Duane Hicks
With Queen’s Park thrown into disarray following the abrupt resignation of Dalton McGuinty, Kenora-Rainy River MPP Sarah Campbell is looking forward to seeing a new Liberal leader in place later this month.
And she hopes it will spark a new era of co-operation for the sake of Ontarians, especially those in the northwest.
“As much as I hate to see it, the thing that we’re all looking forward to, and it’s probably just of matter of getting it done to figure out where we stand, is the Liberal leadership race,” she said Friday.
“So much is hinging on that election that we can’t really say, even a month down the road, what we’re going to be really doing,” added Campbell, stressing she just wants everyone to get back to work.
The Liberal leadership convention is set for Saturday, Jan. 26, at which time some 2,500 delegates will be choosing the next head of the Liberals and, by extension, Ontario’s next premier.
Sixteen delegates from each of the province’s 107 ridings will attend the convention. Another 800 ex-officio delegates from the party will cast ballots, as well, making endorsements even more important than in a one-member-one-vote selection process.
Campbell said that by many accounts, leadership hopeful Sandra Pupatello is the frontrunner. And Pupatello has said she is not going to recall the legislature until she gets a seat.
“If you do the math on that, if she were to get elected, that would be the [fourth] week in January,” said Campbell.
“Then, she’d have at least a 30-day by-election, so we wouldn’t be getting back on Feb. 19, like we’d hoped,” she noted, adding MPPs have not sat since Oct. 15 and to wait until March is a very long time.
“Plus, if Sandra Pupatello does win, Dwight Duncan, who is our current finance minister, has said that he would step down so that she could run,” said Campbell.
“I have respect for what the finance minister does and I wonder what kind of position that’s going to really put us into if we’re going to lose our finance minister right before our budget.
“I have no doubt he is going to do a lot of work prior to that but still, going forward, it puts us into a very precarious and difficult position,” she warned.
“It’s difficult to be the leader of any political party if you don’t have a seat in the legislature, especially being the premier, so I can kind of appreciate where she’s coming from,” Campbell conceded.
“But by the same point, it would [mean] losing Dwight Duncan, one of the heavy hitters.”
No matter how the leadership race turns out, Campbell said more co-operation must take place between the Liberals and the other parties.
“Looking ahead to 2013, and what’s in store for us provincially, what I am really hopeful of is we are really going to be able to work together in a meaningful way.
“That whoever the new leader of the Liberal party is [will] bring some new ideas and that they’re going to bring a different attitude, that they’ll shed some of the arrogance that we’ve seen from the government that’s been in power for two terms.
“I am hopeful that we are going to have somebody who is going to be willing to talk to us, and engage us, and actually make some things happen to make our region more prosperous, to help make things more affordable, and to really start tackling many of the health care crises we have across the area,” Campbell stressed.
As far as 2012 went, Campbell admitted she started off optimistic where the minority government would go.
“I thought we could really get together and accomplish some things,” she recalled.
“That hope kind of faded, and I kind of gave the Liberals a little bit of time to re-calibrate because let’s face it, it probably isn’t easy to go from a position of majority to having to work with other parties,” she said.
“But as time went on, it became very apparent that they were concerned with gaining more power, and not so much with working together.
“I am hopeful with this year we can actually act on some of the things that I think will make life a little bit easier,” said Campbell.
“I’d like to see us move ahead with job creation tax credits, where if companies create jobs, they get a tax credit—tying it to some measurable result that we’re going to see with the economy.”
Campbell said she also will continue to fight to see the HST taken off home heating and hydro.
“I’d also like to see us position ourselves to help get some of the mining and forestry projects off the ground that are right on the horizon,” she added.
“We can grasp them, we just have to seize the opportunities, and to do that, I think we really do need to work together and put all of our ideas on the drawing board and respect the knowledge that people have living in the north,” she remarked.
