Canadian Cincinnatus

Liberal Talking Points Even in Construction News

It's not surprising to come across talking points from the Ontario Liberal government in the Toronto Star or the Globe and Mail, but I was gobsmacked the other day to come across them in the construction news: On-Site Magazine, which proudly boasts that it's been Canada's construction magazine since 1957. The reasonably titled article, Research Council to Examine Broken Bridge Bolts, is ostensibly about finding out why the brand-spanking new Nipigon River Bridge failed, but deeper in the article the truth begins to reach far more than the cables of this bridge could ever stretch.

I have a bit of a thing for bridge news because in my teen years I worked for a bridge painting company on far flung bridges up north, and this bridge caught my attention because I crossed in twice last fall, first in October on my way out to Vancouver, when the bridge wasn't fully open to traffic yet, and again in December on my way home after it had opened. There are a several of these cable-stayed bridges in the lower mainland of BC, and other than some early ice shedding problems that broke a lot of windshields one week, they seem to work well.

The big news was that on January 10th during a cold snap, the deck on one side of the bridge lifted two feet, creating quite a ramp for one direction of traffic and a undercarriage ripping metal barrier for the other. This resulted in the temporary closure of the brand new bridge, and so far they've only been able to reopen one lane by piling thousands of pounds of concrete barriers in the closed lane to weight the bridge back down into place.

With words like "Embarrassing" in the headlines of some articles, the Ontario government went into spin mode and came up with some talking points, and they're all here in On-Site Magazine.

1) "...the bridge lifted in extremely high winds..."

Most of the articles about this bridge hardly mention the 70 kph winds because they're not unusual or extreme on the north shore of the biggest lake on the continent, Lake Superior. This bridge is less than 5 kilometres up river from Nipigon Bay. But the Liberals are fond of carbon taxes, which they say we need because climate change is making the weather more extreme. Here's the talking point: it's not bad engineering or bad Liberal oversight that caused the bridge to fail, it's global warming! Interestingly, the On-Site article doesn't mention that temperature had plummeted to -30 C. That's not extreme for Nipigon either, but it just sounds too cold for global warming. Any engineer can tell you that metal contracts and gets brittle in the cold, and this probably has more to do with the cable-stayed bridge heaving (and staying up) than the wind. But the Liberals don't want to remind Ontarians that we still enjoy very cold winters. It might make us think that we don't need carbon taxes.

2)"The $106-million project is still under construction…The westbound side was opened to two-lane traffic in November last year" 

Wow! These lines taken together give the impression that the bridge isn’t finished and maybe they just opened the two lanes too soon. The bridge is complete. They had an opening ceremony and everything. The project isn’t complete because construction on a second bridge has yet to begin under a plan to twin highway 11. Eventually one bridge will handle eastbound traffic and one westbound, but this bridge is complete! It failed less than two months after opening. So here's the talking point: make it sound like it’s still under construction, implying that it didn’t fail two months after opening, which sounds like someone really messed up. It's just part of a work-in-progress. It'll all get sorted out when the "project" is complete. Of course the old bridge, partially demolished, stood without a problem since 1933, and it didn’t fail just after opening.

3) "No one was injured but the crossing was closed for almost a day, which severed the Trans-Canada Highway and “cut Canada in half,” said a local politician."

Note the sneer in this statement: Only a “local politician” said the country was cut in half, as if it isn’t really a valid statement. What could a narrow minded “local politician” know about big Canada? Of course, anyone who looks at a map can tell you that the mayor of Nipigon, the “local politician,” was right on the money when he said the country was cut in half for truck and car traffic. It's a good thing the rail bridge just south of the highway bridge is owned by the CN/CP. (Note the rail bridge didn't fail in the "extremely high winds.") The only other highway route from Ontario to Manitoba is south of Lake Superior through the United States, a massive detour. So the talking point: let’s make the local politician sound like he’s exaggerating. Let’s pretend that truck traffic in goods worth hundreds of millions a day wasn’t forced to wait for the bridge to reopen or work through the mountain of paper required to cross the US border so that truckers could deliver their loads via the US.

