McGinty"s Saviour?

Chris Selley's Full Pundit: Can Jim Flaherty save Ontario?
Posted: March 28, 2009, 8:00 AM by Chris Selley Filed under: Full Comment,Full Pundit,Chris Selley

The man comes aroundDalton McGuinty’s budget could have been written by Jim Flaherty. But will it save Ontario?
The Globe and Mail’s editorialists have only minor quibbles with the budget—such as its “unsettlingly vague” promises of infrastructure spending, its politically motivated rebates to taxpayers to offset the harmonized sales tax and its “minimal investment in research and post-secondary education”—but overall they are impressed, not just with the content but with McGuinty’s ability to actually do something reasonably bold for once.
The Toronto Star’s Jim Coyle believes “the buckets of cash and exemption flexibility the feds ponied up” has much to do with McGuinty’s newfound flare for the dramatic. (Indeed, as the Globe’s Adam Radwanski notes, if the Liberals had liked the HST idea all along, they probably wouldn’t have let the opposition frame it as an insidious plot to jack up the price of onesies and tampons.) Still, says Coyle, McGuinty’s reasoning doesn’t diminish the risk he faces: if the economy continues its hellward slide, he “might well have signed his death warrant”; if it turns around, “he might have written himself a place in [the] history books.”
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