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TORONTO - If the Liberals win the June 12 election they will keep the Drive Clean vehicle emissions test program, Premier Kathleen Wynne said Friday.

Speaking at a campaign event in Toronto, the Liberal premier said her party would do whatever they could "to make sure the air is clean."

"The Drive Clean program has been changed over time," she said. "It has evolved, but we'll continue to support it."

The Progressive Conservatives have said they would kill programs that "don't offer good value," such as Drive Clean, which critics say has outlived its usefulness.

"I think you'll be amazed at how much government you're never going to miss (and) top of my list: Drive Clean," Tim Hudak said Friday.

"The auditor general said the program has had its day, and it did, but why we keep making you pay a tax to help you celebrate your birthday every two years just to keep bureaucrats busy, that doesn't make any sense at all."

The Liberal government recently lowered the price from $35 to $30 for the tests drivers pay for every two years for light-duty vehicles at least seven years old.

Drive Clean is supposed to be a revenue-neutral program to get cars that spew pollution off the road, but it started turning a profit.

The government collected $30 million in fees in 2011-12, but spent only $19 million to deliver the program. It had projected a surplus of $11 million by the end of that fiscal year.

Ontario's former auditor general warned in 2012 that could land the province in legal hot water, because it's a user fee, not a tax. He cited a Supreme Court decision which basically ruled that a user fee cannot exceed the cost to providing the service.

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Liberals would keep Drive Clean: Wynne

A sign on the parking lot is seen at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Pittsburgh. (AP Photo/Keith...

As a scandal involving long delays at Veterans Affairs hospitals mounts, it's worth recalling that liberals have long touted the socialized medical system as evidence that government-run health care can work.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has penned several valentines to the Veterans Health Administration over the years. In a 2006 column, Krugman argued that the system was, one of the best-kept secrets in the American policy debate.

He explained, pundits and policy makers don't talk about the veterans' system because they can't handle the cognitive dissonance. ... For the lesson of the V.H.A.'s success story -- that a government agency can deliver better care at lower cost than the private sector -- runs completely counter to the pro-privatization, anti-government conventional wisdom that dominates today's Washington.

In 2011, Krugman wrote a column blasting Mitt Romney after the Republican presidential candidate called for partially privatizing the system. What Mr. Romney and everyone else should know is that the V.H.A. is a huge policy success story, which offers important lessons for future health reform, he wrote.

The lessons, he said, were that the incentives created by its integrated care model led to less waste and better quality care. (Y)es, this is socialized medicine, Krugman wrote, noting that some private enterprises also took a similar approach. But it works and suggests what it will take to solve the troubles of U.S. health care more broadly.

In a 2007 article for the American Prospect, Ezra Klein also praised the system's outcomes. What makes this such an explosive story is that the VHA is a truly socialized medical system, Klein wrote. The unquestioned leader in American health care is a government agency that employs 198,000 federal workers from five different unions, and nonetheless maintains short wait times and high consumer satisfaction.

Both authors cited Phillip Longman, who wrote an influential book on the Left titled Best Care Anywhere: Why VA Health Care is Better Than Yours. Longman, in a 2005 article for the Washington Monthly that led to the book, wrote, It turns out that precisely because the VHA is a big, government-run system that has nearly a lifetime relationship with its patients, it has incentives for investing in quality and keeping its patients well--incentives that are lacking in for-profit medicine.

The description of the system offered by liberals stands in stark contrast to the horrifying reality depicted in recent reports on how the veterans' health care system has neglected patients and covered up wait times at a deadly cost.

The Washington Examiner reported in February that backlogged orders for medical care were being mass purged at hospitals in Los Angeles and Dallas to make wait times seem less than they really were.

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Liberals touted Veterans Affairs hospitals as evidence government-run health care works

Bible teaches us to reward achievement but liberals disagree

By: AFRTALK

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Bible teaches us to reward achievement but liberals disagree - Video

A recent study found liberals were more likely to fib about attending servicesshowing there's still a greater stigma against atheism than belief.

