The Gods of the Copybook Headings

Dalt The Shameless

A lesson in Chutzpah:

“We know Ontario is the best place to live, but it’s very rewarding when so many groups, measuring so many different variables, say we’re number one, too,” Premier Dalton McGuinty said in a statement.
On the employment side, Ontario was one of the top destinations for foreign investment in North America — after California and New York State — in the first three quarters of 2011.

The province also created more jobs than the rest of Canada in both the first and second quarter of 2011 and its employment rate has grown by 1.9% this year, higher than the national average of 1.6%

As I've said before, Dalton McGuinty is in a class by himself. He might just have an entire parallel universe where he and his staffers reside. There is the Ontario that you, me and about 12 million other people live in. That Ontario is a have-not province whose social services are subsidized, in part, by the oil sands of Alberta. It is also really broke. Not in the ordinary sense in which governments are usually broke, but in a style rivalling a Southern European basket-case. Epic broke.

While visiting the relatives these last few days, I spent many hours watching Portuguese state television. Few Portuguese immigrants can go about their day without knowing what the weather is like back in the village. Even if they can't find Manitoba on a map. Aside from the weather reports, the state broadcaster was also providing recaps on 2011 and crystal ball stuff for 2012.

The overall theme of these programs? Portugal is screwed. One program argued that 2012 would be the worst year in Portuguese history since the overthrow of the fascists in 1974. When man in the street interviews were conducted the message from ordinary Portuguese was clear: We are so screwed. The fear in their voices was palpable. One of the oldest nations in the world is scared it just bankrupted itself permanently.

Do keep in mind that the Portuguese, over the last 850 plus years, have been invaded countless times, conquered a huge empire, mapped much of the earth surface and gone bankrupt a few times as well. Since 1834 the country has seen 120 Prime Ministers. That works out to about one every eighteen months. By comparison since 1720 the British have had 53 Prime Ministers. The Portuguese know the meaning of the word screwed. When they get nervous you know the stuff is hitting the fan.

The Dalt is calling us from that parallel Ontario where he lives. He is speaking in that bland meandering way of his that is suppose to reassure the voters of the real Ontario. We are not screwed. Heck, we're doing fine. Ontario is the anti-Portugal and not just in the usual sense of the wine and weather being inferior. The real Ontario is more like Portugal than the Dalt would care to admit. 

The Imperial Province, however, has one great advantage over peripheral Portugal: It's big. Nearly 40% of the population and GDP of Canada. In terms of relative weight, Ontario is to Canada as Germany, France and the Netherlands combined are to the European Union. We are the makers and unmakers of governments, the arbiter of affairs in the Dominion. The West may have the surplus cash, but we have the votes.

The Greeks and Portuguese, and more recently and indirectly the Italians, have had to beg Germany for bailouts. Now imagine a reverse scenario where Germany's fiscal mess was being bailed out by the rest of Europe. Nor was this a negotiated process. The Reichstag simply dictated to the rest of the continent that they were now on the hook for Teutonic profligacy. That is basically what Ontario, through Equalization and the Health Transfer, is doing to the rest of Canada. Alberta, Saskatchewan and B.C. are being forced to bail out Dalton McGuinty annually.

The European crisis has pulled the continent toward greater fiscal union. The spend-a-thon that has been the McGuinty years may very well push Canada's fiscal system in the opposite direction.

Multicult Democracy, Red in Tooth and Claw

Among the proles:

For instance, I thought the election was about the economy. And it was. But just below the placid surface of Ontario politics there is a sea of social tension and percolating class warfare that a riding like Don Valley West epitomizes. The northern half is home to the palatial mansions of the Bridle Path, one of the wealthiest enclaves in the country, while the south is flanked by Thorncliffe Park, its rows of 40-storey tenements literally bursting with new Canadians and boasting the highest concentration of Muslims in Canada.

The north largely votes blue with the electoral map getting redder the further south you go. It’s your classic tug-of-war over the redistribution of wealth, but it is also ground zero in a major reckoning this country is going to have to come to grips with: What, if anything, constitutes Canadian values in a multiethnic country?

Straddling that divide would have challenged Mackenzie King himself. Naturally the pale faced WASPs of the Bridle Path want religion kept out of the schools, partly out of fear of the Muslim hordes and partly out of their deep seated suspicion of religion in general. This is not to say that the Scrooge McDucks of the Canadian Establishment are all militant agnostics. The pious among the upper 1% of the income spectrum tend to prefer the genteel confines of an Anglican or United Church. It's the enthusiastic religions that make them uncomfortable.

It is a maxim of modern Canada that the religious should be seen and not heard. The Christians should not be heard because they hold radical beliefs, which were once quite conventional. The Muslims should not be heard because they too hold radical beliefs, but radical beliefs (i.e. very socially conservative ones) that do not fit into the mushy concepts of multiculturalism. In the Cult of Multicult the villains are always old angry white folk with John Deere caps, the heroes are colourfully dressed and skinned immigrants.

The reality, as this thwarted PC candidate in Don Valley has come to understand, is that not all the immigrants are quite as smiley faced as imagined. She uses the term "reasonable accommodation." To those less enamoured with the Multicult ideal the word appeasement might come to mind. Not all the Muslim immigrants seek to retain the bigoted ways of their homelands. One congregant of a local mosque told candidate Andrea Mandel-Campbell:

What I don’t understand,” said one man, “is what an imam is doing in a public school. The girls should not be separated, we’re in the 21st century after all.” He went on to add, “That is also why I don’t think it’s right that my tax money goes to pay for the Catholic school system.”

One of the recurring themes in my multiculturalism posts is that it will likely be the immigrants who destroy the Cult of Multicult. A policy driven in no small part by white liberal guilt can only be destroyed by the objects of that guilt rejecting it. Of course the WASP elite could stop feeling guilty about their country's history, but let's not hope for miracles. A great number of the Muslim immigrants to this country have no desire to return to the barbarism of their homelands. They like their Canada peaceful, prosperous and essentially secular in its public institutions.

So you're a nominally conservative political candidate, and with the Ontario Progressive Conservatives the emphasis is on the word nominal, how do you handle this tricky issue? You could try the old Wilfrid Laurier approach and say that whatever our divisions we should above all be Canadian. That would, of course, be the correct approach. With some limited exceptions at the federal level, as with Jason Kenney's tweaking of the citizenship test, that is exactly the approach that is not being followed.

