Kathleen Wynne touts environmental record on final day of campaign

“If this were 2005, there’s a good chance that on a warmer June day we would have had a toxic smog advisory,” she told reporters Wednesday on the rooftop of an Ontario St. housing co-op against the backdrop of the downtown Toronto skyline.

“Toxic chemicals would have been spreading all across the province, jeopardizing people’s health. Kids with asthma would have been filling up the ER and schools would be cancelling recess and runners like me would have been getting an advisory not to go running,” the Liberal leader said.

“That’s what life was like under the Conservative government. The air was not always safe and some days it was downright dangerous to be outside,” she said, referring to the reins of former Progressive Conservative premiers Mike Harris and Ernie Eves.

After Liberal Dalton McGuinty was elected premier in 2003, Queen’s Park put more of an emphasis on cleaning up the environment, and promoting — sometimes controversially and expensively — green energy, among other initiatives.

Wynne noted that along with closing Nanticoke and eliminating all coal-fired generation, the Liberals partnered with Quebec and California for a cap-and-trade system to discourage businesses from polluting the air with greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change.

While praising Andrea Horwath’s New Democrats for supporting such environmental policies, she warned that Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives are “living in a different decade, talking about slashing regulations that protect your family’s health.”

Horwath has said she would keep cap-and-trade, which brings in $1.9 billion that must by law be used to bankroll environmental programs, such as retrofitting old buildings and boosting public-transit infrastructure.

Ford has vowed to eliminate any form of what he calls “a carbon tax,” but has not yet said how he would account for the loss in revenue to the treasury from scrapping such programs.