Right turn for Ontario?
It’s been 15 years since Mike Harris launched his Common Sense Revolution that drove compassion, caring and cooperation out of Queen’s Park in Toronto — along with New Democrat Premier Bob Rae.
Haris won back-to-back majority governments for his hard-right brand of Progressive Conservative government. It took his retirement and the inept maneuverings of his successors who tried and failed to keep the Revoliution going, to open the door to Dalton McGuinty and the Liberals.
Now, with McGuinty into his second term, Ontario’s PCs have gone”back to the future” by picking Harris acolyte Tim Hudak, 41, as their new leader.
Hudak says “We must take Ontario down an entirely different path from the one it’s now on.”
Meaning, of course, ditching social welfare for individual self-reliance; get tough laws on crime (whether they make any difference or not) and cultivating the entreprenurial crowd with promises of lower taxes and less regulation.
This sound so familiar to the Harris credo and the economic side of Bushism that it makes one wonder whether it’ll sail in the current environment.
The next Ontario election will be in 2011. It’s likely there’ll be strong similarities between the political situation at that time and the one that prevailed in 1995 when Harris won power.
We’ll (hopefully) have recently come out of recession. We’ll be deeper in debt that ever. And eight years of Liberalism will have no more solved our problems that did five years of the NDP’s version of social democracy.
But there’ll be one big difference.
We’ll have tried it all before. Been there. Done that.
Consider also that the Liberals may have a new leader by then. Someone who could put a fresh face to a government that has gathered its share of blunders and bloopers — like the eHealth fiasco and an ever-mounting provincial deficit.
Voters who saw the original Harris show as refreshing and different are unlikely to view the sequel through the same innocent eyes.
As well, Hudak has set himself up for a polarizing fight over his pledge to dump the Ontario Human Rights tribunal. There are many things wrong with the way the OHRC – like similar outfits – has gone overboard in allowing frivolous complaints. Abolition is not the answer.
It’s ironic that at a time when true Conservatives are growing more and more disenchanted with the party at the federal level, a champion of true Toryism has been elevated to the top spot in Ontario.
Hudak seems to be following the formula set out in Rescuing Canada’s Right, a 2005 book (Wiley) by Tasha Keiriddin and Adam Daifallah. They argue that the federal Tories are not really conservative. “Overall, federal governments, including conservative ones, have been pretty dismal from a small-c conservative perspective.”
Hudak, if he ever gets into power, is not likely to disappoint the authors.
Mike Harris was in the front row of Hudak supporters at the PC convention in Markham on Saturday. Those who watched him say he gloated with pleasure at the success of his protege.
How often will he be on the phone to Hudak in coming months? Who will really be calling the shots? Stay tuned.
