Why an Ontario politician needs to try riding the train.
When your government is engaged in a multi- billiondollar effort to i mprove transit facilities as a way to get drivers off the road and into more environmentally-friendly means of travel, it’s generally not a good idea to suggest the people who make use of those facilities are a pack of dimwitted losers who lack the talent to rate a more prestigious form of transport.
This would be news to Liz Sandals, Treasury Board president in Premier Kathleen Wynne’s Ontario government, who let commuters on the province’s GO train system know just how low they rate in her estimation.
Asked how the average GO commuter might view proposals to hand generous pay hikes to executives at some of Ontario’s bigger corporations — including an extra $8 million for the already lavishly-compensated bosses at Ontario Power Generation — Sandals offered a brusque put-down.
“Most of the people sitting on the GO train probably don’t have high-level nuclear qualifications or the business qualifications to run a multibillion- dollar corporation,” she remarked.
It was a dumb thing to say, almost as dumb as the time Energy Minister Bob Chiarelli suggested Ontario’s auditorgeneral — who had previously spent 10 years at Manitoba Hydro — wasn’t smart enough to understand the electricity business. Sandals quickly had to backtrack, in that tepid, hollow manner that is common with political apologies, asserting that “I used language that was insensitive and does not reflect my views.”
If that’s the case, you have to wonder, whose views did they reflect? Where did they come from, if they’re not her own? Does she frequently go around expressing insensitive views that aren’t her own?
They also happen to be astonishingly ill- fitting. Ontario’s GO system is a vast and expanding web of road and rail that stretches hundreds of kilometres along the rim of Lake Ontario, north towards Lake Simcoe and west to Kitchener. Wynne is currently in a desperate effort to improve and expand it further in hopes a high-priced, debtfuelled infrastructure program will help lift her from her post as Canada’s leastpopular premier. The area is home to 6.6 million people, or half Ontario’s population. Only a fraction live in the small central core that is the home of the legislature, and many of them possess precisely the qualifications to run power plants and multi-billion-dollar corporations. That’s why so many of them live in big houses out in the tony suburbs, and take the GO.
They’re not louts, these people. A lot of them are quite smart and work in the banking and corporate towers that crowd downtown Toronto. They wear ties and power suits. They spend the commute batting away at computers. They provide the advisers, specialists, consultants, legal and financial minds who help the government get through its day. Some — it could be quite a few, in fact — beaver away in the bureaucratic labyrinth that services the needs of political potentates like Liz Sandals. They’re people she sees every day. They try to help her avoid making mistakes like the big one she just made.
Sandals used to be the education minister. In that job she oversaw a system that hands out millions of dollars in quiet payments to Liberal- friendly teachers unions for ill- defined purposes, including $ 2.5 million to help cover costs for a more complicated negotiating system introduced by the Liberals. Sandals reacted with sarcasm when asked if sought receipts for the expenditures: “We know what hotel rooms cost, we know what meeting rooms cost, we know what the food costs, we know what 100 pizzas cost … You don’t need to see every bill when you’re doing an estimate of costs. I don’t ask.”
Funny, that. People on the GO may not be up to Sandals’ standards, but most of them know enough that when you spend your money — even if it’s just at Winners or the Home Depot — you demand a receipt. The Liberals gave the teachers $ 22 million in 2006 alone, with no strings attached, according to the auditor-general. People on the GO know the price of pizza too, and might still be wondering why the government has to pick up the pizza tab for opponents at the bargaining table, who are trying to squeeze as much as possible out of the government purse.
Wynne desperately needs votes from the suburban belt that surrounds the city. Just recently she sent the mayor of Toronto, John Tory, into a fury by reneging on support for his effort to raise revenue by imposing tolls on commuter roads feeding the city. It was a gamble on Tory’s part, but Wynne encouraged it, agreed not to stand in the way, then suddenly reversed course when her suburban members went postal over the anger it would stir in their constituents, threatening their re- election hopes. Sandals apparently missed the message that suburbs are important, and that they resent government waste. Her blunder forced Wynne to step in — for the second time in a week — to warn public employees the government remains hard-pressed for cash and can’t afford their extravagant pay expectations.
Sandals was born and raised in Guelph, west of Toronto. Before she got into politics, she was a teacher there. She still represents it in the legislature. You can catch the GO in Guelph, to avoid the daily crush along Highway 401 ( once again being torn up to accommodate the burgeoning traffic.) It takes about 75 minutes, which is a pretty quick trip by Toronto commuter standards, and drops you just a few subway stops from the Queen’s Park legislature. Sandals ought to try it sometime. She might learn something useful. It would at least reduce the time she has to say dumb things.