Ontario NDP can be proud of its platform
Winner or not, detailed plan is a wise move
The first section of the 2014 Ontario NDP campaign platform, which was rather prosaically titled “Andrea Horwath’s Plan that Makes Sense,” promised to “respect your tax dollars.” That may remind you of someone and his brother. Among other things, Premier Horwath would have appointed a Minister of Savings and Accountability, who would have taken a hatchet to ministerial office budgets.
The plan was certainly recognizable as a socialdemocratic document — a $100 annual average savings on hydro bills, interest-free student loans, increased dental coverage for low-income children — but it was obviously pitched to the middle, with its tax cut for small businesses and a balanced budget by 2017-18.
The post-Dalton McGuinty Liberals seemed clapped out. Tory leader Tim Hudak wasn’t up to beating them. Yet the New Democrats gained just a single point in the popular vote, and no seats. Kathleen Wynne, who campaigned brilliantly (if predictably) from the Liberal left, ate Horwath’s lunch.
With the release of the NDP platform on Monday, it’s safe to say Wynne won’t outflank the NDP leader on the left again.
We knew about the universal dental care: a private/ public hybrid that would allow the currently insured to keep their plans while forcing all employers, and the self-employed, to buy coverage from private providers or the government. We knew about the pharmacare plan: all-public coverage for the most commonly prescribed drugs. And we knew about the hydro plan: returning to public ownership and a 30 per cent cut in rates, somehow at no real cost to the treasury.
We now have an ambitious daycare plan: a 50 per cent increase in the number of public licensed spots over five years, with tuition free for households making under $40,000 and a median means-tested cost of $12 per day for those making more. We have an ambitious health care plan: $19 billion over 10 years for hospital expansion, and a 5.3 per cent annual increase in healthcare funding overall. Education: Students loans will be interest-free retroactively; in future, student loans will be grants. Affordable housing: 65,000 new units, just to start.
The platform is 100 pages. It contains multitudes. And it’s all going to be paid for, in part, with a tax hike on big corporations and the rich: an extra income tax point for those earning more than $220,000, and two for those earning over $300,000.
You’ll be able to cancel your cellphone contract without penalty; gasoline prices will have “stability and transparency;” and an NDP government would declare war on the “pink tax,” which is to say dry cleaners and hairdressers won’t be able to charge women more than men for similar services (which is at least theoretically conceivable) and retailers won’t be able to sell girls’ toys and boys’ toys for different prices (which is less so).
It’s called a “pink tax” because studies have found, for example, that a tricycle costs more in pink than it does in black. Maybe buy your daughter the black tricycle?
But no, an NDP government would be here to help, and to spend on helping. The party is flying a flag that’s been in storage for some time.
“For far too long, the people of Ontario have been forced to settle for less than what we know is possible. We’ve been told to switch back and forth, from the Liberals to the Conservatives and back again,” Horwath told a partisan crowd at Toronto Western Hospital. “It absolutely does not have to be this way!”
This makes sense, strategically, to a point.
Not settling costs money, but the Liberals have already committed to plunging back into the red: indeed, while the NDP platform projects deficits until 2022-23 and offers no timeline to return to balance, it’s promising smaller average annual deficits than the Liberals. The Liberals’ attacks on Ford thus far have been remarkably clunky — comparing him to Donald Trump, reminding us of already-well-known gaffes, a profoundly idiotic news release suggesting names for the PC campaign bus: “the Canni-bus”; “busted.”
This is a government that’s preparing to start retailing marijuana, and whose former leader’s chief of staff is about to go to jail. It makes sense for the NDP to present themselves as the most credible alternative on the left, because they are.
Still, it must be said that many Ontarians seem rather fond of “settling.”
For example, many of us are happy to boast to Americans about a health-care system that doesn’t guarantee dental or drug coverage, that leaves people languishing in hallways and on waiting lists, and that produces mediocre outcomes compared to our peer countries.
The NDP promises to fix that, and most everything else, with wads of cash. I have to wonder if this platform isn’t just a bit too NDP for the NDP’s own good.
But timidity hasn’t gotten Horwath anywhere yet, and I suspect she will strike many undecided voters as far more credible fronting this detailed platform than Ford will fronting his simplistic one, should it ever materialize.