Appealing to our common Canadianism would imply we have a working definition. We once did. It was, however, a very British definition of being Canadian. This was not a contradiction. Most Canadians until the second world war thought of themselves as being culturally British, as opposed to Americans. This worked well enough until first the British Empire collapsed and then Quebec nationalism surged.

Our British identity was by the 1960s seen as horribly old fashioned. Britain was sliding down the league tables and so was the prestige of being British, even in the narrow cultural sense. With Quebec nationalism entering a militant phase it was decided that to modernize Canada, appease Quebec and integrate the wave of non-British immigrants that arrived after 1945, the British elements of the culture would be junked.

Away went the Red Ensign, the Maple Leaf Forever and pious talk about the Magna Carta. After briefly flirting with the concept of biculturalism, the Canadian political and cultural establishment decided to opt for multiculturalism. It seemed to solve the immediate problems at hand. Canada would get a new identity, the Two Solitudes would be downgraded to just two among many different ethnic groups, and the new immigrant groups would not feel alienated.

There is subtle difference between being cosmopolitan and being multicultural. Both believe in cultural diversity, the former, however, assumes universal values. I suspect that Trudeau had a cosmopolitan understanding of what Canada would become. The Canada as a sub-arctic Balkans was likely not his goal or that of multiculturalism's early advocates in this country.

Had the experiment in multiculturalism been accompanied by an insistence on maintaining a core Canadian identity, it likely would have worked out. The only plausible core identity in early 1970s was a British derived one. Even a generic check list of "modern values" has a certain slant: liberal democracy, individual rights, rule of law, market economies, equality between the sexes and religious toleration. Uncontroversial stuff, eh? Yet each of those concepts were either pioneered or evangelized by the British Empire. 

To much of the Canadian elite, once militantly pro-Empire, anything that smacks of British influence is now old fashioned and "colonial." That many of these values are now widely accepted in cultures that were never under the sway of Westminster does not register. This is about aging boomers reliving their adolescent rebellion against their parents generation. The cultural crises of today are seen through the lens of the 1960s.

If we are to cross the type of political divide seen in Don Valley West, and repeated elsewhere in Canada, there must be a push toward a common Canadian identity. This will mean a partial revival of the British inspired values of the past. Not a crude regurgitation of the past, but a recognition of where this country came from in order to better allow us to move forward. Few "new" Canadians will want to integrate into a country that does not believe in itself.

 

Go Long

The Tory Trek back to power:

If McGuinty’s minority falls in the next two years, Hudak needs to give a reason to voters to switch their political allegiances. In 2005, Harper’s Tories famously released a policy a day (child care allowance, GST reduction, targeted tax credits) to effectively differentiate themselves from the Liberals. The complaint against Hudak is that he is McGuinty Lite, so he will need to come up with innovative policies that appeal to a broader swath of voters while drawing a sharp distinction between what PCs and Liberals would do in office.

You mean he needs to start sounding like a conservative? Yeah, that would certainly be a good place to begin. Getting a better haircut couldn't hurt either. Sounding like a normal human being when he speaks would also help him "connect" with the voters. Yes, I know the Dalt sounds like an answering machine stuck on Play, but for him that's sort of natural. When Tim Hudak gives speeches he sounds like someone doing a high energy impression of the Premier. 

Paul Tuns, the author of the above and a long-time friend of this blog, seems to be leaning toward the "It's gonna take awhile" school of knocking off the Dalt. The comparison being drawn here, as it was being drawn by more than a few Tory flacks on election night, is that Tim must follow the ways of Stephen. Tory provincial following the lead of Tory federal. It will take another election, perhaps even two, to get the Ontario PCs back into control of the Pink Palace.

Sorry. Didn't buy that on election night and I'm not still not convinced. Stephen Harper is not Tim Hudak and federal Conservatives and provincial Progressive Conservatives are at best kissing cousins. The latter is far "Redder" than their Ottawa relations. The Bill Davis faction remains quite strong. If you doubt me try this handy litmus test: Walk up to an Ontario PC operative and say the name Randy Hillier. The reaction tends to be quite visceral. Think of asking a man if he wants his daughter to marry white trash.

The federal Tories are a "Bluer" bunch, Stephen Harper's pragmatism aside. In brief moments the conservative light breaks through. Listen to Monte Solberg or Stockwell Day being interviewed. Now that they are safely beyond the confines of Harperdome they sound, shockingly, about as conservative as when they went into the game nearly twenty years ago. Ottawa may have limited their room for maneuver but does not seem to have dulled their basic instincts. That's the problem with Tim Hudak, we don't know if he has those instincts.

Then there is pedigree. In 2004 and 2006 Harper & Co were selling a new party to the Canadian electorate. The Progressive bit was dropped during the merger, taking with it many a Red Tory (Good Bye Joe Clark!). The upper echelons of the new party were dominated by Reformers with a few old Tory hands sprinkled along (Marjory LeBreton). It wasn't the Reform Party with a new look, it wasn't the old PC Party with Stephen Harper in charge, nor was it quite the old Mulroney coalition reassembled as the soft Quebecois nationalists were gone. Then there were refugee Harrisites limping up to Ottawa after Ernie Eves' defeat in 2003. The Conservative Party was something kind of new.

You can't say that about the Ontario PCs. They are the closest thing this province has to a natural governing party. From 1943 to 2003 the Progressive Conservatives controlled Queen's Park, with either a majority or minority, for 50 of those 60 years. That's a better record than the federal Liberals. The provincial Tories also did not spend the late 1980s and 1990s as two separate parties (arguably three if you include elements of the Bloc). Many of the seats that Bill Davis won in 1981 the party has held unto this day. Organizationally, electorally and politically the modern Ontario PCs are the same party they were thiry years ago. Red Tories who lean Right when deemed necessary.

Tim Hudak's job this summer, unlike Stephen Harper a decade ago, was not to sell a new party, it was to reintroduce an old one to the electorate. Many of the people who voted to put Dalton McGuinty into the Premier's chair again are people who voted in Mike Harris. That may sound counter-intuitive to us Right-wing mouth breathers, but think of it in pragmatic electoral terms. 

