Premier Kathleen Wynne hopes meeting NDP Leader Andrea Horwath’s demand to boost youth jobs will keep her minority Liberal government gainfully employed.

Bowing to another of Horwath’s conditions for supporting the upcoming budget, Wynne on Monday announced a two-year, $295 million youth employment strategy to create 30,000 jobs.

“What we are planning to do . . . goes quite a ways beyond what the NDP is asking and is a much more complete strategy,” the premier told reporters at the Richmond St. W. offices of Youth Employment Services.

“My hope is it will meet the needs of the young people of the province. My hope is that both (opposition) parties will look at this and they will say that this is a very good thing,” she said.

The new youth jobs strategy is a key piece of Finance Minister Charles Sousa’s first budget, which will be tabled Thursday afternoon.

If Sousa’s spending plan is defeated, Ontario voters would be at the polls as early as June.

“This is new money,” he said, noting the deficit is steadily being reduced and the shortfall in 2013-14 will be “about $1 billion” less than the $12.8 billion previously forecast. The deficit for 2012-13 was $9.8 billion.

Included in the Liberals’ plan is a $195 million “Ontario Youth Employment Fund” that would launch this September should the budget pass.

That matches Horwath’s call for $195 million — $78 million this year, $117 million next year — in her “First Start” on-the-job youth training program.

Under the Grit proposal an additional $100 million will be earmarked for a new youth entrepreneurship fund — to support would-be tycoons through mentorship and start-up cash — as well as special programs for innovators to help with industrial research and commercializing their ideas and another fund to encourage “business-labour connectivity and training.”

But the Liberals’ ambitions are moot unless Sousa’s budget survives a confidence vote expected next month.

Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak again stressed Monday that his party will vote it down — and castigated the New Democrats for enabling the Liberals.

“The NDP has been very clear that they’re willing to prop up a Liberal government basically to look the other way if enough spending promises are made in their direction,” Hudak told reporters.

Horwath insisted “it’s hard to say” if the Liberals’ lip service to NDP demands — including a cut to auto insurance rates to be announced Tuesday and closing corporate tax loopholes — will be enough.

“Liberals make lots of promises and then we find out after that they were hollow or they weren’t followed up on,” she said.

“So we’re going to wait and see what the budget says itself on Thursday and spend some time on that.”

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A new poll released Monday suggested Wynne is drawing support away from Horwath, which has helped the Liberals tie the Tories at 36 per cent support apiece. The NDP was at 24 per cent and the Greens at 4 per cent.

The Forum Research poll of 1,133 people, conducted Friday using automated calls, is considered accurate to within three percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

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