Rapid-fire PC government not sweating the details
Ontario government will put best interests of the people first, says house leader
In a quick summer session, the Ontario legislature will bury the cap-and-trade system for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, order an end to a long strike at York University, and kill a small wind farm in Prince Edward Country, the Progressive Conservatives’ shepherd for Queen’s Park business said Tuesday.
Todd Smith, the government house leader, said getting through the business will probably take a couple of weeks, after MPPs choose a speaker Wednesday and hear a speech from the throne Thursday. Actual lawmaking starts Monday.
“These three priorities send a clear and serious message about what you can expect from our government,” Smith said. “We are prepared to act. And we will always put the best interests of the people first.”
None of it is likely to matter as much as things already done under the Tories. They’ve already smothered the cap-andtrade system and a lot of green projects it was to pay for and, maybe inadvertently, cancelled plans to update parts of Ontario’s school curriculum without any lawmaker casting a vote.
Sending the strike by York’s contract instructors and teaching assistants (the longest strike even at that ridiculously troubled campus) to arbitration will reopen a major university. Cancelling the contract for a nearly finished nine-turbine wind farm in Smith’s own lakefront riding will keep it from whirring to life and tell other green-energy entrepreneurs that Ontario’s now a bad place for them. Maybe we’ll get sued.
But you don’t need a legislature to get a lot done.
Ontario’s carbon market is already closed. The money previous auctions brought in has already been frozen, unspent on the green projects it was supposed to cover.
First came the halt to that rebate program for energy-efficient windows and doors. Now a $100-million fund for school renovations is toast. Lots more like this — about $2 billion worth — is to come.
The NDP’s Peggy Sattler scolded the Progressive Conservatives: “It’s sad that there is no hope coming for kids and educators, and absolutely disgusting that our children’s classrooms is one of the first places Doug Ford’s axe is falling,” she said.
Eliminating the cap-and-trade system and the things it funded has been explicit Progressive Conservative policy since Patrick Brown was leader and Doug Ford emphasized his commitment to it on the campaign trail. Tories have called the Liberals’ climatechange budget — the school and hospital refits, social-housing renovations, cycling projects, some transit construction, corporate and residential energyefficiency subsidies, and on and on — a “slush fund” since at least 2016.
No public institution run by competent people should have been counting on one dime of that money under the new crew. You can be appalled by the decision but there’s no honest way to be surprised by it.
What might have been reasonably expected to continue was normal summertime work in the Education Ministry, which gathers subject-matter experts to update and add to curriculum documents. Among others, this year the ministry was going to finalize two years of work on improving the material offered to teachers on Indigenous peoples and issues. Until, just before last weekend, participants got calls or messages from the ministry to cancel their plans.
A couple of other sessions, including ones to create units on Indigenous languages and sign language, and a separate math-instruction session, have also been scrapped, but the first was a big one. It was Ontario’s response to a recommendation from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that huge gaps in what Canadian students learn about Indigenous history need to be closed.
It’s not that the work doesn’t need doing, it’s that the government has a total freeze on nonessential travel all of a sudden, so the Ministry of Education can’t cover the costs of participants’ trips.
The thing about reconciliation, for privileged white people, is it means thinking about stuff we didn’t previously consider important. Not blindly applying an austerity policy in this particular way would have been a good example.
“No other curriculum revision sessions are cancelled or planned at this time,” Education Minister Lisa Thompson said in a written statement Tuesday. “I will work with the ministry on how to move ahead with the updated Truth and Reconciliation Commission curriculum revisions in the most cost-effective way possible.”
So we’ll figure out the one thing we really kind of have to do, somehow, and never mind the rest.
Governments end up judged not only by what they do on purpose but by what they allow to happen. In the Liberals’ case, to take one example, they wanted to reinforce and modernize Ontario’s power grid and they did; but they also allowed electricity prices to soar. They’ll be remembered longer for the second part than for the first.
The Tories’ style, so far, has not involved much worrying about details. Maybe it’s just early, and urgency will give way to more care. If it doesn’t, the collateral damage is going to start piling up pretty quickly.