You're the classic swing voter. It's 1995. What's the most pressing issue of the day? Province is going broke and the economy sucks. Mike the Knife makes sense. Fast forward to 2003, the economy is doing fairly well and the fiscal house is mostly in order. You've had eight years of strikes and protests on the lawn of Queen's Park, including one minor riot. You have also lived through the media hyped Walkerton fiasco and the mood is that maybe too much has been cut. Perhaps we need to make the angry people happy. Peace in our time and all that. In that context the Dalt makes sense. 

It's now 2011. The economy is stagnant but not in crash mode, as measured by the unemployment rate not the more abstract GDP growth figures. Fiscally it's a dog's breakfast but has been worse. The Americans, the yardsticks of everything that is done in Canada, are doing worse than us. All this makes things precarious but not impossible for an incumbent. It's not yet seen as a full blown crisis moment but people are willing to look and, if they see something plausible, jump to something new.

The problem for the Ontario electorate is that there was nowhere to jump on October 6th. The more idealistic Liberal voters, the ones who stick with the party out of necessity, decided to follow their heart and vote NDP. But what about that large swath in the middle of the electoral map that stretches from Blue Liberal to Red Tory? That's about 10% of the electorate in this province.

They had nowhere to go and so stayed put. Those few who switched to the Hudak Tories did so out of anger, not admiration. If the economy picks up in 2-4 years time, or if the Americans have imploded completely making even a bleak scenario in Canada look good by comparisons, then the Dalt will win a fourth term. 

The Ontario Progressive Conservatives lost because they didn't offer that 10% a reason to change horses, not because the voters hadn't gotten used to Timmy's badly coiffed mug. It's unlikely Tim Hudak will come up with a reason between now and the next election, or even the election after that.

Defeat & Victory

It was the worst of both worlds. Dalton McGuinty is still in power, albeit barely. Tim Hudak will almost certainly remain as leader of the Progressive Conservative Party. The NDP has gained ground. Had a mad villain wanted to devise less auspicious results he could not have accomplished more.

For practical purposes 53 seats is a working majority. The Speaker is likely to be chosen from the Opposition benches and the only mathematical alternative to the Liberals is an NDP-PC government. Last night on TVO Norm Sterling was seriously mulling about such an unholy alliance. At one point Steve Paikin had to politely shoot the idea down. My thanks to Jack MacLaren, former President of the Ontario Landowners Association, for having "stolen" the Tory nomination for Carleton-Mississippi Mills from the ossified Mr Sterling. Mr MacLaren won on election night, adding a somewhat bluer hue to the Hudak backbenches.

These are bright spots on a bleak landscape. There are 107 men and women being sent to the Pink Palace at Queen's Park this Fall. At some point over the life of this legislature one or two of those, as a matter of probability, is going to be leaving Ontario politics prematurely. Perhaps for an electoral run at a different level of government, a family or personal emergency or even an awkward police investigations. This means that for the next four years the Dalt will be living from parliamentary vote to parliamentary vote.

With a clear cut minority government, as the federal Tories endured for five plus years, the Opposition has an incentive to pull the plug about eighteen to twenty-four months into the legislative cycle. With a hung parliament the leading party has a very weak mandate to rule. This means the electorate understands that a parliament will not last its full legal life. How about a sort of hung legislature? A lucky judicial recount and the Dalt will have the magic 54 seats. A by-election defeat and everyone goes back on tender hooks. Will 40th Ontario Legislature last until 2015? Flip a coin.

The worst aspect of Thursday evening's results is not the narrow victory of the Dalt, it is the strong electoral gains shown by the Hudak Tories. While the results can be interpreted as a defeat for Hudak and his moderating ways, he was expected to waltz into the Premier's office, that is not how the Big Blue Machine will spin the election's outcome. By about 10:30 PM on Thursday the Tory operative chatter was that they always knew it would take two elections to win office. Not what they were saying in August. But August is long time ago in politics.

Half way to victory is still victory. Didn't Mike Harris lose the first time? Yes he did. In 1990 when everyone assumed the Ontario PCs were dead and the Dippers and Grits would rule the province for decades to come. The Tories were to become the Socreds of Central Canada. They likely would have without Harris' leadership. Over the next five years the Tories didn't change the message just the messaging. With a little help from Bob the Blunderer 1995 became a good year.

The Tories' weak performance this election is an indictment of Tim Hudak's leadership. Against a moderately competent Liberal government Thursday night's results would have understandable. Timmy, however, wasn't running against David Peterson or Jean Chretien, he was running against Norman Bates' body double. Bill Davis was fond of joking that "bland works." By comparison to the current Premier Brampton Billy was Lady Gaga. The motto for the modern Ontario Liberal Party: "Comatose works."

As regular readers will know I endorsed the Freedom Party back in September. They didn't win. So I guess this blog is not the arbiter of Ontario elections I had assumed. Que sera, sera as the lady sang. As of this writing we don't as yet have the province wide vote tallies for the minor parties. Scanning the riding level results, including my own and that of party leader Paul McKeever, FP had a solid evening. Not fantastic results but with more than triple the candidates from 2007, ads running on Sun News and the internet the profile of the party has risen dramatically during this campaign.

When I started talking about Freedom Party at the beginning September I typically got blank stares. I also got a few curious comments and e-mails. Seriously? You're going to spoil your ballot? Those who did take a serious look at the FPO were generally impressed with its platform, leadership and campaign. I counted about two dozen individuals, excluding readers of this blog, who said they would vote FP after speaking to them about the party. These are not the sort of people who say things to be polite, especially concerning politics.

This is obviously a narrow sampling of "Far Right-wingers" with an intense interest in politics. If elections were decided by hardcore operatives and wonks there would be no need for campaigns, advertising or leaders' debates. The political future of the province would be decided in coffee shops and high-end saloons. The great mass of the electorate, fewer of whom showed up to vote than at any time in Ontario's history, are not so easily swayed.

What gives me hope is that those who looked at the Freedom Party found it attractive. There is a great deal of frustration with Hudak's leadership among the political Right. This not so among the flacks running the Big Blue Machine. Residing in large urban centers many of the party operatives have friends who are Dippers and Grits. They must awkwardly explain that they aren't that kind of conservative, the mouth breathing bureaucrat hating hick of urban legend. No, no they are progressive conservatives. House trained Tories that won't saying anything rude to the gay couple everyone else likes.

