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The Progressive Conservatives rear up in fury when they hear their leader, Doug Ford, compared to Donald Trump, but dammit if his newly announced jobs policy isn’t straight from the Trump book.
Liberal leader Kathleen Wynne kicked off Ontario’s political day Wednesday by comparing Ford to U.S. President Donald Trump. She accused him of all but leading Ford Nation in chants of “lock her up” when he said Tuesday that in the private sector, people who behaved like Liberals would be jailed. Wynne prepared a statement and her office sent it out to make sure reporters everywhere saw it. It had “Trump” in it seven times.
“He believes in an ugly, vicious brand of politics that traffics in smears and lies,” Wynne said of Ford. “He’ll say anything about anyone at any time because just like Trump, it is all about him. It’s not about our people. It’s not about their families. It’s not about Ontario’s success. It is about him.” And so on.
He never actually said “lock her up” and the force of the Liberal attack was muted by the party war machine’s stupidly putting words of Trump’s about “the blacks” in Ford’s mouth, stopping just short of calling him a racist. If your political case depends on convincing people you’re holier than your opponent, you have to actually be holier than your opponent. If you aren’t, you’re just a hypocrite.
Ontario’s Premier Kathleen Wynne at her Queen’s Park office.
Which the Tories happily pointed out right after Wynne was done. They organized a quick conference call starring Nepean MPP Lisa MacLeod. “(Wynne’s) trying to run an election campaign against a different candidate in a different country because she can’t defend her record in Ontario,” MacLeod said.
Then Ford popped up in Cobourg, saying it’ll be so easy to bring manufacturing jobs back to Ontario that a baboon could do it.
“There is no secret to creating good jobs in Ontario,” he said. “It all starts with lower taxes, cutting red tape and regulations, and reducing hydro bills for everyone. We need to attract businesses to Ontario, not drive them away as Kathleen Wynne and the Liberals have done.”
Ford made just one specific promise: He’ll cut corporate income taxes from 11.5 per cent to 10.5 per cent (small businesses already pay less than that: 3.5 per cent). Corporate tax rates have been steady since 2012 after Dalton McGuinty cut them in the late 2000s and corporate-tax revenues have risen quite a bit, suggesting businesses here are doing OK, but perhaps they could be doing better.
Other than that, Ford offered nothing specific. A background document the Tories released said they’ll “stabilize industrial hydro rates through a package of aggressive reforms,” which so far consists of firing the head of Hydro One. Note that “reducing hydro bills for everyone” became “stabilize industrial hydro rates” before they were even done talking.
And they’ll “cut red tape and stifling regulations to enable investment and good job growth,” they say, details to be determined.
Ontario has lost 300,000 manufacturing jobs under the Liberals, Ford said. This is true: Statistics Canada says Ontario had just under 1.1 million manufacturing jobs at the end of 2003, when McGuinty won power, and in 2017 we had 769,000.
That decline has hurt like hell, especially in small centres that relied on one or two factories. The problem is the idea that all those jobs have gone because Ontario uniquely sucks.
But over the same period, Canada as a whole lost 550,000 manufacturing jobs, according to the same Statistics Canada data the Progressive Conservatives use. Every single province lost manufacturing jobs except Saskatchewan and Prince Edward Island, which added 1,400 between them over 15 years.
Overall employment, meanwhile, is up 900,000 jobs in Ontario since 2003, including 300,000 jobs since 2013, even as electricity prices have climbed. (Prices have actually ticked down for the biggest industrial users in the past two years, according to the Association of Major Power Consumers in Ontario, which represents them, but the association’s president, Colin Anderson, says he doesn’t expect that to last.) There are more jobs here — just not manufacturing jobs.
U.S. manufacturing is up a bit since the last recession but it’s way, way below its peak almost 40 years ago. Manufacturing employment has soared in Asia, though. Tens of millions of jobs. The forces that have engaged that many new workers in the industrial economy over 20 years are much more powerful than a percentage point off corporate taxes or a few cents on a kilowatt-hour of power will counteract.
Wind turbines near Strathroy, Ont., west of London. Mike Hensen/Postmedia
Under McGuinty, the Liberals got us heavily into green energy, which flopped as an industrial strategy. Under Wynne, they’ve decided Ontario’s economic future is in high-end manufacturing (which brings fewer jobs but better-paid ones), technology development and financial services. They’ve spent hundreds of millions on subsidies for jobs in those fields, and billions more on social programs meant to backstop Ontarians’ lives in ways permanent jobs can’t be counted on for.
The New Democrats would turn up the dial, pledging even more generous social programs, one-stop shopping for auto-industry subsidies and support for extraction industries especially in the North.
Both those parties promise permanent increases in the size of Ontario’s welfare state, and deficits to finance them.
