Dwight Duncan

Wednesday December 5, 2012

By Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator, Wednesday December 5, 2012

Dwight Duncan has warning for next Ontario Liberal leader

Tim Hudak asks Santa ‘Dwight Duncan’ to keep labor restrictions

A confidential report says Dwight Duncan has always been admirably frank as finance minister. His finger-wagging, however, is usually aimed at Tory and NDP rivals across the floor.

Now fellow Liberals are bearing the brunt of his bluntness.

In the race to replace Dalton McGuinty as premier, Duncan is watching warily from the sidelines, preparing his own exit strategy from provincial politics. And fussing over his fiscal legacy:

Après Dwight, le deluge?

“I don’t intend to go silently into the night,” he told the Toronto Board of Trade during a PowerPoint show outlining doomsday scenarios for Ontario’s fiscal future:

Tory tax cuts would add billions to the budget deficit and undermine government programs. NDP tax and wage hikes would imperil the economy.

But Duncan was also sending a clear message to the seven candidates vying for the Liberal leadership. The winner of the January convention will automatically inherit the premier’s office and dictate the terms of the next budget.

A few are straying from the party line by second-guessing the teachers’ dispute. Some candidates are hinting they would have handled the unions differently, deftly avoiding any imposed deals.

While they waver, Duncan disdains pussyfooting. He stressed Monday that the controversial Bill 115 must be deployed to ensure total payroll costs do not increase. (Source: Toronto Star) 

 

Thursday October 25, 2012

By Graeme MacKay, Editorial Cartoonist, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday October 25, 2012

Dwight Duncan decides not to run

Dalton McGuinty shows Dwight Duncan what the Premier inherits

The race to succeed Premier Dalton McGuinty as Ontario Liberal leader is shaping up as a historic showdown between powerful women.

With Finance Minister Dwight Duncan’s decision not to run for the Jan. 25-27 leadership, the leading contenders to replace McGuinty are now former minister Sandra Pupatello and Municipal Affairs Minister Kathleen Wynne.

Duncan, 53, endorsed Pupatello, his long-time friend and fellow Windsor native, when he announced Wednesday he would not seek re-election in Windsor—Tecumseh in a vote expected next spring.

His move — eight days after McGuinty’s surprise resignation — radically alters altered Ontario’s political landscape and the race for the Liberal crown.

“I’m obviously interested because I’m getting that fire in my belly all over again. I can’t deny that,” said Pupatello, 50, who left politics before the Oct. 6, 2011 provincial election.

“But I have some serious logistical issues that I have to work out,” said the former Windsor West MPP, now director of business development and global markets for PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, referring to the fact her husband works in Newfoundland.

“It’s a much bigger leap for me to get back in than it is for those that are already at Queen’s Park,” she said, adding it could be talented field with candidates like Wynne, 59, and Health Minister Deb Matthews, 58.

Duncan admitted Pupatello won’t get a free pass on some of the Liberal government’s recent troubles, such as the controversial scrapping of gas-fired power plants in Oakville and Mississauga.(Source: Hamilton Spectator) 

 

Thursday June 21, 2012

By Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator, Thursday June 21, 2012

Hudak got off too easy during budget crisis

As Ontario teetered on the brink of its second election in less than a year, attention was squarely focused on the public spat between Dalton McGuinty and Andrea Horwath.

But to understand why the province’s minority legislature is still very much on borrowed time, even after a summer campaign appears to have been narrowly avoided, there’s no getting past the role of the party leader who actively avoided the spotlight during the past week.

For all that Mr. McGuinty’s Liberals and Ms. Horwath’s New Democrats have at various points been guilty of bluster and false bravado and overplaying their respective hands, it’s Tim Hudak’s Progressive Conservatives who are most responsible for this legislature’s dysfunction.

Faced with a $15-billion deficit, Mr. McGuinty has decided that he needs to adopt a relatively fiscally conservative agenda. That should leave him looking to find common ground with the right-of-centre Tories. But because they’ve shown very little interest in engaging, he instead has to keep tilting left to appease the NDP. And the more that becomes obvious to the New Democrats, the more they keep pushing him away from what he wants to do, and toward impasses.

This situation began to play itself out around the tabling of Finance Minister Dwight Duncan’s budget this spring. Although the Tories now insist otherwise, it was obvious to most anyone around Queen’s Park that they had no intention of voting for it, no matter what was in it. That meant the Liberals had to table a document the NDP could conceivably be willing to support, then add various concessions – most notably a tax increase on the highest income earners – in order to get the budget motion passed in April. (Source: Globe & Mail) 

 

Friday April 27, 2012

By Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator, Friday April 27, 2012

Moody’s debt-rating downgrade sour news for Ontario

A community group pushing the city to take another look at its ward boundaries has successfully collected the 500 Just two days after the McGuinty Liberals’ first minority government budget passed a crucial vote, one of the world’s major credit rating agencies downgraded Ontario, citing the province’s swollen debt burden and tough economic times ahead.

Moody’s Investors Service’s decision Thursday to downgrade Ontario followed a stern warning and dimmer outlook issued one day earlier from Standard & Poor, another influential credit rating agency.

Finance Minister Dwight Duncan acknowledged that the move by Moody’s was serious but he also attempted to play down the sour financial news. Moody’s downgrade could make Ontario’s government bonds less attractive to investors and could also make it more expensive to borrow money at a time when the province’s debt is mounting.

Progressive Conservative finance critic Peter Shurman suggested the rating drop was “catastrophic for Ontario,” but Mr. Duncan said he expects the effect will be minimal.

“We’re still in the top echelons of credit ratings,” Mr. Duncan noted. “It [the downgrade] reminds us that it’s important that we continue to meet our targets or we risk paying more money to bond holders instead of for schools and for health care.”

Moody’s downgrade of the province’s debt rating to Aa2 with a stable outlook from Aa1 with a negative outlook brings the agency’s score more in line with S&P and DBRS, which both downgraded Ontario by one notch in the fall of 2009. DBRS, which also weighed in Thursday on Ontario’s fiscal state, decided to maintain its “stable” outlook on its debt rating for Canada’s largest province, saying the government’s increased focus on controlling spending was “an encouraging step in the right direction.” (Source: Globe & Mail)