Patrick Brown and “The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance”*

Without a Praetorian Guard of world-wise volunteers and an attractive personal epiphany around age 30, a conservative leadership aspirant is not expected to be smart enough to escape IOUs to crazies, or disciplined enough to use those important briefing books that drive modern government. These presumptions make sentient politicians uncomfortable.

The last leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party, for instance, made heroic efforts to get specific about Ontario’s ugliest policy problems, seeing no public virtue in ignorance. Did Tim Hudak try too hard, was he too specific, too far to the right, and/or heed the wrong economists?

These questions, along with a pervasive suspicion that post–William Davis Progressive Conservatives don’t feel at home south of Bloor Street or in the precious heart of Georgian Bay cottage country, will haunt what we read and hear about the closing days of their leadership race. After all, they pop up in the nervous asides and clammy dreams of the finalists and their advisors — all except for one Patrick Brown, the candidate whose hustle has put him conspicuously in front.

Excellent Queen’s Park columnist for the Toronto Star Martin Regg Cohn sees that Brown is different and isn’t comfortable.

After spending 90 minutes alone with this bilingual professional politician, Cohn writes that he left without a clue about the specifics driving Brown and his mysterious juggernaut. Harmless false modesty. The faithful Star reader happily assumes that insurgent Progressive Conservatives with names like Patrick Brown will be inarticulate or be hiding vicious secrets.

Patrick Brown may be seven years younger than Justin Trudeau, but no one’s ever likely to call him Peter Pan.

I got my 90 minutes with Brown simply watching the February 11th Ottawa Leadership Debate, held a week or so before it was reported that he’d sold more $10 memberships than his two remaining opponents, combined.

My instant impression was mixed. He’s burdened by — or blessed by — not being a handsome 36-year-old, six-foot-tall bachelor. With short, windswept, wispy hair, a weathered face, and a long nose, cartoonists will have a blond raven to play with. His sentences and his smiles are brief but intelligent; it's fitting he's not slavishly connected to the task of being likeable.

Cohen is professionally demanding of politicians, but people who turn out at public meetings in Ottawa this winter are demanding as well. They asked questions about what’s gone wrong in the party and in Ontario and what they should to do about it. Brown doesn’t stand out when ‘"reading" words, even words he may have written himself. However, informally answering questions, and in attack, he’s impressive: concrete, unqualified, and even-tempered.

Brown asserts quietly and coldly that they must “fix” the party, that he “knows how to do this,” that he’ll sell 100,000 memberships and that those members will “dictate” the next election platform. Anecdotally, he demonstrates that while selling 40,000 memberships, he’s discovered “thoughtful” new policy ideas. All in all, he’s an insurgent without any sense of being on the outside.

He's tying himself to a dormant truth about our relatively conservative, affluent society: mobilizing 100,000 adults across Ontario will make you stronger and more careful.

He may never match Premier Wynne’s encyclopedic confidence in all she’s doing for us. He may not yet be tough or funny enough to handle the deceitful intimacy of Queen’s Park. But certainly in debate, his tongue will not be tied by past party embarrassments. 

*With apology to Birdman or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance, a film about the dreadful prospect of failing once too often.

Conservative Tim Hudak’s Winston Churchill Moment

There’s a virus sleeping in the heads of most recognizable politicians on this continent. It makes them try to get away, if only once, with what I’ve dubbed: A Winston Churchill Moment. They want to show courage and conspicuous intellectual integrity.

Stephane Dion in Canada and Paul Ryan in the US Congress are ideal examples. They broke the strict rules of our bland politics to stand apart — from their peers and from their own unappealing images. They were convinced that "bold" fiscal and environment policies would enhance their stature — and fill gaps in their formal education.

Rather than stand with Churchill in history, they joined the swelling crowd around that literary invention: Don Quixote. And, certainly, the WCM virus is dangerously active in the Ontario election’s temporary front-runner, Conservative Tim Hudak.

Before elaborating, please accept that I’m out to protect us, not discourage policy-driven campaigns. The failure of “chivalrous” gestures does not reflect poorly on our maturity. Not being easily led near a cliff is nothing to be embarrassed about. History’s folly is fueled by the bad ideas we buy, not the ones we reject.  

