Vote Strategically! A Hudak Government Would Be A Disaster For Ontario

An Election Commentary by Niagara At Large publisher Doug Draper

We’ve all heard the old line that if you don’t vote; you have no right to complain.

Tim Hudak at one of Ontario Tory’s leadership conventions as his old boss Mike Harris leads him on.

There is certainly some truth to that line with at least one caveat I would put you who I hope will go out and vote and vote in this June 12^th’s Ontario election, and the caveat is this. If you vote for Tim Hudak’s Tories and they form the next provincial government, you have no right to complain.

And you will complain, if not in the first one or two months following the swearing in of a Hudak government, then sometime with the next one or two years as you begin to feel the impact of the public services you want and need eroded, and you begin facing escalating user fees and municipal taxes to make up for a loss of revenue due to ill-advised tax cuts Hudak is promising at the provincial level.

This is a certainty because anyone who lived through the Mike Harris/Tim Hudak Tory government years from June 1995 to April, 2002 (when Harris resigned from elected politics and Ernie Eves took over as premier for the next two years), should remember that practically no service or individual or group in the province was not negatively impacted by a Harris/Hudak slash-and-burn program that rolled out of that government’s so-called ‘Common Sense’ manifesto.

What Hudak is now hocking to the Ontario electorate as a ‘Million Jobs Plan’ is nothing more than a retreaded version of that manifesto that may cost even more jobs and service, and do even more damage to the economic health of the province than the Harris juggernaut did.

Tim Hudak yukking it up at a recent campaign stop in a meat packing plant in his home west Niagara riding.

Indeed, economists – left-wing, right-wing or somewhere in between – who have reviewed Hudak’s platform say it scores failing marks in math and that what it really adds up to is a sucker punch to jobs, services and the province’s economy.

In other words, unless you believe in sugar plum fairies, how could anyone other than a hopelessly blind and entrenched Tory partisan believe that gassing 100,000 public sector jobs (more than twice the number Harris eliminated), throwing those who were holding them and contributing to the economy to support their homes and families onto the unemployment rolls, improve Ontario’s economy and the services those workers helped deliver?

How can awarding up to 30 per cent more cross-the-board tax cuts to corporation and another 10 per cent cut in income taxes create jobs and help lower that deficit Hudak claims is so threatening to Ontario’s economy. They are more likely mean losses of billions of dollars in revenue needed to fund health and seniors care, education and other provincial program, and even more losses in jobs? These cuts may also leave municipal governments scrambling to pick up the slack for needed services, as they did during the Harris years, which meant having to increase municipal property taxes for everyone, including seniors and others on low or fixed incomes., when these moves, according to many economists, will mean losses of billions of dollars of revenue for funding services in Ontario and make it even harder to reduce that deficit Hudak insists is so threatening to the province’s economy. 

When the last Tory government of Harris/Hudak made these cuts, Ontario’s deficit actually ballooned anther $20 billion through the first four years it was in power. 

Hudak appears to be suffering from a severe case of amnesia when it comes to all of that and, in the final days of this campaign, is trying to massage his promise to slash 100,000 public sector jobs by suggesting that many or most of those jobs will disappear through attrition. This is should be seen as the y dis-ingenuous air-brushing effort that it is, of course, since every job that is taken off the books in the public or private sector – whether it be through layoff, firings or attrition, is one less job that is there for young people in this province who are already experiencing some of the highest unemployment rates in the country as they desperately seek work in their studied fields.

One last word here on those corporate tax cuts Hudak claims will lead corporations, which he so foolishly assumes are “job creators,” to hire more people, this is a page out of the old ‘trickle-down economics’ playbook going back to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher that has never proven to be a sound plan for creating jobs. There is just as much evidence out there that corporations are just as likely to take the additional money that comes their way from the tax cuts and shove it into the pockets of their executives and shareholders

As the very hard-nosed stock market player and financial advisor Kevin O’Leary never ceases to remind viewers on the weekday CBC television program, ‘The Lang & O’Leary Exchange, it is not the job of corporations to create jobs. It is the job of corporations to maximize profits for its shareholders – PERIOD! If Hudak doesn’t know that by now, it is one more reason why he should never be elected this province’s next premier.

I well remember covering the election leading up to Mike Harris’s Tories, including then Fort Erie area candidate Tim Hudak, being swept to power in 1995, and all of the many same promises of tax cuts, slashing government programs and reducing a deficit the then-Rae government was struggling with through what was a global recession at the time.

I remember so many individuals and groups in Ontario at the time, including teachers, health care workers and others, saying that’s good at the time. We get a tax cut and surely Harris and his bunch are only going after people who are welfare cheats and other wasteful spending.

Then not so slowly, but most surely, the Harris/Hudak government began going after education , health care and other programs because they had to in order to make up for the lost revenue from all of those sumptuous tax cuts. Then all of a sudden we had teachers marching in the streets and all kinds of other people, from seniors to college and university students, complaining about the impact this kind of slash-and-burn agenda was having on them.

Like I said at the beginning of this commentary, many of us have seen this Harris/Hudak movie before and anyone who votes for it again has no right to complain.

Hudak and the candidates he has in play across Niagara and the rest of the province are counting on us to have the memory of a fly and take another bite out of the same apple too many Ontario voters bit in to in 1995.

Niagara At Large is urging you to vote this June 12^th, and to vote reject that toxic apple and support the NDP or Liberal candidate in your riding that has the best chance of beating the Conservative candidate that might deliver enough seats to make Hudak Ontario’s next premier.

In Niagara, Ontario, a vote against a Hudak government means voting for the NDP’s incumbents Cindy Forster and Wayne Gates in the Welland and Niagara Falls respectfully, and veteran Liberal MPP Jim Bradley in the St. Catharines riding.

(NOW IT IS YOUR TURN. Niagara At Large encourages you to share your views on this post. A reminder that we only post comments by individuals who share their first and last name with them.)