Ontario: Crombie's Commission Of Audit

How To Pay For Our Policies

(I talked about LaSalle, Bay of Quinte, and general topics on the Scrimshaw Show this week. Listen and subscribe - it would mean a lot.)

Doug Ford is spending more money than ever in Ontario and yet every public service Ontarians rely on feels like it’s falling apart. We have ER and doctor wait lists that are rising, teachers are being forced to flagrantly disregard class size limits and teach classes that are way too big, and Ontarians who need basic government services are often finding them inaccessible. This is what the highest spending government in history is getting us.

For someone who won election in part railing against Liberal deficit and debt, Doug Ford is leading a government that is consistently spending too much money. The $9.8B deficit is a choice, as are the various decisions to lower revenue through mostly car-friendly giveaways. Some of the problem is that Ontarians expect a level of services that the current tax base can’t D accommodate. It’s likely that part of the answer to fixing our current crisis will require tax rises. But it’s hard to ask Ontarians to pay more and more in taxes if there’s no effort made to ensure the taxpayers are getting the value for their money they deserve.

That’s why there’s an opening for Bonnie Crombie, who is off a successful weekend in London at the OLP AGM. There is an opening for progressives to reclaim fiscal responsibility, attack one of Doug Ford’s most persistent failures, and identify the money to pay for the big solutions that can attract ex-NDP voters.

Bonnie Crombie needs to promise to put together a commission of eminent ex-politicians across the political aisle with a wide, reaching mandate to identify waste, mismanagement, programs not achieving their objectives or whose objectives are long passed, and find the waste. Because if messaged properly, this could be a skeleton key to a bigger shift in sentiment against Doug.

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One of the problems with this government is that everyone agrees Doug Ford isn’t great. What the public is unconvinced of is that the opposition are any better. One of the problems for the left is that they’re not viewed as serious parties, and we do a lot to feed that narrative. The NDP have spent so much time on Ford Bad and not nearly enough articulating a vision for themselves in their 6 years of official opposition. The Liberals, it’s safe to say, have decided on a broad theme of wanting more for regular Ontarians and less for the rich and connected, but the Day 2 story is absolutely going to be “how are you going to pay for your ambitions?” And it’s hard to find non-politically toxic ways to do it.

We need more teachers, more nurses, more doctors, more hospitals, and more schools. Paying the literal human beings more money is great, but will cost money. Building the schools and hospitals to do health care and teaching in also cost money. We have a $16.8B backlog of school repairs that need fixing as of 2022 and a $16B commitment from Ford over 10 years. By then it’ll be double that at least. All of this costs a lot.

If a Crombie government is serious about housing, and driving down prohibitive development charges, then we’re probably going to need to help replace those charges with provincial cash in a Housing Accelerator Fund-esque scheme of cash for good regulatory changes. (Yes, the province has wide authority here, but I assume Crombie would like to get re-elected in this universe, so overruling councils would be a last resort.)

Reversing some of the Ford gimmicks could get us someway there - maybe a billion a year from a new license plate renewal program - but it’s unclear whether the province has the stomach for a big gas tax hike, which Ford has stubbornly frozen. Even something like canceling the 413 would be a one-off gift that couldn’t be re-used on an annual basis, though the Del Duca era idea of canceling it to fund necessary infrastructure is good.

So either Ontarians can be hit with higher deficit spending, higher taxes, or we can have the conversation about waste and efficiency to try and identify money already being taxed and spent that can be better used. Governments in general shouldn’t get the benefit of the doubt that they are being ruthlessly efficient, but a government that is as corrupt, as cozy with its friends, and as comfortable with the blatancy of its corruption surely has some terrible decisions that we don’t know about on top of the ones we do.

It’s also a political winner because of the fact that it ties together the deficit spending, the broken promises, and the corruption in a way that proposes a solution. The outsourcing of health care staffing to agencies is a good example of how you can save money by directly employing staff - you save on overhead of paying the agency, you point out that agencies picked have robust ties to Doug Ford/the PCPO through donations, and you say you’ll spend the money saved on hiring more staff. It’s a winning message because it ties together everything.

Yes, some progressives will balk at the concept of efficiency and waste being brought into the lexicon, but there is actually a progressive case for a ruthless war on waste. If we want to ask Ontarians to spend more of their tax dollars on government services it is perfectly reasonable for Ontarians to know that the dollars they’re already sending are being used well. And they will look kindly at a political party that gets that fact.

One of the things about the dying days of the Wynne government was the fact that nobody ever really got it. I was at the 2016 Scarborough loss and the 2016 Vanier win, and the mood in both those cases was genuinely insane to me as someone who lived in a house with progressive parents who had been shitting on Dalton McGuinty for being a liar and corrupt since I was old enough to remember. The reasons for discontent with the Liberals were numerous, and everyone in the bubble couldn’t see it. People got mad at the campaign the Liberals ran in Scarborough, and celebrated a 14% swing against them in Vanier like they won another majority government. I was at the victory party. I said at the time I thought they were insane for their reaction.

The reason this matters is that successful Liberal Parties convince the electorate that they can be trusted to be careful. Conservatives have to show the electorate they won’t be heartless, and Liberals have to show they won’t spend like drunken sailors. That is the curse both parties have to overcome to win.

Yes, people support more money for teachers and nurses and hospitals and schools, but individual policies can be popular and the totality of them can be not. Ed Miliband ran on a bunch of issues that polled at 60-70% in 2015 and yet the public looked at his shaky financial costings and the prospect of Ed Balls at the Treasury and re-elected Cameron. I’m sure there will be more and more polls showing that various ideas the Liberals have already signaled support for or are likely to do so - promising not to legislate wage levels, paying educators and health care workers more, raising ODSP - are popular. But if the message out of the Liberal Platform is an Oprah Car-esque “And you get more cash” to every issue we will lose.

If the commission comes back with minimal savings - which, frankly, given Doug Ford’s cronyism and general uselessness, seems unlikely! - then at least the public has been braced for the idea that tax rises or higher deficits are necessary. If the commission comes back with meaningful areas of waste that can be repurposed, then you get a lot of extra money for higher wages or less offensively little ODSP rates or whatever priority you want. But most of all, the act of announcing there will be a commission will make the politics so much easier.

Doug Ford’s main attack line on Bonnie Crombie is that she is a big government tax and spend Liberal who will bankrupt Ontario and make everything more expensive. The solution is not to pretend we won’t spend more money on priorities, because the public won’t believe us. If the Liberals spend years bemoaning the state of our public services and then say we won’t spend more money, nobody will believe us. But if we say that we will spend more money, but before we look at higher deficits or tax rises we will audit the books line by line to make sure we wring every dollar out of current spending before we ask for more? That will be seen to be more honest, and in touch with the reality that a majority of Ontarians believe Doug Ford is corrupt and helping his buddies.

The Ontario left has given up the ghost on fiscal responsibility, and it is part of why we aren’t trusted enough to govern. If Bonnie wants to win, a Commission of Audit to find all the waste and inefficiencies of Doug’s time to use to fund healthcare and education is a crucial step forward - both on policy terms and in the political reality. It’s not a silver bullet, but it’s a really strong step to distancing Crombie from the Dalton and Wynne legacies that also puts all of Ford’s worst traits - his reckless deficits, his cronyism, and his lies - on the front foot and takes away his best weapon.