Tim Hudak expressed his Winston Churchill Moment in the carefully chiseled and widely quoted cornerstone policy:

“If I have to trade off 100,000 jobs in the bureaucracy for one million new jobs in the private sector creating wealth, that’s a tradeoff I would do any second,” he told a town hall meeting in Barrie. “It’s not easy, I take no joy in this, but it has to be done if we want job creators to put more people on the payroll in our province.”

The best that has been said about this statement is that it’s “radical.” Nevertheless, it distorts both conservative economics and any common-sense conservative way to appeal for votes.

In placing his cuts right up against a million new jobs, it’s entirely reasonable to presume that he’s asking voters to endorse the layoff of 100,000 Ontario workers. Also, in placing his payroll savings against eliminating the provincial deficit in the next two fiscal years, he’s left little room for unfilled vacancies, retirements, and the private sector contracting out to significantly reduce the number of actual layoffs.

The hurried nature of his bloody prophesy certainly separates Hudak from his smarmy Keynesian pump-priming opponents. However, as stated starkly above, it also separates him from the economics of the only Conservative prime minister since the Great Depression that is better trusted in managing the economy than Liberals.

Harper’s federal deficit-reduction targets respect provincial spending cost pressures, aren’t leading to provincial job cuts, and are being absorbed by a Canada-wide economic recovery that is in far better shape than Ontario’s.

Harper isn’t terribly popular and it’s forgivable not to drop his name gratuitously. Still, on managing the economy back to sustainable growth, he still beats the competition — and did nothing in the last two restraint budgets to panic Liberals and New Democrats into uniting to defeat him at the polls.

Asking for a mandate to fire tens of thousands of people is as stupid for a conservative as asking for a mandate to raise middle class taxes by the left.

Voters rightfully suspect it’s not in their interest to help their leaders do the nasty things they must do sparingly.

These "courageous" gestures are common currency amongst retired public administrators and tenured academics. Only when struck by the WCM virus should a sane politician be excused for taking one up.

Signs of division — and life — in liberal thinking?

Within the last week, retired Ontario Minister of Finance Dwight Duncan and retiring liberal champion and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg openly abandoned hard liberal pieties on the political power of public sector unions and the wisdom of public ownership of giant public utilities.

Alongside the fine-grain speculation over the feelings of mad men on the right, is it not also interesting that liberals are starting to question the validity of core liberal policy in Canada and the United States?

It’s holiday season and we’re all worn down by scandal. Still, something big is happening: after years of dining out on conservative extremism, intelligent liberals are now questioning their loftiest sound bites. Bloomberg’s concerns about “a labor-electoral complex” may not, immediately, contaminate Hillary Clinton’s meticulous campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016. However, Dwight Duncan’s twitter below may seriously complicate Premier Kathleen Wynne’s plans — and prospects — in an Ontario election within the next 6 months:

“OPG [Ontario Power Generation] should be privatized. Market discipline will be much more effective at addressing the problems than political oversight.”

Brutes and nihilists are expected to complain about crown corporations. It’s news, however, when a leading liberal acknowledges aloud that these institutions will not always serve liberal ends.

Ontarians want to be interesting but never consciously vote for radicals. So, Liberals have told Ontarians for over decade that Ontario conservatives are radicals. You see: some 15 years ago, they actually tried to organize a competitive, private electricity industry. They ran out of luck — and nerve. But their intention at that time has been used to demonize them ever since.

It frays that liberal accusation — to say the least — to read that the former Liberal government’s illustrious minister of both Energy and Finance believes that OPG, one of the largest electricity generation companies in North America, should now operate and sell its power as a private company.

Raising Ontario’s taxes without being trusted

Trapped by bad timing and intolerable traffic congestion from one end of its political base to the other, Kathleen Wynne’s government is agonizing over how to sell higher fuel taxes to pay for infrastructure and to encourage greater use of public transit.

Doing something brave like this isn’t entirely out of the question.

The need to make expensive new transportation investments is accepted. Historically, Ontarians have accepted higher taxes and Ontario Liberals certainly have no woolly ideological objections to raising them. Indeed, serious people think it’s possible that a broad, visible tax increase by this particular government now could survive, if necessary, an election next spring.

