{"id":48417,"date":"2014-05-06T09:03:51","date_gmt":"2014-05-06T13:03:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/?p=48417"},"modified":"2014-05-06T09:08:58","modified_gmt":"2014-05-06T13:08:58","slug":"lorinc-ontario-election-lesser-three-evils","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2014\/05\/06\/lorinc-ontario-election-lesser-three-evils\/","title":{"rendered":"LORINC: In Ontario election what is the lesser of three evils?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2013\/06\/27\/lorinc-how-to-keep-metrolinx-honest\/feature-lorinc-3\/#main\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-44316\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-44316\" src=\"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2013\/06\/feature-lorinc.gif\" alt=\"feature-lorinc\" width=\"600\" height=\"85\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u200bBy 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.<\/p>\n<p>\u200bAnd 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?<\/p>\n<p>\u200bNDP leader Andrea Horvath did her part to\u00a0confirm my hypothesis yesterday morning when she told Metro Morning\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>\u200bAs for the Tories, Tim Hudak has always struck me nothing but a one-note Johnny, endlessly reciting speaking notes and promoting clich\u00e9s 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\u2019 laps. Say this about Stephen Harper: at least he came into the top job with a vision of what he wanted to achieve.<\/p>\n<p>\u200bBut in my view, the Liberals don\u2019t deserve a pass simply because Hudak and Horwath leave so much \u2013 so much! \u2013 to be desired.<\/p>\n<p>\u200bSo while the campaign will unfurl with whatever dynamic it picks up along the way, it seems to me that voters \u2013 and certainly those in Toronto \u2013 have to take the measure of Kathleen Wynne\u2019s government based on four key markers:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>the legacy, in terms of both cost and credibility, of the gas plant\/Ornge\/executive salaries revelations;<\/li>\n<li>the Liberals\u2019 total record on transit in the GTA, including the flip flop on revenue tools and the half-measures announced in the budget;<\/li>\n<li>the sustainability of Charles Sousa\u2019s approach of managing the provincial budget;<\/li>\n<li>the implications of Wynne\u2019s centerpiece election plank, the made-in-Ontario pension plan.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>\u200bLet 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\u2019t and can\u2019t produce enough retirement savings for the vast majority of people, because so few of us have the discipline to invest. In the end, she\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>\u200bIf the Liberals were carrying half the baggage into this election, I\u2019d argue that the pension policy &#8212; which is a generational fix and long overdue \u2013 would justify a vote all by itself.<\/p>\n<p>\u200bSadly, 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\u2019s a lot of crap on the other side of the scale.<\/p>\n<p>\u200bI won\u2019t say more about the scandals over the gas plants\/Ornge, etc. except to note that Wynne can\u2019t plausibly claim to be an innocent bystander. She\u2019s 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\u2019t get to molt all that back-story just because she allowed hearings in the gas plant debacle and made contrition-like noises.<\/p>\n<p>\u200bOn the transit file, Wynne was the transportation minister who, in December 2010, allowed Toronto\u2019s 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\u2019 Scarborough subway plan to win a provincial by-election.<\/p>\n<p>\u200bShe came into office assuring voters and commuters that there was no spare change to be found in the provincial piggy-bank, which meant we\u2019d have to accept new taxes and levies that would be used exclusively for transit investment. A year later, she\u2019d abandoned that pledge in favour of a half-funded plan that relies mainly on moving numbers from one column to the other.<\/p>\n<p>\u200bWhich brings me to Sousa\u2019s 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\u2019s certainly possible that we\u2019ll all wake up on June 13 to a\u2026minority 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.<\/p>\n<p>\u200bThe budget, a.k.a. campaign platform, projects a return to surplus by 2017-18, which is simply a fantasy, as The Globe and Mail\u2019s Jeffrey Simpson<a href=\"http:\/\/www.theglobeandmail.com\/globe-debate\/ontarios-deficit-includes-the-politicians\/article18376967\/\"> pointed out last week<\/a>. The province\u2019s economy is still only firing on two cylinders, and we\u2019re probably closer to a downturn than most people realize. By 2017, it\u2019s possible we\u2019ll be in the midst of another recession, at which point government revenues start to plunge and Sousa\u2019s sunny forecasts\u00a0become nothing more than numbers on a page.<\/p>\n<p>\u200bThe 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\u2019s not difficult to guess what those line items may be. Consider Exhibit A: McGuinty\u2019s 2009 decision to slash billions from the Transit City funding package in the name of fiscal austerity.<\/p>\n<p>\u200bThe dedicated, ten-year transit fund may last for, well, three years.<\/p>\n<p>\u200bSo at this early stage of the campaign, that\u2019s how the calculus looks. Better the devil you know? Meh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u200bBy 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. \u200bAnd so voters in the broad middle swath of the political<a href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2014\/05\/06\/lorinc-ontario-election-lesser-three-evils\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"sr-only\">&#8220;LORINC: In Ontario election what is the lesser of three evils?&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4051,"featured_media":48424,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>LORINC: In Ontario election what is the lesser of three evils? - Spacing Toronto<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2014\/05\/06\/lorinc-ontario-election-lesser-three-evils\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"LORINC: In Ontario election what is the lesser of three evils? - Spacing Toronto\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"\u200bBy just about any standard of political analysis I can conjure up, the Ontario Liberal Party desperately needs a time-out. 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