CM ST: Liberals Elected to Run Ontario for Another Four Years

source: en.wikipedia.org

On October 10 this year, Ontarians elected the Liberals to run the government in Ontario for four more years. As the early vote counts began coming in, it was clear that the Liberals were clearly headed towards a majority. The liberals secured 71 seats to gain majority in order to form government in Ontario, while the Conservatives got only 26 seats. NDP managed to get only 11 whilst the Green party did not secure a single seat.

According to views expressed by many experts the major reason for Dalton McGuinty’s win was the issue over the funding of the faith based schools. Conservative party leader John Tory had started his campaign with laying a stress on funding of faith based schools if his government was elected. In his opinion along with the current funding of the Catholic schools, other religious schools should also be funded with tax payers’ money. This caused quite a furor among other rival politicians especially Dalton McGuinty, who chose to make it point in his campaigns to talk about this issue and how Mr. Tory’s plan would tend to divide the children according to religions. The general public at large was also mostly against the idea of the funding of faith based schools. Most of the voters thus, chose not to vote for the Conservatives specifically due to this issue.

The Conservatives were stressing on Dalton McGuinty’s broken promises also. Mr. McGuinty had promised when he had been elected previously that he would not raise taxes which he did end up doing though he himself acknowledged this time during his campaign for this recent election. There was also debate about health care and the current situation of the availability of doctors for every person in Ontario. People were generally frustrated about the shortage of doctors in Ontario and the long waiting times in hospitals. Though there were all these issues going against the Liberals which were being publicized by the Conservatives for their campaign, the Liberals in the end did manage to gain a stronghold in the 2007 Ontario elections mainly due to the opposition to faith based schools funding which actually struck a chord with the masses.

Students from a Toronto college interview people on the street about the October Election