THE SUMMER OF DECONSTRUCTION
Premier Doug Ford And his Progressive Conservative caucus have set themselves up for A Busy Autumn. They’ll Be working to retool or replace the programs And plans they’ve quickly dismantled since taking office, David Reevely writes.
Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives are setting themselves up for a busy fall of reassembling provincial programs and plans they’ve spent the summer taking apart.
The social-assistance system that cares for Ontario’s most vulnerable is a horrifying mess and we’re cancelling Liberal plans to repair it, but it can still be sorted out by November, Social Services Minister Lisa MacLeod says.
Ontario’s climate-change policy is blown up but a new one is coming, Environment Minister Rod Phillips says.
We’ll have massive provincewide consultations on a new elementary-school health curriculum that someone will get around to organizing really soon now, Education Minister Lisa Thompson says.
Confusingly, the first things the Tories have dismantled since taking office a month ago have been some of the most conservative-minded programs the Liberals started, which will make replacing them a challenge for the, er, Progressive Conservative party.
Take MacLeod’s announcement that the province is scrapping an experiment with giving social-assistance recipients a “universal basic income” instead of payments based on a complex formula that tries to assess each person’s need and degree of deservingness.
We’re in the third month of a three-year pilot project, but the Tories have decided it’s a failure.
The idea of a universal basic income sounds kind of socialist: You just give money to people who don’t have enough. But its intellectual roots are in libertarianism, traceable in modern form to Milton Friedman’s 1962 manifesto “Capitalism and Freedom.”
Friedman championed laissezfaire economic policy, was arguably America’s leading conservative academic for decades — he won a Nobel economics prize — and was a top adviser to Ronald Reagan.
Yes, Friedman argued, you just give people money.
The alternative is an army of social workers invading every detail of welfare recipients’ lives, making them account for their assets, their income, their spending. A welfare worker is forced to be “a policeman and a spy,” Friedman said, dictating on the state’s behalf the “right” way for people to live.
That’s bad and unconservative, Friedman argued. People know themselves, they know their lives, they know what they need. Have them file their taxes and if they don’t make more than a certain amount, send them cheques akin to refunds.
The army of social workers, however good its intentions, will be self-perpetuating, Friedman argued. Demobilize it. Save a ton of money.
“The idea of a negative income tax,” Friedman once explained to journalist William F. Buckley (also an arch-conservative though a more aristocratic sort) in a TV interview, “is to treat people who are poor in the same way as we treat people who are rich.” We trust them to know what’s best for them.
Reduce benefits by half of whatever people make by working, so recipients have a clear incentive to earn, Friedman proposed. Other than that, stay out of their way. This was precisely what the Liberal-launched experiment did, on the advice of Hugh Segal, the ex-senator who was the top aide to Tory premier Bill Davis and then Tory prime minister Brian Mulroney.
Would this work? Ontario was trying to find out. Instead, before we really have any idea, the government is ditching the experiment to focus “on more proven approaches,” which we don’t know what they are.
It’s much the same with climate-change policy, on which the Tory position has been only negative since Doug Ford became leader. He’s asserted repeatedly that he believes climate change is happening, humans are substantially responsible, and humans need to do something about it, but what that might be, we have no idea.
The cap-and-trade system for limiting carbon emissions that the Tories have eliminated was an alternative to having the government instruct particular businesses what they can send up their smokestacks. Command and control from a central authority is very gameable by lobbyists and politicians with donors to defend.
Pricing carbon imposes a cost on carbon pollution but lets people figure out for themselves how best to respond.
The Liberals were Liberals about Ontario’s system in that they auctioned permits and spent the proceeds on government programs rather than returning the money through tax cuts, but that could have been tweaked easily.
Or, as the Tories planned to do under Patrick Brown, the government could have adopted the federal carbon tax. Some conservatives — like Greg Mankiw, a Harvard professor who was George W. Bush’s chief economic adviser, and Jim Dinning, Ralph Klein’s finance minister in Alberta — prefer that broader approach because it’s simpler.
Ontario Progressive Conservatives now run down any sort of carbon pricing as the stupidest idea anyone’s ever had.
Phillips will be required by law to come up with an alternative plan to tackle Ontario’s contribution to climate change and to report on how it’s going.
He doesn’t have much room to manoeuvre.
Luckily for him, the law sets no targets or deadlines.
Even the sex-education portion of the elementary-school health curriculum (which school boards say is still in place because nobody’s formally told them otherwise) is a pretty conservative document, full of warnings about the dangers of sex and sending around photos of yourself naked, and the importance of setting and respecting boundaries.
If the government does get around to taking the curriculum back before September, it’s going to have to write up an alternative and take it on the road to 124 ridings to find out what people think. What exactly is wrong with the old one? The Tories have never quite specified.
Populism opposes whatever burdens the vile elites have imposed on normal decent people. It doesn’t offer much guidance for what ought to replace those things. What’s a populist environmental policy? What’s a populist policy on welfare?
The Tories have been on a real streak in their first month, fulfilling a meaningful percentage of their promises to take things down. That’s what they were elected to do and they’re doing it, so good for them. What comes next? Nobody really knows, apparently including the Tories.