Windsor and Essex County spent a few days this week with Version 2.0 of Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak, and seemed to warm to the relaunch a little more than the original.
Hudak isn’t any different from the likeable everyman he presented to voters during the election last year. But he is certainly being packaged a little differently. More smiles, less script.
With Premier Dalton McGuinty in hiding behind a prorogued legislature, Ontario is still broke, still overspending and still rocketing its way to fiscal Hell in a Liberal hand basket.
So said Hudak in nearly identical speeches to a crowded town hall meeting in Essex on Wednesday night, a Chamber of Commerce meeting in the city the next morning and to The Star’s editorial board.
But instead of being earnest and intense about Ontario’s impending debt crisis – during the election, that ended hung-jury style, with a minority government – the Tory leader now cracks a joke or two while he lays out the grim policy options.
“I’m taking questions later,” Hudak told a sold out crowd of about 300 at the annual general meeting of the chamber. “With the House shut down we have to have question period somewhere, right?”
It went over rather well, as did the Tory prescription for what ails Ontario. As Hudak paints the picture, the former economic heart of Canada is now hemorraghing manufacturing jobs, borrowing more than the rest of Canada combined and drifting toward a fiscal cliff behind a clueless government on the run from its many scandals of incompetence.
“We’re at a very dangerous tipping point,” Hudak said to nods from members of both audiences – one in suits, the other in blue jeans. With a provincial debt near a quarter of a trillion dollars and still rising, Ontario now risks joining Greece and the other failed super-spenders of Europe.
If interest rates rise – and there is no doubt interest rates will eventually go up – the payments due on the provincial credit card would leap by half a billion dollars per year for each one per cent rise.
“We’re in a mess,” Hudak says. “The hole is deep.” Once again the Tories are auditioning for the cleanup role after a years-long spending orgy. Queen’s Park regulars call that “the election cycle.”
The Tory prescription for escaping the hole is so obvious that all three parties are basically proposing the same thing, albeit with differing levels of conviction and believability: “We have to stop digging.”
That means “reign in spending, balance the books, pay down debt.” Hudak wants a wage freeze for everybody in our bloated government, including MPPs. That would save $2 billion a year, just a start to the necessary savings.
Ending the deficit is only half the battle, since the lack of jobs is the most pressing issue for Ontario’s 600,000 unemployed. There will have to be a tax cut, too, Hudak says, to spur growth.
The PCs figure Ontario either has to either cut income taxes by 10 to 15 per cent, the HST by two points, or slash corporate taxes to eight per cent in order to light a fire under consumer spending and restore growth – the key to creating real private sector jobs.
I told him I voted for cutting the HST; he merely smiled at the suggestion and forged on. Like Canada’s Conservative prime minister, Hudak is also an economist. He put himself through grad school as a member of the union PSAC, working as a border guard in Fort Erie, Ont.
The economic message is the same one Hudak has been delivering across the province, in a series of 15 major policy papers released on the party’s website and in upwards of 40 town hall meetings since last January.
It’s all battle readiness, for an election most people expect to see next April or May, well after the Liberals emerge from smoke-filled back rooms with a new leader to replace the camera-shy McGuinty.
“We’re putting substantial policy out there to let people know what our approach is going to be,” Hudak told The Star. “People want an alternative to the Liberals. When an election happens you’re going to know where I’ll be.”
He doesn’t really have to convince a lot of people. If they can win only a few thousand converts here and there in a handful of key ridings – a couple in the GTA, maybe an extra one in Essex County – they’d have their majority and the inevitable cleanup phase of the cycle can begin.
cvanderdoelen@windsorstar.com 519-255-6852 Follow me on Twitter @winstarvander
