Your Home, Your Vote: Tories edged out of lead

There are 23 days left until Ontario’s election; and during Tuesday’s campaigning Dalton McGuinty was defending his party’s finance record.

While talking about clean energy at a solar plant in Toronto, he was asked about the record deficits run up during his term as Premier, and whether or not the money was being handled properly.

“We’ve made some great progress together, you know the recession hit us particularly hard here we’re a manufacturing centre, we’re the second largest manufacturing centre in North America. So what we’ve done is you know we reduced our deficit since the depths of the recession by 43 percent.”

“We’re ahead of schedule, that’s something that we’ve done on a fairly regular basis. We know how to deal with deficits. We inherited a $5.6 billion deficit from you know, the last guys. We cleaned that up, we balanced our budget for three years in a row. and we’ve made some difficult decisions and put ourselves in a position to keep moving forward.”

A new poll shows the Liberals have edged slightly ahead of the Progressive Conservatives a little more than three weeks from election day.

The Ipsos Reid poll shows the Liberals with 38 per cent support – a slim, one point lead over the Progressive Conservatives. Support for the NDP is growing as well: it’s now at 24 per cent, while the Green Party has about one per cent.

And with his early lead apparently lost, it looks like PC leader Tim Hudak is changing his focus on the issues.

Hudak had been zeroing in on a proposed Liberal tax credit for employers who hire new Canadians. But in London today, he was highlighting government waste.

He talked about the e-health scandal, that saw millions of taxpayer dollars wasted on consultants, and led to the resignation of then-health minister David Caplan.

Meanwhile, Ontario NDP leader Andrea Horwath says the party is investigating the use of Jack Layton’s death by at least one NDP candidate to help raise funds for the October 6th election campaign.

Veteran New Democrat Michael Prue has been using an auto-dialing system to call voters in his Toronto riding, saying the party is going through a rough patch since the federal NDP leader died last month, and could use financial support.

While campaigning in Windsor, Horwath said the use of Layton’s memory to raise money was not approved by her office. She added it’s not an approach she agrees with, and nor should NDP candidates.

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