To understand Tim Hudak’s chilling plunge, from double-digit front-runner to the big loser in the Ontario election, just talk to the missing million voters.
While everyone was bemoaning the abysmal voter turnout – only 4.1 million Ontarians cast a ballot, about 48 per cent – nobody seemed to notice who the malingering electors actually were.
It’s not rocket science. Ontario’s provincial elections are waged along the same battle lines as federal elections, with identical electoral district boundaries. The same Ontario that sent 77 Conservatives to Parliament in May, compared to just 11 Liberals, returned 57 Liberals to Queen’s Park and only 37 Conservatives.
Dalton McGuinty cruised to a third term in office with just over 1.5 million votes, improving on Michael Ignatieff’s disastrous performance in the spring by about 150,000 ballots.
But Tim Hudak fell short of Stephen Harper’s vote total by nearly a million votes, losing the popular vote to McGuinty by 90,000 ballots.
A million Conservative voters stayed home.
It didn’t matter if it was the Tory heartland of eastern Ontario, where firebrand Randy Hillier polled roughly 22,000 votes, compared to nearly 38,000 for MP Scott Reid last May. Or downtown Kitchener, where universities minister John Malloy edged the PC by 300 votes, hanging on to a seat the federal Conservatives swept by 6,000. Even in the Danforth, Jack Layton’s stomping ground, the Conservatives collected fewer than 3,500 votes compared with 6,885 for Katarina von Koenig, the sacrificial Tory lamb who challenged Mr. Layton this past May.
It’s not hard to see why. In comparison to Hudak, Harper campaigned as a veritable fiscal hawk in the spring, vowing to balance the budget by 2014, a year sooner than previous promised. Hudak, in contrast, campaigned as McGuinty Lite, vowing to continue spending record levels on health care and education, preserve McGuinty’s costly all-day kindergarten initiative and run deficits for the next seven years.
Hudak’s fiscal plan called for a balanced budget by 2018, a full ten years after the 2008 financial meltdown. Not only would Hudak run deficits through his entire term of office, he planned to run deficits through half of his second mandate as well.
Running deficits in Ontario is easy, with the McGuinty government paying some of the highest public sector wages, benefits and pensions in the country. Experienced teachers in Toronto have seen their pay packets jump 15.4 per cent since 2007, to $94,968. Throw in EI, CPP, teacher’s pension, workplace safety premiums and you’re looking at $110,000 before we even get into extended medical, dental, laser eye surgery and wellness counselling. It’s destabilizing the rest of the country: many other Canadian provinces pay at least $10,000 a year less and their teachers are hounding them to play catch-up.
It’s the same story with police officers, fire fighters and health care workers. Last year, with record revenue of $106 billion, Ontario ran a deficit of $14 billion. With additional borrowings, McGuinty added $24.5 billion to the provincial debt.
This year, interest costs alone on that debt have risen over a billion dollars. They’re forecast to rise another billion next year and yet another in 2013.
Hudak’s failure to tackle the real issue in the campaign cost him the election.
In August, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation toured our Ontario Provincial Debt Clock around the province. We invited PC leader Tim Hudak (as well as NDP leader Andrea Horwath) to join us, to stand in the front of the clock and draw attention to the fiscal disaster facing the province: total debt surpassing $250 billion - $18,000 for every man, woman and child in Ontario. He wouldn’t be the first leader to have their picture taken with this chilling visual symbol of the debt crisis. It would have also been a prime opportunity to for him to commit to a fiscally conservative plan to balance the budget and turn Ontario back into a ‘have’ province.
Mr. Hudak turned his back on the opportunity and a million voters turned their back on him.
