Canadian Cincinnatus

What Tim Hudak should have promised voters in the recent Ontario election: painful budget cuts

Contrary to the received wisdom of small-c conservatives, Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak didn’t do all that bad: the Ontario PC party gained 12 seats at Queen’s Park while the Liberals lost 17; the PC popular vote was only 2 percentage points lower than the Liberals (35.4% vs. 37.6); and most importantly, Hudak denied Premier Dalton McGuinty a majority. Ronald Reagan he ain’t, Mike Harris he ain’t, even Stephen Harper he ain’t, but Conservative leader Tim Hudak is nevertheless a damn sight better man than his two hapless predecessors, John Tory and Ernie Eves (which is why he should be given a chance to grow into his job).

Still, it is obvious he could have done better. Dalton McGuinty is an enormously unpopular figure who is clearly well beyond his best-buy date. The recent Ontario election was Hudak’s to lose. A decisive majority was in his grasp and he blew it.

In my opinion, Hudak’s principal mistake was that he failed to fire up his base. This is not just a feeling on my part, it is backed up by the numbers. I think my analysis, written two days before the vote, also holds up: Hudak’s campaign went too negative because he was afraid to positively state all of his platform.

Hudak was right in focusing on taxes. Dalton McGuinty is enormously unpopular because of all the taxes he has raised, such as the HST. Unfortunately, in promising to repeal a bunch of them, Hudak had a credibility problem. He didn’t come across as a serious man because his tax cuts didn’t have corresponding spending cuts attached to them. While Hudak’s strategists likely thought this was a clever move - staying clear of controversial matters in an election campaign – his people were too clever by a half. What this omission signaled to the voters was that Hudak was merely pandering to them and being less than honest. Even worse, by avoiding difficult issues, it also signaled to them that he is a coward, and not a leader.

(As an aside, Hudak’s proposed tax cuts would not have increased tax revenue as per the Laffer Curve. Tax cuts only stimulate government revenue when the tax burden of wealth creators is relieved. Cutting a consumption tax, like the HST, does nothing to stimulate the economy. The Laffer Curve effect only really kicks in when taxes on employers, investors and savers are cut.)

Want an example of a real leader? Take Paul Ryan, Republican congressman from Wisconsin District #1. Recently, he came up with the Ryan Plan for balancing the US budget. It is the only serious budget plan out there that actually takes on runaway entitlement spending (basically Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security). Is Ryan able to get away with such heresy because he represents a safe conservative district? No. Ryan is in a largely Democrat district. But early in this interview, he tells the announcer, Peter Robinson, an anecdote that illustrates his survival secret: a constituent comes up to him and says to him, “You know. I don’t always agree with what you are doing, but I can tell you are trying and being sincere. And that’s what matters to me.”

Unfortunately, in the last Ontario election, voters could not have said the same thing about Tim Hudak.

 

The Ontario riding of Pickering – Scarborough East: an anatomy of an electoral defeat

My friend, Peter, ran the numbers for the Electoral District Association of Pickering - Scarborough East, comparing the results of the recent provincial election with those of the last federal election, held earlier this summer. This is what he found:

 

Federal election (May 2, 2011)                    Provincial Election (Oct 6, 2011)

Conservatives - 19,220 votes                        PC   –       13,010 votes

Liberals   –        18,013 votes                       Liberals – 18,134 votes

NDP        -          8,932 votes                        NDP      -   6,433 votes

Green      -         1,751 votes                        Green    -  1,092 votes

 

The first thing that jumps out of these figures is that the number of Liberal votes hardly budged from one election to the next - Premier McGuinty’s candidate got barely 100 votes more than Ignatieff’s; the second is that the Ontario PC party got over 6,000 votes less than Prime Minister Harper’s Conservatives; and the third is that the rest of the parties got marginally fewer voters than they did in the federal election.

While it is possible to read too much into the behaviour of one riding, it should be noted that the Pickering – Scarborough East EDA is known as a bell-weather riding – that is, it tends to go with whomever forms the majority in Parliament.

