“His legacy will survive the taunts, it will survive the unfair comments,” Mr. Duncan said of Dalton McGuinty.
OK. I’m going to give it a go anyway.
Mr. McGuinty’s image has been artfully managed. Consider the scene on Oct. 15, when he announced he was quitting politics and proroguing the legislature. Liberal MPPs were gathered in the Government Caucus Room at Queen’s Park; reporters and television cameras poised at the back of the room. The Premier walked in, jacket off, red tie loosened slightly, and sat down on the edge of the stage. He spoke quietly, voice cracking at times, and said it was time for someone else to do his job. Reflecting on his record, he noted: “I’m not saying our government has been perfect throughout,” but that “we got the big things right.” It was note-perfect Dalton McGuinty: the sense of someone who had tried his best to do well, and felt he had mostly succeeded. Were there regrets over difficult choices that had been made over his tenure? Sure, but this was simply the cost of leadership. He had meant well.
In truth, underneath Mr. McGuinty’s big-government exterior — the one that put forth new laws to ban smoking in cars carrying children, outlaw dandelion spray, crack down on teen drivers, prohibit certain breeds of dog and everything else that earned him the Premier Dad moniker — was a ruthlessly pragmatic and cynical politician far closer to the Stephen Harper mould than either man would likely care to admit.
He was very adept at pulling a con, and Ontarians were his marks.
The story of the McGuinty government is best exemplified by two budgets. The first, in 2003, came after the Liberals had trounced Ernie Eves and the governing PCs to win Mr. McGuinty’s first majority. The Liberals promptly appointed a former provincial auditor to take a look at the books and found, lo, the finances were in a shambles. Much talk of the “$5.6-billion Tory deficit” ensued and Mr. McGuinty was able to use it as cover to back away from a host of promises he had made in the previous campaign — never mind that he had suggested during the campaign that the Tories were on track for a substantial deficit. A pledge to run balanced budgets was off, as was a promise to keep electricity rates capped. Smaller class sizes would be delayed and, most significantly, that 2003 budget included the euphemistically named “health premium” — a $2.4-billion tax that rather explicitly broke Mr. McGuinty’s promise that he wouldn’t raise taxes.
Blaming all of this on his predecessors worked beautifully. It was faithfully reported that unexpected budget woes had forced the Liberals into these actions, rather than that they had overpromised and under-delivered. There was even hope for transformational change. A National Post editorial from January, 2004, under the headline “McGuinty the bold,” noted approvingly that the Premier was “giving serious thought to scaling back government programs … selling public assets, standing up to public service unions in wage disputes and introducing toll roads and other user fees.”
Unless he wasn’t. In the ensuing years, as the economy grew, Mr. McGuinty avoided those politically risky moves and let the province’s expenses rise in line with its revenues. His major attempt at transformation came with the Green Energy Act, a scheme to create a subsidized renewable energy sector that would bring jobs and pivot the province away from coal-fired power plants. The Liberals have happily claimed victory on the latter front, noting last week that the province was drawing more energy from wind than it was from coal, but that itself is a ruse — the burning of coal is almost eliminated, but it has been replaced not by wind but by the burning of gas. In 2004, Ontario was getting 14% of its energy from gas-fired plants. Today, almost 28% of its generation capacity is from gas-fired plants — those same plants that caused the Liberals such electoral headaches in the GTA. (During this week’s cold snap, wind was providing about 1% of Ontario’s electricity.) Energy rates for homeowners, meanwhile, went from the (foolishly) capped rate of 4.3¢/KwH in 2003 to, depending on the time of day, between 50% and 300% more in 2013.
Mr. McGuinty’s last budget is about as instructive as his first. The Liberals had won re-election a few months earlier on a platform that didn’t say anything about the urgent need to curb public-sector compensation. Then the 2012 budget took the public sector to the proverbial woodshed: wage freezes, benefit and pension reductions, and the threat of legislation to back it up. The culprit this time was not the Tories but the global recession. It’s not that there wasn’t a need to trim costs, but again Mr. McGuinty had managed to obscure that fact while getting re-elected — thanks in large part to public-sector unions that campaigned hard against the PCs. Meanwhile, that budget, despite its austerity theme, protected some of the Liberals’ costly — and politically savvy — programs: A 30% rebate on post-secondary tuition and a 10% refund on electricity bills, the former of which applies to any family with less than $160,000 in income and the latter of which isn’t income-tested at all. Also in that budget is the Ontario Health Premium, now collecting more than $3-billion annually and rising. Nine years after it was first introduced as an extraordinary measure, Mr. McGuinty’s health tax remains on the books, allowing the Liberals more latitude to fund programs that will help win seats.
It is a government that has made staying in government its greatest success. No wonder, then, that when Mr. McGuinty appeared alongside Mr. Harper on Wednesday, the Prime Minister praised his “great partnership” with the outgoing Premier. Both men, despite their differences, have governed with votes always, relentlessly, in mind. They were speaking at an auto plant, handing money to a carmaker that didn’t particularly need it. It seemed fitting.
Original Article
Source: national post
Author: Scott Stinson
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