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With their new election platform, the Progressive Conservatives are the party to beat in Ontario in 2018, if the spring election is to be judged according to who promises to stuff more goodies into your pockets.
Under Patrick Brown, the Tories have been transforming into a party of the left. With their “People’s Guarantee”, signed dramatically by their leader at their weekend convention in Toronto, there’s no going back before Election Day.
The only thing the Liberals are spending on that the Tories wouldn’t is the environment: They’d scrap a couple of billion dollars a year in spending to avert climate change. They’d actually collect even more money from charging for carbon emissions — via a much broader carbon tax administered by the federal government, rather than the Liberals’ existing cap-and-trade system — but they’d give those revenues back in income-tax cuts.
(Stéphane Dion promised to do substantially that when he was federal Liberal leader a decade ago. The federal Conservatives derided it as a “permanent tax on everything” and all but called him a communist. Now it’s Progressive Conservative policy.)
So that’s a bunch of things like retrofitting social-housing buildings and schools to make them more energy efficient, subsidizing greener industry, and sending money to cities for new bike routes. All zapped.
But pharmacare for young people? Keep it. Tuition cuts? They stay. Hiking the minimum wage? Slowed slightly but still being done.
Then add:
A public dental plan for seniors, $190 million a year more for mental health, new heart clinics in communities that don’t have them and a new PET scanner to wheel around the North. A hundred new probation officers, plus 2,200 more corrections officers (200 more than the Liberals say they’ll hire). More subway money for Toronto.
A $500 tax credit for buying winter tires. A new provincial tax credit for putting your kids in soccer. Subsidized cell towers and broadband Internet in remote areas. A city parks fund! More loans to help tradespeople buy tools! Wi-Fi on GO trains!
A Brown government would pay its share for the next stage of LRT construction here. It would also build the new Ottawa jail the Liberals promise — but, of course, sooner.
Tim Hudak, then the leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative party, made a second visit to Ottawa in 2014 to reverse his accidental promise to not fund the next stage of the city’s light-rail plans.
Because inexpensive car insurance is a birthright of all Ontarians, a Brown government would forbid insurers to charge different premiums based on where people live. Everyone would, by law, get the cheapest rate.
Because “it’s time for a government that cares about horse-racing in Ontario,” it says here, the Tories would create a new lottery with revenues going to racetracks. People are just not that interested in betting on horses, so of course the government must act.
Maybe you wonder how we’ll pay for all this. The carbon-tax money is part of it, but not nearly enough.
The answer is magic money: unspecified savings in unnamed programs. The Brown Tories would do a value-for-money audits on everything. This would be a labour-intensive, time-consuming process that would start paying off to the tune of billions right away.
“The value-for-money audit is conservatively estimated to find waste of less than 2 per cent of spending,” the Tory platform says, or about $2.8 billion a year within a couple of years. That’s about the same as the budget for the Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services. Should be easy to find.
(Also, the Tories would continue the financial gymnastics they accuse the Liberals of using to lie about the province’s books. The Progressive Conservative platform clucks about the Liberals’ fights with the auditor general Bonnie Lysyk over them, but that’s all.)
Ontario auditor general Bonnie Lysyk, who has frequently criticized the Liberal government for treating excess public pension money as a government asset and hiding debt on Ontario Power Generation’s books.
The platform slags the Liberals for selling 60 per cent of Hydro One, the public power-transmission utility that turned an annual profit and paid dividends to the government. The Liberals sacrificed most of those year-in-and-year out revenues (hundreds of millions a year) for a shot of cash for public works (billions, once).
“The sale of Hydro One was a reckless decision that sacrificed the province’s long-term fiscal health, forfeited control over the utility’s decisions and — without consultation — robbed the Ontario people of an asset that was rightfully theirs,” the Tories say.
So, they say, they’ll give the 40 per cent remaining of Hydro One’s dividends back to power consumers as a rebate on our bills.
If giving up 60 per cent of the dividends was dangerously irresponsible for the treasury, giving up the other 40 per cent is an odd remedy. But it does get the Tories 4.7 percentage points of the way to cutting hydro bills by 11.7 per cent more than even the Liberals say they can.
Another big step in that direction, 2.9 percentage points’ worth, is from simply transferring hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of energy-conservation programs from the electricity system’s players to provincial taxpayers. Same people paying — us — but lower bills in the mailbox.
It’s hard to fault the Progressive Conservatives for giving up on trying to sell a conservative message after failing at it so consistently. They tried patrician managerialism under John Tory in 2007, Liberals-but-more-competent-ness under Hudak in 2011, and hard-edged conservative incompetence under Hudak version 2.0 in 2014. None of them worked.