Much of the Tory leaning electorate, those who might consider voting blue, are concerned with the pressures of everyday life. They do not delve too deeply into political issues and accept the choices offered by the political elite. If the choice is between Dalton McGuinty's lying and spendthrift ways and a former Harris cabinet minister, they will instinctively side with the latter. Explain to them Hudak's actual positions and they become far less enthused.

It will be 2 to 4 years before we have another election in this province, the health and ambition of 107 politicians allowing. That is time we have to get out the message that Thursday night's victory spoke far more about the incompetence of the Dalt than the brilliance of the Hudak Tories. A strong conservative leader would have provided Ontarians a real choice and likely formed a government. A strong pro-freedom message is what Ontarians need and I suspect want to hear. 

Our Teachers, Our Future

The Red Star digs up the dirt:

The case went to the College’s discipline committee and a deal was reached. Geekie pleaded no contest to a modified list of allegations (a perception among female students that he leered; that he questioned girls about their relationships; that he suggested female students stop talking about tongue studs “as they were for oral sex”; that he slapped the thigh of a female student with a metre stick; that he swore often and called students “whore,” “retard,” “gay” and “ditsy”). The committee said it published a summary of the case, keeping Geekie’s name secret, to “demonstrate the transparency of the discipline process” and as a “general deterrent” to teachers.

The guy sounds like fun. Given the state of modern youth I suspect many of his comments were, strictly speaking, accurate. Still, it's not the sort of thing you should say to young vulnerable people. At least if you're teacher. It's the sort of thing their parents should be saying to them at home. 

Many of the bad teacher stories the Star reports on make a bleak sense. My sympatheties are somewhat with the teachers. Ill-disciplined youth make teaching a semi-hazardous profession. Something closer to Blackboard Jungle than Goodbye, Mr Chips. You sometimes have to wonder how teachers are expected to maintain discipline in modern classrooms. Even a stern talking to might result in dealing with an enraged parent convinced little Johnny can do no wrong.

This is only to be expected. Two generations of spoiled children have breed two generations of spoiled parents. Garbarge in and garbarge out. The elevation of feelings above facts, "fitting in" above independent judgment and self-indulgence above self discipline have led to a crass and ill-prepared cohort of youth. It was once seen as the duty of parents to prepare their children for adulthood. The opposite logic is in force now. The goal of parenting is to prolong the irresponsibility of youth as long as possible. With such elements facing them even the best of teachers can be overwhelmed.

The falling off there has been is culture wide, yet statism has played its role in excerbating the situation. It is unlikely the touchy-feely forms of teaching that are now widespread would survive in an open market. One of the selling points of private schools is discipline and high academic standards. The irony is that most private education today is roughy equivalent to public schooling forty years ago. 

The awfulness of so much state education, there are always exceptions of course, is derived from its top down approach. It is far easier for a small group of activists to take control of a centralized education system than one mostly consisting of small locally administered schools. Among the most disasterous decisions ever made by Bill Davis was the consolidation of Ontario's school boards.

As late as 1962 there were 3,676 boards in the province by 1967 there were only 192. A small school board would be far more in touch with the needs and concerns of parents. While there were likely inefficiencies in the purchasing of materials, such functions could have been handled centrally, while leaving decisions about staffing and even some aspects of the curriculum as close to the parents as possible. The longer the chain of accoutability the lesser the quality of the service that is provided.

It should come as no surprise that a largely unaccountable system, which is also politically untouchable given the power of the teachers unions, should strive to protect its bad teachers. In the above Star article the Ontario College of Teachers disciplined teachers are allowed to keep their names secret from the general public. The panel which makes these decisions is mostly comprised of previous members of a local bargaining unit. Friends helping friends.

A plague on both their houses. A union that, not surprisingly, protects its members rather than students. Parents who offload their children's behavioural problems on public employees. The whole system in the control of social engineers. Sin will pluck on sin. 

One of the oft overlooked insights of the great classical liberal and Whig thinkers is the importance of virtue. A society of corrupt and short-sighted individuals will never long maintain a free government. A tyrant seeking to gain power might also, like the Roman Emperors, seek to corrupt the morals of the people. Virtue is a prerequisite of freedom. There is very little virtue in modern public education.  A bleak portend. 

With Choices Like These

Election Day already? My how the empty rhetoric flies.

Last month I argued in favour of the Freedom Party of Ontario. In making the endorsment I was driven by my belief that FPO is offering a genuinely pro-liberty alternative to the statist status quo. I was also driven, it should be admitted, by my utterly disgust at the Dalter than Thou approach of Tim Hudak. Ontario does not need two Liberal Parties. While many would dismiss my stance as that of a classical liberal purist, it seems I'm not the only one looking for the "none of the above" box on the ballot.

The Toronto Sun, a populist conservative paper, has refused to endorse anyone for today's election. Since it is unlikely that a major outlet would endorse a small outfit like the FPO, their refusal is the most sensible position they could have taken. If no one represents your values, then don't support them. From the October 2nd, 2011 editorial:

Which brings us to Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak. We wanted to endorse him today.
From the start of this campaign we waited for him to come out swinging against big government, high taxes, runaway debt and greedy public sector unions.

But his platform--while better than his opponents --is not the robust, fiscally conservative agenda Ontario needs in these difficult economic times. It fails to curb provincial deficits or balance our budget until 2017/18, mimics McGuinty polices we can't afford, like all-day kindergarten, and increases health care and other spending.

That's why we are not endorsing any of the three party platforms.

It's a stance that has provoked criticism from a number of quarters, including the paper's legendary founder Peter Worthington who calls it a "dereliction of duty." No, the Sun is very much doing its duty. Politics is the art of the compromise but only so far. A message needs to be sent to the Big Blue Machine that two Red Tory campaigns in a row is too much. Ontarians of a right-leaning disposition need a choice, otherwise we will sit on our hands or seek better alternatives.

The Ontario Right, we motley collection of libertarians, conservatives and classical liberals, have been solemnly told by Torydom's political operators, some of them hangovers from the days of Bill Davis, that Right-wing values don't sell. When the example of Mike Harris is brought up it is dismissed as an outlier. With two defeats in a row, and a third one looming tonight, it might be time to rethink that moderating approach.

