There is mush to this platform
Details lacking in plan from Ontario Tories
Over four provincial elections and three leaders, the Ontario Progressive Conservatives have vacillated between mush ( Ernie Eves), mush with indigestible l umps (John Tory), hard-faced mush ( Tim Hudak) and in the last attempt, something approaching conservatism, only without the math: narrowly leading at mid- campaign, Hudak threw it away with a mix of implausible happy-talk (the “million jobs” platform promise) and polarizing shock- talk ( removing 100,000 employees from the public sector payroll). They lost again, as they had lost the previous three times.
True to form, rather than refine its message while remaining faithful to its core convictions, the party has remade itself yet again. With the next election just seven months away, and the party holding onto a reduced but still comfortable lead in the polls, it is Back to Mush. In fairness, a belief in mush — mush for mush’s sake — may perhaps be the party’s most sincere conviction: certainly it can’t claim any greater record of electoral success with it than with the alternative. Perhaps it is simply a calculation that mush is what people want now: Mush i n Our Time.
At any rate, the result is a 79-page platform, or “People’s Guarantee,” of such iridescent vapidity it might have better been titled Nothing To See Here. The tag line, repeated on every page of the document, is Change That Works, I can only assume in an attempt at irony — because if there is one idea that is most powerfully communicated throughout it is that the Tories, under their impenetrably vacant leader Patrick Brown, would change next to nothing about how the province is governed.
Virtually everything the Ontario government is now doing after fourteen years of Liberal activism, including its very latest and least-considered extensions — raising the minimum wage, expanding rent controls, free drugs for under-25s, all-day kindergarten, the works — it would still be doing after four years under the Conservatives. By 2022, spending would be 1.8 per cent less than it is cur- rently projected to be, which is to say 10.6 per cent more than it is now — though in fact the Conservatives cannot identify a single program they would cut, beyond a “value for money audit.”
So while the platform is full of promises of the taxes it would cut, the prices it would slash, and the goodies it would distribute — usually dressed up, with the duplicity now in vogue, as tax credits — it is vastly less interested in discussing how any of this would be done, still less how it would be paid for.
So: electricity prices would be cut “an additional” 12 per cent. That’s pretty ambitious, considering the Liberals have promised to cut them 25 per cent. What sweeping reforms would a Progressive Conservative implement to the province’s electricity market to make this possible? None that are mentioned, beyond cutting salaries for executives at the province’s power utilities, renegotiating contracts with providers and redirecting a portion of the dividend that Hydro One, the province’s distribution monopoly, pays the government annually.
That 25 per cent reduction, by the way, is under the Liberals’ Fair Hydro Plan, widely and rightly derided as a shell game: the province is essentially borrowing to suppress prices now, at the cost of greater increases in later years. Among the fiercest critics of the plan at the time of its unveiling were the Progressive Conservatives. Yet it is now the baseline for their own plans.
The same is true of their broader fiscal program. The Liberals have gone to heroic lengths to produce a “balanced budget,” even as the debt continues to mount. How? By moving more and more public debt off- book: the government’s accumulated deficits, at $193.5 billion, are now just 62 per cent of its total net debt, at $ 311.9 billion. Yet the Tories propose, not only to do nothing to reduce this debt, the largest of any sub-national government in the world, but to run a deficit to boot. Of course, it would only be a small one, and only temporary. You may have heard that one before.
If the Tories would undo very little of what the Liberals have done — replacing cap-and-trade with a carbon tax is the only change of any real significance — most of what they would do would not be out of place in a Liberal, or even NDP, platform. A tax credit for child care; a $ 5- billion subway- building scheme; free dental care for the old and poor: it’s not that these are bad ideas (well, the subway plan is bonkers). It’s just that they are not situated in a larger vision that represents any alternative to the statist quo.
What would a Conservative government do about the province’s lumbering state health care monopoly, and the massive waiting lists that plague it? Well, it would “reduce hospital and emergency room wait times.” Yes, but how? Spend more money — sorry, “make proper investments” — is the closest we get to an answer.
What would it do about the alarming deterioration in student performance within the elephantine bureaucratic-union complex that is the province’s education system? Well, it would “take concrete steps” to improve math test scores. Yes, but how? Make teachers study math. Golly.
It’s pretty much all in this vein: to the extent it has any policies, they are invariably simplistic, cost-free, and unassailably popular, with no one disturbed or put out in any way. Once, the Conservatives promised to abolish corporate welfare. Now they pledge only to punish corporations that take the subsidy and run. Once, they might have promised to roll back rent controls. Now, there is only a review of the Residential Tenancies Act. Once, they might have taken the partial privatization of Hydro One further, and sold off the rest. Now the dividend redistribution scheme is touted as a way to prevent any future government from privatizing it.
Perhaps this calculated triviality will make it more likely they will be elected. But what possible difference would it make if they were?