 

The simple fact: if you wanted to drive from anywhere in the east of Canada to anywhere in the west, you would've had to go through the United States of America. In fact, some heavier truck loads are still forbidden. Canada, except for rail traffic, was cut in half. The Ontario government failed to properly oversee an essential piece of economic infrastructure.

 

Journalists believe they are more objective than bloggers, yet they parrot the Liberal governments without a question. I'm a conservative, but when you read my words, at least you know that and can make your own judgements. I don't pretend to be a neutral observer, which is why I'm more trustworthy than the CBC, or apparently, On-Site Magazine.

 

Mike Downtown

Christine Elliott: sore loser

On August 28, Christine Elliott, the widow of Canada’s legendary finance minister Jim Flaherty, announced her immediate resignation as Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP). She was most recently re-elected to represent the riding of Whitby – Oshawa in the Provincial Parliament on June 12, 2014. Ontario’s next election is scheduled for Oct 4, 2018.

For a year, she had been running to succeed Tim Hudak as the new leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario. The leadership vote was on May 9 of this year. She lost to Patrick Brown. According to the newspapers, she has not been seen inside the provincial legislature since her defeat. The new party leader Patrick Brown had, apparently, “reached out to her numerous times” but according to The Star, she has only been in text or e-mail communication with him.

In my opinion, by resigning barely a year into her four-year term of office, she is doing the constituents of Whitby – Oshawa a disservice. She was elected to represent them in the provincial legislature until the next election. Barring some unforeseen circumstance, she owes it to her constituents to stick it out. Losing a leadership bid does not count as such a circumstance - becoming party leader would have simply been icing on the cake. There are plenty of MPP’s in Queen’s Park who are able to serve their constituents perfectly well without becoming party leader. I know that she had also recently lost her husband, but as his death - April 10, 2014 - was before last provincial election (June 12, 2014), she had the opportunity to drop out. Her loss also did not prevent her from subsequently seeking party leadership. As a result, she cannot now plead personal grief as an excuse for resigning form politics.

Another example of such behaviour occurred after former Prime Minister Paul Martin lost the 2006 Federal election to Stephen Harper. After the loss, he rarely showed up in Parliament. Then-NDP leader Jack Layton was right when he called Martin out for his selfish behaviour. Because, in spite of his personal setbacks, he still represented the federal riding of LaSalle – Emard until Oct 14, 2008. The good people of LaSalle – Emard deserved better than a sulking, absentee MP. Incidents like this demonstrate that many elected officials care more about their own career prospects and personal vanity than they do in representing their constituents.

The gold standard for how an elected official should behave when he loses comes from former Australian Prime Minister John Howard. He represented the Division of Bennelong the Australian House of Representatives from 1974 to 2007. He was the Australian Prime Minster from 1996 to 2007. He is the second longest serving Australian Prime Minister ever and was elected Prime Minister for four terms. On Dec 3, 2007, he not only lost the election to Labour, but he lost his own seat.

His concession speech was one of the most remarkable I have ever heard. Instead of being downcast and gloomy and bitter, like many, he cheerfully thanked the voters of Australia for the privilege of allowing him to serve the good people of Bennelong and Australia.

It is said that in hardship, the true worth of one’s character comes out. On Dec 3, 2007, John Howard demonstrated that his character was made of gold. Too bad many of our elected representatives are made of less noble stuff.

 

Patrick Brown and the power of the grassroots

On Saturday, Patrick Brown beat Christine Elliot to become the new leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario. The contrast in style when it came to their respective leadership campaigns couldn’t have been starker. Christine Elliot, the wife of former federal Conservative Finance Minister, Jim Flaherty, was the odds-on favourite to be the next PC Ontario leader. She had most of the existing Conservative MPP’s in her camp. In contrast, the Queens Park press corp initially gave the 36-year old Patrick Brown – a virtually unknown Federal Conservative backbencher, and a former Barrie city councilor – almost no chance. Who is he?

When it was revealed that he signed up 40,000 new party members (frontrunner Elliot had only signed up 26,000), everybody took notice. When Christine Elliot questioned the validity of some of these members, she showed that she was worried.

What was his secret?

