TORONTO — About 200 people gathered at Temple Har Zion in Thornhill to hear from Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, who shared her vision on how her government plans to tackle key issues including poverty, transit, the plight of aboriginals, victims of sexual assault and the $10.5 billion- deficit.
“The problems I’m trying to solve now, are how we’re going to get around this city for the next 25 years,” said Wynne, who was invited to be the keynote speaker for the inaugural President’s Circle Speakers Series.
“We have to deal with the fact that only 40 per cent of aboriginal kids graduate high school… How are we going to deal with the fact that we’ve got laws and protocols around sexual assault and they are clearly not working well enough,” she said in an address, before sitting down for a one-on-one with Har Zion’s founding president, Philip Epstein.
“We’ve also got a deficit in this province and I know we’ve got to deal with that. We’ve got to eliminate the deficit and we’ve got to get our books in order, but I’m not going to do that on the backs of the poorest in our society.”
She talked about her government’s poverty reduction strategy, which aims to eradicate poverty entirely. Part of that plan is to increase wages for personal support workers and early child educators and for “people whose wages have not changed over the last decade, who are doing work that is essential to the well-being of the community.”
She said when it comes to the issues facing the aboriginal community, she said “the relationship that we have with aboriginal people is one that has been fraught for literally hundreds of years and we have not addressed it in a way that I think is adequate.”
She said that one only need to look at the living conditions on reserves and acknowledge the fact that there are about 4,500 missing or murdered aboriginal women to understand how dire the situation is.
“We grieved the deaths yesterday of the 14 women who were killed at École Polytechnique in Montreal 25 years ago, but there are thousands of aboriginal women who we don’t know about and we do not talk about in our society.”
She spoke about the fact that since the story broke about the claims of sexual assault against former CBC radio host Jian Gomeshi, people have been reacting to the topic as if it is a new phenomenon.
“If you fill a room with women, most of those women are going to have had some experience, certainly of discrimination, probably of harassment and a lot of them, sexual assault.”
She said many women who have been assaulted never reported it because they didn’t feel it is safe to do so.
“My response in government is that we have to do something about that. We have to go the next step because we’re not doing enough and we’ve got to do more.”
Speaking about the deficit, Wynne said that having “a better partner in the federal government,” would help, a statement that elicited laughter from the crowd.
“I believe that with the surplus that the federal government has right now, they’re going to be able to put in place some tax cuts because they’ve got a surplus, but I believe there are other things we could do with it. I believe that they could balance their budget and not give more tax cuts and spend some of that money on an annual basis on the issues that I’ve identified,” she said.
When Epstein asked Wynne where the money would come from to pay for the programs and infrastructure the province needs, she said, “we are raising income tax on the highest income earners in our province…. We are looking at our assets, whether it is Hydro One, the LCBO, OPG, [Ontario Power Generation] … looking at how to maintain the revenue flow into the province and increase it in some areas… We’ve put together a plan that will give us $29 billion over the next 10 years.”