‘Outrage’ in Ontario

WHY DO LIBERALS THINK ANY SPENDING CUT IS AN ‘ASSAULT?’

‘As a francophile,” Catherine Mckenna declared this week, she is “outraged” by Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s “devastating cuts to French language services.”

Mckenna is the environment minister, not the minister of official languages. But “as a francophile,” she wanted it known Liberals would never treat the interests of French-speaking Canadians with such savage disregard.

“While (Ford) and Andrew Scheer demonstrate their lack of respect for francophones across the country, we will always defend the right to express ourselves in our language of choice,” she declared proudly in a tweet.

A francophile is defined as “a person who is fond of or greatly admires France or the French.” Evidently being fond of the French doesn’t require actually absorbing in any detail the changes made in Ontario. As Randall Denley demonstrated in these pages on Wednesday, they are moderate and involve no diminution in service. A French university that doesn’t exist yet will continue to not exist. All that’s happened is that a promise made by a previous government, which couldn’t afford to keep it, has been rescinded. The school hasn’t been built, there are no students, no training has been provided. This will remain the same, no matter how often poorly-briefed ministers refer to it as a savage cut.

In addition, a language office that attracted middling traffic will be folded into another office that can easily handle the load. Another office will have its name changed, although its budget will remain higher than under the previous government.

Some attack. But Mckenna’s confusion is perhaps not surprising. The Liberals appear to be having problems with their terminology these days. Recently Ottawa issued a statement indicating it had given the provinces plenty of time to prepare plans to “put a price on carbon pollution.” But of course, carbon is not pollution. As any basic science text will explain, “carbon dioxide (CO2) is a gas essential for life — animals exhale it, plants sequester it. It exists in Earth’s atmosphere in comparably small concentrations, but is vital for sustaining life.”

The problem with carbon is in the amount: excessive emissions cause too much warming. Identifying it as pollution is like saying food is poisonous. It’s not — but eating too much can cause problems.

Mckenna should know thus, and perhaps she does. As a francophile working in Ottawa, she can hardly miss noticing the University of Ottawa just down the road, which bills itself as “the largest English-french bilingual university in the world.” No shortage of French education there. But Liberals, like most politicians, like to skirt the truth when it serves their interests. In this case it serves the Liberals to pretend Doug Ford is being mean to francophones, as it might win them some votes in Quebec. The real lesson to be taken from such faux outrage is the bone-deep acceptance among Liberals, “progressives” and left-wingers, that no expenditure, once committed to by a government, can ever be revoked. No matter how unnecessary, ineffective or overpriced a program may be, no matter how much circumstances may change, it must be continued forever or be treated as an assault on whatever audience it was targeted to please.

Ford has been under attack on several fronts on this basis. On Wednesday the minister for universities, Merrilee Fullerton, revealed that Ryerson University’s request for money to open a new law school had been rejected. The explanation was straightforward: Ontario already has plenty of law schools, there’s no shortage of lawyers, and borrowing money to finance yet another campus can’t be a priority. Predictably, Ford has been depicted as a muttonhead unleashing a vendetta against higher education, despite the fact the province is extremely well stocked with colleges and universities, which struggle to keep up enrolment and hardly need more competition from new schools offering similar programs.

Ontario got into the situation it’s in — a crushing debt load, outof-control deficits — because previous governments couldn’t bring themselves to ever say no to new spending. Spending makes voters happy, and happy voters reelect governments. So borrowing money against the future makes sense, if all you care about is the result of the next election.

Federal Liberals care a great deal about the next election, which is why there will be no hint of a slowdown in the spending that turned the prime minister’s pledge of a balanced budget — with deficits limited to $10 billion a year for a couple of years — into annual shortfalls of $19 billion or so, with no end in sight. On Wednesday Finance Minister Bill Morneau revealed that, despite billions in extra revenue, the Liberals would continue spending far more than they bring in. A Royal Bank of Canada chart shows that future deficits will be even larger than the ones Morneau anticipated in his last budget, just nine months ago. Even after a decade of growth and with several billon dollars in windfalls, the Liberals can’t whittle down their spending by even a dime. Which makes you wonder how deep into debt we’ll have to go when the next recession hits.

They’re not worried about that. They’d rather ignore the danger. Part of a government’s job should be to prepare for economic emergencies, just as they do for natural disasters, but “progressives” dislike that task because it tends to interfere with their spending plans.

Eventually it catches up, as Ontario’s Liberals discovered in June, when their ceaseless accumulation of debt finally reached proportions alarming enough to scare the general public, and resulted in the election of a government pledged to returning the province to some semblance of sustainability.

That’s what Ford is trying to do, and it means cancelling some Liberal promises which were made despite the fact there wasn’t money to pay for them. Ministers like Mckenna can only see the impact on favoured voting blocks. She’s blind to the fact the government she serves is cynically following the same dangerous, and ultimately destructive, path.

Ontario Liberals got together after their overwhelming defeat to discuss how it could have happened. It happened because they followed spending policies like the Trudeau government is following now. And because voters foolishly let them.