The inescapable conclusion from Peter’s investigation is that Tim Hudak lost principally because conservative voters stayed home.

Stay tuned: in an upcoming post, I will argue what mistakes were made and what can be done to turn things around in the future.

 

The Ontario election: the contest that shouldn’t be close

I have to apologize to my dear readers for being AWOL on the Ontario election campaign up till now, even though election day is Thursday and I live in Toronto. I have tried on several occasions to write something but I just have not been able to summon the necessary enthusiasm. But guilt is haunting me, so here goes: 

This election shouldn’t be anywhere near close. Liberal leader Dalton McGuinty is a deeply unpopular, serial liar whose time was clearly up a long time ago. I believe the reason Conservative leader Tim Hudak’s campaign has gotten such little traction is because it has focussed too much on Dalton McGuinty and not enough on us. Paradoxically, by constantly attacking McGuinty, Hudak has given him a free ride.

What I mean is this: the first rule of campaigning is that you start out positive and only go negative near the end, and they broke this rule.

The positive message brands you, differentiates you from your competitors and gives people a reason to vote for you. The key to executing the positive phase correctly is to not try to avoid controversy. This is a common mistake and is what Hudak’s team did. Your message must be sufficiently controversial. This will have two effects: it will emotionally pull people who agree with you into your camp, and it will deliver people who disagree with you into the arms of your enemy. But with a judicious mix of wedge issues, the first group will be bigger than the second. I think this is what Scott Stinson was getting at when he wrote a few weeks ago in the Post that the Ontario election was “a race in need of a wedge”. 

Unfortunately, this group of supporters will not be large enough. You need to also get enough disengaged ‘moderates’. Your positive message will not reel them in. They don’t care about policies. They vote solely based on gut-feel (that is, when they bother voting at all). These people are what I call ‘naively cynical’. By this I mean, they know little about the issues but make up for it by believing that all politicians are crooks. Professing your own purity and good intentions will not impress them. You will just look holier-than-thou. What you have to do is to get them to recoil from your opponent, who they also believe is a crook. This is where the dreaded ‘American-style’ negative attack ads come into play.

The order of execution is important. The positive message must come first because the voters it works on have a much longer political memory than those who the negative attacks target. As a bonus, if you hold your attacks until the end, they do not have adequate time to respond to your allegations.

A classic example is Reagan vs. Carter in 1980. He started out positively, patiently explaining his agenda while the Democrats were screaming ‘extremist’ at him the whole time. In this phase, he ignored them. The ad with the picture of Carter kissing Brezhnev only came at the very end. A second example is Mike Harris’ Common Sense Revolution in 1995. It is amazing how well the positive-negative strategy works and how often campaigns ignore it and fail.

Unfortunately, the success of Harris’s campaign against McGuinty in 1999 (“Dalton’s not up for the job”) - which was almost entirely negative - taught his successors the wrong lesson. The reason going negative right away against McGuinty worked so well for Harris was because, by 1999, everybody knew exactly who Mike Harris was. His first term was the positive phase of that campaign. In contrast, Eves, Tory and Hudak are (or were) new and unknown and they desperately needed to define themselves.

Fortunately, Hudak did this just enough of this that he is unlikely to pull a John Tory. But still, an overwhelming victory was his for the taking. Luckily, he will likely live to fight another day, and hopefully he will have learned a lesson.

 

Who is the Strong Mayor Now?

"Unintended consequences" has become a buzz phrase lately, mostly used by left wing latte sippers.  It's an indication of a shift in power from left to right over the last few months, and Toronto's election of true conservative Rob Ford is the most dramatic example.

Four years ago David Miller won his second term with unprecidented powers, bestowed upon him by Ontario's libreral premier, Dalton McGuinty, who felt Toronto's mayor needed to be a "strong mayor," with powers like the mayor of New York, the power to push through a socialist (oops, I mean "progessive") agenda without needing the support of right wing councillors.

