Glen Murray slams Holyday as ‘mouthpiece’ of Ford brothers

Watch: Liberals accuse Mayor Rob Ford of meddling in provincial by-elections. Alan Carter reports.

TORONTO – Transportation Minister Glen Murray slammed Deputy Mayor and Progressive Conservative candidate Doug Holyday as well as Mayor Rob Ford Wednesday after recent comments the mayor made criticizing the Liberal government and telling people to vote against them.

Murray dismissed Holyday, a long-time city councillor and former mayor of Etobicoke as “trying to ride on the mayor’s coat-tails.”

Holyday is running for the Tories against a fellow city councillor in Etobicoke-Lakeshore, one of five Thursday byelections.

At a campaign event supporting Holyday on Tuesday, Ford compared voting for a Liberal candidate to giving bank robbers a gun and telling them to “go rob another bank.”

Murray fired back at the mayor Wednesday outside of Queen’s Park, saying Ford is being hypocritical by calling himself a “subway champion” when he has done little to raise money for a subway.

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“How you actually run to say you’re a fiscal conservative when, as a resident of Toronto, this guy has been raising my property taxes and he hasn’t built a single metre of subway. So the subway champion can only talk about subways, can’t deliver them,” Murray said, adding that were he mayor, he’d have raised the money. “So I don’t think he has much credibility. And having a Ford puppet at Queen’s park will be no great help.”

Watch: Glen Murray criticizes Holyday as a ‘mouthpiece’ for the Ford brothers.

Murray’s statements on Wednesday are the governing Liberals’ most strident rebuttal of the Ford brothers’ vocal campaign against them, which has included exhortations on their weekly radio show to vote for any candidate other than a Liberal.

But both of the candidates actually campaigning for a seat in Etobicoke-Lakeshore distanced themselves from the growing public quarrel between Toronto’s mayor and Ontario’s transportation minister.

Holyday described the spat between the two as “gutter politics” and Liberal candidate Peter Milczyn called it “tit-for-tat politics.”

Transit has become a hot issue in this byelection after the province’s about-face in support of a subway in Scarborough, whose constituents go to the polls Thursday.

Earlier in July city council voted to replace an already-funded light-rail transit route in Scarborough with an unfunded subway. The mayor voted along with the majority of city council to increase property taxes between 1.1 and 2.4 per cent as well as increase development charges in order to pay for approximately $500 million of the roughly $2.3 billion project.

That vote relied on the province contributing $1.8-billion to the total cost of the subway – $400-million more than Murray said the province will pay. The project relies on several hundred million in as-yet-unconfirmed contributions from the federal government.