Hudak's Changebook is like a trashy novel

I have had an opportunity to review Changebook which is the Ontario Conservative’s platform document. Although I have low expectations of election policy documents, this one doesn’t even meet my mediocre standards of pragmatism. The layout and artwork remind me of a Grade 5 story book. The content is just not realistic. This is not a matter of ideology. For example, there were a number of policy initiatives in the 1995 Common Sense document that I did not agree with but economic basis of the Harris platform were sound and endorsed by economist Mark Mullin.

Changebook suggests that a Conservative government would be able to eliminate Ontario’s $14 billion deficit, expand health care and education, provide taxpayers with tax relief and accomplish all this by reducing waste and finding service reductions in other programs. Well it’s not possible because health care and education spending make up about 70% of the provincial budget. And after 15 years of belt tightening by the provincial government there is very little waste to be found. Many programs and services are underfunded which causes long waits for service (hospital ERs), inadequate services (GO trains), and decaying infrastructure (crowded roads).

A significant portion of our tax dollars do not go to funding programs but to paying interest on accumulated debt. We either start paying off the debt now or sink into the financial crisis that exists in the U.S. So when the Conservatives propose to remove Debt Reduction Charge from electricity bills, sure that will save us money today but it doesn’t eliminate the debt created by low energy prices in the past. By the way, it was a Conservative government that introduced the Debt Reduction Charge. The trouble with Changebook is that it tries to buy voters with their own (tax) money, relying on gimmicks such as HST givebacks instead of making productive investments.

Interestingly, Jim Stanford, a labour economist., suggests that Changebook goes beyond oversimplification to outright manipulation. Stanford works for the Canadian Auto Workers — but he is a widely respected analyst. His analysis was released by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (a lefty think tank), shows how the data and charts in Changebook cross the line of truthfulness and accuracy, misstating Ontario’s economic situation, hydro rate hikes and the rising debt. It documents the deception on a scale that would embarrass any first-year economics student, let alone someone like Hudak with a masters in economics. He describes the charts in the document as a creations of a graphic artist and cartoon like.
After a year of watching Rob Ford hunt for ‘gravy’ do we really want to watch the same spectacle on a provincial level?