The fear of being tarnished with the Harris brush has driven the Ontario PCs further and further leftward. Tim Hudak presented himself as a conservative candidate for leader and eventually garnered the support of the libertarian leaning Randy Hillier. The party convention was the high water mark of Hudak's conservatism. In the time since the Tory leader has backed away from scrapping the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal, mumbling instead about reforming the existing system. Other climb downs, both small and great, have happened along the way as well.

The ghost of Mike Harris haunts this election. The Liberals and NDP, backed by their union phalanx, have invoked the memory of the former premier to scare voters into line. It hasn't worked. This is still a close three-way race. Harris left office nearly a decade ago and much of the venom has faded in the years since. The Tories, fearful of any comparison to their former boss, have also distanced themselves. 

For all three parties the working assumption is that Harris is electoral poison. But why? The former premier was deeply unpopular with the editorial board of the Toronto Star, militant activists and other assorted Leftists. People who hated him hated him a lot. Those people, however, comprise only a small minority of the electoral. The opinion polls for Mike Harris' second term placed him at about average for a long-serving incumbent. 

The MSM has created the monster of Mike Harris, a crude caricature that has been successfully used to frighten the Ontario PCs back into their default Red Tory mode. They've been duped. The media is not the electorate, nor do they hold the same sway over the voters of this province as they once did. The internet has allowed voters more direct access to information and to candidates. The scare power of the MSM is greatly weakened.

No matter how hard Tim Hudak has tried to be moderate, the comparisons continue to be made toward Mike Harris. Back in 2007 even that Davis-era stalwart John Tory was absurdly compared to Mike the Knife. The message should be clear: Act conservatively and you'll be branded as a heartless bastard. Don't act conservatively and you'll still get branded as heartless bastard. 

The Ontario PCs have been playing a political game defined by their enemies. The Left is telling us what is and what is not too conservative. At such a game the Tories can never win. They are playing a game with loaded dice.

Rather than letting the Left define what the Right should be in Ontario, as well as in Canada as a whole, we should be defining that ourselves. The political middle is a constantly shifting target. A well timed and sold policy can shift that middle to either the Left or Right. Another way, perhaps the most important, for Ontario PCs to move the Overton Window in their direction is to convince like-thinking people to show up to the polls

Since 1985 when the Ontario PCs have offered voters Red Tories (Larry Grossman and John Tory), or former Blue Tories that ran to the Left (Ernie Eves and Tim Hudak) they have lost. When a conservative option was presented the party has won. The people who decide elections are those that bother to turn up and vote, this is one of the reasons that well run campaigns place so much emphasis on GOTV (Get out the Vote) operations. From phone calls to free rides to the polls, the GOTV can decide many close ridings.

Offering voters a real reason to vote, a real choice that reflects their values and concerns is the ultimate GOTV effort. Giving the people of Ontario, including millions of sincere conservatives, a choice between Left, Lefter and Leftist will result in electoral apathy. Tim Hudak going down to defeat tonight will send a strong message to Ontario's Progressive Conservatives: Drop the adjective and emphasis the verb.

 

All My McGuintys

Kelly McParland:

Inconveniently enough, Mr. McGuinty chose the weekend for his latest change of mind, abruptly cancelling plans to build an unpopular power plant next to a shopping mall in a hotly-contested Mississauga riding, even though the site has been cleared and concrete footings poured. It’s the second power plant the Liberals have renounced, having earlier abandoned an equally unpopular project in another critical riding in Oakville.

Hmm. Isn't Oakville a rather affluent community? Wasn't much of the power that was to be generated from that plant suppose to go to the wider GTA grid? Did the Dalt shaft ordinary Ontarians to appease wealthy weathervane voters? No. That would be the cynical as well as the obvious interpretation. No doubt there are deep public policy reasons for his dramatic volte face. Reallly. I'm sure the Premier will be giving a clear and concise explanation shortly. Very shortly...

While the wind whistles through the leaves of happy Oakville, those of us not so blessed as to live in a riding favoured by the Sun King Dalt are left wondering how this man got into office. A little while back I wrote about the Incredible Mendacity of Dalton McGuinty. Upon reflection that title simple does not do justice to the subject. To accuse him of being a liar, even by the low standards of modern politics, is par for the course. What is remarkable is how utterly incompetent the man actually is.

During the leadership debates last week the redoutable Michael Coren mentioned that he had interviewed the Dalt on several occassions. After prolonged exposure to the Ontario Premier, Coren's observation was that he was "not an impressive man." That's rather the point. You could hate Pierre Trudeau. The man had so many aspects to his character and beliefs one could spend a lifetime attacking him, his accomplishments and his political impact and still be left hating for more. How do you hate something as insubstantial as Dalton McGuinty? It's like ranting at gray clouds.

I've never really understood why serious people like Coren waste their time talking to politicians, especially ones as inherently nebulous as the current Ontario Premier. It's a nice headline, sort of, about them interviewing a very important person. The actual substance of the interview, no matter how well framed the question, is immaterial. The politician's response is almost always evasion and ambiguity. It's all like nailing jello with a hammer.

It is the nature of the political game that its players cannot be bluntly honest. This goes for life in general. There are many situations in which truth must be compromised for the sake of tact. These are generally small truths whose proclamation is of limited value. Saying that the voters of Quebec, to take an example at random, are in general a bunch of spoiled children living off the taxpayers of Alberta and Ontario is certainly true. Saying it would be political suicide. Spoiled children don't like being called spoiled. The same point, however, can be made in a more tactful manner. Talk instead about the need for greater fiscal balance. Same point, different tone.

Tact is at times necessary. The occassional bit of ambiguity in the interests of public safety is sometimes acceptable. When a politician lies for no real reason except the most immediate and narrow of electoral gains, with little thought of how this will impact the wider electorate's perceptions, then something else begins to emerge: Is the Dalt a compulsive liar? 

Politicians need to be elected which requires at least a plurality of the electorate to support you. Wining that support is a matter of rhetoric and calculation. I doubt Stephen Harper particularly cares if anyone loves or hates him, outside of his immediate circle of friends and family. Even the famously thin skinned Brian Mulroney could utter a few profanities at his enemies and then move on. Same with Papa Jean, PET and Mike Harris. Politics is a game they played well, won and then did something else. What they did they did for power and whatever personal or ideological goals that power would help meet.

