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Ottawa turns down auto aid


The Harper government has refused to provide financial aid to the auto industry, including funding to support a $300-million plan to reopen a shuttered engine plant in Windsor, Ont.

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty said this morning that Prime Minister Stephen Harper made it clear when he met with the premiers last Friday that Ottawa is not prepared to inject funding into specific projects.

"He told me very directly, 'look, I operate at the macro level. We'll cut taxes, offer some regional incentives, but we're not prepared to take it one step down,'" Mr. McGuinty said.

He said the two leaders have a "fundamental philosophical difference" when it comes to addressing the economic slowdown that is taking its biggest toll on a manufacturers in Ontario and Quebec.

"They think you cut taxes, sit back and allow economic fortunes to kind of play themselves out," Mr. McGuinty said. "I think we have a heavy responsibility and that responsibility is to find ways to provide supports to those who are losing their jobs and provide incentives to businesses to make additional investments to make them stronger."

Mr. McGuinty confirmed that the Ontario government is looking at providing $30-million in funding to Ford Motor Co. [F-N] to help it reopen the engine plant in Windsor.

The Globe and Mail cited auto industry sources in a story last week saying that Ontario had already agreed to provide $30-million of the $60-million Ford was seeking, but the project would not go to Windsor if the federal government did not participate.

"I would love to have someone from the federal government sit down and join with us in that regard," Mr. McGuinty said. "He's not prepared to do that."

Ontario's share of the funding will come from the $650-million the province earmarked last year to help auto makers create jobs by developing environmentally friendly technologies.

Mr. McGuinty acknowledged that a lot of hard work goes into deciding whether to invest in private-sector enterprises.

"There's always an element of risk associated with that because you're using public dollars," he said.

Ford wants to build a fuel-efficient V8 engine at the plant, which was closed in November as part of a massive restructuring the second-largest Detroit auto maker is undertaking after years of market share losses.


Auto Industry Disaster: The Harper Government's Betrayal of Ontario

From its first day in office in February 2006, the Harper government's top priority has been to promote the rapid expansion of the export of Alberta oil to the United States.

The negative consequences of this thoughtless policy have been myriad. Vast quantities of clean natural gas and precious water have been used to produce synthetic crude oil at the cost of reducing a huge stretch of northern Alberta to a fetid dump, unfit for wildlife or human habitation. The Harperites have enriched their pals in Calgary's oil patch with record profits and they have poured huge sums into the pockets of the owners of the foreign owned oil giants.

The prime minister likes to brag that under his watch Canada has become a global energy power. So what if one consequence has been to render Canada incapable of halting the increase in its greenhouse gas emissions.

Another consequence has been to cut Ontario's manufacturing sector to the bone. The rapid rise in the value of the Canadian dollar in relation to the U.S. dollar has delivered a blow to manufacturing from which it may never recover. And the rise of the Canadian dollar has been directly tied to petroleum exports.

The Harper government has received repeated warnings over the past two years to moderate the pace of petroleum exports so that other sectors of the economy from tourism to book publishing to manufacturing can have the time they need to adapt to a rising dollar.

Today, the disaster came home to us with the announcement by General Motors that it will close its Oshawa truck plant next year throwing 2600 workers out of a job. GM CEO Rick Wagoner said it was unlikely the plant would ever reopen.

Appropriately CAW President Buzz Hargrove took aim at the General Motors management for signing a deal with the union a couple of weeks ago whose essence was to keep jobs in Canadian plants in return for huge monetary concessions from the workers. The CAW will fight the battle against the pusillanimous bad faith bargaining of the company.

The rest of us need to focus on the calamity the Harper government has created in our most important manufacturing industry. If the dollar had not been so high against the U.S. greenback, it is highly likely that GM would have planned for much more future investment and economic activity in its Canadian plants to produce the new hybrid vehicles, electric cars, smaller cars and crossover vehicles on which its future depends.

Instead, we've been shafted by the Harper government and by the GM management.

Not least to blame is Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, the MP for Whitby-Oshawa, who has been openly saying he can see little reason why companies should invest in Ontario. Thanks Jim. I'm sure a lot of families in your constituency are singing your praises over dinner tonight.

Flaherty has been bone headed in his insistence that only corporate tax cuts can save jobs in Ontario. You would have thought that a minister from Oshawa would have seen the growing menace of the rising dollar and would have pushed for a shift in economic policy to slow the pace of petroleum exports, protect the environment, and give the manufacturing sector some much needed breathing room.

Given the economic restructuring that is now going on, Canadians cannot afford to have a federal government that is fixated on profits in the oil patch as the source of a rising TSX, no matter what that means for working Canadians and the well being of most of the regions of Canada.更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net