Liberal Manufacturing Report

Thursday, 07 August 2008
Queen’s Park - Ten months of work on a report that was supposed to assist Ontario’s hard-hit manufacturing sector has turned out to be much ado about nothing for the McGuinty Liberals, said NDP Leader Howard Hampton.
“There’s nothing here,” said NDP Leader Howard Hampton. “Seventy pages of fluff isn’t going to help the tens of thousands of manufacturing workers who have lost their jobs since Dalton McGuinty came to office. This so-called report is an insult to the workers who lost their jobs. It’s no wonder there were no photo-ops when this report came out,” said Hampton.
Shortly after the 2007 provincial election, backbench Liberal MPP David Ramsay was asked to write the report looking into the challenges and opportunities facing Ontario’s manufacturing sector. The report was hailed in the 2008 budget as proof of the government’s commitment to finding solutions to the manufacturing crisis that has now claimed more than 200,000 jobs across Ontario.
Under the cloak of a long summer weekend, the report mysteriously appeared late last Friday afternoon.
“The so-called strategy outlined in the report suggests that a marketing strategy is the solution to Ontario’s manufacturing woes. Maybe David Ramsay should have consulted with the workers getting the pink slips - they know all too well that real economic policies create jobs, not gimmicky marketing campaigns,” said Hampton