You don't get that sense from the Dalt. A human being with goals and ambitions who is just doing his job. The vacuous stare, the automatic smile and the slow clipped tone convey a non-entity. He doesn't know why he's there, he doesn't know what he's doing, he just doesn't want to leave. Gertrude Stein famously quipped that once you get to Oakland "there isn't any there there." The same applies to the current Premier of Ontario. 

There seems to only one consistency in the career of Dalton McGuinty, a desperate desire to be liked. It's why he appeased the government unions with fat contracts, lest there be "strife" on the lawn of Queen's Park. It is also why he flip-flopped on the power plant issues in two key ridings. The Dalt isn't a pol on the make, he's that nerdy kid in high school who wanted everyone to like him. He has earned instead our contempt. 

This Election Vote for the Freedom Party of Ontario

Most of the readers of this blog are right-leaning conservatives: People who believe in freedom, individual rights and basic law and order. For years you have watched with increasing dismay as provincial and federal "conservative" parties have undermined those values. Lack luster efforts to dismantle the human rights tribunals, fiscal recklessness and a hamfisted approach to crime have discredited these parties.

For many of those years I have ranted away on this little corner of the internet about these failings. While many of you are sympathetic to what I say, the realities of modern politics keep you in the fold of the mainstream right-wing parties. Many of you have commented, or written to me privately, saying that however much you despise the compromising ways of the Harper Tories federally, and the succession of nonentities at the provincial level here in Ontario, you feel you have little option. Who else are we to vote for?

I was facing much the same problem. A vote for the Hudak Tories would mean continuing the failed policies of the McGuinty years but in a different guise. The NDP promise only bankruptcy and an increasing erosion of our freedoms. In Ontario's electoral oligopoly the choice is statism straight or statism on the rocks. 

For years I have kept my eye on the Freedom Party of Ontario. Founded in 1984 by activists Robert Metz and Marc Emery the party has fielded candidates in every provincial general election since 1985. Through out this period the Freedom Party has fought against government intrusions of the rights of Ontarians. Battling successfully against censorship and Sunday shopping laws in the 1980s, they continue today to challenge the Human Rights Commissions and the rapid growth of government.  

Since 2002 the party has been under the leadership of Paul McKeever, a successful Oshawa based employment lawyer, who has moved the party online and into a higher profile. McKeever, as with many Freedom Party supporters, is deeply influenced by Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism. They are not anarchists who believe the state should be dismantled. Here is the Freedom Party's ideological statement:

Freedom Party promotes capitalism on the ground that it is the only social system compatible with reality, reason, rational self-interest, and consent. Freedom Party is opposed to attempts to promote capitalism with appeals to altruistic, irrational (e.g., skepticism, faith, group consensus), or supernatural rationale. Freedom Party's policy direction is founded upon Objectivist philosophy. As such, the party rejects and condemns libertarianism. 

Here is Paul McKeever's description of Objectivism and Rand's own criticism of libertarianism. Yaron Brook, the current head of the Ayn Rand Institute, explained the difference between the two philosophies in this 2007 letter:

Ayn Rand was not a libertarian and rejected this movement on principle. Rand held that political freedom cannot survive without a foundation of reason and egoism, a view developed at length in her novel Atlas Shrugged. Libertarianism rejects the need for a systematic, philosophic defense of freedom. Accordingly, the "hybrid form of laissez-faire capitalism and collectivism," mentioned in your review, is simply the latest contradictory policy flowing from the libertarian contempt for philosophy.

This is a party that lives up to its name. The Liberals have long ago forgotten what liberty means. The so-called Conservatives at both levels of government seek to conserve only the welfare state status quo. For those who believe that government should defend our individual rights and not undermine them, Freedom Party provides a solid and compelling alternative.

In the 2011 provincial election Freedom Party is running a slate of 64 candidates (so far) across the province, more than quadruple the number who ran in 2007. Luckily this will be the first time an FP candidate will be running in my riding. The party's election platform can be found here. It is filled with catchy and controversial items like shutting down Ontario's race base schools and re-establishing the separation of religion and state in public schools. The FP platform also takes dead aim at the Medicare monopoly. These planks have been turned into campaign ads that can be seen at the FP's You Tube channel.  

Freedom Party is sometimes dismissed as a "fringe party," a collection of activists with little real base. It is certainly a small party but so, once upon a time, was the Reform Party. It is one of the ironies of the modern conservative movement that people who preach competition in economics keep supporting the same oligopoly that has dominated Ontario politics for decades. Creative destruction can work in politics just as much it has worked in business. For real change to happen there must, however, be real competition.

While the federal Tories still show some sign of pro-freedom tendencies, Scott Reid and Jason Kenney being examples, they have been suppressed under Stephen Harper's leadership. The CPC is still new enough an organization that a grass roots effort can help restore the party. The provincial PCs, however, are a statist machine of long standing, having helped dramatically expand the role of government over the last two generations. The Harris years can be seen as a brief interregnum in decades of Red Tory leadership. 

Tim Hudak and his entourage have shown themselves to be cynical career politicians. Principled opposition within the party, such as Randy Hillier, has been silenced in the name of electability. The choice we are offered is socialism local (the PCs), socialism through (the Liberal Party) or socialism express (the NDP). Voting for a real choice would not be throwing away your ballot. Voting for the status quo would be.

 

Tomorrow, Saturday September 17th, 2011 the Freedom Party will be holding a "money bomb." That's modern speak for a one-day online fundraiser. Party memberships can be purchased here. Check to see if there is a Freedom Party candidate in your riding here. Steve Paikin interviewed party leader Paul McKeever here.

Dalt's Health Care Time Machine

The Dalt makes some promises:

The Liberals kicked off the last week before the provincial election campaign by appealing to seniors with a promise to bring back doctor house calls.

Health Minister Deb Matthews announce plans on Sunday to spend $60-million annually for a program that would allow health care providers visit seniors and others who may otherwise find it difficult to leave their home.

To put that in perspective, total health spending in Ontario for 2010 is $46 billion. The Dalt has basically flipped Ontario seniors a dime and told them not to spend it all in one day. Those who remember Canadian health care before Medicare, yes we did have medicine in those days, will recall that family doctors would routinely make house calls. They stopped doing this not because they became lazy, or because the world has moved on, but because they could no longer charge for doing so. 

