Article content

Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne is entering some bizarre territory in her ongoing verbal assault on Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Wynne’s latest effort is the suggestion that, had Harper been prime minister instead of Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s national railway would never have been built.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Kelly McParland: Kathleen Wynne helps no one with her outbursts about Harper Back to video

Wynne seems set on reviving the days when Ontario sought to dictate policy to Canada.

“If Stephen Harper had been the Prime Minister instead of Sir John A. Macdonald and B.C. had said ’well we need a railway,’ he would have said ‘well, you know, we’re not going to help you with that, build it yourself,”’ Wynne said while appearing with Bill Blair, the former Toronto police chief who is running as one of Justin Trudeau’s Liberal candidates in the October election.

[np_storybar title=”Read & Debate” link=””]





[/np_storybar]

This is an odd statement, considering the considerable efforts Ottawa has put into convincing Ontario to get behind Energy East, the transcontinental pipeline that would move crude from Alberta and Saskatchewan to Saint John. It’s a truly national project, it would work to the benefit of the country as a whole, would create jobs and expand domestic refining activity, and the provinces at the east and west ends of the pipeline are strongly in favour. It would unite an NDP government in Alberta with a Liberal government in New Brunswick, but is being held up by the Liberal governments in two provinces in the middle – Ontario and Quebec – which have no real skin in the game except for the fact the pipeline would cross through their territory. The Ontario leg already exists, in fact. TransCanada Corp., the builder, would simply convert it from gas to oil. Canada has been building pipelines for decades; there is no question of our expertise. There is no reason to hold up the project, in fact, but narrow provincial political gamesmanship, which is exactly what Wynne is practicing.