Like Mike Harris before him – the last successful Conservative leader in Ontario, he understood the power of the grassroots. As the National Post post-mortem relates:

“Brown showed up when he visited ridings. He didn’t just appear and make a stump speech, but he did the work. As one Tory told me, he was stunned when Brown arrived at his local riding association and not only knew the local issues but had read a party policy paper the former candidate had helped draft. He had questions about local issues and knew how to connect with voters.

That riding went for Brown when the votes rolled in Saturday and he trumped Christine Elliott’s total take.”

“By contrast, the same Tory said Elliott gave a rote speech and didn’t come briefed on local issues.”

This anecdote illustrates Patrick’s virtues, virtues that several friends of mine who were involved in his campaign have already corroborated.  He was also active in Ontario’s ethic communities. During his campaign, he went on a trade mission to India and got an endorsement from the Prime Minister of India!

What is less remembered is that Mike Harris used the same playbook when he created the underpinnings of what was to become the Common Sense Revolution. When he became the PC Party leader (while Bob Rae was Premier), he didn’t stay put in Queen’s Park. He went out on the road to sell his message to the party’s members and to listen to what they thought. He visited every riding in the province. I have been told that these meetings could be very small: seven people in a church basement in Nowheresville, but that experience served him well. He earned the loyalty of his party’s supporters and learned a lot about what was possible to do and what was not. This was experience that former PC leader Tim Hudak could have used.

My favourite part of the Netfix series, House of Cards, was the Peachoid episode, the third episode in season 1. It began with Frank Underwood entering into high-stakes negotiations with the teachers unions on a big nationwide education bill. As the meeting began, Frank’s assistant pulls him aside to tell him about some trouble brewing in his congressional district. His assistant insists that he go back to resolve the problem. When Frank protests, exclaiming that the education bill is vastly more important than some petty local issue, his assistant reminds him who sent him to Washington. Just before the opening credits, Frank is sitting in a limo going to the airport. He says, “I hate this small-ball crap.” When I saw this for the first time, I thought: this is real politics.

All too often, riding-level stuff is ignored by our parliamentary press corp. Sitting around the seat of power, they think it’s all small-ball crap out there. Unlike Frank Underwood, they forget that this is the source of Parliament’s power. The fact that the Queen’s Park press corp views grass-roots conservatives with contempt and bafflement doesn’t help them. They are the least qualified people to explain what is transpiring there. They are geographically and ideologically isolated. As a result, somebody like Patrick Brown or Mike Harris can come up from nowhere and surprise them.

Nice going Patrick. And good luck.

Brad Duguid’s endorsement of John Tory means that Toronto’s left has given up on Olivia Chow

Yesterday, Ontario Liberal cabinet minister Brad Duguid endorsed former Ontario Progressive Conservative leader John Tory for mayor of Toronto. This can only be because the left-wing candidate in the Toronto mayoral race, Olivia Chow, has fallen to third place. Right now, it is a two-way race between John Tory and Mayor Rob Ford.

Clearly, Olivia Chow is the candidate the Toronto left would like to see running City Hall, but after the debacle of David Miller (Toronto’s Bill De Blasio), Torontonians are not clearly in a mood for another extremist in the mayor’s office. Nevertheless, as Toronto’s left sees it, Job One is not electing Olivia Chow, but making sure the Great Satan, Rob Ford, is not re-elected.

As the article linked to above points out, Ford and Tory are neck-and-neck, with Chow a distant third. Time for some strategic voting by Toronto’s respectable class.

How Tim Hudak could have won – even after he promised to fire 100,000 civil servants

The conventional wisdom is that Progressive Conservative Party leader Tim Hudak lost the last Ontario provincial election because he promised to fire 100,000 civil servants. I believe, in this case at least, the conventional wisdom is correct.

However, in looking for lessons to be learned from the last election, I nevertheless think the conclusions that the Conservatives should never broach the subject of public sector layoffs again is wrong.

To see why, we must go back to the 2011 provincial election to understand why Tim Hudak said what he said in 2014. In 2011, Hudak made the fiscal incompetence of Dalton McGuinty the centerpiece of his campaign. With annual deficits running over $10 billion, and more billion-dollar boondoggles than you can count on your toes, it seemed like a good strategy.

