Ed Broadbent blasts Wynne’s presumptuous rhetoric

Apparently, Kathleen Wynne has become the champion of the poor and huddled masses this election. According to her, she has picked up the NDP torch left behind when Andrea Horwath abandoned her principles to become the “right-wing Rob Ford party.”

Of course it turns out Wynne wants left-leaning votes a lot more than she wants to represent them.

It turns out her “most progresssive budget in two decades” is also the most regressive budget in two decades according a Bloomberg analysis. They say Wynne will bring in the “biggest cuts since 1995.”

Ms. Wynne, you are no Ed Broadbent

Aside from claiming to be the party of “social justice,” Wynne has taken to invoking past NDP leaders whom she says Andrea has betrayed. One of them was Ed Broadbent.

Ed minced no words putting Wynne in her place:

Partisan debate is one thing, but by invoking my name in weekend speeches and articles to attack Andrea Horwath and the Ontario NDP, Kathleen Wynne has gone beyond the pale.

Let no one doubt: I fully support Andrea Horwath and the Ontario NDP.

Blast from the Past

David Reevely of the Ottawa Citizen noticed a parallel between Wynne’s government weighed down in scandal and that of Paul Martin’s in 2006.

In a column titled, If you invoke Ed Broadbent, you’d better know what you’re doing, he points out what Ed Broadbent — as an NDP MP under Jack Layton’s leadership — said of the Liberals back then:

No matter how unethical, undemocratic, and unprincipled the Liberal Party becomes, the team of insiders at the top can simply not imagine people choosing to take power away.

It should be taken away…its conduct in office has not been ethical. Its contempt for Parliament is rivaled only by its manipulation of voters.

Reevely concludes:

In his final statement as an MP in 2006, Ed said that the Liberals had lost the moral authority to govern.

And so too have the Ontario Liberals.