If Dr. Smith is getting paid X to see you, regardless of where and when, then he'll see you in his office when he feels like it. And it really is when he feels like it. The last time the Liberals were running Queen's Park in the late 1980s they reduced the number of slots in provincial medical schools. This was done in the name of saving money. Being politicians they failed to understand that:

1) Ontario's population will keep growing thanks to all those immigrants you're bringing in.

2) A disproportionate number of doctors are baby boomers. Guess what happens when they, and the other members of their cohort, hit 65?

There is planning and then there is government planning. The latter rarely extends beyond the next election cycle. When you add socialism on top of ordinary short-sightedness, then you get modern Canadian health care. Not to worry. Because the aging boomers will not overload the system:

Fears that Canada's aging population could lead to soaring health-care costs may be greatly exaggerated, say researchers, who suggest that the predicted "grey tsunami" may turn out to be more like a "grey glacier."

{...}

They concluded that neither the sharpest rise in cost nor the larger share of the increase was driven by the aging population, but by factors that can be controlled by health-care providers or policy-makers.

Well not yet.  Nor perhaps ever. Socialized health care has a wonderful feature that helps reduce costs: rationing. In other words, they're going to start pulling the plug on grandma. They is already done covertly, through waiting lists, not funding new "experimental" treatments and delisting certain services.

If anyone questions this privatization on the sly, they say that Medicare and the provincial health plans are designed to cover what is "medically necessary." Who decides that? Why doctors whose paychecks are signed by the Ministry of Health. When conservatives criticize global warming they are denounced as being in the pay of Big Oil. Why are doctors who defend socialized health care not criticized for being in the pay of Big Health?

The one chance that Ontario seniors have of not getting the plug pulled is their electoral muscle. Old people vote. What else do they have to do on election day? The very young are too stoned and ill educated to know or care. The middle aged are too busy working to pay for everyone else. Past 60 that fresh hospital smell becomes only too familiar. Vote early, vote often and vote for more money being spent on health care.

Governments spending money, however, rarely solve problems, though they often create quite a lot. Every government since the days of John P Robarts has spent more money on health care. Yes, even nasty old Mike Harris increased health care spending, despite Paul Martin rolling back the federal contribution to Medicare. We are among the world's top health care spenders per capita. That includes spending significantly more than Australia. We don't get what we pay for.

Government health care means bureaucratic health care. Much of those many billions that has been tossed into the Medicare fire over the last forty years has gone into fatter administrative pay, fancier hospitals and rather less to hum-drum things like doctors and nurses. Bureaucratic empire building is an elemental force of government. The more government you have the more paper-pushing, versus actually doing, you're going to get.

The nominal goal of Medicare is universal access. Prince or pauper, all Canadians would have a right to decent and timely care. Yet the problem of not everyone being able to afford health care is no different from people not being able to pay for food, housing or transportation. If the issue is purchasing power than give more money, or the equivalent, to those who need it. We don't nationalize Loblaws to ensure everyone has enough to eat. Yet we follow such an absurd logic in something far more complex like health care.

Medicare is not about helping the poor. It's about socialist ideology and left-wing nationalism. A universal one-tier system was the product of an age when serious, intelligent and learned men believed government could run things more efficiently than the private sector. Place things in the hands of the bureaucrat and his political masters and wasteful competition will wither away. Indeed it did, replaced by forms of waste and inefficiency unknown to operators of private businesses.

Socialism lacks the cache it once had, yet by lasting close to half a century Medicare has become institutionalized. We are so used to it we cannot imagine plausible alternatives. Should anyone dare to suggest any they are denounced as traitors. Single tier medicine is one of those things that distinguishes us from the Americans. It helps reassure Canadians that they are morally superior to the dollar chasers to the South of us. To challenge Medicare is to challenge Canada itself, or least some people's version of Canada.

 

Broke Leading the Broke

Ontario teaches its children financial literacy:

Lest history repeat itself, Ontario has laid the educational groundwork for a new generation of students who appreciate the perils of interest rates and debt, and know the real cost of borrowing money.

The province’s Ministry of Education has released comprehensive teacher guidelines that identify places in the Grade 4 through 12 curriculum where financial literacy can be inserted into classes as varied as mathematics, computer science and native studies.

Because if there is anything the government of Ontario knows how to do, it's balancing the books. No, wait. That's the one thing they very clearly don't know how to do. So how can Dalt & Co. teach basic financial skills to students? Having demonstrated virtually none after nearly a decade in power? It's like Madonna teaching a Sex Ed course on abstinence.

How does a government become so conceited? Well, it's the same conceit that allows provincial governments across the country to teach children history, economics, mathematics, English and science without any understanding of those subjects. Bad history, economic fallacy, math that doesn't add up, junk science and a general contempt for the English language are par for the political course.

Let's for a moment accept the educrat's premise. One of the reasons for the financial crisis was that ordinary people didn't understand basic finance. Somehow millions of people were under the impression that you could just borrow up to the neck and no one would ask for the money back. You know how soft hearted those credit card companies are with their clients. But if ordinary folk were so ignorant, whose fault is that? 

You can blame the parents. Certainly educrats are fond of doing that. But isn't the whole point of public education that the government compensates for the failings of the parents? Your papa might be a blockhead and your mama a skank, but wholesome learning is always in store at your neighbour government run school. If the world is going to hell and hand-basket because people don't know the basics, doesn't that tell you something about the people responsible for teaching the basics?

While I'm always willing to give a swift kick to our government run education system, the 2008 financial debacle wasn't really the fault of the schools. History is replete with examples of well educated people spending beyond their means. Spending oneself into a corner has more to do with character, will power and circumstance than formal education. Schools used to try to instill character, very long ago. It was removed from the curriculum at about the same time as the Red Ensigns and the portraits of the Queen. 

The underlining cause of 2008's brush with financial armageddon was a single conceit. It is essentially the same conceit that undergrids most of big government: That a credentialed know-it-all can run your life better than you. The decisions of a handful of bureaucrats and their nominal political masters are wiser than those of millions of consumers and producers.

It's why governments about a century ago abandoned the gold standard. A few appointed experts can figure our how big or small the money supply needs to be at any given time. Within a few years of embarking on their new roles as monetary Messiahs, they triggered the greatest peacetime economic disaster in modern human history, the Great Depression. They then nearly repeated the trick in the 1970s and the 2000s. They're are still doing it now. Just watch the price of gold. Up, up and away!

