“What comes next? If we don’t have bold reforms to actually drive down the cost of government then we’re going to hit these unaffordable heights once again once the wage freeze comes off,” Hudak said Monday at Queen’s Park.
“We’ll be right back where we started from and staring at a mounting, job-deterring provincial debt load,” he said.
To that end, the Tories are reviving their 2011 election pledge to revamp a “broken arbitration system” that routinely awards pay increases to unionized workers not legally allowed to strike.
These include police, firefighters and Toronto Transit Commission employees.
“You can’t get blood from a stone,” said the Tory leader, flanked by MPP Jim Wilson (Simcoe-Grey) who has introduced the Ability to Pay Act.
Wilson’s legislation, which will be debated Oct. 4, would force arbitrators to factor whether an employer, such as a municipality, can afford a settlement and would increase transparency over any decisions.
Ironically, the Conservatives sided with the New Democrats in the spring to derail an attempt by the minority Liberals to revamp the arbitration system.
“We’ll be taking action and reintroducing the sections of the budget bill that Hudak instructed his party’s members to vote against, even though it was in their election platform,” a senior Liberal official said.
At the time of that budget standoff, which had Ontario on the brink of an election, the Tories insisted the Liberals’ measures did not go far enough.
Finance Minister Dwight Duncan, who has a $14.8 billion deficit, is expected to expand the Liberals’ wage-freeze push from teachers to other public servants in the weeks ahead, before tackling arbitration.
Original Article
Source: the star
Author: Robert Benzie
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