There’s nothing ‘fair’ about Wynne’s promises

Premier Kathleen Wynne has revealed the Liberals’ campaign theme for next June’s Ontario election.

It will be, she says, all about “fairness.”

“Everything we’ve done will be part of the re-election (bid), but I certainly hope there will be a discussion in the election campaign about how to have a fairer society,” Wynne said in a recent interview with The Canadian Press.

Not only does Wynne repeat the word “fair” ad nauseam when introducing Liberal initiatives, the word itself is included in her initiatives.

Hence Wynne’s Fair Workplaces and Better Jobs Plan, Fair Housing Plan and Fair Hydro Plan.

Conversely, should Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown or NDP Leader Andrea Horwath criticize any of these programs, Wynne will attack them for being “unfair” to Ontarians, in a bid to define them before they can define themselves with voters.

It’s the oldest political trick in the book.

In reality, of course, there’s nothing “fair” about Wynne announcing out of nowhere a 31.6 per cent increase to Ontario’s minimum wage by January, 2019, as she recently did under her, “Fair Workplaces and Better Jobs Plan.”

It will not be fair to the struggling mom-and-pop operations that go out of business because this is the straw that finally breaks their backs, in addition to runaway electricity prices and the added costs of cap and trade under the Liberals.

It will not be fair to workers who are laid off as businesses trim their costs to meet this sudden and huge Wynne-imposed expense, given that the responsible way to introduce hikes to the minimum wage is gradually and in line with inflation.

Nor will it be fair to the workers never hired because businesses cancel expansion plans.

Nor to consumers hit with higher retail prices because of Wynne’s radical increase to the minimum wage.

Similarly, there is nothing fair about Wynne’s Fair Housing Plan, which includes a massive expansion of rent controls.

That’s because rent controls inevitably shrink the rental housing supply and result in the deterioration of the existing housing stock, both of which hurt newcomers to the rental housing market who have to compete for fewer and fewer rental apartments.

Similarly, there is nothing fair about Wynne’s Fair Hydro Plan, which passes on to future generations the cost of paying for all the blunders Wynne and her predecessor, Dalton McGuinty, made that sent electricity prices soaring, and from which it will take generations to recover, no matter which party wins the next election.

Sticking our children and our children’s children with a price tag of up to $93 billion — according to Ontario’s Financial Accountability Officer — to pay for $24 billion in hydro rate relief today, has nothing to do with “fairness” and everything to do with Wynne trying to get re-elected.

As the great conservative thinker Thomas Sowell writes in The Vision of the Anointed: Self Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, which could practically be Wynne’s biography:

“There is … no way the television camera can show which unemployed people would have had jobs, if the minimum wage laws had not made them too expensive to hire at their current levels of skills and experience — and thereby cut them off from acquiring the additional skills and experience they need.”

So much for Wynne being “fair.”