National Post (National Edition)
Mulroney can tell the truth, or go full Trudeau
The early skinny on Caroline Mulroney is that being Caroline Mulroney won’t be enough.
If she wants to be leader of Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives and head the campaign against Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals in June, she needs some policies. Ideas, proposals, answers to the many challenges that confront the province after 14 years of Liberal rule.
She says she’s “new” and “fresh,” but what about hydro? What about taxes? What about the debt … oh Lord, the debt. Independent analyses — i.e. anything not concocted by minions in the finance department tasked with painting a smiley face on the rickety old rattle-trap that passes for a budget plan — forecast years of deficits ahead. How do the Tories, no matter who leads them, hope to fix it all?
Mulroney had her first chance to address those issues when she appeared before a conference organized by the Manning Centre in Ottawa. She offered little in the way of details, probably wisely, given that she’d been in the race for all of five days. Instead she opted for the big picture. After handing the Liberals four successive mandates, are Ontarians happy with the result?
“This campaign, this election will be about the fact that Ontarians need to be able to afford to live in their province,” she said. “We have to deliver two messages. One, that we have to make life more affordable for Ontarians, and we will do that. But also, after 15 years, there’s an opportunity to think positively about what the future’s about.”
It was a succinct message, and one that should hit home with a lot of Ontarians. Almost half the population lives in the greater Toronto area, yet young people can’t afford to live in the city. None but the wealthiest or luckiest can even afford to rent. Transit remains inadequate and expensive. Roads are gridlocked. Taxes keep rising, businesses struggle against regular government-mandated increases in costs and regulations, the cost of heating a home has become a serious problem, and the only workers protected from the government are the ones paid from the public purse. Rural Ontario long ago ceased voting Liberal, now the cities would appear to have little motive to do so either.
Yet the perceived wisdom is that the next PC leader will have to offer a comprehensive package of policies to quickly right the wrongs of Liberal rule. Behind the assumption is the belief the province can’t continue along the path it’s on, continually borrowing billions of dollars to finance ill-conceived schemes and voter-friendly giveaways, while pushing the payments ever deeper into the future. To that end, two options present themselves: either rein in costs, or raise revenues through more taxes.
Mulroney joined Christine Elliott and Doug Ford, the other two leadership candidates, in opposing a carbon tax, the means by which former leader Patrick Brown planned to raise the cash to finance a grab-bag of promises. Instead she suggested that eliminating waste would do the trick. “Everyone knows that they’ve been wasting money,” she said, which is true. But everyone also knows that every other politician of the past eon or so has made the same promise, and few ever succeed. Because wasted money is usually devoted to programs that make people happy, and cancelling or curbing them is a sure way to drive away votes.
All three candidates, therefore, now share the same problem: they’ve pledged to fix the Liberal mess, but disavowed the one source of cash that might have helped them succeed. It would appear they may already have doomed their hopes before the election begins.
Unless the received wisdom is wrong, and voters no longer need to be bribed with new goodies in order to be won over. There are arguments to support this: the problems confronting Ontario are of such magnitude that only the most facetious would suggest there are easy answers to be had. And most voters must surely know by now that campaign promises aren’t worth the breath used to make them in any case. The federal Liberals offered more than 300 promises to win the 2015 election, and have been breaking one after the other ever since. It doesn’t appear to have hurt the prime minister’s popularity much, perhaps because no one really expected him to deliver anyway. It was his attitude that they liked. The great mystery of why diehard Trump supporters continue to stand by him amid the chaos of his administration owes much to the same outlook: they don’t really care if he builds the wall or not, they just like to hear him say it.
In seeking to win over party members — and, more importantly, Ontarians — Mulroney could opt to mimic Trudeau and offer up a fat package of pricey promises she probably can’t pay for, and hope voters forgive her as they regularly forgive him. She has many of the same attributes: personality, looks, a famous name, a positive vibe, and she’s probably smarter to boot. She has much greater experience in life than Trudeau had to offer, having raised four children while establishing a successful career and pursuing philanthropic activities.
Or she could level with voters and admit there’s a difficult road ahead. Many of the worst actions of the Liberals have been baked into the future and will be enormously difficult to remedy. Hydro One has been sold off, and that can’t be magically reversed. The money’s been spent, the revenues lost. The ludicrously costly contracts for the Green Energy Act have been signed, and may be irreversible. The debt has been pushed to frightening levels, interest payments stretched to $1 billion a month. Government unions have been trained to expect regular annual inducements to keep them docile. The next government simply can’t expect to keep offering new subsidies to offset past mistakes.
The second option — a promise of good management in dealing with intractable problems — would be risky. It would be the more honest approach, but expects a lot from voters. “We need somebody who can beat Kathleen Wynne and we need somebody new, somebody fresh,” Mulroney said. “When I knock on doors, I sometimes get invited in and I get hugged, because people just want something completely different.”
The trick for Mulroney will be in convincing those same people she has the skills, talent and fortitude to offer better government, even if she lacks political experience and magical solutions.