The Progressive Conservative pledge to scrap grants for companies doing business in Ontario would jeopardize jobs, warns Liberal Leader Kathleen Wynne.

Campaigning at Transformix Engineering, a robotics manufacturer in Kingston that received $178,000 in 2011 from the province’s Eastern Ontario Development Fund to create 20 full-time positions, Wynne stressed government has a roll to play in helping business.

“Being here at Transformix illustrates what is at stake in this election,” she said Friday.

Wynne blasted Conservative Leader Tim Hudak and NDP Leader Andrea Horwath — who was in Windsor touting a manufacturing investment tax credit — for opposing last week’s budget, which triggered the budget, a cornerstone of which was a new $2.5-billion 10-year “jobs and prosperity fund.”

Hudak has criticized such initiatives as “corporate welfare” and says the best thing the government can do for business is cut corporate taxes and red tape.

Wynne’s comments came the same day as Statistics Canada announced Ontario created an additional 25,800 full-time jobs last month.

Horwath was in Windsor making her second $500 million promise in two days with the manufacturing investment tax credit aimed at creating thousands of jobs and boosting productivity.

The two-year program is designed to encourage companies to put more money into new machinery, equipment and buildings with a 10 per cent tax break.

“As they invest in new machinery they hire people as well,” Horwath said a day after Unilever announced it will close its aging Brampton soup plant in two years, killing 280 jobs.

She described her plan, which builds on a $500 million job creation tax credit announced Thursday in Niagara Falls, as a targeted way to help business that is better than the Liberal “no strings attached” handouts and the Conservative approach of across-the-board corporate tax cuts.

“We need some new ideas to give companies that are ready to invest in Ontario the boost they need,” she told reporters.

As with the jobs tax credit, money to fund the program would be found from the $2 billion the Liberal government spends annually what the New Democrats call an “overlapping array of business support programs.”

The campaign stop was in the Liberal-held riding of Windsor West, where the NDP is running Lisa Gretzky, the vice-chair of the Greater Essex County District School Board, whose husband is related to hockey great Wayne Gretzky.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

New Democrats are looking for a June 12 election hat trick in Windsor, where Percy Hatfield won an Aug. 1 byelection in a riding formerly represented by veteran Liberal Dwight Duncan.

New Democrat MPP Taras Natyshak has held Windsor-Essex since 2011.

Read more about: