Richard Paul/ Deputy Iraca Papineauville Special
Ontario’s election campaign is in full roar. Here’s your quick guide to understanding some of the most important problems this province faces and what each of the three big parties propose to do about them.
Hydro
Ontario’s electricity system and what we pay for it has been a dominant issue in provincial politics for decades. In the past 10 years, though the details vary depending on what kind of customer you are, where you live and how much energy you use, average electricity bills have roughly doubled.
The price hikes cover investing in a sturdier transmission grid, replacing relatively cheap coal-fired generating stations with much cleaner natural-gas plants and paying off billions of dollars in debt that governments of all three major parties loaded onto the old Ontario Hydro corporation to keep prices artificially low in the past. But not only those things.
The opposition parties point to the fiasco of the Liberals’ green-energy plan, which deliberately overpaid for electricity from new wind and solar farms in an effort to kickstart an industry in manufacturing windmill blades and solar panels here. Auditor general Bonnie Lysyk has found that that increased bills by a collective $37 billion over eight years. Wind farms in particular are wildly unpopular among their neighbours and green-energy manufacturing hasn’t taken off.
The Liberals sold a majority stake in Hydro One, the province’s long-distance transmission utility and the delivery company that serves 1.3 million mostly rural and remote customers. That brought in $9.2 billion for the treasury, and the Liberals say it’s made the company better focused on customer service. It also forgoes billions in future revenues and means Hydro One behaves like the private corporation it now is, including hiring a chief executive with a $6-million pay packet and buying an American power utility in the Pacific Northwest.
The Liberals have borrowed billions of dollars to cut electricity prices 25 per cent starting last year. That will only last four years, after which prices will start rising again and end up higher than they would have been if not for the “Fair Hydro Plan.” Kathleen Wynne says this is what the Liberals should have done in the first place — the costs should have been spread out over more years — and it’s better late than never.
The Progressive Conservatives would keep the Fair Hydro Plan (undoing it would be difficult at this point) and cut prices further by transferring hundreds of millions of dollars of spending on things such as conservation campaigns off hydro bills and onto tax bills. We’d still pay, just a different way. Doug Ford also promises to fire Mayo “Six-Million-Dollar Man” Schmidt, the Hydro One chief executive.
The New Democrats would also keep the Fair Hydro Plan. They promise to buy back the sold-off chunk of Hydro One and look for other ways to cut electricity prices, including asking the federal government to stop charging sales tax on electricity.
Health care
The biggest thing the provincial government does, health care has grown from a $28.1-billion expense in 2003 to a $62.1-billion expense in 2018, in both years making up just under 40 per cent of the province’s program spending. That’s expected to increase as more and longer-lived Ontarians need more health care, especially as we get into the later 2020s.
In their first years in power, the Liberals spent heavily on improving waiting times for a number of treatments and procedures, from cataract surgeries to knee replacements to cancer care. In general, waiting times shortened, but with a lot of variation in different parts of the province, and since the mid-2000s times have crept up. The number of Ontarians without family doctors is way down (to about a million, from a high of three million), but there are still shortages outside larger cities.
After several years of tight budgets for hospitals as the Liberals tried to close the provincial budget deficit, it’s now routine for many to operate over their official capacities. Waiting lists for nursing homes are long — stretching into years at popular places like the Glebe Centre — and thousands among the province’s current 77,500 long-term-care spaces are on the verge of needing major upgrades.
The Liberals have battled the Ontario Medical Association over the fees doctors are paid for particular procedures, especially where the government wants to cut the prices it pays for treatments that technology has made faster and easier.
To try to keep pace with the demand for long-term care (about 32,000 people are on waiting lists now), all the parties promise to build 30,000 to 40,000 new nursing-home spaces in 10 years. The Tories and NDP promise quicker starts than the Liberals by getting 15,000 beds opened within five years, which might be more than is realistic. The Liberals say they can do 5,000 in the next five years and 25,000 in the five years after that.
Belatedly, the Liberals boast of spending billions to increase hospital budgets and build new and more advanced facilities, such as the $2-billion plan for the new Civic hospital campus here in Ottawa. They’ve promised $2.1 billion over four years for mental-health care in particular, and have expanded public drug coverage for youths and seniors.
The Progressive Conservatives don’t yet have a hospital-oriented platform plank, though they promise an end to “hallway health care.” They also promise $1.9 billion over 10 years for mental health.
The New Democrats have the most ambitious and expensive plan: 2,000 new hospital beds “right now,” a $19-billion, 10-year construction program, a standalone ministry devoted to mental health and addiction treatment, and universal public coverage for medication and dental care.