The Tory plan, such as it is, promises that we can get back the jobs of the past with lower taxes and less regulation. But the diagnosis is wrong and the treatment plan amounts to returning to a golden age for one particular sector of our economy by wishing really hard for it.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
Liberal leader Kathleen Wynne kicked off Ontario’s political day Wednesday by comparing Ford to U.S. President Donald Trump. She accused him of all but leading Ford Nation in chants of “lock her up” when he said Tuesday that in the private sector, people who behaved like Liberals would be jailed. Wynne prepared a statement and her office sent it out to make sure reporters everywhere saw it. It had “Trump” in it seven times.
“He believes in an ugly, vicious brand of politics that traffics in smears and lies,” Wynne said of Ford. “He’ll say anything about anyone at any time because just like Trump, it is all about him. It’s not about our people. It’s not about their families. It’s not about Ontario’s success. It is about him.” And so on.
He never actually said “lock her up” and the force of the Liberal attack was muted by the party war machine’s stupidly putting words of Trump’s about “the blacks” in Ford’s mouth, stopping just short of calling him a racist. If your political case depends on convincing people you’re holier than your opponent, you have to actually be holier than your opponent. If you aren’t, you’re just a hypocrite.
Ontario’s Premier Kathleen Wynne at her Queen’s Park office.
Which the Tories happily pointed out right after Wynne was done. They organized a quick conference call starring Nepean MPP Lisa MacLeod. “(Wynne’s) trying to run an election campaign against a different candidate in a different country because she can’t defend her record in Ontario,” MacLeod said.
Then Ford popped up in Cobourg, saying it’ll be so easy to bring manufacturing jobs back to Ontario that a baboon could do it.
“There is no secret to creating good jobs in Ontario,” he said. “It all starts with lower taxes, cutting red tape and regulations, and reducing hydro bills for everyone. We need to attract businesses to Ontario, not drive them away as Kathleen Wynne and the Liberals have done.”
Ford made just one specific promise: He’ll cut corporate income taxes from 11.5 per cent to 10.5 per cent (small businesses already pay less than that: 3.5 per cent). Corporate tax rates have been steady since 2012 after Dalton McGuinty cut them in the late 2000s and corporate-tax revenues have risen quite a bit, suggesting businesses here are doing OK, but perhaps they could be doing better.
Other than that, Ford offered nothing specific. A background document the Tories released said they’ll “stabilize industrial hydro rates through a package of aggressive reforms,” which so far consists of firing the head of Hydro One. Note that “reducing hydro bills for everyone” became “stabilize industrial hydro rates” before they were even done talking.
And they’ll “cut red tape and stifling regulations to enable investment and good job growth,” they say, details to be determined.
Ontario has lost 300,000 manufacturing jobs under the Liberals, Ford said. This is true: Statistics Canada says Ontario had just under 1.1 million manufacturing jobs at the end of 2003, when McGuinty won power, and in 2017 we had 769,000.
That decline has hurt like hell, especially in small centres that relied on one or two factories. The problem is the idea that all those jobs have gone because Ontario uniquely sucks.
But over the same period, Canada as a whole lost 550,000 manufacturing jobs, according to the same Statistics Canada data the Progressive Conservatives use. Every single province lost manufacturing jobs except Saskatchewan and Prince Edward Island, which added 1,400 between them over 15 years.
Overall employment, meanwhile, is up 900,000 jobs in Ontario since 2003, including 300,000 jobs since 2013, even as electricity prices have climbed. (Prices have actually ticked down for the biggest industrial users in the past two years, according to the Association of Major Power Consumers in Ontario, which represents them, but the association’s president, Colin Anderson, says he doesn’t expect that to last.) There are more jobs here — just not manufacturing jobs.
U.S. manufacturing is up a bit since the last recession but it’s way, way below its peak almost 40 years ago. Manufacturing employment has soared in Asia, though. Tens of millions of jobs. The forces that have engaged that many new workers in the industrial economy over 20 years are much more powerful than a percentage point off corporate taxes or a few cents on a kilowatt-hour of power will counteract.
Wind turbines near Strathroy, Ont., west of London. Mike Hensen/Postmedia
Under McGuinty, the Liberals got us heavily into green energy, which flopped as an industrial strategy. Under Wynne, they’ve decided Ontario’s economic future is in high-end manufacturing (which brings fewer jobs but better-paid ones), technology development and financial services. They’ve spent hundreds of millions on subsidies for jobs in those fields, and billions more on social programs meant to backstop Ontarians’ lives in ways permanent jobs can’t be counted on for.
The New Democrats would turn up the dial, pledging even more generous social programs, one-stop shopping for auto-industry subsidies and support for extraction industries especially in the North.
Both those parties promise permanent increases in the size of Ontario’s welfare state, and deficits to finance them.
The Tory plan, such as it is, promises that we can get back the jobs of the past with lower taxes and less regulation. But the diagnosis is wrong and the treatment plan amounts to returning to a golden age for one particular sector of our economy by wishing really hard for it.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
