Liberal gouging at the pump

If you were running the province of Ontario, do you think now would be a good time to give our frail economy a really hard kick in the teeth?

The answer should be “Of course not — unemployment is still too high. And too many families are struggling to make ends meet.” And if that’s what you think you have more empathy than our current premier, Liberal leader Kathleen Wynne.

Wynne thinks now is a perfect time to slap another huge, job-killing tax hike on the Ontario economy in the form of sharply higher fuel taxes. The premier says she needs billions more per year from everybody to benefit the minority in and around Toronto who use public transit.

The Liberals would have us believe that 10 cents per litre — about $5 more per tank — is the price of having good roads and public transit. And that the money will be evenly distributed around the province for local infrastructure projects.

But the first claim is demonstrably not true: constantly raising taxes seems to be the price of Liberal mismanagement of government, our infrastructure and the economy.

And their second claim is not believable because of this government’s 10-year-long record of making financial pledges they don’t honour.

Toronto needs more transit because its left-leaning council has blocked every attempt to build new subways for years, and because the provincial government has squandered the tens of billions of dollars needed for transit on, among other things, criminally high spending on public sector workers and executives, and hiring 300,000 more of them.

“Punitive” was the word used most often Friday to describe raising gas taxes from the current 40 cents per litre. The pain of a 10-cent-per-litre hike would cause would be immediate, harsh, widespread and long-lasting.

Household costs would skyrocket, and thousands more jobs and lives would disappear down the rabbit hole.

“This would affect the price of everything,” Candace Malcolm, Ontario director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, told listeners of the morning talk show on AM800 Friday morning.

And it’s not as if Toronto’s transit woes appeared overnight, Malcolm said: “The government has failed to address this problem for years and years and years.”

Ontario’s automobile dealers are concerned the increase is so large — at least $880 million per year —— it would further depress auto sales.

And if that happens, autoworkers and industry suppliers’ jobs would also be threatened.

The tax would be economically devastating: driving to work, food, services, and everything delivered by truck would all cost more. Ironically, even the cost of public transit would jump because fuel is one of many operators’ largest costs.

The Liberals counter by saying higher fuel taxes would benefit everybody because they will spread the money around the province.

If you believe that, you probably bought a host of other Liberal promises written in disappearing ink. It’s difficult to think of a single Liberal economic promise that has turned out to be either honest or accurate, going back to former premier Dalton McGuinty’s famous “no new taxes” pledge a decade ago.

Instead, McGuinty raised taxes an estimated 120 times, the opposition PC party says, while wasting billions on infamous boondoggles including eHealth, ORNGE, the gas plants and the recently revealed bonuses and pensions at Ontario Power Generation, which are so obscenely large most people compare them to out- right theft.

But it could be argued that Wynne’s latest tax plan is consistent with how the party operates.

One of the curious policies pursued by this government for the past 10 years is identifying areas in which the Ontario economy is competitive, and deliberately eliminating those advantages by increasing taxes and costs.

They’ve done it with the price of water, which used to be cheap in Ontario.

The party years ago identified it as being seriously “underpriced” and used Walkerton as an excuse to encourage utilities to raise prices.

They’ve done it with power prices. “Too low!” the Liberals cried, pointing to higher European prices as justification for raising ours and enriching their friends in the green energy racket.

And now they cluck that our fuel taxes are out of step so Ontario should raise its own.

Here’s a thought: if the richest city in the country can’t afford more subways, then maybe it just shouldn’t build them.

Or it could change a law to make them affordable.

Did you know subways cost twice as much per kilometre to build in Toronto than anywhere else in the world?

It’s because of Ontario’s closed bidding process, which excludes contractors not approved by an insider’s group of trade unions.

“Higher gasoline taxes will just give the government more money to waste,” Frank Notte, director of government relations for the Trillium Automobile Dealers Association, scoffed this week.

He told Wynne to budget better with the $136 billion per year she already spends. It’s hard not to agree with him. So: change the bidding law, cut spending, reign in the agencies, balance the budget.

And then get back to us, Premier Wynne.

Or just call an election and let voters decide if they feel strong enough to survive more Liberal tax medicine.