Ontario election a referendum on Liberals

Tories’ woes just intervening madness

This week’s report from the Financial Accountability Office offered plenty for Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals to crow about: in 2017 Ontario enjoyed its strongest job gains since 2003, with 128,400 net new positions; and the unemployment rate continued i ts steady downward slide from the unpleasantness in 2009 to six per cent, the lowest it has been since 2000.

The Tories countered with some of the report’s less good news: “Southwestern, eastern, and northern Ontario only saw 1,600 net new jobs combined,” finance critic Lisa MacLeod noted in a statement; the gender pay gap “has not improved since 2011 and continues to be pervasive across industries”; and, most compellingly, “middle- class families haven’t had a real raise since the 2000s.”

Median household income rose just 3.8 per cent in Ontario from 2005 to 2015, Statistics Canada reported last year — by far the worst of any province and seven points below the national number. Eight of the nine Canadian metropolitan areas where median i ncome dropped were in Ontario, the worst being Windsor at -6.4 per cent.

That’s not a good look for a 15- year- old government, and Economic Development Minister Steven Del Duca didn’t ignore the problems in the FAO report in his own response. He pledged to address regional job- creation disparities, the gender wage gap and the prevalence of “precarious work — though the FAO numbers on the latter aren’t as compelling, or at least not as recent a phenomenon, as rhetoric often suggests. The number of employees holding temporary and multiple jobs is higher than in the 1990s, but has been steady since the mid-2000s. The number who want fulltime work but can only find part- time has receded sine the recession back toward its 20-year average.

Regardless, Del Duca and Co. have a plan. “These findings are exactly why we took historic action to create more opportunity and security for workers with a plan for fairer workplaces and better jobs. A plan to raise the minimum wage, make university and college tuition free for middle and low income students and to provide free prescription drugs for everyone under the age of 25,” he said in a statement. “We’re committed to this plan and to creating more fairness and opportunity all across the province.”

Those are popular policies, polls show, even if they’re designed to clean up Liberal messes. But page five of the FAO’s six-page report reminds us of some recently released labour force figures: in January “total employment fell by 51,000 positions” from the month before. Young and part-time workers took it on the chin especially hard, the FAO observes: the economy actually added 8,000 full- time jobs in January, while shedding 59,000 part-time positions.

The FAO is at great pains, quite rightly, to observe that it’s far too early to ascribe that to the Liberals’ whopping minimum wage hike — 32 per cent in 18 months, if the final $ 14 to $ 15 topup kicks in on Jan. 1, 2019. Several other provinces lost jobs in January without hiking their minimum wages. Still, it’s exactly what most economists — whatever their opinion on the minimum wage — would expect to happen if a jurisdiction hikes the minimum wage very much and very quickly. This is the first January of Wynne’s tenure as premier that Ontario hasn’t added jobs. And the FAO itself predicted last year the hike would probably cost around 50,000 of them.

Fewer jobs isn’t necessarily the end of the world, if those with jobs are better off. We’ll have more labour force surveys between now and the provincial election on June 7. But it’s a reminder of what this election was about before the Progressive Conservatives went kablooey: the Liberals’ competence, or lack thereof, and the credibility of their let- us- fix- ourown- problems pitch. They had 14 years, and Wynne herself had five, to ratchet up the minimum wage beyond inflation, but more gradually, toward the apparently magic number of $ 15. They declined. The l ast major hike, a comparatively modest $ 0.75, kicked in 11 days before the 2014 election. How confident should Ontarians be, really, that these are serious people trying seriously to solve serious problems and not just winging it and hoping for the best?

Doug Ford’s candidacy for the Tory leadership is certainly a wildcard that didn’t exist on the afternoon of Jan. 25, when Patrick Brown seemed so well placed to become the province’s next premier. If he can build a broad coalition of mad- ashell populist, social and fiscal conservatives — and he might — then the basic completion of the election campaign might well change.

If it’s Caroline Mulroney or Christine Elliott, though, chances are it will not. This was supposed to be a referendum on 15 years of Liberal governance, and that’s what it probably will be despite the intervening madness. On Wednesday, interim leader Vic Fedeli confirmed suggestions from many riding associations that donations and volunteerism have surged since Brown’s unceremonious departure ( Brown has since announced he’s in the race for his old job.)

If it’s the economy, stupid, that matters most, then things could certainly be worse for the Liberals. But they could be all the more vulnerable with a more likable leader at the Tory tiller.