National Post (National Edition)
O'Toole owes us a second policy disclaimer
Conservative leader Erin O'Toole spent last week assuring Canadians he is not a rightwing extremist or white supremacist, even releasing a statement to that effect. That was fine, but those things were never really in doubt. Nobody reading the statement would have learned anything new. But now that he has assured everyone that he is no right-wing extremist, Mr. O'Toole should follow up with a second statement, one assuring Canadians, especially the large numbers of us who are unenthusiastic about the federal government's great progressive reset, that he's not a lefty, either.
He would have to forgive anyone who sees his party as being, not in the political centre, as he says, but rather squarely in the crowded left, alongside the other four parties occupying Canada's legislature. Since becoming Conservative leader, O'Toole has exchanged his “True Blue” slogan for an NDP-orange policy agenda, including: running budget deficits until 2030, transitioning Canada to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, supporting the expansion of labour unions, and adopting an interventionist industrial policy to protect domestic manufacturing from competition.
To take the budget issue first: although O'Toole has said that spending and deficits cannot be unlimited, his policy of taking a decade to balance the federal budget is grounded in exactly the same reasoning Justin Trudeau's appealed to in 2015 in taking Canada from a balanced budget into deficits. Which is to say none: there is no economic reasoning behind it, just political calculation. Trudeau's rationale for deficits in 2015 was to make clear he was a progressive who wanted to ramp up spending; O'Toole's rationale for another decade of deficits now is to make clear he's not much of a conservative and has little real interest in constraining spending.
Given his mimicking of Trudeau's thinking on budget deficits, it was no surprise when O'Toole also followed the Liberals in insisting that the government must act today to put Canada on the path to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. I wonder if Trudeau and O'Toole would also presume to know how many hamburgers we should eat, how many pencils we should manufacture, and how many shoe stores we should open in 2050. If not, why do they presume to know the appropriate level of net emissions in 2050?
It is not sufficient to say that some scientists believe we should get to net zero by 2050 to avert a global warming crisis. We would not, after all, have governments shut down McDonald's on the basis of some scientists saying we should get to net-zero hamburgers by 2050 to avert an obesity crisis. The appropriate number of hamburgers eaten, pencils manufactured, shoe stores opened, and greenhouse gases emitted all depend on the costs and benefits of those activities when they are undertaken. But their value is subjective and the information about them decentralized, so this is a calculation beyond the ability of government planners to perform, whether they are planning for tomorrow, next year, or three decades from now.
Finally, O'Toole's preferences for a protectionist industrial policy and the expansion of labour unions — which are two sides of the same coin — are a complete repudiation of sensible economics in favour of NDP-economics. Protectionism increases the scarcity of goods by restricting supply and consumer choice, in order to artificially inflate the prices received by certain privileged producers and protect them from the consequences the economy would normally impose on people who deliberately waste resources by doing more expensively in Canada what can be done less expensively elsewhere. The union agenda is, similarly, to increase the scarcity of labour by restricting less privileged members of the labour force from supplying it, usually through some form of government regulation, in order to protect privileged union workers from competition.
At bottom, the intentions and effects of O'Toole's proposed interventions are to: 1) replace the capital allocations that arise from people spending and investing their own income with allocations chosen instead by government planners who have less knowledge and less incentive to get decisions right; 2) deliberately tilt these capital allocations towards domestically manufactured products that could be acquired more cheaply through international trade; and, 3) thereby encourage domestic companies and workers to operate less efficiently and less productively.
Erin O'Toole is clearly not a right-wing extremist or a white supremacist, but his economic sensibilities suggest he might well be a closet New Democrat. If his economic philosophy does materially differ from the NDP's, let's see a statement from him explaining exactly how.