Recommendation No. 363 – Defeat Ontario’s McGuinty Government ASAP

A Commentary by Doug Draper

There is no recommendation to bounce the McGuinty Liberals out of power in the bombshell report former TD Bank chief economist Don Drummond released this past February 15. That recommendation is mine and I’ll get back to it in a moment.

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty hasn't got the guts to raise taxes, even when the province's economy is at stake.

In the meantime, let me put my reasons for wanting to see the back of Premier Dalton McGuinty and his government into context with a brief look back at the sledgehammer Drummond dropped on us last week.

There were actually a grand total of 362 recommendations in the report that Drummond, who was appointed by McGuinty to do a review of our province’s fiscal house, offered the premier for wrestling down a deficit now totaling $16 billion and growing like a metastasized tumour.

Many of Drummond’s recommendations call for cutting or eliminating completely a number of services and programs, privatizing the delivery of others, hiking sales taxes and bills on such necessities as hydro and water, and applying new fees to everything from parking at Go Train stations to busing children to school.

Will this mind-boggling mishmash of service cuts and fee hikes – if implemented by the McGuinty government – cause the average person out on the street much pain? Drummond pulls no punches. He certainly says it will and Martin Regg Cohn, a provincial affairs columnist for The Toronto Star, put it this way in a front-page story the morning after Drummond’s 668-page report was tabled. “If you lived through the Mike Harris years,” Cohn wrote, “you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Now that has got to be a frightening thought for almost anyone who remembers the first three or four years the Harris Tories governed this province with their so-called “common sense” manifesto in one hand and a meat axe in the other. My daughter was just starting kindergarten when Harris came to power in 1995 and my mother-in-law was suffering through her final years with kidney disease, and we witnessed firsthand the havoc the meat axe was wreaking on front-line services in health care and education, not to mention a host of other programs.

Looking back at the social and human costs of those cuts, one might have been moved to shutter last week when Drummond was quoted saying that this time “the (McGuinty) government will have to cut program spending more deeply … and over a much longer period of time than the Harris government did.”

In his government’s first day back in the legislature this past February following an inexcusably long holiday season break given the fiscal crisis at hand, McGuinty was quick to say his government will not be adopting all 362 of the recommendations or making any “thoughtless, reckless, across-the-board cuts.” And then, when pressed by members of the opposition as to whether he would raise taxes for revenue needed to cut the deficit, he was just as quick to reply with one word –  “No.”

That “no” on raising taxes was it for me for this premier who I was once pleased to see wrestle power away from the remnants of the Harris Tories. It was outrageous enough that before Drummond even began his work, McGuinty told him, in so many words, not to even think about coming back with a recommendation to raise income taxes or eliminate more than a billion dollars annually in corporate tax cuts. That left Drummond little choice but to look for services to cut and fees to hike in order to keep the province’s debt from possibly doubling within the next six years.

Income taxes are at least “progressive” taxes in the sense that they are based on an individual’s ability to pay. Hiking bills on water, heat and hydro, on the other hand, are “regressive” in the sense that they hit people at the middle to lower end of the income ladder the hardest. And imagine, for example, a single parent whose child can no longer walk to school because the neighbourhood school has been closed and now she is going to have to pay an extra fee on top of school taxes to have her child bussed.

How about cancelling those tuition rebates for post-secondary students already drowning in debt? How much more can the Ministry of Environment be cut before we don’t have one wit of environmental protection services left in this province? On top of all that this government has never shown the courage to freeze the wages of higher paid public service.

So back to my recommendation. Let the Conservatives and NDP pull the plug on this minority government and we will see if either one of them can balance the books in ways less painful than slashing services and slapping higher fees on people with the least ability to pay.

Almost anything has got to be better than going on with this. Or maybe not. What a mess we are in!

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