The problem was that the Liberals had an effective counter. They asked Tim what government programs he was going to cut. And Hudak couldn’t tell them. He mumbled something about eliminating waste, fraud and abuse. Unfortunately, this was not a particularly convincing because if it were possible to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse without implementing painful and controversial budget cuts to do so, even the NDP would support them. No matter how much McGuinty pressed, Hudak didn’t have a serious answer. End result: Hudak looked weak.

To avoid this trap in 2014, Tim Hudak admitted that 100,000 positions needed to be eliminated. While this promise ultimately backfired, many conservatives – myself included – lauded Hudak for his candor. Tell the people the truth, level with them, and you can win… not with ease, but it can be done.

But it wasn’t to be. So does this mean that it isn’t possible to get elected in Ontario by telling the voters the truth? That to govern this province, you must first lie like a Liberal, and then stab your supporters in the back, like Kathleen Wynne will likely have to do in the coming four years? At this point in time, it certainly seems so, but I think there is a way where you can level with the voters and win a workable majority at the same time.

I believe that the weakness with Hudak’s campaign strategy wasn’t its content but its execution. The promise to eliminate 100,000 provincial jobs was just blurted out without any warning, or preparation, or context, or justification. As a result, it was a blank slate that his Liberal Party and public sector union opponents could write the most beautiful propaganda on.

A better campaign would have begun the same way as in 2011: attack the Liberals for their reckless fiscal irresponsibility, highlighting their many fiascoes. In making similar opening moves, the Liberals would have been steered towards the same reaction - calling Hudak out on the specifics of his planned cuts. At this point, the trap could have been sprung.

But first, the campaign would have stretched the moment out, by refusing to answer, in order to emphasize the point, allowing the charge-counter-charge cycle to build up to a dramatic crescendo. Then Hudak could have dropped the hammer, and answered them directly – by introducing a serious plan for balancing the budget, one that wouldn’t have skimped on the hard details.

Why would this have worked, when Hudak’s actual promise to fire 100,000 civil servants went over like a lead balloon?

Because the promise to eliminate 100,000 positions wouldn’t have been made in isolation, but only as part of a much larger plan, one whose aims had been made clear, properly justified, and with accompanying mitigating details (such as the fact that many of these positions would be eliminated by attrition). Many people actually turned off in 2014 would have been convinced because they will have been prepared to accept the right answer.

As well, allowing this point to dangle in the air for so long would have ensured that everybody would have been paying attention, with a significant share of the voters agreeing with it. That such voters exist, I have no doubt. It wasn’t that long ago when Ontario voters endorsed Mike Harris’s Common Sense Revolution – twice.

At this point, an argument I had made at the time to defend his cuts – but one that Hudak didn’t employ –could have also been used. I said that the only difference between Hudak and Wynne is that he is honest and she isn’t. The issue of the cuts themselves is irrelevant. This is because no matter whom you vote for, the government will have to cut regardless of what promises are made. The iron laws of economics will see to that.

Notice that nothing in my plan waters down any specifics. The problem with Tim Hudak isn’t that he is ‘too extreme’ or that he needs to ‘moderate’, but that doesn’t know how to persuade people about the things he believes in. Mike Harris could do that, and so can, for that matter, Rob Ford. But Hudak can’t. And that is what disqualified him for party leadership.

 

Why Andrea Horwath, the most popular leader in Ontario, is in trouble

Going in to the last provincial election in Ontario, the most popular partly leader – by a wide margin – was Andrea Horwath, the leader of the New Democrat Party. She consistently outperformed her party in public opinion polls. So if that’s the case, why did her party do so poorly in the election – essentially flatlining at 21 seats?

Answer: because she neglected her party’s base. 

See the Toronto Sun:

“The left wing of the party is angry with Horwath for taking them away from their social justice roots. 

Since the election, a number of former candidates and campaign managers have signed a petition calling on Horwath to step aside.

Two Toronto MPPs, Peter Tabuns (Toronto-Danforth) and Cheri DiNovo (Parkdale-High Park), have been openly critical of a campaign platform that focused more on populist, pocketbook issues than on NDP core values.”

While it can definitely be argued that “populist, pocketbook issues” have a wider appeal with the voters-at-large than the ideological obsessions of the NDP’s extreme left, it is also true that the vast majority of the people who concern themselves with things like a party’s ‘campaign platform’ are its’ core supporters, donors, and volunteers. If these people are not onside, no campaign can succeed. 