A blue-ribbon report authored by policy entrepreneur Anne Golden has made the case for new revenues and has found, allegedly, a plausible way to make a substantial tax increase palatable. Taxpayers won’t actually have to trust their politicians with their money: presto, the extra hundreds of millions of dollars will flow obediently into a separate, pristine trust account.

The Globe and Mail editorial board isn’t easily excited. But, dedicated revenue streams arouse their support:

“A dedicated fund would manage these revenues. Without such a stand-alone fund, new money runs the risk of disappearing into general revenues, and being co-opted by other needs.”

The weird thing about Golden’s gambit is that it’s so business-as-usual.

The Wynne government is being pummelled by financial messes in stand-alone government authorities — in energy and in health delivery, especially. And now it's being advised to restore trust in creative government by creating another stand-alone pot of public monies to spend on another high-profile, virtuous public cause.

The government opposes any "privatization" of government assets or services and, of course, will campaign for positive government as a problem-solver. And, at the same time, it should promise to further distance its own Cabinet from the tax dollars it raises for its greatest new priority?   

Deputy ministers in line ministries, of course, dream of not having to fight for new resources or defend ministry expenditures in Cabinet meetings — in competition with other ministries and other priorities. But only exceptionally lucky crown agencies — like power authorities and airport operators, for instance — enjoy the privilege of pocketing directly special taxes (with businesslike names like rates, fees, and charges) that are rounded, by the full force of government legislation, for their exclusive purposes.

Consistent delegation and professional public service doesn’t require, let alone excuse, the "micro management" of program spending by the Premier’s office or by central agencies. Wynne won’t put the scandals of the past behind her government by promising to do everything herself.

However, turning tax-raising power over to another tax-spending public body will neither discourage petty politics nor prevent extravagant spending.

(Would former Premier Dalton McGuinty have pushed electricity authorities to waste over a $billion on two paper power plants if he’d known that he’d have to go into the legislature and raise the money directly?)

Before going down that path once again, the Wynne government would be better advised to: (1) reduce the cost of new investments by reducing its vast storehouse of old assets that no longer need to be owned by the government and (2) spell out how the Wynne Cabinet will better manage rather than delegate the deployment of any new monies.

Wynne has been quoted as saying that the latest agency in trouble — Ontario Power Generation — needs a new “culture.” This is, at worst, pure evasion, at best naïve.

Ontario Liberals have been in power too long to play the ingénue. The public needs evidence of a new culture of zealous accountability around the Cabinet table, not amongst distant technocrats, before being asked to pay higher taxes.

Premier Wynne’s way of avoiding another $1Billion rip-off (cont.)

Last week, we learned authoritatively that the Ontario Government lost $1billion in two electricity generation projects. Rather than rethinking whether it’s wise for the Government of Ontario to sit at the table as a "commercial" player with big-time capitalists in the money-mad energy sector, Kathleen Wynne thinks she knows how to be as bold as Dalton McGuinty — without wasting another $billion.

The new premier and her Cabinet will carry on as the owner of two of the largest "commercial" electricity companies in North America — Ontario Power Generation and Hydro One — and will continue to hold the statutory power to shape the terms of commercial electricity development in Ontario. Wynne hasn’t volunteered a tinkle of doubt about the extraordinary political centralization of electricity decision-making in Ontario.

However, while struggling to “contain the fallout," the Globe and Mail

 reported:

“Once again apologizing to Ontarians, Premier Kathleen Wynne took the extraordinary step of vowing to ban political staff from interfering with commercial transactions.

“As a new Premier leading a new government, I pledge to you that this will not happen under my watch,” Ms. Wynne told a Queen’s Park news conference after the audit was released.”

So Wynne, in one way, will be different.

She will make prudent commercial decisions by keeping her political staff out of the room.  Wynne and her cabinet of full-time politicians will be businesslike by keeping their political advisors safely away from their deliberations with their public servants.

This is a conceit. Elected politicians — existentially or in groups — only make political decisions. They don’t think commercially on Mondays through Fridays or on weekends whenever they’re wielding our money. 

Partnerships between public and commercial sectors, in emergencies or in new sectors, can do useful work that neither sector can do alone. However, Ontario’s model of commercial/political electricity development is both unnecessary in this century and leads directly to wasteful government and coddled capitalism.