Mr. Garfield Dunlop (Simcoe North): This year, we are celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Ontario Trillium Foundation. I was pleased to attend the recent reception hosted by CEO Robin Cardozo.

Thousands of organizations across Ontario, representing a cross-section of the diversity of our province, spend countless hours filling out complex applications in their quest for funding.

Hard-working and dedicated OTF staff work closely with the organizations, helping them with applications and making sure the process is transparent. The dedicated OTF grant review team scrutinize the applications and choose those that are successful.

The program awards assistance to groups representing the following: the environment, recreation, social programs, public safety, and the arts.

The money is well spent and appreciated and, above all, transparent and a wise use of public funds.

But we now have a new program, a program that is partisan, a disgraceful, Guité-style misuse of taxpayers' dollars, chaired by the election campaign chair of the Ontario Liberal Party and part-time Minister of Finance, Greg Sorbara. The program is called slush-fund-gate, and it's a cousin of the scandalous federal Liberal program called sponsorshipgate. The money is funnelled to the son of Guité and has to be rolled out before the end of the fiscal year-a true slush fund.

Ontario taxpayers should be reminded that on top of a string of broken promises, scandal now is the norm for this McGuinty government: one scandal after another and one broken promise after another.

The hard-working taxpayers of Ontario are paying for grants to Liberal-friendly organizations-