As I pointed out before election day, the reason Kathleen Wynne’s poll numbers didn’t tank, in spite of the fact that she is much less personally popular than Horwath, and representing a government with an indefensible record in office, is that she took care of her base - dishonestly perhaps (we’ll see how many Ontario civil servants she will have to lay off) - but she did think enough about them to feed them sweet lies.

As I have repeatedly said: the first rule of politics is to protect your base.

Karlene Nation: A conservative star who was buried by Hudak’s PCs

On election night last Thursday, while I was absentmindedly following the dismal results on TV at my local PC candidate’s ‘victory’ party, I saw a name come up in the feed that surprised me: Karlene Nation. Not watching the local TV news in the past ten years, I did not immediately recognize why I recognized her name. It took me a few moments to realize Karlene Nation is (or was, until recently) a TV reporter for CTV News. I did not know until then that she had been a candidate for the Progressive Conservative Party in the recent provincial election. (I presume her conservatism came from her father, one of the first black police officers on the Toronto force.) 

Looking her up on the Internet I saw that she had lost in the riding of York West, but I was surprised by how much. This long-time reporter for the top-rated TV station in Toronto had received a shellacking. The Liberal candidate won with 11,800 votes; the NDP candidate received 10,000 votes; and she only got 2,800 votes. She had also represented PC Ontario in this riding in the 2011 election with similar results. (She had also run municipally for a council seat in Ward 19 in the 2010.) 

This situation perfectly illustrates a serious problem with the people running the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario. Here they had a star candidate - an award winning TV journalist, who also happened to be a black woman - and they buried her in a no-hope riding. I presume she chose that riding because she lives there but somebody in the party should have spoken to her and parachuted her into a swing riding where her name recognition and star power might have shifted a marginal riding into the Conservative column. They should have also made her one of the party spokesmen, subtly countering the inevitable accusations of racism, stated or implied, that left-wing parties and the MSM routinely make against conservatives.

But they didn’t. They were asleep at the wheel. The Tim Hudak brain-trust: no killer instinct, and no will to win.

 

Well, that didn’t take long: Premier Wynne to freeze civil servant pay

According to the Toronto Sun, Premier Wynne said:

The budget that we are going to be re-introducing in the next couple of weeks is the same budget that we introduced at the beginning of May and there is no new money for wages and salaries in that budget,” Wynne said. “So any groups or individuals who supported us either knew that or they should get to know it now because that’s the plan that we brought forward.”

Well she sure didn’t emphasize that in her campaign.

On Tuesday, I posted an article predicting that Premier Wynne would stab her union supporters in the back now that she has got her majority. I was right, except in that the timelines I was considering was a year or two, not two days. I also advised this:

If Kathleen Wynne is smart, she will pull a Dalton McGuinty and break all her promises immediately.

The only thing is, at the time I wrote those words, even I didn’t think she would be so brazen as to take my advice so openly. I also wrote: 

The only choice was whether to elect the honest, straight shooter or his dishonest and deluded rivals. 

Well Mr. Union Man, what do you think now about supporting the party of dishonesty?

 

P.S. If the pay freeze really was buried in the fine print of the Wynne budget, it speaks poorly of the Hudak campaign that they didn't dig it up and feature it in anti-Liberal attack ads aimed at splitting her off from her union supporters. As I said before, no killer instinct.

A tale of a million jobs

In the recent provincial election, Ontario Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak touted his ‘million jobs’ plan. While the plan to produce those million jobs included many proven common sense measures like lower corporate taxes, less regulation, lower energy prices and getting rid of the recently created College of Trade, the opposition parties derided his plan for its supposed ‘bad math’ and trotted out a bunch of Keynesian economists to prove it.

The problem with the plan was not in the details. They were quite solid. The problem is that by saying you will create a million jobs, the onus is now on you to prove your numbers. As the challenger, you should not put yourself into this position, particularly when you are campaigning against a feckless, incompetent and corrupt government with a horrible economic track record. The onus should be on them to prove their record. 

