Play your position, Patrick Brown

This past summer I was invited to play a game of pickup hockey with Ontario Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown. I was there as a friend of a friend. Roster filler, if you will.

And while I’m pleased to report I scored just as many goals (two!) as the player who may soon be our next premier, that’s not the anecdote I’ll be using to start this column.

This is: the team Brown and I were on was a player short. And having an odd number of players means everyone has to rotate through the various positions rather than play the same position the whole game.

So whenever I jumped on the ice, I had to figure out who was playing where. And it was never clear to me where Brown, a freewheeling skater who’s also a bit of a puck hog, was supposed to be. Sometimes he was playing right wing. Sometimes left wing.

I get that same sense of frustration reading his election platform.

Released two weeks ago, Brown’s “People’s Guarantee” is a glossy magazine-style document that supposedly lays out how he’ll govern if he wins the provincial election next June.

The platform has been heralded as a clever jump to the centre by a right-wing party that has often shot itself in the foot at election time.

The Toronto Star’s editorial board — a perpetual critic of past Tory leaders — claims Brown has finally delivered a credible alternative to Premier Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals.

“Next spring’s election is shaping up to be a real contest of ideas,” a Star editorial chirps.

Baloney. A “real contest of ideas” would require Brown to stake out positions at sharp odds with the Liberals. Instead, Brown spends most of his time promising to do exactly what Wynne is already doing.

Name an expensive and controversial Liberal policy, and Brown pledges to keep it. Growth-inhibiting Green Belt restrictions. Pedagogically-pointless full-day kindergarten.

The explicitly-deceptive Fair Hydro Plan. Job-killing $15-an-hour minimum wage. Giveaways to the movie industry. Pharmacare.

On and on it goes. Reading the document, you get the impression Brown thinks the Liberals are doing a wonderful job. The only change required is to swap out Wynne with himself.

Oh, there are occasional quibbles with existing government policy. Brown rightly says he’ll do what he can to get out from under the Liberal’s absurd green energy commitments.

And the document correctly identifies the problem with rising housing prices as a lack of supply caused by restrictive government zoning regulations. (Although it’s strangely mute on rent controls, another silent assassin of housing supply.)

But every time economic common sense makes an appearance, Brown switches positions and starts playing the other side of the rink.

Consider Brown’s claim he’ll save you an additional 12 per cent off your hydro bill. Like the Wynne government’s fantastical 25 per cent cut, Brown is simply shifting money around from your hydro bill to your tax bill — as if voters can’t tell the difference between their front and back pockets.

Then there are crazy market-meddling ideas such as a plan to ban car insurance companies from charging differential rates based on location. Plus tax goodies for winter tires.

Beyond this muddle of objectives, however, is the fact Brown seems so determined to avoid conflict or complaints about his platform that he appears incapable of making difficult choices.

Competing interests and trade-offs are unavoidable in government. Instead of acknowledging the existence of such controversies and telling voters how he’ll govern in the real world, Brown declares a policy of perpetual rainbows. He’ll keep everything Wynne has already promised, plus offer up a whole bunch of new treats. And yeah, he’ll balance the budget thanks to a new federal carbon tax.

While this might be good marketing, it’s bad news for voters who have no clue about how, or if, he intends to tackle the biggest, stickiest problems we face.

For Waterloo Region, the most glaring omission in Brown’s platform is the fact it never mentions municipal closed-shop tendering.

Many construction firms here and throughout the province have lost the ability to bid on large municipal infrastructure projects due to deceptive union practices and the Byzantine provincial labour code. For regional taxpayers, this means fewer bids and higher prices.

A $658,000 paving contract at the regional airport was recently awarded to a company that isn’t even a paving company. It only won because it has the required approval from the necessary union. An actual paving company bid $130,000 lower, but was rejected outright because it isn’t a signatory to the closed-shop union deal. And that massive King-Victoria transit hub project? It received just one qualified bidder. This lack of competition has a real and substantial effect on local tax bills.

Curiously enough, local Tory MPP Michael Harris has worked long and hard on this issue, and he’s already suggested a fix with a private member’s bill. Following through on this commitment would be a pro-market plank in any ‘conservative’ party’s platform. Unfortunately, vowing to change the labour code to protect taxpayer rights would anger some noisy unions, court controversy and spoil Brown’s safeas-milk plans for winning the election. So it’s nowhere to be found.

You never win hockey games by playing it safe. We’ll see if the same holds true for elections.