A few days ago I posted a list of various Ontario election newspaper endorsements. Since that time, more newspaper editorial boards have come out with who they think should lead the province. Here they are...
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Ottawa Citizen
Hold your nose and vote Liberal
It wasn't a ringing endorsement, but the Citizen suggested that the best choice Ontarians have is another McGuinty Liberal government. The editorial board's decision seems to have as much to do with its disappointment in the Progressive Conservative Tim Hudak campaign as with any sense that McGuinty is the steadiest hand in difficult times:
On meeting Hudak in August, this editorial board was convinced McGuinty was in serious trouble. Hudak was clearly able to give voice to the frustration of the electorate with eight years of Liberal rule. But he needed to do more than that. He needed to offer Ontarians an alternative. ...
McGuinty's experience in government will be needed in the coming years. Hudak's team needs a little more seasoning in opposition. We'll take the devil we know.
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Sudbury Star
Sudbury's newspaper has made its endorsement based on which party it thinks is best for the local area:
Under the Liberals, more hospitals have been built -- including those in Greater Sudbury, North Bay and Sault Ste. Marie -- more doctors and nurses have been hired, emergency wait times are shorter and more surgeries aimed at accommodating an aging population such as Sudbury's are being performed. ...
For the Sudbury area, as a regional health centre and a city with three post-secondary institutions, investments in health care ($60 million more for home care for seniors will help address the alternate-level-of-care crisis) and education (60,000 new post-secondary spaces and a 30 per cent cut in tuition fees for middle-income families) are crucial to the future of our city.
"As well, the Liberals will increase the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund, which leverages private investment for job creation, by 10 per cent to $110 million. And vitally, the Liberals vow to complete Highway 69 by 2017."
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The Torontoist
The Toronto news website goes out on a limb (a Tory has not won a provincial seat within Toronto since 1999) and says that residents of Ontario's largest city should vote for anyone except the Progressive Conservatives. They call it an "undorsement."
Neither the NDP nor the Liberals have swayed us sufficiently to rise, as a publication, to their defence. ...
Dalton McGuinty has run an upbeat, optimistic campaign, but let’s be honest: nobody in the province is particularly enthusiastic about Dalton McGuinty. Under eight years of his leadership the province of Ontario has mostly fared…well, kind of okay. ...
Andrea Horwath has done good work in putting some important but politically unsexy things on the table. ... But our concern with Horwath is that while she has a lot of good ideas, her party’s platform fails to fund them in any realistic manner. ...
Luckily, the Tories provide us with whole reams of against to vote for, because this isn’t just about Tim Hudak: it’s about every last Tory running for office. The silence from the various MPPs and candidates on Tim Hudak’s bigoted, dishonest, and stupid campaign says all you need to know about them.
You might be wondering: where are all the Progressive Conservative endorsements? Truth be told, they've been hard to find.
The National Post is the only paper I could find whose editorial board gave a full endorsement of the Tories. One reason for this might be that a number of local Ontario newspapers (The St. Catharines' Standard, The Peterborough Examiner, The Kingston Whig-Standard, the London Free Press, and others) are owned by the Sun Media chain and do not always issue their own editorials on every subject.
When Sun Media decided not to endorse any leader or party it reduced the amount of potential Progressive Conservative endorsements significantly. Many Sun papers simply published the same editorial that appeared in the Toronto Sun (see this earlier post).
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