{"id":43385,"date":"2018-05-11T03:00:08","date_gmt":"2018-05-11T07:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=43385"},"modified":"2018-05-10T11:02:14","modified_gmt":"2018-05-10T15:02:14","slug":"imagine-ontarios-election","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/05\/11\/imagine-ontarios-election\/","title":{"rendered":"Imagine Ontario’s election"},"content":{"rendered":"

Andrew Coyne<\/a> on the fantasy campaign that is just kicking off in Ontario:<\/p>\n

The first NDP ad of the 2018 Ontario election campaign invites viewers to \u201cimagine a place\u201d where hydro is cheap, drugs are free, and dental care is on the house \u2014 all at no cost to anyone except the \u201cvery rich\u201d who will be \u201casked\u201d to \u201cpay a little more,\u201d which I gather is NDPese for \u201ctaxed within an inch of their lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

That word \u2014 \u201cimagine\u201d \u2014 might be the theme of the coming election. The three major parties appear to be living in a world of the imagination, with platforms full of imaginary promises paid for with imaginary dollars. The province is sinking ever deeper in debt, notwithstanding the Liberal government\u2019s desperate efforts to conceal it, its debt-to-GDP ratio headed for 45 per cent even after a decade or more of uninterrupted economic growth. A recession of any length or severity would blow that number skyward.<\/p>\n

Beyond that the picture only grows darker, with the first of the baby boomers just into their 70s and the costs of health care projected to rise, relentlessly, as they grow into their dotage. And yet all three parties are merrily racking up new spending promises \u2014 daycare, pharmacare, dentacare, the works \u2014 with money they wouldn\u2019t have even if the official budget numbers were genuine, and not, as the province\u2019s auditor general has lately warned, a swindle and a fraud (I paraphrase). It\u2019s an election in la-la land.<\/p>\n

Oddly, this does not seem to be the conventional view. The advance word on the election, rather, is that Ontario is facing a choice of unprecedented starkness, a polarizing election with no one seeming to occupy the middle ground.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s hard to remember a provincial campaign that\u2019s featured two leaders so diametrically opposed to each other,\u201d broadcaster Steve Paikin wrote recently, of the Liberals\u2019 Kathleen Wynne and the Conservatives\u2019 Doug Ford. \u201cThe political centre,\u201d agrees the Globe and Mail<\/em>\u2019s Marcus Gee, \u201chas vanished like a puddle in the sun.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true that the Liberals and the NDP are in something of a bidding war for the left-of-centre vote. If the March budget signalled a retreat from the Liberals\u2019 not-overly-stringent devotion to fiscal restraint, the NDP platform goes further in every direction: about $4 billion a year further, in fact.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Andrew Coyne on the fantasy campaign that is just kicking off in Ontario: The first NDP ad of the 2018 Ontario election campaign invites viewers to \u201cimagine a place\u201d where hydro is cheap, drugs are free, and dental care is on the house \u2014 all at no cost to anyone except the \u201cvery rich\u201d who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,53],"tags":[71,1188,188,908,798,87],"class_list":["post-43385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-politics","tag-debt","tag-dougford","tag-electionwatch","tag-liberalparty","tag-ndp","tag-ontario"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-bhL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43385"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43385\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43386,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43385\/revisions\/43386"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}