Category: Ontario Politics

Dalton McGuinty resigns

This week, Dalton McGuinty called it quits after nine tired years as Premier of Ontario. The announcement came as a surprise to all as the details came in two announcements just hours apart on Monday.

Before he stepped down as Premier, McGuinty used his constitutional powers to prorogue the legislature dodging a motion of contempt leveled against his government’s energy minister Chris Bentley who only on Monday produced an additional 20,000 pages of documents regarding the building of two new gas-fired electricity plants in Ontario. The situation is familiar for Canadians as motions of contempt — one for the failure to produce documents — were brought before the federal House of Commons against the government of Stephen Harper prior to the election which granted him a majority in 2011.

The outcome here, however, is unfamiliar. Dalton McGuinty’s government was running out of fuel. Having previously won two majority governments, the last election resulted in a minority. The gas-plant imbroglio is rooted in that previous election; cynics and neutral observers noting alike that the construction of two such plants were politically motivated attempts to secure two seats in order to guarantee that third majority. The previous by-election was McGuinty’s last hope to achieve peace and place a cone of silence over the legislature with a majority. The result was not so fortunate for the Premier.

So, McGuinty prorogued.

Nothing constitutionally amiss with that, yet the reaction among Liberals, journalists, and the left has been quite muted about the issue. In 2010, we saw a Facebook group of 20,000 Canadians reach a level of national prominence after the Toronto Star decided to promote it on their front page. The Canadians Against the Prorogation of Parliament are notably silent today. In one month during that prorogation by Stephen Harper, I counted 1,561 articles written by Canada’s establishment press about this so-called affront to democracy. Perhaps predictably, and calculated by team McGuinty, the media could be distracted by something else.

Will Dalton McGuinty run for leader of the federal Liberal Party?

There was never a greater attempted ruse in Canadian politics this year than Dalton McGuinty’s attempt to deflect from the mounting corruption of his government at Queen’s Park — eHealth, ORNGE, secret deals with private energy firms, misadventures in wind and solar doubling the provincial debt and taking the province to “have-not” status in Confederation — than to leak an exclusive to the Canadian Press about the leadership team forming around Dalton McGuinty as he refused to rule out a bid for federal leadership.

The Canadian consensus media raised a five-alarm fire alarm on Stephen Harper’s constitutionally politically-motivated prorogation in 2010, while mentioning McGuinty’s as an aside in 2012. Bigger issues on the national agenda than the “fate of democracy” to be sure: the issue-challenged glam son of Pierre Trudeau was potentially being challenged by the last successful politician of the Laurentian Consensus media elite. (Gossip-hungry, issue-abstaining members of the Ottawa chaterrati will be enticed by the news that young Justin was ushered out of the Nova Scotia Liberal leader’s dinner fundraiser to be briefed on McGuinty’s retirement and possible challenge. It is reported that the young Trudeau returned to his seat looking ashen and deeply concerned. Good golly!)

There are serious issues to discuss. While Ontario has faltered on its fiscal footing, betting poorly on the dominating energy infrastructure of the first half of the 21st century and while the Canadian west is booming and preparing, building pipelines west (and eventually south) to emerging energy markets globally, the central Canadian media pines for the old times. It’s no coincidence that Liberal parties federally and in six provinces provincially are looking to elect new leadership (seven soon with Clark losing in BC). Canada is changing and looking to address new challenges and and energy- and resource-hungry world with action instead of cynical immovable inertia. Our old Liberal kings and their palace guards in the mainstream media are looking more and more like relics of another age.

Richard Ciano’s bid to run the PCPO

My friend Richard Ciano is running for the Presidency of the PC Party of Ontario. He’s launching his campaign tonight in a simultaneous telephone townhall/live townhall/live webcast event.

His slogan is “Time to win” which really cuts to it for a lot of Ontario Tories. Clear messaging has always been a hallmark of Ciano and his pal Nick Kouvalis who ran Rob Ford’s “Stop the Gravy Train Campaign”. The event kicks off at 7:00pm and I’ve embedded the video below.

You can join the telephone townhall at 1-877-229-8493 and enter ID code 19167

Other candidates for the Presidency include Kevin Gaudet and John Snobelen.

Why Tim Hudak lost

Last week, Ontario voted to re-elect Dalton McGuinty to a third term as Premier of Canada’s largest province. Ontario is big on the Canadian stage and is unrivaled in sheer population numbers at 13.2 million, unrivaled in its debt numbers at $237 Billion, unrivaled in unemployment outside of Atlantic Canada and it set a new record for voter turnout: a low at 49% — unseen since 1867.

Given the numbers, it would be foolish to dismiss Ontario’s hunger for change and the Hudak team knew this. They did everything to label their candidate as the province’s agent of change — they even named their platform “Changebook”. Yet a label will only take you so far. What Hudak’s team failed to offer was change itself.

Barack Obama won a campaign on hope and change. Though in truth he was a superficial agent of change at best. Suffering wars, recession and bailouts, a chance to elect America’s first black President proved to be the change America had been waiting for, but not the change they needed. Three years later, America is still at war, deeper into recession and Obama is still trying to bail out America with more spending. Hope and change indeed. But America was interested in what Obama represented, not who he was.

To say the least, the Hudak plan to offer superficial change did not elect him to high office. No, on October 6th, Tim P. Hudak was not giving a chance to Ontario to turn a chapter in Canada’s troubled anti-Slovak history and elect the first descendant of Slovak grandparents to sit as provincial leader of the free Confederation.  The greatest strength offered by Tim Hudak to the Ontario electorate was that his name wasn’t Dalton McGuinty. Needless to say, it wasn’t enough.

If you took a passive view of the PC campaign over the past two months, you might have been vaguely aware of what Changebook’s greatest promoted promise was: a cut in the HST! (ahem, off of home heating costs). Or maybe you heard about chain gangs for prisoners! Or that foreign workers something something bad something something! Or that Premier Tim was going to reverse Premier Dad’s move to educate our kids about “the gays”.

Tim Hudak ran as the “change” candidate, yet he offered none. Why? A few polls early in the low signal to noise phase of the campaign early this year told his team that he was up 20 points! Time to shift the “change” plan into the superficial gear and run a front-runner no drama campaign, it was likely decreed. Yet, those polls didn’t really represent anything substantive and as the campaign began, Hudak could only count himself to be a meager few points ahead.

A true message of change was one that would have resonated with the people of Ontario. Every new green job that Dalton McGuinty was creating was costing 5 jobs in the real economy due to the higher cost of doing business. Ontario’s credit rating will come under greater pressure in the coming years making it cost much more to pay off the interest on Ontario’s $237 billion debt — now nearly double from when McGuinty took office. Ontario is a have not province meaning it is the laggard of Confederation, drawing on the wealth generative capacity of the likes of Newfoundland and Saskatchewan. You want a message of change? Ontario stands to our own Greece as $7 of new government spending is supported by $1 of economic growth. What to change?

1) End government involvement in creating economically unsustainable industries.

2) Cut the HST from 13 to 12 to 11 percent

3) Cut the Ontario corporate tax rate to encourage new investment

4) Cut government spending 5%, then 10-15%

5) New union and lobbyist transparency rules

5 priorities? Stop the Gravy Train? Sounds familiar? A clear and consistent message track. Put change in the window. Tim Hudak can be Ontario’s next Premier, but only if he lets Ontario know he has a plan to change.