Murray seeks re-election
[attach]4613[/attach]As the Oct. 6 provincial election approaches, Toronto Centre MPP, Glen Murray, is hoping to ride the green wave back into office.
The Liberal’s Minister of Research and Innovation lauded Ontario as the innovation province due to the government’s work in creating a green economy by bringing in the Green Energy Act.
“That involved a trading price system of feed-in tariffs that is considered about the best in the world, according to Al Gore and David Suzuki,” he said. “That largely brought huge amounts of capital and created companies.”
Murray said the McGuinty government has closed almost all of the coal plants in Ontario and mentioned that Samsung has opened four new factories related to solar energy in the province.
He also pointed to the majority government’s record of job creation in the face of the worst global recession in recent decades.
“In June alone, Ontario created over 40,000 jobs,” he said when mentioning that Ontario had recovered 124 percent of the jobs lost during the recession. “In that one month we’ve created more jobs than were created in the rest of Canada or the United States put together.”
While Murray stressed the success of the Liberals’ green initiatives, he said he feared that if the Progressive Conservatives were to gain office their leader would scrap the Green Energy Act.
“We’ve emerged in the last 10 years to become a global leader in this completely new economy and what (the Progressive Conservatives) are proposing to do will absolutely destroy that and send us into greater deficits, job loss and more expensive energy,” he said.
The PCs have painted Premier Dalton McGuinty as the “tax man” in recent ads and some critics have said a statement made by Murray during a July campaign stop indicate that the Liberals will increase taxes.
“Money is coming back to you today and we have to raise taxes to do that,” Murray reportedly said while speaking to employees at an Ajax aerospace company.
Murray later said that the word “raise” was used in the sense of collecting taxes, not increasing them. He told the Town Crier that since the Ontario Liberals recently introduced the HST they will not be increasing taxes.
“Absolutely not,” he said. “No, we’ve just gone through major tax reform,” he said.
Closer to home, Murray is working closely with Ward 27 and 28 city councillors, Kristyn Wong-Tam and Pam McConnell respectively, to find new ways to tackle problems within the areas they govern.
Collectively, they have formed a neighbourhood planning group of residents and business owners in many of the local neighbourhoods such as Yorkville, Moore Park and Rosedale.
“I work seamlessly with the city councillors,” Murray said. “We hold meetings almost monthly in each of these neighbourhoods.
“They each identified their priorities in each of these neighbourhoods and the councillors and I work together with the community to realize each of these projects.”
