Ontario vote about dollars and common sense
Ontario turned Tory Blue in last week’s election, not because incoming premier Doug Ford is an extremist, but because he isn’t.
The contest became a weird three-way race: Between a moderate and fiscally conservative businessman and two tax-and-spenders out of the public sector, one more extreme than the other.
It was not a right, centre and left contest. It was Doug Ford in the centre versus a left and an extreme left leader.
He promised to cut spending, taxes, hydro rates, and scandals. His goal was to trim spending overall by a relatively modest four per cent and to fire Hydro One’s overpaid $6-million-a-year chief executive officer.
By contrast, the Liberal and NDP leaders outdid each other with promises to spend more, never less. They offered the status quo on steroids despite widespread public dissatisfaction about taxes, energy costs, and scandals.
The first indication Ford would win handily was when sitting Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne conceded that she couldn’t win. Her announcement was an admission that her policies had alienated voters.
It was unusual, classy, but risky, and ended up handing the NDP’s Andrea Horwath the highest popular vote of any NDPer. Wynne’s concession convinced many Liberal voters to move into the extreme left lane to stop Ford.
Meanwhile, Ford never veered, adhering to his pledge to restore fiscal integrity and cut taxes.
This was in stark contrast to Wynne, the big spender who dropped out, and Horwath, the bigger spender with policies pronouncements so costly that they would have even made a Swedish prime minister blush.
Horwath promised universal dental and drug care for everyone, free tuition for Ontario’s 250,000 post-secondary students, and, to boot, re-nationalization of Hydro One at a cost of billions of dollars.
Even worse, these policies were not costed out until after promises were made and then NDP estimates were questionable and staggering. It was vintage Liberal and NDP thinking: Put it on the tab in the form of debts or higher taxes.
Now Ontario has the highest debt of any sub-national government in the world, a figure that has doubled during the 15-year Liberal tenure. Taxes have soared and business investment has stalled or been withdrawn.
The result is an NDP vote that won’t stick and a Liberal party that has been decimated.
It was a surprising outcome to some as was the first election of a Green Party MPP in Ontario, Michael Schreiner. Interestingly, he is, like Elizabeth May, an American who came to Canada, then got involved in the environmental movement.
The upshot will be that the NDP will decline in popularity as the Liberals slowly rebuild. This may take years, guaranteeing that the Tories will have a chance to fix the province, which is good for the country as a whole.
As for national politics, Ford’s victory will also bring about change. For starters, he has promised to join Saskatchewan and Alberta in legally challenging the prime minister’s expensive carbon tax — a stance that will increase tensions at the intergovernmental level.
But he is not, despite the Liberal and NDP narrative, the Canadian version of Donald Trump. He is not an extremist, any more than are those people in Ontario who voted for him.
He won because Ontario has lost its way and has been run by leaders who behave like trust fund kids and spend tax dollars with abandon and hand taxpayers the tab.
It was a common-sense election about fiscal responsibility and lower taxes to create more jobs.
It also sends a message to the rest of Canada’s politicians, including the prime minister.