TORONTO - Public sector unions are gearing up for a protest Friday outside the Collingwood resort where Ontario's governing Liberals will gather for a weekend conference ahead of the next provincial election.
While politicians hunker down at the "Imagine Ontario's Future" thinkers' conference, dozens of demonstrators plan to remind them that they're punishing low-income families by demanding wage freezes from public sector workers.
"It's really an attack on the working poor in Ontario," said Mike Grimaldi of the Ontario Public Sector Employees Union, which represents 125,000 workers.
"In many cases, you have part-time workers who are making $20,000, $30,000 a year, whereas they're still allowing pay-for-performance and bonuses, for example, (for) hospital CEOs who are making half a million dollars a year."
More than a million Ontario public sector workers are affected by the freeze on wages and benefits announced in the March budget, a move the government claims will save $750 million as it struggles to rein in $110 billion in red ink over eight years.
Some 750,000 unionized employees will see their compensation packages capped for two years once their contracts expire. The government vowed to immediately freeze salaries for about 310,000 non-unionized workers, but senior managers will still receive performance pay.
"We don't think that that's the way you balance the budget -- on the backs of the poor," said Grimaldi.
Finance Minister Dwight Duncan, who put workers on wage-freeze alert, shrugged off the planned protest.
"It's a free country. People will take their positions and protest their governments," he said Thursday.
Unlike Bob Rae's NDP government, the Liberals aren't re-opening collective agreements and stripping them, he added.
"These are never easy things," Duncan said. "You're talking about people's pay, their benefits. But we believe we've got the right policy."
The Liberals want to drum up new ideas at the weekend conference for the 2011 election, which they hope will hand them a third consecutive majority government.
McGuinty will fire the starter's pistol with a speech to the party faithful Friday night, followed by two days of seminars on the economy and public services, from health care to using social networks to encourage voter participation. Malcolm Gladwell, a Canadian-born journalist and author, will make the keynote speech.
The conference is about finding ways to "re-engineer" Ontario for the 21st century, said party president Yasir Naqvi.
"A lot of our good ideas have come through that process," he said.
"This is our next step as we look beyond 2010 on a longer horizon: where the future for Ontario lies, to get engaged in that discussion, to build the policies of the government."
If Premier Dalton McGuinty is all out of ideas, he should just talk to the public, said Progressive Conservative critic Lisa MacLeod.
There's growing discontent with his policies, from tax harmonization to changing the sex ed curriculum to funding cuts to pharmacists, she said.
"People are really unhappy right now," MacLeod said.
"They're just going off and doing this big thinkers' conference, and I think it just spells how out of touch they are."
