I like Eye's stance on this issue. As I've been saying, we are still living under Harris...
HARRIS HAUNTS US STILL
With the provincial election campaign unofficially underway, the news in Toronto remains, relentlessly, about the municipal government's cash crunch. City Hall politicos, while arguing about whether or not to raise taxes to finance the $575 million shortfall it faces in meeting next year's commitments, all agree that the provincial government should be footing a bigger chunk of the bill.
Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty, meanwhile, says that he won't be leading the cavalry, and that Toronto needs to make some “difficult decisions.†Conservative leader John Tory walks an even firmer line against helping Toronto, saying that not only will he not open the Queen's Park purse but that the city should be prevented from raising taxes on its own.
One might be forgiven in all of this for assuming that the agendas of Miller, McGuinty and Tory have any relationship to this discussion. In truth, all of them are carrying out the business of Mike Harris, the former premier, and implementing his Common Sense Revolution.
Harris and his revolutionaries implemented an ideological program, slashing both taxes and program spending while shifting responsibility for big-ticket items such as welfare and social housing onto the municipal tax base.
This, as intellectual John Ralston Saul pointed out at the time, is a tactic straight out of the neo-liberal textbook: if what you want is smaller government but you don't want to have an uncomfortable debate about, say, the merits of the welfare state, you shift responsibility for those things to the cities, claiming that they'll be better administered “closer to home.†You then immediately cut taxes so that any successor who would like to undo those changes will need to swallow political hemlock by raising taxes to do so.
But, of course, funding those programs from the local tax base is near impossible. And so there is, once again, a fiscal “crisis,†requiring “difficult decisions.†Everyone would like to expand transit and policing and welfare, the argument then goes, but who has the money?
And so in this way, neo-liberal governments accomplish the task of gutting the welfare state without any real debate. Following the Xs and Os in this small-government playbook, Harris downloaded provincial programs onto cities while cutting income taxes by 30 per cent.
And look: five years after Harris left office – during, you'll note, one of the longest sustained economic booms in Canadian history, a period of tremendous prosperity – our cities are neck-deep in a fiscal crisis, faced with the punishing choice of hiking taxes or shuttering services. Toronto faces a “structural deficit†of $1 billion per year, according to the Conference Board of Canada. Surprise! The Common Sense Revolution is alive and well at Toronto City Hall, and our local politicians implement Harris' plan every time they privatize a street furniture program or threaten to close a transit line.
No one talks about this in these terms, of course, lest they be accused of fighting yesterday's battles. But this should be a live issue in the provincial election campaign. Dalton McGuinty came into office selling himself as the antidote to Harris' revolution, not as the guardian of its legacy. He ought to be shamed into undoing the damage of Harris' years by accepting responsibility for those abandoned programs and, if necessary, inching income taxes back up to pay for them.
John Tory ought also to look at undoing Harris' damage. It was the legacy of Bill Davis-style Red Toryism (the kind Tory claims to be so fond of) that Harris shredded. Progressive Conservatives of Tory's ilk governed Ontario for 42 consecutive years between 1943 and 1985 and built the great society that Harris spent seven years gutting. He should feel no obligation to carry on Harris' thrashing of the stable Ontario his predecessors built.
The city government, doing the best it can in a crisis of Mike Harris' making, hopes to make this a provincial election issue. The alternative is to continue doing Mike Harris' bidding for a generation to come.
