Ontario's Surprisingly Intelligent Budget

Crisis seems to concentrate minds. The normally-feckless McGuinty government has sensibly used the fiscal crisis to cut corporate taxes and harmonize provinical sales tax with the GST. Hopefully, the rest of the country will follow suit and we will have a more economically-efficient tax system.

Common Sense Revolution: Introduction

The Chief Economist at Midland Walwyn, one of Canada's most respected securities firms, concludes...

"This plan will work. The Mike Harris plan to cut provincial income tax rates by 30% and non-priority services spending by 20% will give Ontario a balanced budget within four years, and create more than 725,000 new jobs."

- Mark Mullins, Ph. D. (Economics)

The people of Ontario have a message for their politicians -- government isn't working anymore. The system is broken.

You sent that message when you handed the provincial government its dramatic defeat in 1990. You sent it in the referendum campaign in 1992. You sent it in the federal election. And yet, no one seems to be listening.

Over the last few years, I have been out talking with the people of Ontario. In Town Hall meetings, in living rooms and around kitchen tables.

I have heard your message. You are looking for a Common Sense Revolution in the way our province is run. Well, I'm prepared to actually do something about it.

It's time for government to make the same types of changes all of us have had to make in our own families and in our jobs. If we are to fix the problems in this province then government has to be prepared to make some tough decisions.

I'm not talking about tinkering, about incremental changes, or about short term solutions. After all, the changes we have all experienced in our personal lives have been much more fundamental
than that.

It's time for us to take a fresh look at government. To re-invent the way it works, to make it work for people. While many goals remain important to us -- creating jobs, providing safe communities, protecting health care -- we are governed by a system that was designed to meet the needs of the 1950's, not the challenges of the 1990's or beyond.

It's time to ask ourselves how government spending can double in the last ten years, while we seem to be getting less and less value for our tax money....

To ask ourselves why we spend more money on education than ever before, but our children aren't able to get the kind of education they need to secure a good and prosperous future....

Time to ask ourselves how we can spend more and more money fighting crime,
while our streets end up becoming more dangerous.

I have been troubled by these realities for some time. I fear Janet and I cannot hope for a better future for our children.

I want to do something about it. So, today I'm putting forth a plan to help build a better future.

There are more than half a million people unemployed in this province. The bottom line is that Ontario needs jobs. This plan will create more than 725,000 new jobs over the
next five years.

Ontario is among the highest-taxed jurisdictions in North America. There have been 65 tax increases in the past decade, including 11 hikes to your income tax.

This plan will cut your provincial income tax rate by 30%. Government spending has more than doubled in the past ten years, pushing both the tax burden and the provincial deficit higher.
This plan will reduce non-priority government spending by 20%.

Too many services essential to the public are now being cut, or are under such financial pressure that the quality of service is in danger.

This plan guarantees full funding for health care, law enforcement, and education spending in the classroom.

A decade of tax-and-spend economics has pushed our annual deficit over the $10 billion mark, mortgaging our children's future.

This plan will fully balance the budget in four years.

This is not a wish list or a bunch of empty political promises. This is a solid plan based on four years of study, analysis, consultation with workers, employers, party members and ordinary
Ontarians through extensive public hearings.

To be sure of our conclusions, we subjected this plan to an independent analysis by one of Canada's leading economic experts.

In short, our plan will work, and bring hope, opportunity and jobs back to Ontario.

There is nothing wrong with Ontario that a new vision, a new direction and turn-around management can't fix.

We can build a safe and prosperous province, but first we need a major change in the way government works.

It will not be easy, but it CAN be done, and it WILL be worth it.

In order to create the jobs we so badly need, and to renew our economy, we will have to set priorities and stick to them.

Tinkering with the system will not be enough. It is time for fundamental change, and change is never easy.

The political system itself stands in the way of making many of the changes we need right now.

Our political system has become a captive to big special interests. It is full of people who are afraid to face the difficult issues, or even talk about them. It is full of people doing all too well as a result of the status quo.

We need a revolution in this province....a Common Sense Revolution.

It will be a revolution of practical ideas for making government work better for the people it serves, and a revolution against the last ten years of government thinking when it comes to job
creation.

Ontario needs jobs today, and jobs tomorrow.

This plan will show you how this can be done....how Ontario can once again become an economic powerhouse, full of hope, opportunity and real jobs.

If you believe, as I do, that we need lower taxes, less government and 725,000 new jobs in Ontario, I am asking you to join me in my fight for a Common Sense Revolution.

- Mike Harris

The "Common Sense Revolution": An Internet Never Forgets

We encourage digressions in the Pith & Substance comment threads. And so there was nothing unusual about a discussion on the merits of the Common Sense Revolution (both the 1994 document and the post-1995 event). The debate caused me to look for the document on the Internet. Wikipedia provides a link, but it is now dead. It seems the Ontario PC's had it on their website until August 2005. Comparisons to the airbrushing of Trotsky and Zinoviev from Politburo get-togethers are unwarranted. I'm sure there is some innocent explanation for why this rather important historic document was deleted.

Anyhoo, thanks to those who archive the Internet, I can provide a link here: http://web.archive.org/web/20051124195225/http://www.ontariopc.com/feature/csr/csr_text.htm

Update: The hypertext link doesn't work. You have to copy the URL and put it in your browser.

