‎KITCHENER — A Progressive Conservative government would create a dedicated trust to fund transit and highway expansion and explore moving newly hired provincial public sector workers to riskier pensions, party Leader Tim Hudak said Thursday.

After touring a tool and die shop class at Conestoga College to tell students about his plan to allow more apprentices in the skilled trades — expected to create 200,000 new skilled trades jobs over the next four years — Hudak said "taxpayers have done enough to fund" roads and transit.

"We would invest in what we consider the strengths of our system — highways and GO Transit," Hudak said in an interview.

The PC plan involves creating an Ontario Transportation Trust, where gas tax funds and money saved by cutting waste would be directed to roads and transit and would "lock in" to prevent it from being used to fund other expenses.

"‎It would be audited by the auditor general, so that taxpayers would know every penny is going to highways and transit improvements, and they could see every project it's going to," Hudak said.

He added that infrastructure spending has risen to $12 billion a year in the province, but not much seems to be spent on transit.

"That number is up 800 per cent since 2003, when the Liberals took office," Hudak said. "It makes you wonder where it all went."

To help tackle the deficit, which is again on the upswing to $12.5 billion next year, Hudak would move new public sector workers onto less costly pension plans

"‎So for new hires, they'd receive a pension that's more common to those who do not work in the public sector," Hudak said.

Nearly all public sector workers in Ontario are part of defined-benefit pensions, where benefit amounts are set and indexed to inflation. Defined contribution pension plans, where benefits are determined solely by how contributions by employees and employers perform in the marketplace, are becoming more common.

Hudak said he'd "look at what exists outside government entities and move to something more fair and reasonable," ‎for newly hired public sector workers, but did not say whether it would involve defined contribution pensions.

‎Earlier Thursday in Vaughan, Hudak told reporters he would lower the ratio between skilled trades apprentices and fully-trained journeymen to fill the critical skilled-labour shortage in Ontario.

Allowing more apprentices on work sites so young people can get good-paying jobs as plumbers, welders or electricians makes good sense, he said.

"They have this old rule that dates back to the 1970s that says for every single apprentice in many trades you have to have four or five journeymen, so they limit the number of opportunities," Hudak told construction workers at a new housing project.

"Allow each journeyman to mentor and trade an apprentice, one each, and that'll help create 200,000 positions."

Limiting the number of apprentices hurts young people, but benefits entrenched unions that support the Liberals by funding campaign advertising attacking the Tories under the banner of the Working Families Coalition, said Hudak.

A Conservative government would make trades training a community college course and would abolish the College of Trades set up by the Liberals as a self-regulating body, which Hudak said amounts to little more than "a tax grab" to fund a "needless new bureaucracy."

The Tories have always opposed the College of Trades, which was created just over a year ago, because workers in applicable trades are required to pay $120 plus tax every year to be licensed to work, up from the old fee of $20 a year.

Premier Kathleen Wynne said Thursday "there's absolutely no evidence" Hudak's plan to change the apprentice ratios would create jobs, and she warned he would cost the province jobs by slashing government spending and ending grants to corporations.

"The cornerstone of Tim Hudak's jobs plan is actually to cut jobs, is actually to cut education and health care and to drive wages down," Wynne said in Ottawa. "The proposals we're putting forward are about creating jobs, supporting companies, building infrastructure, investing in an environment that is going to bring jobs."

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The New Democrats said the College of Trade was relatively new, and while it should be responsive to criticism so it can improve, it shouldn't be shut down.

"You don't cut something off at its legs before it's even able to walk," said NDP Leader Andrea Horwath at a campaign stop in Niagara Falls.

- Ontario Tories draw fire with plan to cut 100,000 public sector jobs