Social Policy in Ontario

Kathleen Wynne’s victory sends a strong message

Posted on June 13, 2014 in Governance Debates

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TheStar.com – Opinion/Editorials – Kathleen Wynne has pulled off an extraordinary political victory, one that has implications far beyond Ontario.
Jun 12 2014.   Editor

Kathleen Wynne has pulled off an extraordinary political victory, one that has implications far beyond Ontario.

Despite the burden of past Liberal misdeeds and bungling, she has secured a majority mandate for her party and a personal mandate for herself as premier. It is a resounding tribute to her political skill and her own integrity, and it is well deserved.

More importantly, Wynne campaigned and won on an unabashedly progressive agenda, rejecting the rush to austerity promised by Tim Hudak’s Progressive Conservatives. Ontario’s voters had a rare chance to pass a straight-up judgment on two radically opposed visions of government. To their credit, they chose the more optimistic, constructive path.

This message should be heard across the country, and especially in Ottawa, where a cramped, mean notion of what government can do has been entrenched for the past eight years. The voters of Canada’s biggest province have made it clear that is not the path they want to travel.

Wynne now has a chance to put her agenda into action, after being hamstrung for the past 16 months in a minority legislature where little got done. She should push ahead with the budget promises that died in early May when the opposition parties refused support and triggered the election that blew up in their faces.

Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives will have to take a long, hard look in the mirror after what has just happened. Under Hudak, they offered a sharp right turn towards cuts in public sector jobs and services, and most of the people clearly weren’t buying.

Their leader had two chances to unseat the Liberals, and came up short both times. This election, in particular, should have been a cake-walk for Hudak, facing a Liberal government haunted by its string of misdeeds and scandals, from the billion-dollar gas plant fiasco to ORNGE and the rest.

Hudak could simply have appealed to Ontarians’ desire for change. But he chose instead to run on a hard-right platform, and after this stunning rejection he had no choice but to announce his resignation as leader. His party now must ask itself whether that approach will ever work in a province where most voters gravitate towards the political centre.

For the New Democrats, the message is also hard. Unlike the PCs, their vote did not collapse. But Andrea Horwath provoked this election by refusing to offer any support for the Liberal budget, despite its progressive measures, and performed her own pirouette to the right.

Now, instead of having leverage with the government in a minority parliament, Horwath and the NDP will be on the sidelines. There must be serious questions about her political future as well.

Wynne now has a huge stock of political capital, and badly weakened opponents. She must use the moment to get to work for Ontario.

Her new government can pass some of the progressive measures it promised, such as a boost in pay for front-line home-care workers, and a $29-billion plan for transit and infrastructure (half of which will be spent in the greater Toronto region). The Liberals should also press ahead with a made-in-Ontario pension plan, an example to the rest of the country.

But the new Wynne government will also have to come to grips with Ontario’s worrisome fiscal reality.

The province has a $300-billion debt and its deficit of $12.5 billion will jump in the next year with new spending. To avoid a credit-rating downgrade, Wynne must spell out more precisely how her government intends to balance the budget within the three years it has pledged. Will Wynne play Hudak-lite and cut public service jobs or government spending? So far she has offered few details.

Inevitably, the Liberal government will face its own hard choices. That will almost certainly mean confrontations with public sector unions. Their leaders should not confuse voters’ rejection of Hudak’s deep cuts with complacency in the face of stubborn government deficits. Wynne has a mandate to govern and to balance the books – and that will mean asking some to take less.

It will be a hard road to navigate. But Wynne has shown a sure touch in the premier’s office and rare political skill in engineering this victory.

< http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/2014/06/12/kathleen_wynnes_victory_sends_a_strong_message_editorial.html >

Tags: budget, economy, ideology, pensions, standard of living

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