A million jobs he says. Within 8years. Really! So says Tim Hudak as he prepares for two by-elections.

By Ray Rivers

BURLINGTON, ON.

January 17th, 2014

February 13th Ontario electors in Thornhill and Niagara Falls will head to the polls.  Thornhill Tory MPP Peter Shurman resigned over expense claims and Liberal maverick MPP Kim Craitor hung up his gun belt late last year.  Premier Wynne led off the campaigns promising a new hospital for Niagara.  The NDP’s Horwath seems to be hiding, waiting for public input.  But Tory opposition leader Hudak has rolled out a bold new policy called the Million Jobs Act.  That is a million jobs created over the next eight years.  Yes, eight years.

His strategy begins by cutting corporate taxes to 10 percent, the level former Premier McGuinty was targeting before Andrea Horwath and minority government stopped him.  Still, at 11.5% today Ontario has one of the lowest rates in the country.  When federal and provincial rates are combined, total corporate taxes in Ontario are well below those in the US.  So why is this so important?  When you cut taxes, you cut revenues and that means your deficit increases.  And as far as job creation driven by tax cuts – that disproven, revisionist, ’Reagan era’ piece of voodoo economics is not supported by any credible economist, anywhere.

Ontario hasn’t managed – yet – to make the renewable energy sector really come alive – but they are going in the right direction.

Hudak further disappoints by echoing the misinformation being churned out by Ontario’s right-wing dailies, blaming the tiny renewable energy sector for Ontario’s high energy costs.   As I pointed out in my Dec 14th column, energy rates are high, and getting higher, in large part because Harris and Eves fumbled deregulation and privatization, back when Hudak was a member of their Tory caucus.  Was he sleeping and missed it or is he just being disingenuous?  It’s not McGuinty’s renewable energy policy but his government’s inability to fix the system that is costing us.

Hudak’s million jobs legislation would bring Ontario into the ‘New West Partnership’, a deal currently among British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan to eliminate trade barriers.  It is hard to understand why we Canadians can conclude all those international free-trade deals yet we don’t even have free-trade among ourselves.  Wouldn’t it be nice to see one of those excellent BC wines in the LCBO?  This is no-brainer policy, and a good one, but it will hardly get us to a million jobs.

Hudak has promised to freeze civil service wages, a reasonable position for a government in deficit, though he appears soft on continuing Harris-era management bonuses, which the Liberals have frozen.  Picking on the civil service unions is a key part of his greater strategy – to de-unionized Ontario – turning the province into one of those Tea Party ‘right-to-work’ places he admires south of the border?  If freezing civil servant wages doesn’t give him the labour war he wants, then eliminating thousands of education jobs sure will. 

To his credit, there is some evidence that high levels of unionization may retard employment growth and, perhaps, even productivity.  Unions are a barrier to labour mobility, after all.  But trade unions also complement the human relations responsibilities of management – so it depends on what you are measuring.  For example, most skilled trade guilds have qualifications criteria and experience as a screening pre-requisite for membership.  And unions often form the backbone of workplace committees on health and safety, anti-harassment, conduct and discipline – all of which lighten the load of management and often reinforce normal management actions.

Union busting:

Let’s not forget that the labour movement and progressive taxation is what created the once powerful middle class in our society.  Unions’ bargaining power shifted more of the returns from production to labour, putting more money into pay packets which enabled greater consumption by the middle class and spurred economic growth.  In addition, the mere existence of large unions helped pull up the incomes of non-unionized workers, the ’free-riders’, particularly when labour markets were tight.  It is a complicated issue with potentially serious repercussions for hasty, thoughtless ideologically driven action.

It is no coincidence that the drop in union numbers over the last several decades has been accompanied by an increasing spread in income and wealth between the richest and the rest of us.  Without the unions’ collective agreements, progressive governments would be forced to increase minimum wages to well beyond where they are today.  And governments of all stripes would need to exercise greater regulatory oversight over workplaces and workplace rules, meaning more, not less, red tape for the business community.

The Million Dollar Jobs plan is really a little bit of good, some bad and a lot of ugly.  And even spread over eight years there is no way that Mr. Hudak will see anything like a million jobs from his proposed legislation.  Still, it is a catchy piece of marketing which may well attract voters to the PCs in the by-elections — even if it is mostly nonsense. 

If you want you to know they really care – they will spend some of your money on you. Burlington knows all about that stuff – we got our hospital didn’t we?

We will know better as the campaigns unfold.  The NDP has to decide if they want to stick their necks out and if so how far and perhaps advance some policy.  The Liberal government has to  roll out the rest of their campaign. The word on the street is that these by-elections are only primers for a general election coming sometime this spring or early summer.  So expect to see the parties taking some risks to test the voting appetite for ideas, which is exactly what Mr. Hudak has just done.

Ray Rivers writes weekly on both federal and provincial politics, applying his more than 25 years as a federal bureaucrat to his thinking.  Rivers was a candidate for provincial office in Burlington where he ran against Cam Jackson in 1995, the year Mike Harris and the Common Sense Revolution swept the province. He developed the current policy process for the Ontario Liberal Party.

Background inks:

Million Job Act   Tax Cuts and Jobs   Corporate Tax Cuts    Not the Time to Cut

Unions and Employment    Hudak and Unions   Energy Myths   Energy Subsidies