Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty’s bobbing and weaving during Tuesday’s leaders debate was the perfect visual metaphor for the way’s he’s governed and the way federal and provincial Liberals operate.
He shimmies and shifts, dodging real commitment and chasing expediency to wherever he thinks he can find votes. Staying in power at any cost is the goal.
While McGuinty once got elected fighting corporate tax cuts, he now seeks to mimic the Progressive Conservatives. After already reducing corporate taxes in 2007, he intends to match the Tory pledge to drop them even further, to 10 per cent from the 14 they once were under his watch. This while even at 14 per cent, our corporate taxes are lower than those in any of the American states that share the Great Lakes with us.
At the same time, he weaves left, feigning a commitment to the environment, yet despite the free ride he’s been given by a surprising number of enviro-activists, this preem surrenders to the death grip of nuclear power, pledging to expand this discredited energy source. Like the PCs, he’s committed to generate 50 per cent of this province’s power from exploding atoms at a cost of billions of dollars and environmental peril.
And how green is a premier who creates a Green Belt that leaves one environment-destroying industry to operate unfettered in this supposedly protected area? Aggregate interests – sand and gravel – get a free ride to tear up the countryside and destroy the water table as their trucks race along country roads.
And if McGuinty were really committed to the environment, he’d have told Rob Ford to take a hike – or a light rail train – when the mayor asked him to kill the greener-than-green Transit City plan for Toronto.
It wasn’t just so-called Ford Nation that emboldened Ford to destroy an elegant and affordable plan that would have united this city. McGuinty had already signalled that his commitment was soft by pulling back some of the funding for the plan. And when the pliant pol feared that Ford’s angry base might turn to Tim Hudak, he was happy to help his newfound friend set back Toronto’s transit – and environment – by dozens of years.
While allowing provincial tuition rates to become some of the highest in Canada as premier, he now claims a willingness to cut them, at least for some students.
McGuinty is selling the same mythology that conservatives like Hudak and Ford peddle, that you can cut taxes and not gut services. And McGuinty worships the same private sector god, the one that launched the latest financial meltdown, letting private companies drive his energy development and edge into health, and giving across-the-board tax cuts to corporations with no province-serving strings attached.
Andrea Horwath’s New Democrats are the greenest party running in this election, and they are the only party prepared to make corporations earn their tax breaks. She would give tax breaks to corporations that actually create jobs, train their workers and invest in infrastructure. This would translate into jobs, not bigger profits and huge bonuses for job-exporting CEOs. She’s also prepared to offer some spending relief for working Ontarians, lowering heating and fuel bills by pulling back on the HST.
Proto-progressives desperate to discredit the only party of change have jumped on Horwath’s efforts to ease costs for beleaguered Ontarians. But as Horwath points out, heating your home during our frigid winters isn’t optional. Rather than punitive taxation, her government would support retrofitting and energy-efficient housing to make a real enviro difference. And Horwath is prepared to fund a game-changing approach to conservation with the billions she’d save by directing cash away from expanding nuclear power.
In a province where mass transit is either non-existent – seen many subways or even buses in Thunder Bay? – or crumbling and under attack as in Toronto, Horwath would invest and commit to covering 50 per cent of municipal transit costs for cities prepared to freeze transit fares.
On the same track, she’d hasten the uploading of many of the services to the province’s tab that were stuck on the city’s bill by Hudak’s mentor, Mike Harris, and left there by McGuinty to create the constant fiscal crisis that consumes so much of our municipal imagination. And she would have told Ford that cutting Transit City wasn’t an option.
New Democrats represent the only real alternative in Ontario, but as reliably as winter follows fall, second-best voting is being peddled by fear-foisters who depict McGuinty’s failed flock as the only electable alternative to Hudak’s hordes.
Didn’t we hear this same misguided message during the last federal election? The one where the party of the centre was decimated and it was the NDP that was sideswiped by vote-splitting progressives and denied an even bigger electoral breakthrough than the one it so stunningly achieved?
Canadians are gaining clarity and increasingly see that the party that represents our core values of decency, sharing and sustainability is the NDP. It’s not a message that those who have governed in this country for the last 100 years are anxious to amplify, but the NDP’s federal breakthrough and the national mourning coupled with hope that followed Jack Layton’s death signal this unstoppable change.
No poll predicted the NDP’s significant successes this spring voters just made it happen. And if the NDP can go like a sports car from zero to 60 in Quebec with lightning speed – okay, from one to 64 seats – then why not here?
Vote for a party that doesn’t just find its heart around election time. Make a vote you can be proud of, to continue the exciting change that is taking place in our country. Cast your vote for your local candidate from Andrea Horwath’s NDP.
michaelh@nowtoronto.com
