Predicting Hurricane Doug’s path of destruction
Premier Doug Ford was only sworn into office on June 29, but already he’s embarked on a series of actions that presage a major tropical storm for Ontario.
Having analyzed the fallout from the province’s last right-wing government, I expect the damage wrought by Hurricane Doug will be particularly harsh for two specific and often intersecting constituencies: urban progressives and women.
Let’s consider Mike Harris’s track record as leader of two consecutive PC majority governments. Elected in 1995, Harris-era Conservatives endorsed lower taxes and cost-cutting in their calls for “less government,” “fewer politicians,” and “less overlap and duplication.” The Tory platform known as the Common Sense Revolution promised to “spend more efficiently” because, in Harris’s words, the party would trim “a lot of fat, a lot of waste.”
Arguably the most consequential decision of the Harris years for Canada’s largest city was sharp, rushed and unexpected. The move announced in December 1996 to eliminate borough and metropolitan government in Toronto rejected the recommendations of at least two expert reports, including one produced by a panel the PCs themselves commissioned. Harris’s government also ignored the results of a local referendum on amalgamation in 1997 in which 76 per cent of Toronto voters opposed plans for a megacity.
Doug Ford’s proposal to create a Toronto city council with 25 members echoes Harris’s record of reducing elected urban representatives from more than 100 before amalgamation to 44 by 2000. It is also entirely consistent with the PC mantra dating from 1995 that streamlining and efficiency trump democratic deliberation.
The implications of that approach remain far-reaching. Not only did the Harris PCs dramatically reduce welfare benefits, weaken rent controls and chop education funding in the name of cutting costs, but also they downloaded to fiscally strapped municipalities responsibility for child care, social housing and transit.
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