Murray pays the price for Ontario government’s $500M MaRS scandal

There were plenty of casualties in the recent Provincial election; some deserved and some not. This post tries to give you some background on one of them.

It has been about two months since it came to light that the Provincial Liberals were in the process of forking over $500 million to bail-out the guarantee provided by MaRS to a U.S.-based real estate developer. To put that figure in context, in January, Premier Wynne committed a paltry $36.3 million in total over the next five or so years to the Venture Catalyst Fund, the successor to the Ontario Venture Capital Fund (see prior post “Northleaf’s Venture Catalyst Fund gets to work” Feb. 27-14). Compare that to a $90 million commitment to OVCF under Dalton McGuinty in 2008. The new NVCF commitment works out to a Provincial investment of about $7 million per annum into primarily Canadian VC funds that are then to invest in job-creating entrepreneurial ventures.

A pittance as compared to the MaRS’ bricks-and-mortar bailout, which is why the ecosystem got so irate when the news broke, as captured on the chat pages of StartUpNorth and our own comment section.

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