Education
Dalton McGuinty said he wanted to be known as “the education premier” and spent billions to live up to the name. The Liberals have made full-day kindergarten universal, expanded colleges and universities, dramatically improved literacy scores and dropout rates, and reformed collective bargaining with teachers to do most of the contentious work in one provincewide negotiation rather than giving school boards orders and trying to reach dozens of separate agreements.
They’ve raised post-secondary tuition but also enriched the Ontario Student Assistance Program to help students who can’t pay the higher fees.
They also picked a huge fight with teachers in 2012 that resulted in back-to-work legislation, have been unable to improve students’ math performance in the same way as their reading and writing scores, and put the private child-care industry into turmoil with constant reforms.
The Liberals promise to keep adding preschool spaces and to make daycare free for children age 18 months to four years, a $2.2-billion pledge that would start in 2020. They promise to keep adding money to student assistance, to hire hundreds of guidance counsellors for Grade 7s and 8s, and to spend $3 billion on construction at colleges and universities.
The Progressive Conservatives promise education reform that would restore traditional math teaching methods instead of the “ideological” curriculum that’s been in place since 2005, repeal an elementary health curriculum that talks bluntly about sex, and punish universities for not championing free speech enough. In child care, they promise a 75 per cent tax credit for parents’ costs, whether their kids are in licensed or unlicensed daycares.
The New Democrats promise to hire teachers and education assistants, in part so they can cap all kindergarten classes at 26 kids. They pledge a new funding formula for education, aimed at increasing supports for students with special needs. They promise to abolish the province’s standardized-testing agency on the grounds that it gives teachers the wrong classroom incentives. In post-secondary education, they say they’ll wipe out new student loans, replacing them with grants, and cancel interest payments on existing ones. And in child care, they promise public daycare — free for some, and with fees on a sliding scale for people with higher incomes, averaging $12 a day.
Jobs and the economy
At 5.7 per cent in March, the unemployment rate in Ontario is almost the lowest it’s been in a generation, down from a peak of 10.1 per cent during the last recession. It’s been better than the nationwide unemployment rate since 2015. But we also have 300,000 fewer manufacturing jobs than we did when the Liberals took office in 2003. Most of the post-recession growth has been in Greater Toronto, with some here in Ottawa. Urban Ontario and rural Ontario occupy different economic realities.
The Liberals’ response has been to subsidize employers that have big expansion plans such as Cisco, Ubisoft, and automakers. Sometimes this money has been to back projects that wouldn’t have happened otherwise; sometimes it’s to entice companies to put offices here that they could have opened elsewhere. Wynne has also argued that her government’s spending on “social infrastructure,” like child care and drug coverage and health, is an employment agenda in that it makes Ontario a more attractive place to do business, encourages people to go back to school to upgrade their skills, and lets entrepreneurs take risks.
It has also led Ontario to a record level of debt, which the Liberals are consciously planning to increase by running continued deficits until 2024 to spend on social programs. They’ve also kept up a running battle with the province’s auditor general and financial-accountability officer over just how deep their deficits are. Ontario’s credit is still good, but bond-rating agencies have downgraded it.
The New Democrats also propose to run deficits, but smaller ones, reducing them largely by raising taxes on corporations and on personal incomes over $220,000 a year.
The Liberals are also using their cap-and-trade system for cutting carbon-dioxide emissions to subsidize companies’ efforts to be more energy efficient. The market’s regular auctions of emission permits bring in about $1.8 billion a year. They and the New Democrats would keep it. The Progressive Conservatives say they would dismantle the system and fight federal attempts to apply a carbon tax on Ontario in its place.
The Progressive Conservatives say they’ll close the deficit within a term, but have been evasive about how; leader Doug Ford says he can find four cents of waste in every dollar the government spends without cutting any services or eliminating any public-sector jobs.
Corporate taxes in Ontario are 11.5 per cent, with a special rate of 3.5 per cent on small businesses’ first $500,000 in profits. The Liberals propose to leave them where they are. The Progressive Conservatives want to lower them by one point; the New Democrats want to raise them to 13 per cent.
Finally, the Liberals have increased the minimum wage from $11.60 an hour to $14 as of last January, with another $1-an-hour increase due at the beginning of 2019. The Progressive Conservatives would keep the current wage, but cancel the next increase. The New Democrats would honour the increase and eliminate loopholes that allow slightly lower wages for teens working part-time and people who serve alcohol and typically get tips.
For more
The New Democrats have released a full platform, with financial estimates.
The Liberals’ last budget is serving as their policy book.
The Progressive Conservatives have made individual promises, but not released a platform yet.