The party is over and it’s time to clean up the mess.

That was the sobering message from Tim Hudak as he unveiled a Progressive Conservative platform ending the Liberals’ tuition breaks for students, cancelling teachers’ raises, and axing a renovation tax credit for seniors.

In a document free of the consumer-friendly baubles that often dominate campaign manifestos, Hudak warned of increased class sizes, higher fees for college and university students, and fewer people working in education.

After months of signalling reforms to Ontario’s anachronistic booze laws, he opted not to change the government’s LCBO monopoly or open up the foreign-owned Beer Store to competition if he wins the June 12 election.

“I have to set priorities and I have big fish to fry. Getting our economy to grow again and making some tough calls to balancing the books comes first,” said Hudak after a polished 45-minute town-hall performance in front of 100 supporters at Toronto’s Intercontinental Hotel.

“I’ll save that battle for another day,” he said Wednesday of modernizing the sale of beer, wine and liquor.

Hudak conceded his belt-tightening platform, the Million Jobs Plan, means “some difficult decisions” like eliminating 100,000 positions out of the 1.1 million people who work in Ontario’s broader public service and freezing the wages of those left behind.

With an eye toward eliminating the deficit — which sits at $12.5 billion this year — by 2016-17, he is proposing some steep cuts.

“We have to take urgent action on a turnaround plan to balance the budget and create jobs,” he said.

Following the recommendation of economist Don Drummond’s sweeping 2012 report to former Liberal premier Dalton McGuinty government on revamping public services, a Tory administration would raise class sizes.

That would increase the current 20-student class-size cap (up to Grade 3) to 23 children.

From grades 4 to 8, the cap average would jump from 24.5 students to 26 and in high school classes would rise from 22 to 24.

Liberal Leader Kathleen Wynne’s promised raises for Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario members and early childhood education educators would also be cancelled.

The “healthy homes renovation tax credit” that pays senior citizens up to $1,500 to improve bathrooms and stairs to enable them to remain in their houses longer — and out of costly long-term care facilities — would be axed.

As well, the Liberals’ 30 per cent tuition grant for most Ontario college and university students would be eliminated.

Hudak said such cuts would lead to the deficit dropping by $8.5 billion to about $4 billion next year and the books balanced in 2016-17. Wynne’s Liberals claim they can get Ontario into the black in 2017-18 without radical surgery.

Touring an elementary school in Guelph, she called the PC platform “a dangerous set of ideas” that will cost Ontarians more out-of-pocket for things like hydro bills and university and college tuition and put Ontario at risk of tipping back into recession.

With cuts to education, “he would undermine schools like this one . . . to suggest raising class sizes and remove people from the school, it’s the wrong way to go.”

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“He’s talking about cutting twice as many jobs as Mike Harris did,” said Wynne, who entered politics as a school trustee in the 1990s to oppose the former PC premier’s agenda.

“We fought the cuts Mike Harris made . . . because those cuts undermined the social fabric. It is the wrong direction that Tim Hudak is suggesting.”

While Hudak declined to even utter Harris’s name when asked if his political mentor’s “ghost” haunted him, he said: “If people want to judge me for being part of a government that led North America in job creation, they can choose yay or nay.”

His platform announcement came the same day a new Forum Research poll in the Star suggested his plan to reduce the size of the public service is not popular.

Almost two-thirds — 62 per cent — disapproved of the proposal, with 26 per cent approving of it and 11 per cent unsure.

About 9,700 “non-teaching positions” in the education system are among the 100,000 civil service jobs that would be slashed.

Similarly, Forum found‎ 63 per cent do not think Hudak will be able to create 1 million new jobs, while 26 per cent feel he can deliver and 11 per cent don’t know.

His austerity measures have also affected his party’s popularity.

The Liberals now lead with 38 per cent support to 35 per cent for the Conservatives, 21 per cent for Andrea Horwath’s New Democrats, and 5 per cent for Mike Schreiner’s Greens.

In the May 2 Forum survey, the Tories were at 38 per cent, the Liberals 33 per cent, the NDP 22 per cent, and the Greens at 6 per cent.

Using interactive voice-response phone calls, Forum polled 996 people across Ontario on Monday and results are considered accurate to within three percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

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