politics
Queen’s Park Watch: NDP and Tories Unite Over Heating Bills
In what could be the most boring buddy movie ever made, the NDP and Tories are joining forces to try and lower your monthly heating bill. It remains to be seen whether the Liberal minority government will let it happen.
Hello minority government! The New Democrats have announced that when the Ontario legislature opens for business next week, they’ll introduce a private members’ bill to remove the provincial portion of the HST from home heating bills. Normally this kind of proposal would just be the political voguing of a third party with no actual power, intended to remind the voting public that the NDP are still around and looking out for the interests of the hard up and the hypothermic. However, this bill lives at the unlikely intersection of NDP and Conservative campaign promises—an eerie twilight zone of ideas populated by malformed, misbegotten socialist-libertarian hybrids—so it has a shot at getting passed.
While the PCs and the Orange Brigades don’t agree on much, during the late elections both parties hopped on the overpriced energy bandwagon and vowed to lower home heating costs by eliminating the five per cent of the HST that goes to the province. With a combined voting bloc of 54 votes in the House versus the Liberals’ 53, if all PCs and NDP voted in favour of the bill, we could have ourselves a law.
The NDP press release suggests that the move would save the average family about a hundred bucks a year (more if you live up north or run a grow-op), enough for a few buckets of Timbits or a couple rounds of laser hair removal. Against that is the anticipated hit to the provincial treasury of $350 million dollars in a time when the economic forecasts are starting to get ugly again.
Conservative leader Tim Hudak has already said that he’d support such a bill, meaning the votes are in place. However, before you we can crank the thermostat to a figurative 11 and strip off the Forever Lazy®, consider that only the Liberal government has the power to call the bill up for the necessary third reading. As it happens, Premier McGuinty is already harumphing about the cost of the initiative, suggesting that the trade-off for cheaper heat would be the axing of the proposed “healthy home” tax credit on renovations which help seniors live longer in their own homes. Thus the fate of the bill may come down to which visual image pulls more citizen heartstrings; impoverished families warming their hands over a barrel of flaming schoolbooks or grandpa tripping over a too-high bathtub and impaling himself on the shower knob.
Whether the lower heating bill bill gets passed into law or not, it’s an early wake-up call for a Liberal government unaccustomed to sharing control of the legislative process. And pass or fail, it never hurts to inject a little more democracy into the system.