Dispute the facts if you dare.
Rae's Record Says It All
by Greg Wilson
| |
The good news for Bob Rae is that a recent Ekos Research poll shows he is the No. 1 choice of ordinary Canadians to lead the Liberal party into the next election, his popularity for the Grit job presumably strongest among Conservative voters.
The bad news for Bob is that the closer he gets to the Grit ring, the more his creepy critics are going to dredge up all that nasty stuff about how he almost drowned Ontario in a sea of red ink during his four years as NDP premier.
So far in the Liberal leadership race, Rae has admitted he came away from his turn at the helm of government with some valuable lessons, but regrets too few to mention.
"You'd be crazy not to learn lessons," Rae told the Globe's John Ibbitson recently. "But I'm also very proud of some of the things we did."
And so he should be proud, his accomplishments as premier showing clearly why this is the guy to run the country. For instance:
* Bob Rae made history as a man who gets things done. It took 40 years for mainly Conservative governments in Ontario to accumulate $20 billion in debt building the province's schools, hospitals, highways and hydro dams. It took Bob's NDP administration only four years to run up another $40 billion in red ink with little of enduring value to show for it at the end.
* Bob Rae is a visionary in health care. It was his NDP government that implemented the ingenious plan to cut medicare costs by reducing the number of doctors graduating from medical schools. Today, his legacy endures with a physician shortage that saves taxpayers a fortune by not having to treat millions of sick Canadians who can't find a family doctor.
* Bob Rae is a champion of the Canadian leisure industries. For the first time since the Great Depression of the 1930s, there were fewer people employed in Ontario industries when Rae left office than when he arrived.
* Bob Rae boldly stands up for Big Business and isn't afraid to stick it to the Little Guy, those whining small businesses that always have it easy. In the five years before Rae came to office, about 85% of all the net new jobs created in Ontario were in companies with fewer than 100 employees. Even in the 1980s recession when big companies shed more than 100,000 jobs, small businesses in the province grew by almost twice that number.
But not under Bob's watch -- a few major industries got huge bailouts, while all those mom-and-pop operations got ravaged, losing more than 100,000 jobs in the four years of NDP rule.
* Bob Rae understands what it means to be a taxpayer -- when economic times get tough, the tough get taxed, thereby ensuring the economy slows to the point where everyone gets screwed equally -- although some more equally than others. For instance, by the time the NDP left office, Ontario professionals and entrepreneurs earning more than $67,000 a year had the highest marginal tax rate in North America, and were ungratefully running for the border in droves.
* Bob Rae is a politician who never forgets his promises. The NDP pledged to introduce public auto insurance that would save car owners a fortune in premiums. Four years later, the Dippers were still promising socialist collision coverage even as they were being driven out of office.
* Bob Rae is perhaps the only great Canadian leader of the last century to have a day named in his honour -- Rae Days. Just over a decade ago, the man who would now be the next federal Liberal leader and perhaps Canada's next prime minister looked out upon the economic landscape he had created and saw that it was ravaged by record debt, record deficits and record job losses, and he knew exactly what needed to be done.
He hired 100,000 more public servants, gave them all a big raise, and ordered them to stay home and not get paid.
Bob! Bob! Bob!
No comments:
Post a Comment