Watching the twists and turns of Premier Dalton McGuinty’s government as it tries to reconcile economic reality with its ideological indifference to business would be grist for Monty Python if it weren’t so serious.
How else do you explain the passage of an Endangered Species Act that has environmentalists salivating over their brand new power to stop forestry activity even as northern Ontario’s economy reels from mill closings?
Or the Liberal endorsement of coming changes to the Mining Act that will, in essence, give aboriginal groups veto power over mining development on Crown land.
Or the giving of financial handouts to dozens of companies as part of an old-fashioned “picking winners” strategy, as if government was ever any good at making entrepreneurial decisions.
Or, strangest of all, the signing of an Ontario-Quebec agreement by premiers McGuinty and Jean Charest that together the pair will tackle “climate change” by bringing in a version of carbon taxes known as a “cap and trade emissions system.”
Even assuming “climate change” means human-originated warming of the climate - a somewhat dubious assumption considering all the prior warming and cooling eras that predate the industrial age - the McGuinty-Charest solution is guaranteed to take another huge bite out of the Ontario economy.
After all, higher fuel prices, probably the purest and most effective form of carbon tax if the aim is to reduce emissions, will cost the Ontario economy an estimated $6 billion this year. (In terms of carbon tax, 10 cents a litre increase in gasoline is apparently equal to $50-a-carbon-ton tax.)
How much will “cap and trade” cost the economy? No one knows, but it will be heavy.
Mind you, high oil prices, like the high dollar and a slow American economy, are forces beyond Liberal control.
But what the Grits really have to do is avoid making matters worse by assuming the private sector can take continued financial and regulatory battering at the hands of the province and not suffer negative consequences.
Today, there is little sense that Ontario is “open for business,” as the phrase once went. The Liberals look skeptically upon business, fearing it will veer away from the straight and narrow if they do not micro-inspect, regulate, tax, and control. (Think of the set of petty rules recently imposed upon tobacco retailers).
Coming to power in 2003, the Liberals raised corporate taxes to the highest level in North America without blinking an eye, as though such actions would have no effect upon decisions made by business.
Most of the net growth in Ontario employment in the Liberal years has been in the public sector, which, when combined with wage increases above inflation and no discernible increase in productivity, has meant a need to keep corporate and personal taxes high to pay for what McGuinty likes to call his “valuable” public services.
The premier proudly roll-calls the more than 100,000 people newly hired by the state, from nurses to teachers to Crown attorneys.
He says it is to “protect public services that the people of Ontario are entitled to count upon every single day.”
And there’s the rub, the Achilles Heel of Liberal thinking.
Government is necessary, but just hiring more public servants doesn’t mean a corresponding increase in accomplishments or productivity by those public servants.
Take justice, for instance.
Could Robert Baltovich count on “public services” to prevent his wrongful conviction? We’ll never know, because Attorney General Chris Bentley has refused an inquiry.
And could those who have had a child die count on “public services” to handle such sad events fairly and reasonably? The hearing into former pediatric forensic pathologist Charles Smith’s career suggests otherwise.
In education, student enrolment declines, staff hiring and costs go up, and properly measuring outcomes is a decidedly four-letter word.
Health care is another example.
Hundreds are dead in Ontario public hospitals because of C. difficile infections and the Liberal answer, after initially expressing considerable reluctance to do anything, is more hospital reporting to Queen’s Park.
Nobody in the public sector is to blame - not systems, nor union rules, nor anything else - for poor infection control.
But if someone in a private nursing home even gets sick, the government will, and has, (rightly), come down on its owners like a ton of bricks.
This is an attitude thing.
Listening to Liberals in the legislature is to hear a constant din of praise for the public sector, an attributing of superior virtue to its members, as if they are more competent, more caring, more self-sacrificing, less greedy, less selfish and so on - making one wonder who repealed human nature for that segment of society.
If the McGuinty Liberals are to successfully ride the economic whirlwind now upon us, they need to be more skeptical of the public sector and less indifferent to the needs of the private.
Derek Nelson is a freelance writer who spent 19 years at Queen’s Park. His e-mail address is [email protected].
