Monday September 17, 2007
Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, Editorial Cartoonist, The Hamilton Spectator – Monday September 17, 2007
Green party would add six new holidays
The Green Party of Ontario is proposing six new statutory holidays, dwarfing a pledge by the governing Liberals that would see Ontarians receive one additional day off.
Under Green leadership, vacation days would be provided in March, April, August and November and municipal and provincial polling days would be holidays.
“It gives people more time to spend with family and gardening and cleaning the house and that makes people feel awful good about themselves and then they feel better at work,” party leader Frank de Jong said yesterday in an interview.
“I don’t think this is rash or extreme in any sense of the word. In Ontario, we only have two weeks’ holidays. That’s substandard in the modern world. This is trying to partially catch up to Europe. Europe will still be ahead of us by a week.”
The platform, released yesterday at Queen’s Park, also includes promises to phase out the provincial health premium, ban the construction and refurbishment of nuclear reactors, move toward a single publicly funded education system and a fuel-efficiency incentive of up to $2,000 per vehicle.
But Mr. de Jong offered little insight on the economic impact of half a dozen new holidays.
“This was our decision when we wrote the platform that this was an appropriate number. These are, I suppose, arbitrary decisions of the platform writing team,” he said. (Source: National Post)