Running as lefties is the one thing the Progressive Conservatives haven’t tried yet in 15 years of losing elections to the Liberals, so what the hell. But if you’re looking for actual conservatism in Ontario, keep searching.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
Under Patrick Brown, the Tories have been transforming into a party of the left. With their “People’s Guarantee”, signed dramatically by their leader at their weekend convention in Toronto, there’s no going back before Election Day.
The only thing the Liberals are spending on that the Tories wouldn’t is the environment: They’d scrap a couple of billion dollars a year in spending to avert climate change. They’d actually collect even more money from charging for carbon emissions — via a much broader carbon tax administered by the federal government, rather than the Liberals’ existing cap-and-trade system — but they’d give those revenues back in income-tax cuts.
(Stéphane Dion promised to do substantially that when he was federal Liberal leader a decade ago. The federal Conservatives derided it as a “permanent tax on everything” and all but called him a communist. Now it’s Progressive Conservative policy.)
So that’s a bunch of things like retrofitting social-housing buildings and schools to make them more energy efficient, subsidizing greener industry, and sending money to cities for new bike routes. All zapped.
But pharmacare for young people? Keep it. Tuition cuts? They stay. Hiking the minimum wage? Slowed slightly but still being done.
Then add:
A public dental plan for seniors, $190 million a year more for mental health, new heart clinics in communities that don’t have them and a new PET scanner to wheel around the North. A hundred new probation officers, plus 2,200 more corrections officers (200 more than the Liberals say they’ll hire). More subway money for Toronto.
A $500 tax credit for buying winter tires. A new provincial tax credit for putting your kids in soccer. Subsidized cell towers and broadband Internet in remote areas. A city parks fund! More loans to help tradespeople buy tools! Wi-Fi on GO trains!
A Brown government would pay its share for the next stage of LRT construction here. It would also build the new Ottawa jail the Liberals promise — but, of course, sooner.
Tim Hudak, then the leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative party, made a second visit to Ottawa in 2014 to reverse his accidental promise to not fund the next stage of the city’s light-rail plans.
Because inexpensive car insurance is a birthright of all Ontarians, a Brown government would forbid insurers to charge different premiums based on where people live. Everyone would, by law, get the cheapest rate.
Because “it’s time for a government that cares about horse-racing in Ontario,” it says here, the Tories would create a new lottery with revenues going to racetracks. People are just not that interested in betting on horses, so of course the government must act.
Maybe you wonder how we’ll pay for all this. The carbon-tax money is part of it, but not nearly enough.
The answer is magic money: unspecified savings in unnamed programs. The Brown Tories would do a value-for-money audits on everything. This would be a labour-intensive, time-consuming process that would start paying off to the tune of billions right away.
“The value-for-money audit is conservatively estimated to find waste of less than 2 per cent of spending,” the Tory platform says, or about $2.8 billion a year within a couple of years. That’s about the same as the budget for the Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services. Should be easy to find.
(Also, the Tories would continue the financial gymnastics they accuse the Liberals of using to lie about the province’s books. The Progressive Conservative platform clucks about the Liberals’ fights with the auditor general Bonnie Lysyk over them, but that’s all.)
Ontario auditor general Bonnie Lysyk, who has frequently criticized the Liberal government for treating excess public pension money as a government asset and hiding debt on Ontario Power Generation’s books.
The platform slags the Liberals for selling 60 per cent of Hydro One, the public power-transmission utility that turned an annual profit and paid dividends to the government. The Liberals sacrificed most of those year-in-and-year out revenues (hundreds of millions a year) for a shot of cash for public works (billions, once).
“The sale of Hydro One was a reckless decision that sacrificed the province’s long-term fiscal health, forfeited control over the utility’s decisions and — without consultation — robbed the Ontario people of an asset that was rightfully theirs,” the Tories say.
So, they say, they’ll give the 40 per cent remaining of Hydro One’s dividends back to power consumers as a rebate on our bills.
If giving up 60 per cent of the dividends was dangerously irresponsible for the treasury, giving up the other 40 per cent is an odd remedy. But it does get the Tories 4.7 percentage points of the way to cutting hydro bills by 11.7 per cent more than even the Liberals say they can.
Another big step in that direction, 2.9 percentage points’ worth, is from simply transferring hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of energy-conservation programs from the electricity system’s players to provincial taxpayers. Same people paying — us — but lower bills in the mailbox.
It’s hard to fault the Progressive Conservatives for giving up on trying to sell a conservative message after failing at it so consistently. They tried patrician managerialism under John Tory in 2007, Liberals-but-more-competent-ness under Hudak in 2011, and hard-edged conservative incompetence under Hudak version 2.0 in 2014. None of them worked.
Running as lefties is the one thing the Progressive Conservatives haven’t tried yet in 15 years of losing elections to the Liberals, so what the hell. But if you’re looking for actual conservatism in Ontario, keep searching.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
