McGuinty has made Ontario the land of mediocrity – by Randy Hillier (Calgary Herald – March 11, 2012)

http://www.calgaryherald.com/index.html

Randy Hillier is the Progressive Conservative MPP for Lanark-Frontenac- Lennox and Addington.

As I was reading between the lines of the Drummond report, a penny dropped out from the political spin: Premier Dalton McGuinty’s message is that Ontario can no longer compete with the likes of Alberta or Newfoundland because we don’t have their natural resources.
 
And he is right in this regard; McGuinty has locked our resources away and they remain untouched. The premier has stated that Alberta’s resource wealth has been a burden on the Ontario economy. McGuinty ignores that Alberta’s resource sector would be the exact same as Ontario’s if they were faced with the same regulatory regime.
 
McGuinty has been too preoccupied crafting regulations that now exceed over a half million. Rather than accepting the word of their beloved environmental advisers, McGuinty and his Liberal government should spend more time discovering Ontario for themselves. If they did, they might actually realize Ontario’s true and vast natural resource wealth.
 
Northern Ontario is one of the richest mineral deposits on Earth. The Ring of Fire is home to one of the most valuable chromite deposits in the world and yet it remains virtually untouched. Ontario has some of the most expansive forests and we are strategically located in the heart of North America’s largest market and transportation corridor. Yet we have entombed these resources and advantages within a legislative mausoleum of red tape.
 
Take the Far North Act for example. McGuinty passed the act in 2010 restricting development on 50 per cent of land in Ontario, cutting off an unknown amount of potential mining and forestry operations, new investment and wealth. This act alone has cost Ontario literally thousands of jobs. Our expensive energy policies and forestry legislation have created uncertainty and have all but felled our once profitable forestry industry.
 
Our water resources, whether as a commodity, opportunity or use in power generation, have all been shut down through similar burdensome regulatory regimes. The Far North Act alone shut off almost 2,000 megawatts of potential hydro power. This complacency has only been bolstered with the Green Energy Act.
 
For the rest of this article, please go to the Calgary Herald website: http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/McGuinty+made+Ontario+land+mediocrity/6284293/story.html#ixzz1opxnlts6