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  “ It is the best and biggest and most privileged opportunity to be      Premier of Ontario”.

  An exclusive conversation with

    Mr. John Tory, Leader of the Official Opposition and

  Leader of the PC Party of Ontario.

  By Thomas S. Saras

     Editor-In-Chief

Q: I would, first of all, like to thank you for your time. It’s always a pleasure and an honour for us at Patrides, our readers and our community to have you with us. You have developed of course excellent skills as leader of the opposition since you took over this position, and I am quite sure you are preparing to take over the government eventually.  Please tell our readers of your party’s main platform that you’ve developed.

A: Well, we are in the process right now of finalizing a platform and when you are in the opposition you generally would not put your platform out until closer to the election. But having said that, I can tell you right now that I am very committed. The reason I came into public life was because I felt very strongly that government does not get enough things done. Government talks a lot about things, they make a lot of announcements, but they just don’t get enough things done.  Whether its really bringing about some meaningful solutions to the problems of crime in Toronto, whether its about really helping businesses to be more prosperous in order to create more jobs, or whether its about actually tackling the problems of the healthcare system and making real progress to have that system function better, or whether its about dealing with gridlock and congestion in Toronto. These are things that there is a lot of talk about.  What I want to  do is to have a limited number of things that I commit to people that I am going to do well, but more importantly that I am going to get them done. That there really will be some roads for the transit to go, from the present government you see endless series of announcements on these subjects and yet if you go around Toronto and see how many shovels are in the ground building anything, the answer is virtually none. On the subject of crime, for example, there have been endless announcements of all kinds of funds and programs and people doing this and that, but if you look at it and say how much has really been done in some of the challenged neighbourhoods of Toronto and the rest of Ontario: how much has really been done to fix the justice system, so we do not have people arrested on Friday and back into the street on Monday, if not sooner, very little. And so I am quite determined to have as the main theme a prosperous economy. It all starts there. If you do not have a prosperous economy that creates jobs for our children and for us and in turn is creating the necessary revenue to finance government programs, then it would be virtually is going to be impossible to bring improvements to public services like healthcare and education. And virtually impossible to provide the kind of help we have an obligation to provide to people who may be in trouble or who may be disadvantaged for a variety of reasons. So I think everything starts with a healthy economy. That in turn I think necessitates a strong up-to-date infrastructure, which includes transportation, it includes hydro/electricity, and a lot of similar things.  I think after that people expect you to be providing quality public services and the two things they focus on the most, of course, are healthcare and education. So I think you will find when our platform emerges it will be about better government, not just more government, it will be about better management of the government, because I think right now people are paying more tax than ever and getting less services for their money. It will be about a strong economy and what we can do to make sure that we are welcoming people here to create new business and to expand their business, not chasing them away.  We have lost almost 70, 000 manufacturing jobs in Ontario in the past year alone. There are other jobs being created but there are often not jobs that are as good as the ones that we are loosing that are high paid manufacturing jobs. In many cases, those manufacturing jobs that we are loosing is because we are chasing those people out of Ontario through high regulations, high taxes, high hydro/electric prices and these are all things that have happened on Mr. Mcginty’s watch.  So I think that’s what you will find will be the essence of our platform.

 Q: In the past few years by the previous conservative governments, there was damage done in the social infrastructure of the province as a result, many residents in the province are thinking how they are going to deal with the possibility of a new Conservative government. Can you tell me what is the difference between the previous Conservative government and your future Conservative government?

A: I will name you two in particular. One is, as I mentioned, when I stated why you need to have prosperity. The reason why I think you need to have prosperity is not for the sake of having prosperity, its not so we can celebrate the fact that companies and individuals can make money. The main reason that I think we need to have more prosperity in Ontario and a healthier economy is so that we can afford to provide excellent public services and so we can afford to help people that need a hand up. We have an absolute obligation, in my view, but also in my entire life history.  I will come back to this in a moment. My life history has demonstrated this. When I was a businessman, when I was a lawyer,  I spent huge amounts of time and energy trying to help build a better community, where people who needed a bit of extra help got it.  I believe government has a fundamental obligation to provide elements of that help. Not all of it but I think they have a very important obligation to help people who need help. To provide quality public services that are for everybody but especially for those who cannot afford to provide certain things for themselves.  So number one is that I accompany every statement I make for the need for prosperity by saying that a big part of the reason why we need to have that prosperity is so we can finance for people. It is a fundamental part of my reason for being when it comes to economic strength. The second thing is my personal history. I do not think you will find a person in public life today, and this is a bold statement to make, but I do not think you will find a person who has contributed more of his time. There are many who have contributed as much, but there will not be a person who has contributed more of their time to helping causes that are trying themselves to address some of the very social needs that you refer too. Even today in public life I continue to devote myself to significant community activities such as in fundraising for St. Michael’s Hospital, for autism, for all kinds of causes that I can name, that I am involved with even today. Because I believe not just that its important for the community to go out and raise money and for us to help each other but because I believe there is a partnership that exists between personal responsibility and community responsibility. It’s the government’s role as organization to provide the foundation for public services and programs, to help people who need help. So I think people can look at me and say well, I am John Tory, I am not anybody else I am not advertising myself as anybody else I am advertising myself for who I am and what I stand for and what my track record has been.  I believe people judge that track record fairly in terms of what I demonstrated I am, the views that I have expressed over time about the need to help people. The reason why I believe so passionately in the need for prosperity they will conclude that what they will get from a Progressive Conservative Government lead by John Tory is every bit as much compassion and caring as they get from any other party or any other leader but they will get one that delivers it with a view that is saying lets get more for our money, lets do it better, lets find better ways to spend the money we are spending so that we can provide even more help to even more people with the same amount of money. And if we need to increase it, that’s fine, we can deal with that. But I am just saying that I would be really focused on saying can we find more innovative ways, can we find newer ways, better ways to help more people with the same money that we are already spending. I do not see a diminished role for government in this area, I see an expanded role, but I think we have to do the job better for the taxpayers.

Q: Mr. Tory the social fabric of the province in the last ten years has changed with new immigrants settling, some of them not even settled. There is always the problem of how they can be integrated in the Ontario mainstream society. We found for every new immigrant that comes to the province is going through extreme difficulties for the first few years until he finds his way. And finds very little help from the government. All we hear, as you have stated is a series of announcements but they are only announcements. In fact, a father of four or five must find work and work 15 to 20 hours a day at minimum wage in order to just barely get by.  Some are in the welfare system not because they cannot find work but because they have found that with being on the welfare system they can survive with the benefits that come from being on the welfare system. How will your government deal with this?

A: I will start by saying that we have seriously let down a lot of people that we have invited to come to this country. There are very few people. There are some that came, broke the rules and stayed when they should not have but the vast majority of people followed the rules made applications and we approved them and invited to come to Canada. And while an invitation to come to Canada does not mean that it comes with a guarantee that you will have a certain job at a certain period of time. I think it’s a reasonable expectation to have that you will have an opportunity if you are trained to do something. To be able to use those skills within a reasonable period of time to support your family and have the dignity of a career like you have from wherever you came from. I think it starts right back from the first moment before anyone walks in to the Canadian Embassy or the Canadian High Commission in any country and right now they walk in and express an interest in coming to Canada. We are delighted that they do because we need those people to help build the country. We tell them almost nothing about their education, how it’s viewed in Canada, how it’s viewed relative to a Canadian education in the same area, whether it’s an engineer, doctor, accountant or a lawyer. So we tell them almost nothing. In fact they might be lead to believe that if they are engineers they can come to Canada and be an engineer right away. The second thing that then happens is that they fill out an application that application sits in the system for two years. We take no advantage of the opportunity to have those people understand, because we know many times in advance that if they had a certain degree from Indian, Africa, South Asia or anywhere, we know for a fact that you will have to take some upgrading courses or some additional courses that perhaps are not covered in that course that are covered here. We do not say to them or by the way you have two years because that’s how long the waiting period seems to be whether that’s right or wrong that’s about how long people are waiting sometimes longer. We will make available to you courses on-line or otherwise through correspondence. We do it for people who live in the far north; we do it for people who study by correspondence that live in the rural parts of Canada. We will help you get that upgrading and that improvement in your education while you wait. So that when your application is approved and you finally can come to Canada you have whether its an English language problem or whether it’s a problem with a couple of courses you need to take, we have actually done something to address that short-coming you might have had or whatever needs to be done to make you better equipped to come to Canada. Then when they come to Canada we have a sort of hoggpogg of problems and agencies that help people, if you happen to be lucky enough to figure out where one is. There really is no comprehensive program to sort of say, look, we have an obligation not just to sort of say welcome to Canada, shake your hand and send them over to the nearest place to get a temporary apartment. We should be saying look, we are going to take you to a well-organized universal program that says for everybody that we are going to try and make sure you get directed as best you can. Again with no guarantee we will be able to find you a job within a week or exactly the job you want. But we will do everything we can to help you that means language programs, which in many cases people do not have access too. Not withstanding all the money we seem to spend they do not get access to all these programs. It means mentorship and internship programs that give people the most elusive thing of all a little bit of Canadian experience. When I talk about community involvement I had the opportunity during the time after I ran for mayor and before I got into this job, of being the Chair of Career Bridge. When people were given through Career Bridge a four-month internship that got them inside a Canadian business or government or public organization for four-months, 90% of the people after four-months got a permanent job. Why, because when they got inside those organizations, the people who worked there with them saw that they were very skilled people, they were able to make a big contribution and most of the organizations said you are really good I want to hire you. But what they needed was that exposure. You do not have any network if you have just arrived from some other country no matter what your education is.   How do you know who to call to get a job as a lawyer, an engineer or a computer technician or a pharmacist?  So I think a lot more of these kinds of programs are needed. Right now there are these programs but they are scattered all over the place. They are not really co-ordinated and if you add up the total number of positions covered by those programs, it is relatively small. For example did you know there were more engineers that were registered in the profession in Ontario that had been overseas and then educated in Ontario for the first time ever. This is good news, but the fact is that we can do better to accommodate some of the people that come. But we have to start at the beginning. Before they walk into the Canadian Embassy they can go on-line they can really learn a lot. You look at the web site we have today it is really a weak effort that just has a bit of information about who to phone. But it does not say to you that if you went to the institute of technology in India and you have this degree this is how this is regarded by the University of Toronto or by the engineering profession in Ontario. And by the way this is our advice of what to do to get yourself ready to come to Ontario. And by the way if you go to this web site or go here or go there we can get you a course to get you started right now and getting yourself up to scratch. And then the finally, and you can talk upto two hours on this, but I think we have to make much more of an effort to have the people in the business and government communities reach out and go out and meet the people in the immigrant communities and new Canadians because they do not know how to find their way out sometimes even to the Royal Bank 

Q:  We were talking about crime earlier and its incredible to me how much it has increased. I have lived in Canada all my adult life and I have never seen such an explosion of crime in such short years. I believe that the social gap that exits between the rich and the poor is a factor and that our youngest generation is the one that suffers the most because they have no way to protect/defend themselves against the likes of involvement in crime, drugs etc. Does your party have a way of dealing with this?

 A: Well, the first is to start with the families they came from and probably two things with regard to those families. The first thing you will find is that your point is absolutely correct. That the parents, sometimes a single parent of those children who get in trouble are people themselves that don’t have a job. Who feel marginalized, sometimes for the third generation in a row?   Whether it be the grandfather, then the father etc… become marginalized. And so the best thing to do to make those families more stable is put them in a better situation and put their children in a better situation so that they do not get involved with crime.  We need to make sure that the parents have work so that means a consertive attack on the problem of unemployment in some of these challenged neighbourhoods that are now 15 or 20 in total around Toronto, according to the United Way, involving thousands and thousands of people. The gap between rich and poor has widened in Toronto and that is why there is such a fundamental need to attack this in a consertive way and say that you are really going to try and uplift the fortunes of the people who live in those neighbourhoods by getting them a skill or a job. Or sometimes they have a skill but have no way to access a job and have nowhere to turn. And so I think that’s number one. Number two is, I was in a neighbourhood in Scarborough yesterday, if I was to tell you that this was one of the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods in Toronto where they have had a lot of problems and yet they have probably one of the worst community facilities and by worst meaning almost none, no place for the kids to play basketball, no place for the kids to even have some kind of program for themselves in the winter indoors. The school that sits there is closed up as tight as a drum. It has a gymnasium.  Closed up as tight as a drum because there are disputes that arise or debates about who should pay. The school board says the city should pay; there are insurance issues and so on. And so what should the kids do? Those people told me yesterday in that neighbourhood that they sit there in the summer, they get bored, they see someone who has an ipod and earphones on and so they go up, beat them up and take their ipod away and then worse things than that happen. So I think what we have to do is focus on making sure we give these kids an opportunity to get a summer job. Again they do not have a network to fall into; they do not have a friend to ask get my son or daughter a summer job. The kids don’t know whom to phone. We have to provide that opportunity for them both in the private and public sector and we have to make sure, when they are even younger at about age 10 or 12 that they have proper recreational facilities, that they have homework clubs so that if parents are not able to help with homework and in many cases the parents are able to help with homework because they have two jobs not no job. Or in some cases, lets be frank when parents cannot help with homework its because their own English is not very good, and that they cannot help with homework So does that mean we leave those kids to just stand up and out of high school because they cannot do very well because their parents are not able to help them.  I say no, I say we need to have programs to make sure we focus on those kids and make sure we give them every single bit of help because you know as I do the majority of those kids will be world leaders if they are given a chance. They are smart kids, there is nothing wrong with their brain, they have all the ability in the world, what they lack is the opportunity. The opportunity to get a summer job, the opportunity to get some help to do their homework so that they can stay in school. They just lack because it is not present in their household. It’s not their fault; it’s not their parent’s fault. In most cases it’s just the way it is. And so we have to help both the parent and the kids and I think that will do a lot to reduce crime. Now I should say one more thing. I also think we have to get much tougher like things like sentencing because they will tell you in those same neighbourhoods that the people who get arrested on Friday night are back walking the streets on Monday morning. The people who accused of a serious crime and get convicted get a sentence of a couple of months in jail and they are back in the neighbourhood terrorizing people weeks later. And so we have to address those kinds of things to make sure that the police have those resources they need as well to keep the neighbourhood safe. But I think it starts with making sure you reduce the incidence of crime by helping the parents get on their feet better and by helping the kids to have positive things to do instead getting involved with crime.

Q: I have a very personal question. You were a very successful business, a gentleman managing a very big operation and I am sure that the amount of money you were receiving is much better than the benefits you will receive from either Leader of the Opposition or as Premier of Ontario. My question is why have you left such a successful career better lifestyle and stepped into this position. Is it because you wanted to be Premier?

A: You know Mr. McGinty and his colleagues regularly mocked me for the success I was fortunate enough to enjoy in the business community. They mocked and criticized the fact that a person who was a successful business leader has chosen to devote his life to public life just like they did. Mr. McGinty was a successful lawyer and other people in his government and in my party are people who did other things very well. Some made more money than others but how much money you make is not the measure of how good you are. I chose to do this because I thought that the place where I could make the biggest difference, and I spent years and years as I said helping create jobs in the businesses that I ran.  Helping to address some of society’s problems in the community organizations that I supported as I mentioned earlier. But I felt that the way I can make an even bigger difference and help create more jobs and prosperity that I talked about and help to do more to help people who need help in these neighbourhoods and help the kids that we talked about to help them stay on the right side of the line and to provide better healthcare for people, was for me to go into public life. And I apply my energies to whatever skills I have to making a difference in public life. So it’s not about the money and at the end of the day when you said I left a really good job, a better job, I think is the opportunity to be Premier of Ontario. It is the best and biggest and most privileged opportunity you could ever have. If they paid you nothing it would be a privilege to have a kind of job to try and help people. You are measured, you know, when you go to your grave not by how money you made or how much money you have, you are measured by what you did and what you contributed. And the place where I thought I could contribute the most even more than I think I was able to contribute as a business man and as a private citizen, is in public life.  We will see whether I have the opportunity. The great thing about our system is that I get to offer my ideas, and the policies of my party, and the voters get to decide. And I will of course accept their judgment on whatever they decide but I am looking forward to hopefully having the privilege of being the head of the government because I just think I could make a huge difference in all the things we talked about today, prosperity, health for disadvantaged neighbourhoods, keeping kids out of trouble, having a more effective handling of law and order, better roads for transportation, better healthcare where I think Mr. McGinty has been very ineffective. These are all things you cannot do overnight and you cannot do it yourself, you have a team to do it all with you, but you have the chance to show leadership. I think a look in my track record will say is that one thing I have done is try to demonstrate leadership in everything I have done. Whether it will be a Canadian Football League, whether it’s charitable causes, whether its business or law, I have tried it to show leadership and I will try again.

Q: What do you think about the equalization program that was created between Ottawa and Ontario?

A: I think we have an obligation as the wealthiest province of the country to make sure we provide some degree of support for our fellow Canadians.  There does come a point though where we have to ensure that we are able to provide good quality public services here in Ontario to our own people at the same time as we help the people in the rest of Canada. Mr. McGinty for example, went to a meeting a year a half ago and agreed to an automatic 3% escalation in the amount that we pay into equalization each and every year going forward. So, he, by agreeing to that agreed to have us paying more and more each year no matter how our economy was doing. For example no matter how much we are spending for college education for our kids or on healthcare, that might something he is second guessing himself on now because he seems to have changed his position. Let me be very clear. I think we have to continue to be active participants and contributors to equalization. I think the equalization program has to take account our own circumstances, it can’t just be we pay any amount no matter what based on the needs of other people. We have to take into account the needs of the people who live in Ontario. I think that means some simplification of and some adjustment to the equalization formula to take account of Ontario’s situation. At the same time Mr. Harper has given a signal that he wants to address other aspects of the financial imbalance between Ontario and the rest of Canada by saying that he recognizes that there is such a thing and I think what we have to do is to go out and address the transfer payments where we get less in certain areas now than other provinces do for basic services like healthcare. So I think what is needed though is an approach that says and recognizes Canada is a partnership. You cannot get a new deal for Ontario by dumping on the people that you are going to make the new deal with. We have to work with the other provinces, work with the federal government and if I have any criticism, and as you may know our party has supported twice now in the legislature since I have been here, resolution that supported in principal the position that Mr. McGinty was taking about the need for a better deal in Ontario. What I criticized however at the same time was the methods he used to go out and getting that deal where, he allows himself to become isolated and he picks fights with people.  I don’t think that is the way, I know you have to stand up for your point of view but I think you can do that in such a way by putting forward constructive proposals to advance the national agenda but allows you to build a strong Canada, but also at the same time make sure that Ontario’s interests are protected in advance. And so I think there is an issue to be addressed there. I have provided support in a honourable way when Mr. McGinty asked for it on principal of what he is trying to do, but I have also made very frequent suggestions as to how I think he could be more affective in the way he is handling it. Working better with the other provinces and with the government of Canada and the kind of partnership that people expect of their governments in Canada.

Q: Thank you very much one more time for your time. It was a pleasure, as always,

      talking to you.