An Election About Nothing?

Ontario's political leaders owe voters more than just platitudes and fairy tales.

The leaders' debate is out of the way and there's less than one week left of campaigning to go before voters across Ontario head to the ballot box on Oct. 6. The campaign has hardly been enlightening thus far, but John Ivison of the National Post finds some silver lining in the waning days of PC Leader Tim Hudak's time on the hustings. The reason? He's finally talking about one policy proposal – a pledge to create 200,000 new apprenticeships (“a cost-neutral move” that “has the support of the Ontario construction employers”) – that stands to actually create jobs in the skilled trades with minimal cost to the province. It's just too bad, notes Ivison, that Hudak has lost a lot of goodwill due to his “uninspiring, often silly” tactics over the diversions like the immigrant tax credit brouhaha, chain gangs, and sex offender registries. We're more of the mind that the apprenticeship proposal is more like a diamond in overly rough platform – one or two good policy ideas does not a government make.

And while getting more people into the skilled trades is all fine and dandy, Jeffrey Simpson of The Globe and Mail laments all three party leaders' detachment from Ontario's economic reality. “Within the past eight years, the province’s debt has skyrocketed by 85 per cent. The province’s unemployment rate is now higher than Quebec’s, and so is the provincial deficit,” writes Simpson. But you wouldn't know that by reading campaign literature or watching the leaders crisscross the province. Simpson recommends voters note what happened immediately after recent elections in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, in which the leaders similarly promised pie-in-the-sky policies designed to make voters feel better about themselves and their provinces. “Sure enough, very shortly after taking office, the new governments said: Our provinces are in dire straits, and we’ll need serious spending measures and/or tax increases to escape,” says Simpson. Ontario's chequebook is in no better shape. Voters deserve an honest accounting of the province's finances to be able to make sound decisions on Oct. 6, not pats on the back over how great our schools and hospitals are. Voters are, by definition, adults. We should hope that some day that politicians would speak to them as such.

Finally, Rick Salutin of the Toronto Star wonders what happened to the “progressive” in “Progressive Conservative” as he compares the Red Tories of the Bill Davis era to the likes of Hudak, Stephen Harper, and Mike Harris. “They sought power in order to do something, not just punish certain demographics by cutting welfare (Harris), building prisons (Harper) or creating chain gangs (Hudak),” says Salutin. But Davis governed in an era where the zeitgeist “involved a sense of the usefulness of government and the importance of some kind of social solidarity;” Now, it's “harsher, very individualistic.” Davis remains just about the only Ontario politician that can be considered an elder statesman, a man who's respected across party lines. That his legacy has been ditched from the current incarnation of the Progressive Conservative party in favour of worship at the Reagan-Thatcher-Harris altar is an indictment of Ontario's political culture. Yet somehow, we'll still manage to drag ourselves to the polling station on Thursday and hope this current zeitgeist is as fleeting as the last.