[LINK] "Ontario budget: Can NDP leader afford to prop up Ontario Liberals again?"

[rfmcdonald]

CBC's Robert Fisher writes about how the NDP in Ontario, under Andrea Horvath, holds the future of the province in its hands. Will the Liberal minority government of Kathleen Wynne survive? Or will we go to elections just 19 months after the last one?

It was a triple "e" budget that Ontario's minority Liberal government brought down yesterday: A little of everything, for everybody, everywhere, with the NDP's Andrea Horwath very much in mind.

Finance Minister Charles Sousa and Premier Kathleen Wynne made it clear for weeks that their first budget would be a "Liberal" budget.

But this one has NDP handprints all over it. And the reason was straightforward.

Conservative Leader Tim Hudak, risking (as one senior Tory told me privately) being the only guy "in short pants" at Queen's Park, decided to reject the budget and its direction for the province in advance, to push instead for a provincial election.

Whether he gets his wish, though, will depend on Horwath, who wants to wait a little longer before she delivers her yea or nay. She wants to consult Ontarians, and her party, as she did last spring with what turned out to be Dalton McGuinty's final budget.

But this time there is the added dimension of Ontario Federation of Labour president Sid Ryan telling Horwath not to bring down the Wynne government, and instead work toward an accord with the Liberals to try to create some mutually desired change.

What Ryan is suggesting would be not unlike what happened in 1985 when then NDP leader Bob Rae and then Liberal leader David Peterson brought an end to the long-standing Conservative rule in Ontario with their two-page document that kept Peterson's minority government going for two years.

But the situation this time is a bit different.