That’s why the correct political strategy would have centered over some actual job numbers, such as, for instance, the 300,000 manufacturing jobs that Ontario lost since 2003. Instead of touting a million new jobs, ask Wynne to defend the indefensible Liberal record of destroying jobs. Then, you roll out the exact same policy proscriptions contained in the million jobs plan. Of course, the Keynesians would have still been trotted out, but if Hudak had been properly prepared, he would have foreseen that and had free-market economists lined up counter them. 

With the academics and policy wonks duking it out on increasingly incomprehensible technical points, Hudak’s coup de grace would have been this retort: 

Ms. Wynne, what is your plan? In truth you have none, because if you had, you would have implemented it by now. All you can do is nitpick the ideas of others and naysay people who want to get those 300,000 neglected workers working again. If you can’t do anything constructive, get out of the way. Get out of the way Madam Premier so that hard working Ontarians can get back to work!

I point this out not to refight a war that has already been lost, but to point out that the reason Hudak lost was not with his policies. They were quite good, and he was admirably honest and straightforward about them. Hudak’s problem - and the reason he lost - is because he was unable to connect with the Low Information Voter, i.e. with the undecided.

As I have tirelessly pointed out on these pages, this segment of the body politic cannot be won over with policies, either conservative or socialist. They don’t care about issues. Booring. Right-wing, left-wing, chicken wing. They make their decisions using an entirely different logic than used by politically active people, which is why we (the politically active) so often misread them. They don’t think like us. They need to be persuaded on more emotional terms.

Hudak’s deficiencies were entirely in the categories of political packaging and strategy. A leader with the same policy platform, but with the fingerspitzengefuhl of a natural politician, like say Rob Ford (minus the addictions), would have walked away with this election - leaving the Ontario Liberal Party in smoking ruins.

 

Kathleen Wynne is now free to stab the unions in the back

In the National Post, Matt Gurney nails it. From a fiscal perspective, it doesn’t matter who won the recent provincial election. The province is out of money and a debt crisis is at hand (or will be shortly). The only choice was whether to elect the honest, straight shooter or his dishonest and deluded rivals. Ontario chose one of the latter. 

For Ontario, 2014 is like 1993 was for Canada as a whole. In the 1993 federal election, the upstart Reform Party was branded as ‘extremist’ by the victorious Chretien Liberals for mentioning the looming debt crisis and the need to take proscriptive measures. But two years later, the predicted debt crisis was at hand. As a result, the bond markets forced Jean Chretien to hack and slash, to do the very things he slandered Preston Manning as an extremist for proposing. In Ontario, it’s déjà vu all over again.

But look at it from the perspective of Ontario’s public sector unions. Their ideal outcome would have been a minority government. It wouldn’t really matter much to them which party was in charge because the unions could play one off against the other. If a Wynne minority had proposed the cuts, the unions could have moved their support behind the NDP, killing the Liberals in the next election. If a Hudak minority, the unions could make the NDP and the Liberals compete for their favour with the result that both would staunchly oppose any cuts with lock-step unanimity. This would make meaningful reform to the size of the Ontario government next to impossible – at least until the next majority government.

On the other hand, with a majority government, playing off one party against the others is no longer possible. If Kathleen Wynne is smart, she will pull a Dalton McGuinty and break all her promises immediately. The unions will go ballistic but she will have four years to recover and if, after four years, the budget is balanced and the Ontario economy is riding high, the Ontario public (minus the unions) might reward her steely-eyed decisiveness with another majority. A risky strategy to be sure but better than continuing to spend recklessly until the debt wall is hit. The resulting cuts will be much deeper, the political recovery time for the Liberals much shorter, and no glory at all will flow to the Liberals for demonstrating leadership skills.

This is why, counterintuitively, a Hudak majority would have been slightly better for the civil servants. Hudak’s victory would have come with a mandate to shrink the Ontario government, something he would likely have begun to do immediately. This is actually a better thing for government workers than a debt crisis because the sooner the budget is balanced, the less pain that needs to be inflicted overall, and the greater the percentage of job cuts that can be achieved by attrition. (If McGuinty had run a tight ship all along, no job cuts at all would now be required.) 

Oh well. For Ontario’s public sector unions, be careful what you wish for. You might just get it – good and hard.