Cut adrift

It was the worst possible outcome. Save for perhaps the Vegan or the Pauper parties gaining the reins of power, a majority government for the Ontario Liberal party spells deep problems and worrying days ahead for politics, the economy and cohesion between rural and urban voters in this province.

Firstly, I don’t believe the emerging consensus among wiser observers of politics that Ontario voters rejected Tim Hudak’s ideology. I don’t believe this outcome was about ideology at all.

Just as they did in the municipal election in 2011, when Toronto voters looked up from their busy lives and raised their hand for the chubby guy who promised to lower their taxes, so too in 2014, disengaged and disaffected Toronto voters made the easy, more palatable choice.

It wasn’t about right or left. One guy said hard choices had to be made—that it wouldn’t be easy. Kathleen Wynne said no, the opposite was true—a vote for her party would ensure that life would continue pretty much as it had before. More roads, more trains and more corporate subsidies . Toronto didn’t vote for the centre— it voted for easy.

No money down. Low easy payments. Toronto didn’t elect a government—they bought a sales pitch. And, as it did with Rob Ford, when Toronto wakes up from its distracted stupor, it will be shocked to discover the government it elected.

Kathleen Wynne seems a decent person— thoughtful, sincere and energetic. But I expect many of her supporters, particularly labour unions and corporations who have thrived on subsidies and lavish public spending from this government, will turn on her rather savagely in the coming year or two. Credit agencies will put a lid on how much of Wynne’s promises can be mortgaged. Moreover, her pledge to balance the province’s budget by 2017-18 will either sober her ambitions, or it will be tossed aside in the face of changed circumstances.

Worrisome as this may be—it is not the bit that is causing me this aching unease.

My anxiety over the outcome of the Ontario election is centred solely on the government apparatus. Hardly another bureaucracy in the western world has bungled its oversight, lined its own pockets and run roughshod so grotesquely over the rights and concerns of the residents it serves than that directed by the Ontario Liberals for the last decade. The Green Energy Act. E-Health. Ornge Air Ambulance. Local Health Integration Network. Policing costs. Gas plants. These are more than political miscalculations— they are the manifestations of our current bureaucracy disarray. They should have been sent packing.

But last Thursday’s results, instead, represent a victory for this Liberal government apparatus. It is affirmation of a decade of callous disregard for the public purse, local decision-making and accountability. Our ability to affect the decisions that matter most in our lives, whether it’s the community hospital, industrial wind turbines or policing costs, has been consciously taken away from us over the past decade. Regulations created to protect the environment, consumers and our economy have been eliminated to aid specific developers, over the cries of ordinary citizens. Increasingly, rural Ontario voters are feeling disconnected and powerless. Steve Campbell picks up this point in his column today.

My concerns are more immediate. Closer to home. One example.

A local landowner currently has plans before the provincial bureaucracy to construct a large anaerobic digester facility on the edge of Wellington. Digesters consume rotting garbage and decaying farm waste as feedstock and convert it into energy. In Newmarket, neighbours up to eight kilometres away, complained of noxious odours from the newly constructed digester. It took a decade of complaints and court battles before the digester was ordered to shut down in 2012.

Here, the local landowner seeking approval for his digester in Wellington has already received provincial support for the project— though not approval. Not yet. The bureaucrats driving this project might have been second guessing themselves a week ago. Not any more. Ontario voters have given them the thumbs up.

The future of Milford, of Amherst Island, of the shores of Lake Huron, and of Lake Erie are in the hands of government bureaucrats who have just been given a positive job approval rating. What will these communities look like in four years?

The map depicting election wins last Thursday illustrates a big problem. Liberal seats, coloured in red, are clustered tightly around Toronto and Ottawa, with only a handful scattered elsewhere around the province. The NDP orange covers large swathes of the north, the western tip around Windsor with a few around Hamilton and the NiagaraPeninsula. The vast expanse of the remainder of Ontario is painted blue with PC-held ridings.

Generally speaking, the decision-making regarding industrial wind turbines and other renewable energy projects, as well as the profits derived from them, is centred in Toronto—yet the communities whose landscape will be changed, whose economies will be hobbled and whose health will be compromised, reside in blue part of the province.

This is a very bad set up. It draws a thick hard line between the half-awake voters in urban Ontario and the hyper-anxious folks in rural Ontario who feel increasingly as though they have no recourse—against an energized bureaucracy that believes it has been vindicated and on the right track.

Sadly, we are alone.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca