UPDATE: Call off the alarums. “Free markets are alive and well,” said McGuinty today, clarifiyng his ministers remarks. “It’s just that they have a new partner.”
UPDATE: Call off the alarums. “Free markets are alive and well,” said McGuinty today, clarifiyng his ministers remarks. “It’s just that they have a new partner.”
It turns out the government isn’t going to pick specific businesses as winners; they’re going to merely pick certain sectors. Which is obviously a much easier thing to do.
Sorry for the misunderstanding.
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Ontario is run by lunatics. Perhaps still huffy about Jim Flaherty calling Ontario the “last place” for businesses to invest, Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals are setting about making sure that Ontario’s businesses all come out winners. How? By picking them, of course, in line with an investment philosophy Economic Development minister Michael Bryant calls “reverse Reaganism.”
TORONTO – Ontario’s Liberal government is looking to get into business, says Economic Development minister Michael Bryant, who Monday heralded the dawn of a new era of government intervention.
“The state has got to be strategic and if that’s the case, then we need to act as an entrepreneur and invest directly in businesses,” Bryant told a luncheon crowd in Toronto. “This is government choosing winners and losers. This is supposed to be the thing that governments weren’t supposed to do. But this is the business that we are in.”
Bryant called the new philosophy “reverse Reaganism,” in reference to the deceased U.S. president who once declared: “Government is not the solution to the problem. Government is the problem.