Premier wants transparent government

Premier Kathleen Wynne announced has announced that she wants to make her government more open and transparent. There was an official launch of this initiative Monday afternoon in Toronto. But the PC’s and New Democrats are already jumping on Wynne, calling her a hypocrite. Cindy Csordas has more.

Wynne says this open government initiative will allow the public access to more information than ever before so that people in ontario can engage more with things that matter to them.

Premier Wynne says she’s put together an engagement team who’ll gather feedback from people across the province and they’ll report back to the government next spring. The idea is to make information more transparent online. Wynne says people can log on to Ontario.ca/open to see what the government’s working on and how to get involved. She says the public would’ve known more about the estimated $1.1 billion cost of cancelling the two gas plants if the provincial government had been more open: “It’s much bigger than one issue, so in the context of the gas plant discussion, my hope would be that if we had some of the processes in place there would have been more information available earlier, but on the bigger question. I know people are cynical and I know people question government and decision making processes and this is exactly why this is so important.”

Something that may have embarassed the Premier during this announcment was the fact that on the podium the word “government” was spelled wrong which was addressed and then Wynne tried to correct: “Does open government include spell checking? Ha ha ha. The sign, look. That is really not good.”

Wynne quickly grabbed something to write with and inserted an “n” where it was missing in the word government.