I warned friends, especially socialist friends, about the danger here: what if a right wing mayor were elected?  Would they be happy then?  I was no fan of Miller, and I was trying to get them to understand how I felt about the City of Toronto Act and Miller's new powers, which allowed him to have an executive council of his socialist buddies, limit debate on the budget and shut right wing councillors out of city government, giving key positions only to his loyalists.

My socialist friends scoffed.  David Miller was going to be mayor for years, at least until he annoited a successor.  No right winger could ever win Toronto.

In their defense, I envisioned Doug Holiday, Case Oates or maybe Denzil Minnan-wong coming to power.  Even I didn't see that the left's arch-nemisis, favorite council punching bag, and the man endlessly ridiculed by the Toronto Star could ever come to power.

But now Rob Ford is the strong mayor with power that McGuinty and the socialists unwittingly endowed him with.  He has already shut out the downtown socialist from his executive, and while the left wing councilors point out that Rob Ford is only one vote on council, they are quietly cringing that they gave him the power to corall many votes without the need to compromise.  The unintended consequences of the City of Toronto Act make it clear that it is a mistake to increase the power of government to support a particular ideology.  Governments must be contained and constrained.

I'm delighted about the election and Rob Ford's strong mayor powers, of course.  Rob will be able to fundamentally change the way the city works, and I'm looking forward to that.  But I'd still like to see the end of the City of Toronto Act, because I prefer it when the mayor has to build a consensus, something Miller always talked about but never bothered to achieve.

Unlike my socialist friends four years ago, I can see that a pendulum swings.  Rob Ford has more staying power than David Miller, of that I'm sure, but stuff happens.  One day, unexpectedly, a socialist mayor will be voted in, probably disguising himself as a centrist.  I don't want him to be a strong mayor.  I want him to have to include the right wing councillors.

But for now: Go, Rob, Go!

Mike Downtown

Why hydro rates in Ontario are about to skyrocket

Ontario Premier McGuinty thought he was going to have a good news day when his government announced a 10% cut in electricity rates for Jan 1, 2011. This all blew up in his face when it was revealed that Ontario power consumers will face a 45% rate increase in the next 5 years which will more than offset this government subsidized treat (i.e. taxpayers rewarding themselves with their own money). 

This is common knowledge. What we need to keep our eye focused on is why electricity rates in Ontario are climbing. The basic problem is that Ontario no longer builds power plants, while it is hell-bent on shutting down existing plants. No nuclear plants are in the works; the gas-fired plant scheduled for Oakville is shelved while the Lakeview Thermoelectric Station was shut down because it burned coal. Talk of shutting down the coal fired plants at Lambton and even Nanticoke persists. Meanwhile local utilities are offering exorbitant subsidies to proprietors of wind farms and solar arrays. This counterproductive behaviour isn’t just a silly Liberal idea. Red Tories Ernie Eves and John Tory also promised to shut down our coal plants, just not as many and not as fast as the Liberals (the “me-too-but…” strategy).

As long as Ontario’s electricity policy is governed by a stuff white people like ethos rather than a realistic appraisal of real-world factors, our electricity rates will continue to rise. The facts of the matter are: coal is the cheapest source of reliable power; nuclear is the cleanest source of reliable power; natural gas is cleaner than coal and cheaper than nuclear; solar and wind are too unreliable to ever form more than a small subset of Ontario’s power; and the examples from various European countries show that green energy is a money losing dog. These are fundamental truths that the arts-and-croissant crowd in downtown Toronto doesn’t like to think about because it is too messy. Nevertheless we have no option but to ponder such concerns if we want to keep enjoying reliable cheap electricity in Ontario.

The environmentalists would doubtlessly point out pollution problems and global warming concerns. But even if we assume that global warming is a real crisis, then why are they against nuclear power? the one proven generation technology that doesn’t contribute to greenhouse gases at all. Just look at the French power grid. It doesn’t emit any pollution.

Hopefully the leader of the Ontario Conservative Party, Tim Hudak, shows more understanding of this issue than his two hapless predecessors.

