Ontario Liberal Party leadership front runner Bonnie Crombie made a campaign stop Wednesday morning at the Midland Cultural Centre, where a small crowd had a chance to hear her vision for the province.
Mississauga’s third-term mayor didn’t waste any time telling the gathering life in Ontario was better before Doug Ford became premier.
The next provincial election will be held in 2026, and Ford will have been premier eight years by then.
“The ballot question will be, ‘Do you have trust and confidence in this government or have they betrayed you through their corruption and unethical behaviour?’” questioned Crombie.
“When I think things can’t get worse, you see the scandal that happened last week, and it’s unconscionable. I’m very proud of the residents here (and) the rallies held,” she said of people protesting the selling of Greenbelt land to developers.
When asked where she stands on the issue, she said, “I believe that the Greenbelt needs to be protected and preserved. It is agricultural land that should be held in perpetuity.”
There are no services or infrastructure on the land. Development would be nothing more than urban sprawl, said Crombie. She said she would revisit the decision and work to amend it if elected leader of the Ontario Liberal Party and premier of Ontario.
She took time to tell people about her background. The mother of three is the mayor of Ontario’s third-largest city and she feels her experience would help her govern the province.
“I’m very fiscally responsible but socially very progressive,” she said.
“I have been a longtime Liberal. I knocked on doors when Pierre Trudeau was the prime minister. I was very inspired about the focus on human rights and a just society.”
She had a long business career before entering politics. She worked in marketing for McDonald’s and Disney and worked for the Insurance Bureau of Canada. She’s had her own company and she’s done consulting work.
With government, politicians have a responsibility to act on the public’s behalf, she said.
“I don’t see that happening. There is a lack of transparency and a lack of ethics. This really propelled me to get into this race,” she said.
Crombie said the Liberals are rebuilding and all the contenders for leadership have useful skills.
She said she realizes many people in the region can’t afford a place to live or have security in being able to get enough food and that she would work to make housing and food more affordable.
She believes in public health care and said she doesn’t like how the Ford government is privatizing.
“What I see is this government moving us incrementally toward private medicine,” she said. “It’s against my values. My values are a publicly funded health-care system.”
Private clinics will draw the “best and brightest” medical workers to the system while leaving the public system more burdened while charging the public for “extras,” she said.
“I don’t know how he can post a multi-billion-dollar surplus over the next four years when the hospitals and the education system is so underfunded,” she said.
Currently, teachers’ unions are preparing to walk out as the government has not settled contracts, Crombie said. She added she’s also unimpressed with the large student-to-teacher ratio.
“What’s happened to our education system is we moved to another U.S.-style model like the health-care system,” she said.
She claimed the Ford government has shifted commitment away from protecting the environment and agricultural land, citing the selling of 7,400 acres of land to a handful of developers.
“Prime agricultural land is a scarce commodity in Ontario. Once we pave it over, we don’t have it anymore. We need that farmland. We need to protect and preserve it,” she said.
“This government focuses only on its friends, who attend the parties, the stag and does. That group of developers — I know for a fact that the premier regularly breakfasts and lunches and dinner with these folks and they attend all his fundraisers.
“They purchased that land for $173 million. After that was rezoned, once it was development ready, it was worth $8.3 billion. The numbers are staggering.”
This happened “in the cloak of secrecy,” she said, referring to it as “egregious.”
“Turn it back. Revoke the land. Revoke the rezoning. Let’s start over again,” she said.
“I want to change the direction that the province is in and bring back honest, ethical government.”
