The battle of Queen’s Park
Ford-Trudeau meeting turns ‘super-heated’
Doug Ford is going to have a lot of fun with Justin Trudeau in the coming months — like a World Wrestling Entertainment villain breaking steel chairs over the head of the good guy.
The new Ontario premier met the prime minister on home territory at Queen’s Park Thursday afternoon in a meeting that was described as “super-heated” by people who were there.
Even as the two men met, Ford’s office issued a press release saying Ottawa is “100 per cent” to blame for a housing crisis caused by migrants crossing the border illegally and should pay all the costs. A spokesman for the premier said the federal government has encouraged people to cross the border and the resultant “mess” should be cleared up by Ottawa.
Trudeau will be equally enthusiastic about using Ford as a political foil. He took 20 minutes after the meeting to think about his response before emerging to portray himself as the defender of a national vision, while presenting the new premier as an idiot in search of his own village.
“It didn’t seem to me the premier was quite as aware of our obligations … as he might have been. I spent a bit of time explaining how our asylum-seeking system works,” he said, as if he were a tomcat spraying pheromones.
On climate change in particular, the two are on a collision course. Ford has already pulled Ontario from the capand-trade system entered into by his Liberal predecessor, Kathleen Wynne.
But while that scripted storyline might work for both politically, history suggests that, in private at least, the two men will be forced to co-operate.
When Stephen Harper was elected prime minister in 2006, Dalton McGuinty had been premier of Ontario for two and a half years. The two were chalk and cheese in ideological terms and the partnership was rocky initially. “I wouldn’t want him (McGuinty) behind my back,” Harper reportedly told journalists on the campaign plane in the middle of the election campaign.
After he won, it took three months before he met McGuinty one on one — and that was just minutes before he headed to a dinner where he introduced then provincial Conservative leader, John Tory, as “the next premier of Ontario.”
But Harper agreed with McGuinty that there was a “fiscal imbalance” that saw Ottawa take too big a share of the country’s tax revenue, which it then used to meddle in areas of provincial jurisdiction.
He also needed Ontario’s help to prepare the country for the economic downturn that was coming. Both Harper and his finance minister, the late Jim Flaherty, wanted Ontario to harmonize the GST to help make the province more competitive, not just with Ohio and Michigan but also with Quebec. The move was designed to encourage business investment (the HST removed the 8 per cent provincial sales tax on new equipment and materials). McGuinty was reluctant but he was eventually persuaded to sign on, even though three in four Ontarians opposed the move.
As with Harper and McGuinty, Trudeau and Ford need one another — and not just as political punching bags. Most immediately, the two need to ally against threats by Donald Trump to impose a 25 per cent auto tariff and a 10 per cent tariff on auto parts — which a new CIBC report says could almost halve the two million cars made in Canada every year. TD recently suggested 160,000 Canadian jobs could be lost, if Trump makes good on his threat.
They may never be buddies, but that is the kind of unthinkable assault on the Canadian way of life that might persuade Ford to make a favourable reference to Trudeau in the Ontario legislature.
In the meantime, he will pursue his pointless court challenge to Ottawa’s right to impose a carbon tax on provinces all the way to the Supreme Court, where he will lose — just as the premiers before him lost their challenge of the federally imposed GST.
Politically, though, the story may turn out differently, particularly if Jason Kenney’s United Conservatives win in Alberta next May. The prospect of imposing a carbon tax on three recalcitrant provinces (Ontario, Saskatchewan and Alberta) in the run-up to a federal election cannot be very appealing for the Liberals.
“The carbon tax is now politically dead and Trudeau must realize it won’t survive after he leaves office,” said Ian Brodie, a political scientist at the University of Calgary and Stephen Harper’s first chief of staff.
“(Trudeau) and Ford have every reason to get along. They have a shared interest in the economic future of Ontario in an era of rising protectionism. They both want to get mining and other interests into northern Ontario.”
Yet the prospects of finding common ground on climate change appears minimal. Ford’s problems in this regard are almost as great as Trudeau’s. He has cancelled cap-and-trade and ruled out a carbon tax. That has left Ontario firms with $2.8 billion of worthless pollution permits, which will result in lawsuits. The move also deprives Ontario of around $1.8 billion in revenue from the sale of permits.
Yet there remains a consensus among citizens that some kind of action on climate change is required.
The Liberal plan requires a $10 per tonne tax this year, rising to $50 by 2022 — roughly $700 per household per year, according to Trevor Tombe, an associate professor of economics at the University of Calgary. But as Tombe points out, the revenues brought in by carbon pricing could be used to lower or eliminate other taxes for individuals or businesses (his rule of thumb is that each $10 per tonne in taxation brings in around $1 billion in revenue, so a $50 tax brings in $5 billion). That amount of new revenue could be used to reduce income tax by 13 per cent or cut corporate taxes by one third.
As Tombe notes, most people are willing to take on some additional cost in return for action on climate change.
Beyond the political entertainment, Ontarians expect the premier and the prime minister to put down the steel chairs, stop posturing and work together on intractable problems like a warming planet and Donald Trump.
ON CLIMATE CHANGE, THE TWO ARE ON A COLLISION COURSE.