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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
October 2, 2011
Insidious legacy
One thing can be said in favour of the coming week: By the time it ends, the Ontario provincial election will be over. Knock on wood: for if it proves as much of a dead heat as some polls have indicated, we might spend the next month Florida-style, sorting through the latest voting technology to find out who won, with muddy lawsuits everywhere kerflung.But I don't think that can happen here. For we don't really care who wins. At least, not in an election like this, where nothing serious has been put on the line. The agenda for the next four years will be, barring the usual cosmic surprises, determined by economic realities. This has been effectively conceded by the two leading parties. Liberals and Progressive Conservatives alike are fussing over fine budgetary points. Whoever wins will be fussing, even after taxes again rise, over what cosmetic cuts to make to that budget, in order to sustain the province's credit rating through their watch; while not triggering a labour riot from the province's over-staffed, overpaid, overperked, and fully unionized public service. Canada does not appear to be in as bad shape as most of the U.S. and Europe, economically. But within Canada, an easy statistical inference is that Ontario's economy is lagging, and our competitive position sliding vis-a-vis most other provinces. Tim Hudak, the PC leader, has made surprisingly little noise to this effect, caught as he is in the intellectual warp of fine-weave carping. This was the perfect strategy to hand over an election that appeared, at the outset, to be impossible for Hudak to lose. It played directly to Dalton McGuinty's only strength, which is sleight-of-hand. (Keep watching those hands; they are always moving.) McGuinty is the incredible shrinking target, who, if his opponents will co-operate, can off-load any controversy. Twice he told Ontarians he would not raise their taxes. Twice he lied. Now he asks us to believe him for a third time. That requires alacrity, in the art of slithering. But while I am pathologically opposed to high taxes, and to the allied governing habit of throwing money at problems already aggravated by over-spending (education and health care being the two holy cows in greatest need of fiscal goring), I don't think that is the major issue. It is only the major material issue. My biggest criticism of the McGuinty government is that it is allied with its own bureaucracy. They govern, and the elected types shill. Even the tax-and-spending issues will be hardest fought, not against the opposition in the next legislature, but with the government's bankers. For the immediate issues here do not come down to ideology, but arithmetic. And that will be true, whoever wins. The legacy issues - the more permanent damage this government has done over two terms in office - are in the regulatory sphere. This work is largely invisible, from day to day, because it consists of innumerable small regulatory revisions done by order-in-council and through departmental fiat, flying almost entirely under the radar of the legislature. The measures are known only to the most assiduously specialized readers of the Ontario Gazette, or finally to the isolated victims. Almost every item is a small, incremental, bracket-creep of political correctitude - advancing the "human rights" industry, the family law industry, the adjustment of medical priorities, the environmental review industry, the indoctrination of schoolchildren, the destruction of traditional symbols and established ways of doing things. Each little creeping regulation locks in exactly the sort of changes that publicly-funded progressive activists have targeted and lobbied for behind the scenes - without the fondest chance of public oversight and review. This, to my mind, is the cancer that has been metastasizing through the body politic, for two generations now: the cumulative growth and spread of politically correct bureaucratic cells, while our attention is given over almost entirely to money considerations, questions of personality and image, and the weather from day to day. Much more than the federal, provincial government is charged with responsibility for the "social issues"; as provincial courts with questions of civil law. This is where most of the action is happening to sustain and advance the social revolution that began in the 1960s. But our democratic vigilance relaxes the lower we go down the hierarchy of government, until it disappears entirely, somewhere in the municipal bogs. As I persistently argue, Tim Hudak and "conservative" politicians like him leave the progressive factions with a blank cheque, by actually avoiding conflict with them, or anything that cannot be presented to the sound-bite consumer as a "pocketbook issue." They do this out of an understandable cowardice, because the politician who touches any significant social or civilizational issue will most certainly be skunked through the liberal media, and by gloating progressive politicians. His very stand will be presented, regardless of its merits, as a faux pas. Yet the cancer to which I refer will not be stopped without direct confrontation; and it is the moral duty of conservative politicians to articulate opposition, and lead. When they shirk that responsibility, conservative voters rightly shirk them as a waste of time. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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