Remember this guy in the Harris government?

Peterborough Politics: Rosy Flaherty

Having lived in various parts of Ontario my entire life, I have had the dubious experience of living through the era of the Mike Harris Conservative Government. We are still feeling the effects of those years and their policies to this day. The starved and underfunded school and health care systems, the crumbling infrastructure, the lost fiscal capacity and the growing poverty, all of these things were brought on or made worse by the policies of the Harris Conservatives. Their Neo-Conservative ideology of "tax cuts solve everything" left this province in a terrible mess, with lots of policies that are still doing damage to the bottom lines of the province (also because of the McGuinty Liberals refusal to fix them ie. School Funding formula and refusing to upload Social Services costs from Municipalities).

So after that gang was turfed from Queen's Park, many were justifiably happy. But problem was that some of those Harris Conservatives didn't just go away, they just moved up to Ottawa. Former Harris ministers make up a large part of Stephen Harper's cadre in Ottawa, with the likes of John Baird and Tony Clement taking up big positions there. But in probably the most important Cabinet position is one of the most infamous Harris era ministers, Finance Minster Jim Flaherty. Flaherty was known in Ontario for spending a great deal of his time praying at the alter of his god "tax cut". He was known for downloading things to other levels, trying to defer any responsibility for raising anyone's taxes. He also partook in selling off public buildings and assets, and was big part of the movement towards P3 hospitals (something that the McGuinty Liberals have continued with). Probably the most infamous case of this was the sale of the 407 toll road to a Spanish consortium and using the money to barely balance the books. It was that kind of management that had Ontario deep into deficit by the time they were booted, although they never admitted to those deficits as they were hiding them. Transparency indeed.