LORINC: In Ontario election what is the lesser of three evils?

​By just about any standard of political analysis I can conjure up, the Ontario Liberal Party desperately needs a time-out. But the problem that be-devils me, and a lot of people I speak to, is that the opposition parties at present are so pathetic.

​And so voters in the broad middle swath of the political spectrum are stuck with an especially tough question: should they vote for the government simply because the Liberals are the least bad of the lot?

​NDP leader Andrea Horvath did her part to confirm my hypothesis yesterday morning when she told Metro Morning’s Matt Galloway that the Liberals plan to privatize the TTC. Quite apart from the palm-to-face quality of that nose-stretcher, her remark immediately brought to mind the brothers Ford, and their love of saying whatever the hell they please in order to gain political advantage.

​As for the Tories, Tim Hudak has always struck me nothing but a one-note Johnny, endlessly reciting speaking notes and promoting clichés that masquerade as policy. He has all the verve of a conservative think tank apparatchik, and I find it exceedingly difficult to imagine him making complex governing choices about the tough issues that inevitably land on leaders’ laps. Say this about Stephen Harper: at least he came into the top job with a vision of what he wanted to achieve.

​But in my view, the Liberals don’t deserve a pass simply because Hudak and Horwath leave so much – so much! – to be desired.

​So while the campaign will unfurl with whatever dynamic it picks up along the way, it seems to me that voters – and certainly those in Toronto – have to take the measure of Kathleen Wynne’s government based on four key markers:

• the legacy, in terms of both cost and credibility, of the gas plant/Ornge/executive salaries revelations;
• the Liberals’ total record on transit in the GTA, including the flip flop on revenue tools and the half-measures announced in the budget;
• the sustainability of Charles Sousa’s approach of managing the provincial budget;
• the implications of Wynne’s centerpiece election plank, the made-in-Ontario pension plan.

​Let me start with the last one. By any measure, this move is smart, forward-looking, and fiscally and socially proactive. While small business groups will squawk, but the reality, as Wynne well knows, is that our society is producing a generation of people who will retire into poverty, with all the associated social costs. Pension experts know that RSPs won’t and can’t produce enough retirement savings for the vast majority of people, because so few of us have the discipline to invest. In the end, she’s on safe ground because Bay Street and the investment community love the large pooled pension plans (Ontario Teachers, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, etc.) that arise from such policies.

​If the Liberals were carrying half the baggage into this election, I’d argue that the pension policy — which is a generational fix and long overdue – would justify a vote all by itself.

​Sadly, the reality is otherwise, so voters are left with the task of weighing promises like the pension plan and the dedicated transit funding scheme against all the rest. And there’s a lot of crap on the other side of the scale.

​I won’t say more about the scandals over the gas plants/Ornge, etc. except to note that Wynne can’t plausibly claim to be an innocent bystander. She’s been a senior Dalton McGuinty cabinet minister for years, and participated in all the policy/political decision-making that takes place in cabinet. She doesn’t get to molt all that back-story just because she allowed hearings in the gas plant debacle and made contrition-like noises.

​On the transit file, Wynne was the transportation minister who, in December 2010, allowed Toronto’s newly elected mayor Rob Ford to attempt to kill a fully-funded LRT plan. Three years later, as premier, she allowed city council tear up a fully-funded master agreement as part of a political gambit engineered by her office to use Karen Stintz’ Scarborough subway plan to win a provincial by-election.

​She came into office assuring voters and commuters that there was no spare change to be found in the provincial piggy-bank, which meant we’d have to accept new taxes and levies that would be used exclusively for transit investment. A year later, she’d abandoned that pledge in favour of a half-funded plan that relies mainly on moving numbers from one column to the other.

​Which brings me to Sousa’s 2014 budget. I am not a balanced budget hawk by any stretch, but the spending and debt increases in his plan are certainly a cause for concern. First, the political dilemma: it’s certainly possible that we’ll all wake up on June 13 to a…minority Liberal government, in which case we will be hurled right back to where we were last week, with Wynne and Horwath forced by politics to work out some kind of rapprochement that mostly involves Wynne capitulating.

​The budget, a.k.a. campaign platform, projects a return to surplus by 2017-18, which is simply a fantasy, as The Globe and Mail’s Jeffrey Simpson pointed out last week. The province’s economy is still only firing on two cylinders, and we’re probably closer to a downturn than most people realize. By 2017, it’s possible we’ll be in the midst of another recession, at which point government revenues start to plunge and Sousa’s sunny forecasts become nothing more than numbers on a page.

​The problem is that when a future Liberal regime does have to face stark fiscal choices, as seems almost inevitable, Sousa or some more hard-assed successor will know to cut from spending areas that are less radioactive than the biggies, health care and education. And it’s not difficult to guess what those line items may be. Consider Exhibit A: McGuinty’s 2009 decision to slash billions from the Transit City funding package in the name of fiscal austerity.

​The dedicated, ten-year transit fund may last for, well, three years.

​So at this early stage of the campaign, that’s how the calculus looks. Better the devil you know? Meh.