The Daily Press is the city of Timmins broadsheet newspaper.
Party trades away leverage for a few trinkets, bobbles
The NDP has sold out Northern Ontario for a few trinkets and bobbles. Instead of standing firm and voting against Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty’s budget unless the province agreed to halt its plans to divest Ontario Northland, the party caved.
“We tried to get the government to bend on the ONTC issue, but they just wouldn’t,” MPP Gilles Bisson (NDP — Timmins-James Bay) told our sister paper, the North Bay Nugget.
“We put proposals on the table, but the government wasn’t prepared to move on the ONTC. They were hanging on.” Just like they “tried” to get Xstrata to reverse its plans to close our smelter and save close to 700 jobs in Timmins.
Well, guess what? Tried just doesn’t cut it in our books! Are we supposed to hold our collective breath, as Mr. Bisson and his party brethren continue to tilt at windmills?
After all, he believes the fact the NDP is not voting against the Liberal budget does not mean the fight to save the ONTC is over.
“We will continue to press the government on the issue and I want to have a private conversation with the premier and ask ‘what the hell?’,” Bisson said.
Sounds an awful lot like a question Mr. Bisson’s constituents might like to ask him today, doesn’t it?
For the rest of this column, please go to the Timmins Daily Press website: http://www.thedailypress.ca/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=3542863