Tories send right signals in financially distressed Ontario
In May 1994, a year before the election that would make him premier of Ontario, Mike Harris released his entire platform to the public. Known as the Common Sense Revolution, it contained such striking proposals as a 30-per-cent personal income tax cut and a $6-billion reduction in spending. Harris campaigned on it non-stop the whole of that year, with the result that by the time the election rolled around, as a Conservative strategist told me, “half the population half- believed we’d do half of it.” As it happened that was just enough.
Elections, of course, are only partly about platforms. They aren’t irrelevant, as some pros maintain, but they’re as much about signalling character and direction as anything else. Most people don’t have especially strong ideological leanings. What they want to know, first, is do you have a plan? Plan beats no plan, nine times out of 10.
And second, will you implement your plan? Are you committed enough, tough enough, to see it through in the face of the inevitable interest-group blowback? The Common Sense Revolution helped to answer both those questions for Harris. It plainly reflected his core convictions. Why else would he be willing to put it out there for his opponents to take shots at it?
Twenty years later, Tim Hudak is gambling his Million Jobs Plan can do the same. Having frittered away an election he could have won in 2011, a mixture of over-caution and gimmicky, too-calculated wedge issues, Hudak was determined not to make the same mistake this time. Instead, he has drawn a bright line between himself and his opponents; in the process he has dominated the early going of the campaign.
There’s plenty to criticize in the plan. The “million jobs” pledge is ridiculous, even by the standards of most such job-creation claims. It’s over eight years, for starters; half of it is what one would expect from ordinary economic growth; the rest is hand-waving. The 100,000 jobs Hudak pledges to remove from the public-sector payrolls seems likewise to have been picked out of the air, though I suspect the objective here was to shock rather than to please. If so it achieved that in spades.
Critics reacted as if Hudak proposed to fire 100,000 people tomorrow. In fact, much of the reductions would be achieved by contracting out; much of what remained could be achieved through attrition. Still, it wouldn’t be easy. The party calls it a 10-per-cent reduction, which implies it would apply across the broader public sector, including not only the civil service proper (of which there are fewer than 100,000 employees in total) but health care, universities, schools and local government. Hudak would have only indirect control over much of this.
Whether he cuts the public sector by exactly 100,000, however, or even approximately that amount, is not important. It can be done, certainly: between 2003 and 2011, Ontario’s public-sector payroll, broadly defined, grew by 170,000 jobs, or 17.6 per cent, twice as fast as the province’s population. But its value is mostly for what it signals of his resolve. Would any leader deliberately open himself to such attacks before the election if he did not have what it took to do what was needed after?
That is the value of the platform, generally: for the broad direction it indicates, rather than the details of any one proposal. And the direction is exactly what this over-indebted, overtaxed, over-governed province needs. It would cut spending, first — much of it by implementing the recommendations made by the economist Don Drummond in a 2012 report commissioned for the Liberals, but also by an across-the-board wage freeze, which he recommended against.
The Tories would balance the budget, they claim, in two years, rather than the three promised by the Liberals: irrelevant in economic terms, but again, useful as a signal of resolve. They would cut the corporate tax rate by nearly a third, to eight per cent, the lowest in North America; even better, they would finance this by eliminating subsidies to business — all of them.
There’s much else to like. Hudak would end subsidies for wind and other renewable energy projects that have helped to make Ontario’s electricity prices the highest in North America. He’d join the three western provinces in the New West Partnership free trade area. There’s even guarded talk of privatization: a proposal to let pension plans invest in the province’s hydroelectric and liquor monopolies; opening more government work to competitive bidding; and so on.
That’s about as far as Hudak’s radicalism extends. His policies on health care and education are blandly conventional. His proposals to “end gridlock” in the Greater Toronto Area are rooted in much the same ineffectual big-transit approach as his opponents, even if they differ in the particulars (subways, rather than surface rail). Earlier suggestions that he would liberalize restrictions on the sale of beer and wine or make union dues voluntary have been scrapped.
No matter. The clear direction of Hudak’s policies is to spend less, tax less, borrow less and subsidize less, in all respects the opposite of the course mapped out in this month’s Liberal budget. In reality, the choice is probably less stark than that. The credit markets may very well put a ceiling on the Liberals’ spending plans, while union opposition may put a floor under the Tories’. I suppose it comes down to which you think is more likely: that the Liberals will break their promises or that the Tories will keep theirs?