As I write, even that doesn't work because the Wayback Machine is offline.

I think it is a sad thing that the Common Sense Revolution is not available somewhere on the live web. So, pending any notice from copyright lawyers, I am going to start publishing it as a series of posts. Comment away.

We Respond to Our Critics

I'd like to do a big post on the Ontario schools question, with citations to Rawls and Grant and so forth, but time is scarce. So I'll just reprint my response to the critics in the comment box (especially since the last response got cut off by Haloscan):

DC,

I'm not completely sure whether you are genuinely advancing an argument against public funding of education or are making a reductio to the effect that if non-breeders can't complain about their tax money going to other people's offspring, nobody can complain about any allocation of tax money at all, no matter how sectarian and discriminatory.

It doesn't matter, I suppose, since if the earnest argument doesn't work, the reductio doesn't either. If we think of the tax money as being spent on children, rather than the parents of children, there is no discrimination since everyone is a child at some point in their life-cycle. If that doesn't convince you, there is still the question of external benefits from (a) other people having children and (b) those children being educated. Finally, there are also subsidies to the childless, so maybe things work out in the end (although I wouldn't put a lot of weight on that one).

None of these things are true of funding the religious education of one confession and no others. Protestants don't become Catholics at some point in their lives. If there are external benefits to Protestants of educating Catholics, they can't really exceed those to Catholics of educating Protestants. Moreover, this is clearly a case of a subsidy that has no counter-balance anywhere else in the overall system of public expenditure.

B.

If history has a direction in a descriptive sense, it is impossible to reverse it. If you believe it has a direction in a prescriptive sense, you have a controversial (and false) theological belief. I can't see why people who disagree with this belief should have to send their children to be indoctrinated by those who think otherwise.

The distinction between a sewer system and an educational one is that it is genuinely possible to keep sewage merely technical, bracketing "comprehensive conceptions of the good." We all want our shit to flow somewhere it won't cause trouble. (Even if there are people who feel otherwise, there are non-metaphysical reasons to coerce them.)

Education is different. You can't teach kids in a purely technical way.

Andy,

Are constitutional arrangements a contract of adhesion that those coming here freely can't object to since they had notice of them? I'm probably more sympathetic to that idea than most Canadians, which doesn't make me very sympathetic.

But even on that view, I'd doubt that the original compact has really been maintained. In 1867, the regular public schools could be assumed to be generically Protestant. They'd avoid the disputes between Anglicans, Methodists and Presbyterians, but everyone would be taught the Lord's Prayer and the Whig Interpretation of History.

Neither Protestantism nor the public schools are what they used to be. A generation ago, it might have been possible to assume that they were both travelling in the same self-liquidating secularizing direction. But your future in Ontario is our present in the West: it belongs to the sects that proletyze and have kids, not the United Church. But those sects have as much right to claim descent from the Protestants of 1867 as do the lapsed secular types. So the initial deal, however fair in its time, has become unfair -- even to one of the original parties. We need to apply a cy pres solution, and Tory is approaching it.

Ontario: Fund Everybody's Schools

Those who like history to repeat itself (whether farcically or otherwise) will be happy to see the next Ontario election is going to be fought over the funding of religious schools. Somewhere the shade of George Brown is chuckling.

American readers may be a bit starteld to know that Ontario publicly funds Roman Catholic schools and those of no other religious groups. This arrangement is constitutionalized, and reflects a time when the public schools provided non-denominational Protestant instruction for the province's majority, and the only religious minority were the Papists. It is beyond dispute that them days are over: the public schools teach only the sub-Marxist mush popular in education faculties, unappealing to those who take their Protestanism seriously, and there are now other religious groups with their own insistent demands.

John Tory, of the eponymous Progressive Conservative Party, has proposed to remedy this situation by providing equival funding for evangelical, Mormon, Sikh or Muslim schools on the same basis as currently provided to those in full communion with the Bishop of Rome. The Liberal premier Dalton McGuinty decided to come out swinging this week in total opposition, referring to it as "segregation", "regressive," and contrary to multiculturalism.

In support of the "farce" idea, it turns out McGuinty is himself a product of the "regressive" and "segregated" Catholic school system, and his wife works in it. Moreover, his one plausible argument -- that a common public system is necessary to assimilate Muslims and wingnut kids. The trouble with this argument, though, is that as long as Ontario isn't going to ban home schooling and private schools, it isn't going to get at the people you most have to worry about. Those who abide by the public funding rules will necessarily be taking a move into the mainstream. Further, the public schools already teach the toxic stew of victim identity politics.

More fundamentally, it is just wrong to require parents to put their kids in schools that teach things they abhor if they want to take advantage of their own taxes. It is impossible NOT to teach some sort of religious view in schools, and the "religion of progress" is just as much a matter of faith as young earth creationism.

I suspect McGuinty's position will hurt the Liberals electorally -- if not right away, then over the next generation. He is taking on the most demographically dynamic groups on an issue they are likely to care much more about than anyone else. And the hypocrisy of his position in favour of his own religion can't be dodged.

If the Catholic hierarchy is serious about religious freedom, it should distance itself from McGuinty.