Ontario election campaign has a credibility crisis
John Tory is quite a decorous fellow, and Toronto mayors rarely look a gift horse in the mouth. But I wonder if he rolls his eyes these days when Kathleen Wynne’s name comes up on call display.
Thursday was the third time in six weeks he found himself next to the country’s least popular premier being showered with taxpayer money — in this case, for the province’s one-third share of the Downtown Relief Line, the extension of the Yonge subway to Richmond Hill, and the Waterfront LRT. On April 5, it was GO train rides within Toronto for the price of a TTC ticket. A few weeks earlier, it was $2.4 billion for Sick Kids Hospital.
The problem is, you or I might as well be making these announcements. Most polls show Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives with a commanding lead heading into the June 6 election. Some have the Liberals in third. And on transit issues in particular, Wynne looks quite ridiculous.
The premier has lately been warning that a vote for the PCs would put various transit projects at risk. It might well. To the very limited extent it is possible to identify Ford’s lasting policy preferences, it is safe to say above-ground light rail will continue to stick in his craw.
He did recently pledge his support for light rail in Ottawa specifically, and has said he might support it anywhere outside of Toronto. Take that for what it’s worth. But never forget it was the Liberals who kneecapped Transit City, former Toronto mayor David Miller’s light rail network plan, by slashing its funding in 2010. That gave then-mayor Rob Ford his opening to throw transit planning in Scarborough, especially, into the hopeless money-wasting disarray we see today.
“We all remember what happened between 2010 and 2014 — and I will just say that was the last time Doug Ford was involved in running this city,” Wynne told reporters Thursday. “We’re still paying the price for the turmoil and the cancellation of transit projects that were underway.”
No kidding. But in 2010, this woman was minister of transportation. And she was premier in 2013 when she suddenly announced she would support cancelling the Scarborough LRT in favour of a more expensive subway plan the Ford Brothers preferred. Why? So she could run Mitzie Hunter in a byelection as a “subway champion” and win a Scarborough riding she didn’t need.
The justification for the Transit City budget cut, in part, was the need to cut the deficit — something that ostensibly preoccupied Wynne until about 25 minutes ago, until her 2018 budget plunged us back into years of red numbers. It is reasonable to imagine the deficit might preoccupy her again, should she somehow manage to stay on as premier.
If you want transit plans to proceed as they are, there is no one to choose from between Wynne and Ford.
But then, it’s difficult to have confidence in any of the choices on offer.
Most of us know we’re governed badly. To take two recent examples, both the Auditor General and the Financial Accountability Office say the Liberals’ $6.7-billion deficit is really more like $12 billion; the FAO also recently revealed, to no one’s surprise, that the government has no idea if the billions in business subsidies it doles out have any effect. (It doesn’t know how many apprenticeships are created by the apprenticeship tax credit, for example.)
On the first point, the opposition parties are happy to vent fury. But they’re not about to campaign on the premise of a $12-billion deficit in 2018, because that would screw up their own platforms and, in Ford’s case, expose him to accusations that he’ll hack away all the more viciously. On the second point, the only party leader who says he opposes corporate welfare is Ford — except he supports using tax breaks to lure corporations to Ontario, which is corporate welfare.
In this nihilist morass, without so much as a platform from the PCs, how are voters supposed to predict what any of these people would do in government?
The Tories could point to Mike Harris, who clearly believed in what he said he’d do and largely did it — only a good chunk of the electorate loathes him for it, and Doug Ford is no Mike Harris. He has no ideology. On Thursday, he announced he would bring back the money pit Northlander train, to go along with his money pit Toronto subway plans.
Even the NDP is a bit of a puzzle. Under Andrea Horwath they’ve campaigned twice from the populist middle. Having now suddenly come about to port, how much stock should people put in her very ambitious platform? She would have to deal with Ontario’s debt load just like any other premier.
It’s not that party platforms used to be predictable reflections of rigid ideology, or that we should want them to be. They reflect the times. Promises have always been broken, and votes have always been for sale — never more so than in Ontario in 2018.
It’s just a remarkably unconvincing bill of fare.
WE’RE STILL PAYING THE PRICE FOR THE TURMOIL AND THE CANCELLATION OF TRANSIT PROJECTS. — KATHLEEN WYNNE