For Immediate Release
October 21, 2008

McGuinty has squandered away provincial surplus
Barrett gives angered address on the economy

Queen’s Park – Dalton McGuinty has followed in the footsteps of his Liberal forefathers when it comes to tax and spend ways.

Barrett delivered an angry speech to the Ontario Legislature yesterday and followed it up today with a statement on the Premier’s mismanagement of taxpayers’ money.

The local MPP said Dalton McGuinty has done his best to spend every single penny of surplus revenue that he has taxed in over the past five years including surpluses during the better economic times created by Mike Harris and the Common Sense Economic Revolution.

“Revenues have gone from $69 billion to a whopping $97 billion, but this government spends it as quickly as it comes in. Spending has increased by 40 per cent to $96 billion. Why?” Barrett rhetorically asked. “Because this crew thought the good times would last forever – so much for economic cycles.

“So much for saving for a rainy day; so much for John Maynard Keynes or listening to liberal economists like John Kenneth Galbraith,” Barrett said. “In fact, instead of the restraint that we should have seen during the good times in the last five years, I predict that this government now, now that we are into these tough times, will come up with basically a half-cocked Keynesian-Galbraithian excuse to continue to spend in the spirit of people like David Peterson and Bob Rae.

“I really wonder: Has this government learned nothing from the blunders of those two peas in a pod, if you will-the Liberal David Peterson and the born-again Liberal Bob Rae? Are we looking at a further three years of tax-and-spend McGuinty Liberalism, with the predictable deficits as the only response to this present economic turmoil?”

Barrett concluded by saying that this government started their term with a deficit and predicts they will end with a deficit someday too.

“It’s called knee-jerk liberalism -- jacking up taxes and jacking up spending.”

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For more information contact MPP Toby Barrett at 519-428-0446
or 1-800-903-8629