delivery;

- major individual and corporate tax relief; 

- merging Ontario's many consumption taxes into the CRA-collected HST;

- health care protection for those of lesser means; and

- creating North America's #1 jurisdiction for earning and production.

- Treating Health, Education, and Welfare as Untouchables

- Erroneous Proposals to Eliminate ABCs 

- Eliminating Waste” and “Cutting Red Tape”

- Logan’s Run Revisited

- The Annie State

Paul McKeever, Leader - Freedom Party of Ontario

Office: 106 Stevenson Road South, Oshawa, Ontario L1J 5M1

Cell: ***-***-****

e-mail: pmckeever@freedomparty.on.ca

Freedom Party of Ontario