Queen’s Park Watch: How Tim Hudak Plans to Become Premier of Ontario

By Patrick Metzger

Bulletins from the provincial legislature, and thoughts on Queen’s Park’s sometimes tense relationship with Toronto.

A-a-a-nd they’re off! The unofficial provincial election season started with yesterday afternoon’s dissolution of legislature, and Tim Hudak’s Progressive Conservatives have busted out of the starting gate faster than you can say “Who’s Tim Hudak?” Last weekend they released their “changebook“, a glossy exercise in political sloganeering that gives considerable insight into their strategy to get your x on the ballot come October.

Strategy Part I: Imitate Your Friends

Tim Hudak must have felt like the poetical watcher of the skies with a new planet swimming into view when he saw Rob Ford transform garden-variety suburban disgruntlement into the mayoralty of the largest city in Canada. Taking his lead from the Ford playbook (with a healthy dollop of Harper wisdom), Hudak appeals to the “working family,” Joe and Jane Lunchbucket who worry about taxes and heating bills and how they’re gonna get the multicultural kids to soccer practice when the roads are all gridlocked with light rails and wind farms.
The PCs have even adopted the language of Ford Nation: there is mention of an end to “the war on the car” (apparently, while victory for internal combustion is in sight for the GTA, the rest of the province remains in the thrall of Big Transit); “respect for the people who pay taxes”; and party leadership is warning the faithful to ignore the voices of the “elites.”
Beyond the rhetoric, Hudak is more specifically promising to cut income taxes for the middle class, to allow income splitting for couples, and to eliminate the provincial portion of the HST on hydro and heating bills. There’s also the mandatory “tough on crime” stance (Chain gangs! A website to find yourself a local sex offender!) and a perfunctory slap at welfare fraudsters.

Strategy Part II: Imitate Your Enemy

Tory spin doctors want to inoculate themselves against the charge that they are axe-wielding program cutters by promising early and often to match the Liberal commitment of a 3 per cent annual increase on healthcare spending. That amounts to $6.1 billion more over four years, aided by a promised 6 per cent annual increase in federal transfer payments post-2012.
More broadly, the PCs proclaim “It’s time to bring services into the 21st century, and put you at the centre of service delivery.” Don’t ask what that means. No one knows what it means.
Financially, the PCs also line up with the Grits on the provincial deficit, saying it would be gone by 2018.
In summary, you’ll have everything you have now, be safer and healthier, and it will all cost you less.
The mechanism by which this marvel of economic and social engineering will be accomplished is one beloved by the Ford administration: efficiencies. Right off the bat, the Tories would axe the Local Health Integration Networks and the Ontario Power Authority, both Liberal initiatives that the PCs see as unnecessary bureacracies. Whether these moves will prove practical remains to be seen; what’s certain is that they’re a drop in the bucket of a $122 billion budget. Hudak would cut the civil service through attrition, and—shades of Ford again—eliminate boards and commissions that don’t do anything useful (the sneering implication seems to be that most of them don’t). Hudak would also reduce the size of his cabinet by 20 per cent, generating some savings on salaries and cabinet meeting muffin trays.

Given the plummeting popularity of the McGuinty Liberals and Ontario’s recent starboard tilt, barring an NDP October surprise this is Hudak’s election to lose. However, if the changebook mishmash of dime-store Republicanism and pie-in-the-sky bromides are what sells us on him, we should be ashamed of ourselves.
Illustration by Matthew Daley/Torontoist.