Posted on 10/30/2009 5:26:59 AM PDT by Clive
Here's a New Year's prediction, two months early: Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty is finished. The denouement will take a couple of years.
When the curtain falls for him it will be swift, brutal and decisive. The resulting lurch to the right, with all the attendant cuts to public services, union unrest and so on, will look very much like Mike Harris, Part Deux. And there is very little now that anyone, least of all the Ontario premier or those around him, can do to prevent it. It's too late.
Extreme? Not really.
When McGuinty came to power on Oct. 23, 2003, he already suffered from the perception that he lacked a certain je ne sais quoi in the spinal area. Indeed, many Ontarians seemed to like him because he lacked spine. He was so nice -- the anti-Harris. At the time, we needed nice. Once in office McGuinty immediately confirmed how nice he was by breaking his solemn promise not to run deficits or raise taxes.
McGuinty was the political equivalent of Kraft Dinner with tuna -- comfort food. He was a guy who, if he saw a sweet little old lady waiting to cross a busy street, would take five minutes to guide her safely across, and feel genuinely ennobled by the experience. If he were a daycare operator all the tots would love him. In fact he should be on TV, doing a kids' show. He'd be great at it and make piles of money.
As premier though, he never picked up the somewhat useful knack of making tough decisions, or even slightly unpleasant ones. Given a choice between spending money and making someone mad at him, McGuinty reflexively spends money. Given a choice between the hard and just road, and the easy and morally mushy one, McGuinty always casts himself headlong into the mush.
That worked for him in times of plenty. Now it's backfiring. And so we have the bizarre and unseemly spectacle of a province in hock by $24.7 billion, dramatically expanding the cost and scope of early childhood education.
Kindergarten
Full-day kindergarten would likely be a good thing, for some kids and some families. Do we need it? Do we need it more than, for example, shorter wait times in hospital emergency rooms? If McGuinty ever spoke to any working Ontarians who are not party loyalists he'd know the answer to that question. He doesn't speak to working Ontarians, apparently.
In 1995 Mike Harris won with the 905 belt around Toronto and the 705 to the north. The 416 people in the city were divided and that was enough to tip the balance in Harris's favour, in two successive elections.
The eHealth boondoggle, on its own, is more than enough to split 416 in two years. Every citizen in every emergency waiting room with a sick child today knows that a billion health-care dollars were wasted on computer consultants over the past seven years. That's all it will take.
If that weren't enough, there's wind power. It's not an issue in the cities. But in rural Ontario opposition to industrial wind power has reached a slow boil that will not go away. It will only build. McGuinty-Smitherman's strange insistence on driving these projects forward despite widespread, credible reports that living near a big wind turbine is bad for your health, will crush the Liberals absolutely in the country. Even if they eventually relent and call for more study, which they likely will, the damage will have been done.
I don’t think Ontario will go right. It is Canada’s Massachussetts.
This is a liberal writer lamenting weak liberal leadership, the usual broken promises made by liberal leaders and the usual budget-busting by liberal leaders. Now the liberal author thinks the world will fall apart because voters will express their disgust at the ballot box.
It won’t happen in Ontario. I wish it would though.
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Ontario is very conservative — in the rural communities. Unfortunately they only represent about 20% of the population. The cities, especially Toronto, are generally very liberal.
A Tory government that is faithful to conservative principles can win in Ontario.
Mike Harris won in Ontario against all expectations. Particularly so because Harris was a conservative in a party that had become dominated by progressives.
He became the Tory leader almost by default because none of the progressive movers and shakers thought that the party has a snowball's chance in Hell of winning and so they let Harris have it as a sort of a pat on the back for his party loyalty. In effect they would let Harris lose the next election or two and then retake the party when it stood a better chance of winning.
The Harris Tories governed Ontario from 1995 to 2002 when he resigned as leader and Eves took over. Eves lost to the Liberals in 2003.
I am convinced that what cost us Ontario is that the party lost its nerve and started to drift to the left, letting its Progressive wing again take over.
Harris won mainly by making significant gains in the exurban 905 area code surrounding Toronto. The 905 has a large population of political and economic refugees from Toronto.
McGuinty-Smitherman’s strange insistence on driving these projects forward despite widespread, credible reports that living near a big wind turbine is bad for your health, will crush the Liberals absolutely in the country. Even if they eventually relent and call for more study, which they likely will, the damage will have been done.
WOW I HOPE THIS STUFF NEVER HAPPENS IN ERNEST IN THE US. Thanks for “taking the pill” and experimenting on all this socialist/green stuff first, Canada, then at least we conservatives/libertarians in the US know what to lookforward to (and how to fight it)!
... and with the potential selling of NB Power to Hydro-Quebec, New Brunswick will soon follow. This was the last straw for Shawn Graham. If this sale goes through, he won’t only be the most hated politician in NB, he will be the most hated person.
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