That conceit of centrally planned money flows easily into a thousand smaller conceits. How much you should be eating, drinking, smoking or spending. It applies to in between things like education. Defenders of the public schools will point to a golden era, ending perhaps forty years ago, when even ordinary working stiffs could send their children off each morning to a solid education. 

Between the one room school house of yesteryear and the unionized leviathan of modern public education a transformation has indeed taken place. When a school consisted of a teacher, a textbook, some chalk and a room with four solid walls, it was easier for the parents to keep the "system" accountable. While nominally "public" the one room schoolhouse ran much like a small private schools. Sure the tuition was paid for out of taxes, but the taxpayers helped directly run the schools. The loop of accountability was short and simple.

Fast forward to modern Canada and that loop of accountability has been strained. Between the parent and the teacher there sits a vast centralized administration and powerful unions. Thus modern education looks like most parts of modern bureaucracy: Slow, unresponsive and one-size fits all. Three years after the 2008 Crash some bright ministerial lights thought the kiddies should be taught that borrowing at 22% is a bad idea. If our banks operated with such foresight they all would have failed. 

 

 

Dalton McHudak Poised to Form the Next Government

In Ontario the New Dalton is better than the Old Dalton:

We have rarely seen an Ontario (much less federal) election where the trends have been so consistent and the momentum so one-sided. Hudak has been steadily rising in the polls with only small hiccups. Meanwhile, every day another Liberal MPP seems to jump ship and announce his or her retirement, the fiscal picture is consistently sour, and government announcements have an air of desperate randomness. The Tories have unleashed heavy-hitting and effective negative ads, while the Liberal ads are mostly bland and vague reflections on wait times and full-day kindergarten. The outcome seems so inevitable that it feels we could just go ahead and hold the election tomorrow instead of waiting for Oct. 6.

Why bother with an election at all? There is substantively no difference between the McGuinty Liberals and the Hudak Tories, except that voters haven't had eight years to get sick of Tim Hudak's face. His time, however, will come. When you're product is mediocrity and stagnation, your selling points boil down to style. Neither Timmy or Dalt look very stylish.

The Tories chain gang proposal has gotten the Liberals in a tizzy. The Grits are so frustrated they've even resorted to using actual facts and statistics, a radical departure from their usual tactic of shrieking MIKE HARRIS everytime Tim Hudak enters a room. Yes the chain gang idea is very silly. It appeals to the lock 'em up and throw away the key segment of Torydom. The rest of the electorate is too annoyed at Dalton McGuinty to pay attention to the silliness of the idea.

Timmy has conducted a classic front runners campaign. Say little, do little, smile at lot and hope the other guy hangs himself. Working well enough, so far. It's sensible politics but poor governing. What will the Tories do differently than the Liberals? Wind whistles through the trees saying election. 

But he's better than McGuinty. Even if that's true, why defend the least worst alternative with such gusto? I've always been amazed at people who will spend hours hassling call center operators to get a better phone plan, yet think nothing of voting for the same political party decade after decade. Why does innovation work in business but not in politics? Why look for the next big gadget but not the next big political idea?

Next week I'll go into some possible alternatives to voting for the McHudak Status Quo.

 

Everyone is Mike Harris

When you're a Liberal cabinet minister, everyone looks like Mike Harris:

Is there a case of mistaken identity at the Legislature? Are the governing Liberals seeing double as they languish in the polls leading to the Oct. 6 election?

Environment Minister John Wilkinson dubbed NDP Leader Andrea Horwath “the new Mike Harris of Ontario politics” during a Wednesday news conference touting Liberal achievements such as bans on lawn pesticides and hand-held cellphones in cars.

A suggestion for the NDP caucus. Next time a McGuinty cabinet minister confuses your current leader with a former PC Premier, excepting of course Bill Davis, re-enact that classic scene from Spartacus. Everyone of you stand and up shout: "I'm Mike Harris!" It'll be the funniest thing the NDP has done since Bob Rae was turfed. Trust me.

It's not just the Dippers that are getting the Harris side swipe. Tim Hudak, the current PC leader, is routinely compared to Mike the Knife. If only it were true. The Grits even made buttons with Hudak as Mini-Me to Mike Harris' Dr Evil. Hysterical. Like their politics, the Liberal Party's jokes are about a decade old. What no Monica Lewinsky one-liners? Oh, come on, you're just not trying.

Let me reach out here to my friends in the Liberal Party. No, wait. I don't have any friends in the Liberal Party. Most of my friends spit whenever anyone even mentions the word Liberal. I know one chap who has stopped using the f-word altogether, believing that telling someone to Liberal-off is much more offensive. Probably a sound observation these days.

OK. To you contemptible time-servers in the Liberal Party apparatus, listen. Stop beating up on Mike Harris. He's not running in this election. In fact Mr Harris has not run in any election in twelve years. You're fighting a ghost from half a generation back. Like your jokes, your platform and pretty much everyone you say and do, it's completely out of touch with modern Ontario. Attacking 1995 style Toryism with 1999 reheated Liberalism is not a winning strategy.

Contrary to the paranoid recollection of Toronto Liberals, this province in the late 1990s did not resemble Germany circa 1946. It was a prosperous, fiscally sensible and basically well run place. Certainly the Harris years saw many unwise policies; a botch privatization of Hydro, the introduction of civil asset forfeitures and forced volunteerism in our high schools. As the game of governing goes, however, the Harris years were pretty good ones. 

Desperation drives the Liberals to repeatedly flog the dead political horse that is Mike Harris. They have no ideas on how to govern Ontario. This is nothing new. The Ontario Liberal Party has not had an original idea since the days of Oliver Mowat. It just took until recently for them to figure that out. 

Visceral hatred by some groups of the Harris government have helped the Grits win two elections. The hope is that the third time will also be a charm. Among that class of Ontarians dependent on the public purse such as teachers, bureaucrats and certain types of lawyers, they have a vested interest in fighting to keep Premier Santa Claus in place.

For the rest of us, the former PC premier is a fading memory. Beating the Harris war-drums, especially at a time of fiscal distress, might wind up reminding people of why they elected Mr Common Sense in 1995. If we are caught in a time warp, it might not be one to the Liberal's favour.

Don't worry Dalton. Someone's gotta replace Bob Rae. Eventually.