 

Dalton McGuinty and the war on impaired driving

As of August 1, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty has made 0.0 the legal level of blood alcohol for drivers age of 21 and under. The safety Nazis couldn’t be happier because, as they note, impairment is strongly correlated with highway traffic fatalities.

When I see McGuinty do things like this, I am reminded of something Blaise Pascal once said:

He who seeks to regulate every form of human behaviour, ends up encouraging vice rather than suppressing it.

OK, so what happens when young people can’t consume even modest quantities of alcohol before driving? Some will abstain from drinking all together and drive stone cold sober. But if even having a sip of beer before driving incurs the same penalty as driving sloshed, why not drive sloshed? This is the kind of perverse incentive structure that we create when we punish marginal behaviours with the same severity as heinous crimes.

For instance, one of the arguments against capital punishment for everything except murder is that if we punished, say, child molestation with capital punishment then what incentive does the molester have to keep his victim alive? As the mafia says, “it’s always better with no witnesses.” That is why I am against capital punishment for child molesters even though I would gladly like to see them all killed. The same logic holds for drinking and driving.

This brings me to an interesting but related point. Have you noticed the dearth of statistics surrounding drunk driving? Considering how important an issue drunk driving allegedly is, and how useful statistics are at analyzing social phenomenon, you would think the numbers could be found on the front page of the Toronto Star, but they aren’t.

The MADD crowd love to trumpet the statistic that one in every two highway deaths is ‘alcohol related’ (a slippery concept in and of itself). Aside from the fact that this statistic is outdated (it was true in the seventies, but after three decades of campaigning against drunk driving, it is now closer to 25%),  what I would like to see is a graph comparing the likelihood of causing a traffic fatality vs. the impairment level of the at-fault driver. I wonder what the slope of that curve looks like. I bet it would rise linearly and slowly at lower levels of impairment but would shoot up exponentially as the driver gets blotto. I suspect we don’t see such a graph because it demonstrates that driving with low levels of impairment is not all that bad, a conclusion that conflicts with MADD’s goal of demonizing all drinking. We get a hint of what this graph looks like whenever somebody lets slip the fact that in half of all impaired driver-caused fatalities, the driver has at least twice the legal limit of blood alcohol. Whenever this statistic is trumpeted, it is quickly swept under the rug when it is realized that this fact doesn’t support the desired political goal of lowering the legal limit to zero. I wonder what percentage of deaths is caused by people with three times the legal limit and how few people actually drive that drunk?

Another thing I am curious about is how does the reaction time of impaired drivers compare to a group of drivers who are known to have deficient driving skills but are neverthelesss perfectly legal to drive. Since the anti-drunk driving crowd loves talking about reaction time, how alcohol impairs it and how reaction time correlates with driving skill, you would think they would do studies comparing the reaction time of impaired people against a control group of sober people. For instance, how much does an athletic twenty year old man have to drink in order to have a reaction time equal to that of an 85 year old woman who is sober and with a valid licence? In the statistics of performance measurement, performance scores must be compared with the scores of a control group in order to be able to conclude something meaningful from them. But with regard to drunk driving, they never are (or if tey are, the results are never publicized). Of course, we aren’t shown the raw performance scores either, except to be assured that they are Really Bad. 

I would also like to know what the distribution of reaction times for a set of randomly chosen sober drivers and a random set of drivers with, say, 0.04% blood alcohol? Do the curves overlap? If so, by how much?

I’m betting that if all this data were well publicized, it would provide a much more nuanced picture of impaired driving that would make criminalizing marginal cases of the practice a much harder sell.

What's a Liberal Media To Do?

The liberal bias of the print media stands out glaringly in the case of Michael Bryant versus the Metis down-on-his-luck bicycle courier.

This morning I learned from a relatively conservative paper, The Toronto Sun, that a dozen bike couriers showed up for the first court appearance of Michael Bryant, charged with criminal negligence causing the death of Darcy Allan Sheppard, who spent 60 seconds somehow attached to the side of Bryant's Saab convertible before being smashed off against a mail box.

The National Post, another relatively conservative paper, also mentioned the disgruntled bicycle couriers, noting that one stated, "“I hope justice will be done. Whether it will be or not, I don’t know. This will be a big test.”

What surprised me was that coverage in the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail didn't mention the bike couriers at Bryant's hearing.  In fact, I had to do a search on both websites to even find a mention of the hearing, and the Star's breathless headline described how eager Bryant is to get to court.

I submit that if this were a former conservative cabinet member, say from Mike Harris's government, both newspapers would've led with frontpage photographs of "enraged cyclists."

I actually believe the Toronto Star and the Globe are giving this sad little tale of road rage gone bad all the coverage it deserves.  I just don't believe that a conservative charged with killing a bike courier with his Saab convertible would get the same quiet respect.

Mike Downtown

Dalton McGuinty rejects green power

It never ceases to amaze me how hypocritical liberals are when it comes to the environment. They claim to be sooo concerned about global warming, climate change, carbon footprints, etc. but when it is time for the rubber to meet the road they always do nothing, or at least very little. Take Dalton McGuinty’s recent decision to shelve the construction of two reactors at Darlington. While I have no doubt that the ballooning costs that he cited are a legitimate concern (nuclear reactors are very expensive), if stopping the coming environmental apocalypse is so freaking important, then why not squeeze the treasury until it bleeds and come up with the extra money?

While long-time readers of this blog know that I am a climate change sceptic, I nevertheless do think that if there is a practical way to generate electricity in our province without burning inherently dirty fuels like coal, then we should do it. And there is. Currently Ontario has four major coal plants: Nanticoke, Lambton, Thunder Bay and Atikokan. Of the three, only Nanticoke is comparable in size to existing nuclear plants like Pickering and Darlington. Therefore you only need to build two more full size nuclear power plants to replace all of our existing coal fired generators. At that point all that would be left would be the oil burning plant at Lennox (which is only used for peak production because oil is expensive). Convert Lennox to natural gas and voila, Ontario is generating electricity with almost no emissions.

In addition, the recession and a couple of cool summers have lulled Dalton McGuinty into complacency. But the economy will recover and it is only a matter of time before we get another blast furnace summer (regardless of whether global warming is real or not). When this happens, our air conditioning load will go through the roof again, just like it did in 2003 and 2004 when OPG was scrambling to find electricity to prevent rolling blackouts. To prevent this scenario we need to be planning ahead now. Given that Ontario’s power consumption grows on average every year, we need to be adding to our generation capacity not just maintaining it.

I think at least a partial cause of the cost problems associated with nuclear power resides in the fact that we tend to build them piecemeal from a single source, thereby not taking advantage of economies of scale or competition. If you order more nukes, the required R&D is therefore amortized over more units, lowering unit cost. Competition? Simple. Follow the two-for-the-price-of-one strategy that has been so successful for the US Air Force (whenever they employed it). What is this? Let me tell you about the Great Engine War: In the 1970’s the Pratt & Whitney F100 was the sole jet engine used in the F15 and F16 fighters, but like all monopolies, Pratt & Whitney became contractually unreliable and began to produce shoddy goods with cost overruns. In the early 1980’s, the Air Force initiated the Alternate Fighter Engine program where they began to buy GE’s equivalent F110 jet engine as well. Because the number of engines ordered from each manufacturer depended on how each manufacturer’s engine performed against the other, the result was that both engine types performed better and more reliably than specified, with both bids coming in on time and under cost.

If Ontario had a comprehensive nuclear strategy instead of the present ad hoc one, we could get two different manufacturers - say the top two bids between Westinghouse, Areva and AECL - to build reactors for two different nuclear plants. While the total number of reactors ordered would be fixed, each manufacturer’s portion of that total would depend on their relative performance versus the other guy. Cost over-runs, delays and shoddy goods delivered will mean that the other company gets to build more reactors at your expense. To be able to pull this off Ontario will need a long-term strategy that mandates the purchase of a significant quantity of nuclear reactors over a long period of time. But if we have to build them sooner or later anyway, we might as well do it in such a way that we get the best bang for the buck.

And when they are completed and running, we let the same companies run the plants with the proviso that the quantity of our electricity purchases from them will depend on who gives us the best rates and the most reliable service.

Christine Elliott – another red Tory loser?

Troubling news articles like this makes me wonder if Christine Elliott wants to cast herself in the “socially moderate, fiscally conservative” role, you know, the kind of politicians Canadians (we are told) can’t seem to get enough of, like John Turner, Kim Campbell, Paul Martin, Ernie Eves and John Tory. After all, Canadians are defined by their moderation. They certainly won’t elect “socially left-wing, economically socialist” politicians like Pierre Trudeau or Jean Chrétien, let alone (gasp) unelectable “socially conservative, fiscally conservative” troglodytes like Mike Harris or Ralph Klein. These people will never win high office here!

And then there is the issue of human rights commissions which confirms my suspicions. 

As Hugh McIntyre of the Western Standard blog points out, scrapping the human rights commission is a winning issue if the substance of the matter is explained to the voters beforehand. Most people in that poll likely didn’t know just how much of a threat these tribunals are to free speech and free thought. If the issue is vigorously presented in those terms, it can be an out-of-the-park home run for the Conservative Party.

When Christine Elliott equated the human rights commission issue with faith-based funding, she really only displayed her lack of political judgement. Faith-based funding didn’t fail because it was too right wing. It failed because it was really hated by conservatives – the PC Party of Ontario’s core supporters. In contrast, ending human rights commissions is something conservatives are passionate about. It is a rallying cry. As it will also be for a sizable portion of moderate and uncommitted voters, when the harmful nature of these odious institutions is explained to them.

But one gets the impression that Christine Elliott, like all good red Tories, isn’t interested in vigorously defending anything at all. She thinks she can just glide to victory on her ‘moderation’ – just like John Tory did.

I wonder what other issues she will compormise on to get along?

The red Tory electability myth is like a phoenix. No matter how many times unprincipled ‘moderate’ red Tories get electorally shellacked, the moderation-as-the-key-to-winning-the-election myth rises up from the ashes.

And the winner in Haliburton – Kawartha Lakes – Brock is .... the Ontario PC Party!

Thursday’s by-election resulted in the best possible outcome for PC Ontario. After the self-inflicted 2007 provincial election loss, the party urgently needed rebuilding. The best way to do that is with a leadership race attracting new ideas and face faces to the demoralized party, and now it is getting that chance. The worst possible outcome from a party perspective would have been for John Tory to eke out a slim victory in what is the safest conservative seat in the province. A weak, wounded Conservative leader continuing to dangle over the edge of the abyss - that would have made an ideal gift for Dalton McGuinty.

Much has been made of John Tory’s nice-guy personality from conservative-leaning pundits. Having met the man twice, I can personally attest to that aspect of him. Nevertheless I have long lost any sympathy for the man. After two electoral disasters under his belt (the first being Kim Campbell’s 1993 election campaign – the single worst election catastrophe in Canadian history for any party - which he managed), he needed to do the honourable thing and quit. And if he had done that right away, an opening would have been made for his rehabilitation. He could have then run in the next provincial election as an ordinary candidate. As a former party leader who had the good sense to leave gracefully, he would have been guaranteed a cabinet post by the new party leader once McGuinty was dispatched.

But instead, he made the classic weak man mistake of clinging to an untenable position (cf. Joe Clark), and, as a result, he delayed the beginning of his party’s healing process by a year and a half with his quixotic quest for a seat in the provincial legislature. That was a fundamentally selfish act and that is why I shed no tear for him today.

The good news is that there is still plenty of time left to rebuild the party before the next election is upon us. Even though a leadership race will take about a year, there will still remain at least another year for the new leader to find his footing before the writ is dropped. And whether the Conservatives have 23 or 24 seats at Queens Park right now doesn’t matter a whit, thanks to the commanding majority Tory gave the Liberals in 2007. As well, Haliburton – Kawartha Lakes – Brock will be an easy pick-up for Lauri Scott when the party is under decent leadership again.