Eduardo Munoz/Reuters

Last week, the Public Religion Research Institute published a study showing that Americans want their fellow citizens to think they are more religiously observant than they really are. When asked by a live human being on the telephone how often they attend religious services, respondents were more likely to say they attend frequently. When filling out a self-administered online survey, by contrast, they were more likely to admit that they do not.

Surprising? Not terribly. But this may be: Liberals were more likely to exaggerate their religious attendance than conservatives. Liberals attend services less frequently than conservatives do. Yet their desire to be thought more religiously observant than they actually are is greater.

Americans Voters Moonlight as Existential Philosophers

Why does this matter? Because its more evidence that the claim that liberals are waging a war on religion is absurd. You can hardly listen to a GOP presidential hopeful or flip on Fox News without hearing the charge. In 2012, Rick Perry promised that if elected hed end Obamas war on religion. Bobby Jindal recently warned that the American people, whether they know it or not, are mired in a silent war against a group of like-minded [liberal] elites, determined to transform the country from a land sustained by faith into a land where faith is silenced, privatized, and circumscribed. Ann Coulter explains, Liberals hate religion because politics is a religion substitute for liberals and they cant stand the competition.

Notice the claim. Its not merely that liberals are not religious themselves. Its that they disdain people who are, and this disdain creates a cultural stigma (and a legal barrier) to religious observance. Bigotry against evangelical Christians is the last acceptable form of bigotry in the country, Ralph Reed said recently.

The truth is almost exactly the reverse. Over the past few decades, liberals havefar more than conservativesturned away from religious affiliation, though not necessarily belief in God. But while they may feel proud of their views on religion-informed issues like evolution and gay marriage, theyre not particularly proud of their lack of religious observance per se. Indeed, theyre aware that theyre violating a cherished social norm. Asking liberals to admit that they are disproportionately secular is like asking conservatives to admit that they are disproportionately white. Its a truth they find embarrassing. Liberals love left-leaning religious figures like Sister Simone Campbell, the immigrant-rights-championing nun who addressed the 2012 Democratic National Convention, for the same reason conservatives love right-wing African Americans like Herman Cain and Dr. Ben Carson: They defy a negative stereotype.

After all, if liberals really stigmatized the religious, wouldnt some of them have objected when John Kerry flaunted his Catholicism in 2004 or Barack Obama flaunted his adult embrace of Christianity in 2008? Is there a single example, even in the most liberal city or district, of one Democratic candidate trying to outdo the other by proclaiming herself more hostile to religious belief?

I doubt it, because most secular liberals understandeven if Fox News commentators dontthat Americas last acceptable religious prejudice isnt against evangelical Christians. Its against atheists. According to a 2008 poll, more than two-thirds of American atheists said they feared the repercussions in their community if they openly declared their belief that there is no god.

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The Myth of a 'War on Religion'

QUEBEC CITY There was a nervousness in the air as MNAs faced off in the very first Question Period since the April elections.

Premier Philippe Couillard fielded some tough questions on the economy, but the biggest blow came with the news that yet another Liberal is being called to testify at the Charbonneau Commission.

WATCH: Are Quebec Liberals in trouble?

The Premier is an experienced politician, but the magnitude of the change Quebecers voted for on April 7 has only just started to sink in.

READ MORE: Liberals sworn-in amidst allegations of illegal party financing

That didnt stop Couillard from cracking a few jokes though saying he was glad he would now get to see the right side of the Speakers face.

I hope that goes on for another four and a half years, laughed Jacques Chagnon, Speaker of the National Assembly and MNA of WestmountSaint-Louis.

WATCH: Quebec Liberals backtrack on daycare cuts

Chagnon says he hopes good relations between the parties will last but that didnt stop the Parti Qubcois from launching its first attack.

The Premier is leading the province toward a credit rating downgrade, said Stephane Bedard, the PQs interim leader.

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Liberals address tough topics in first Question Period