An idea without a party
Or at any rate, the document they did release, described as a “plan for Ontario’s future,” while it contains the “ideas [that] are the core of the full platform,” is not to be taken for the platform itself. By the same token, the “ideas” it contains should not be taken for ideas, as such, but are only meant to represent ideas -- the idea of ideas, as it were.
Well, that’s too strong. There are some ideas in there, though distinguished for the most part for being unlikely to offend anyone. For example, the party would roll back the province’s most recent -- and wildly unpopular -- tax increase, the $2.6-billion “health levy” the McGuinty government imposed after the last election. But would it also reduce the statutory personal income tax rates? Would it cut the province’s punishing corporate tax rates, which the C. D. Howe Institute’s Jack Mintz has calculated are among the highest on earth? No, and no.
Likewise, despite railing against the McGuinty government’s $22-billion spending increase, the Conservatives can’t think of a single program they would cut, beyond an unspecified promise to find $1.5-billion in “savings.” Indeed, at various points in the document the party is at pains to emphasize how much more it would spend. A “John Tory government,” is says, will “guarantee growth in health funding.” Likewise, it would “invest” in education, providing “stable, long-term funding” and other euphemisms for “more spending.”
But what structural reforms would it undertake to see that these funds were put to good use? It promises electronic health records, which is probably just as well, and would allow “innovative partnerships” (read: private providers) in the delivery of publicly-funded health care. But would it encourage competition within the public system, on the “internal markets” lines recommended by, among others, Sen. Michael Kirby?
Likewise, while it would offer public funding to other religious schools similar to that already available to the Catholic system, this is on condition that they agree to submit to the dictates of their local school board. But any serious reform policy ought to lean in the other direction, towards allowing public schools to manage themselves, free of the boards’ suffocating embrace: charter schools, in other words. There is no suggestion of this.
Indeed, beyond a vague but praiseworthy pledge to uphold “one law for all” -- meaning less tolerance for Caledonia-style occupations -- there is little in the entire document to suggest any fundamental differences in how Ontario would be governed under Mr. Tory: just that it would be better managed, by more honest leaders. I don’t doubt that’s true. But the government would be just as big as it is now, and would do just about the same things, in more or less the same way.
I don’t mean to single Mr. Tory out. As a statement of policy, his platform, or plan, or whatever it is, is a fair reflection of what Conservative parties stand for today, not only in Ontario, but across the country. Which is to say, not much.
Perhaps we should simply say that the conservative moment has passed in Canada. There was a time some years ago when Conservative parties were willing to advocate for smaller government and freer markets, for cutting spending, ending subsidies, deregulating prices, and privatizing government services. At the time conservatives believed they were in the vanguard of history. But it appears now to have been a blip.
Whether out of sincere conviction or electoral calculation, the nominally Conservative parties, federal and provincial, have lost interest in the sorts of substantive policy changes to which their predecessors were committed. They are conservative only in the sense of wishing to preserve the status quo. But conservatives of the radical, reforming variety are now in more or less the same position as socialists: sincere, well-meaning, but without a hope of forming a government.
With the difference that the socialists still have a party to advocate for them, and as such to influence the policies of the other parties. The Liberals may be a classic interest-brokerage party at heart, but they have the NDP constantly at their elbow, pulling them leftward. No comparable party exists to the right of the Conservatives. The effect is to marginalize the most anodyne ideas as outside the mainstream. As in: “even” the Conservatives would not go so far as to propose x -- though x is as often as not no more than the consensus of modern economists, such as that high marginal tax rates discourage investment, or that minimum wage laws discourage employment.
So perhaps it is time for conservatives and market liberals to have a little rethink. The strategy of throwing their lot in with the Conservatives has been tried, and failed -- failed, not in the sense that Conservative parties have been unable to win power, but that they win power, if they do, at the expense of conservatism.
The broader question is whether exercising power directly, rather than indirectly via principled advocacy, is the best means of seeing conservative ideas put into effect. The NDP’s success over the years suggest the contrary. Might the time have come for an NDP of the right?
6/16/2007
