EXCERPTS
Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak has released his party's campaign platform, including plans to increase class sizes and rein in education spending toward delivering a balanced budget by 2016.
Hudak released the platform, called the Million Jobs Plan, during a "town hall" in downtown Toronto Wednesday.
The platform lays out more specifics of Hudak's plan to balance the budget quickly to attract investment and spur private-sector job creation, which has been the main theme of his campaign so far.
Among the measures in the campaign document are cuts to education spending and teachers as part of Hudak's pledge last week to eliminate 100,000 public sector positions over the first two years of a PC government. Those measures include promises to:
- Increase classroom sizes by 2-3 students.
- Increase the ratio for full-day kindergarten to one teacher for every 20 students, from the current ratio of two teachers per 26 students.
- Cancel a planned raise for elementary teachers in the public school boards.
- Cut 9,700 non-teaching positions in schools.
- End a 30 per cent tuition grant for post-secondary students.
- Eliminate proposed raises for early childhood educators and personal support workers for students with special needs.
The platform includes other spending cuts or freezes as part of Hudak's pledge to balance the books by 2016, among them plans to:
- Freeze the Ontario child benefit at $1,200.
- Forego proposed funding for in vitro fertilization treatments.
- Eliminate the $1,500 Healthy Homes Renovation Tax Credit.
- Combine Ontario Works and the Ontario Disability Support Program.
- End public funding for advocacy groups such as the Toronto Environmental Alliance.
- reprinted from CBC News