Ontario Finance Minister Dwight Duncan sat down with public sector union leaders on Tuesday to talk about a wage freeze for their members.

The move would affect about one million workers including nurses, teachers and hospital workers, and could trim as much as $750 million from the province’s $20 billion deficit the first year it's implemented.

“We can’t manage the deficit without addressing what is the single biggest line in our deficit – public sector compensation,” Duncan said at the meeting.

In his budget speech in March, Duncan announced a two-year wage freeze for about 350,000 MPPs and non-unionized public-sector workers and warned unionized workers would face the same fate when their current contracts expire.

“Nobody in that room is really buying what he was saying,” said Sid Ryan, President of the Ontario Federation of Labour.

“Sure there are some arguments that have got to be made, but there wasn’t one single person that applauded. There’s a corporate tax cut on the table of $4.5 billion. Extrapolate that over the next six or seven years, you could wipe out this deficit overnight.”

But Duncan argued Ontario’s corporate tax cuts need to be competitive and are among the highest in the country.

Union leaders needed more convincing.

“He can propose it, but he has to bargain it,” said OPSEU President Smokey Thomas.

“He can’t legislate it. He’ll lose.”