Northern light - Conservative Ontario, Canada, Premier Mike Harris

National Review, Feb 12, 1996 by David Frum

Mr. Frum is a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute and the author of Dead Right (New Republic Books).

TORONTO

IT'S a grand thing to have a parliamentary majority behind you. Not since Mrs. Thatcher's first term has any conservative leader moved quite so far, so fast as the new premier of Ontario, Mike Harris. Given the magnitude of his achievement in the seven months since his election, if Harris continues in this vein he will rank as one of the outstanding political leaders of the 1990s.

Since July, his government has announced reforms that will cut Ontario's $55-billion budget by $8 billion over the next three years. Because $9 billion of the budget goes for interest on Ontario's debt, the Harris cuts represent a reduction of more than 17 percent in spending on government programs. Not cuts from a "baseline" -- real cuts, including a 22 percent cut in Ontario's astonishingly generous welfare rates.

More cuts will be unveiled when the government brings down its first complete budget, probably in mid March. And despite the pleadings and moanings of the media and elite opinion generally, the first tranche of a 30 percent cut in income-tax rates will be announced at the same time.

Nor is the Harris government confining itself to fiscal issues. Ontario's invasive affirmative-action law has been scrapped; its pro-union labor law, repealed. The last government's petty left-wing initiatives -- photo radar, compulsory bicycle helmets, higher fees for midwives than for obstetricians, a ban on the incineration of garbage -- are one by one being junked. The ban on private for-profit health clinics will soon be lifted. School-choice plans are being designed. The government's electric monopoly is slated for privatization. Rent controls will be dismantled.

The result? Despite some slippage in the polls recently, Harris remains more popular today than when he was elected.

In many ways, the premier of Ontario (which contains one-third of Canada's people and 40 percent of its wealth) has more power than the prime minister of the country. Over the past decade, this power has been appallingly abused. Ontario's past two premiers -- first the Liberal David Peterson and then the socialist Bob Rae -- embarked on a wild spending and regulatory spree. Provincial spending soared from $26 billion to $55 billion.

Taxes rose nearly as rapidly. By 1995, an Ontarian earning as little as U.S. $50,000 faced a marginal tax rate of more than 50 percent, plus a combined federal - provincial sales tax of 15 per cent, plus some of the highest property taxes in North America. Booze, cigarettes, and gasoline all cost dramatically more than they did even in Mario Cuomo's New York. It wasn't enough. Ontario's deficit exceeded $10 billion by the time the socialists got the boot.

Where did the money go? Ontario was not exactly a frugal jurisdiction in 1985, but over the next ten years the province raised welfare benefits to the point where, by some estimates, a working family would need to earn about $25,000 a year to take home as much as a welfare family gets. As a result, there were nearly half again as many people on welfare in 1989, at the end of a six-year economic boom, as in 1982, at the trough of a severe recession. Today, 1.3 million Ontarians, more than 10 percent of the population, depend on welfare.

When the Ontario Conservatives chose Mike Harris as their leader in 1990, this endless drift to the left seemed inevitable. Who, after all, would stop it? The Conservatives, Ontario's governing party in the 42 years before 1985, had traditionally adhered to the same blandly left-of-center consensus that the other political parties did. Almost uniquely, Harris -- a big, portly man with a relaxed, suburban style -- sensed a political opportunity.

In 1990 Ontario plunged into its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, from which it is still recovering. There are fewer people at work in the province today than there were seven years ago; housing prices are off by as much as one-third. The average income still has not climbed back to pre-slump levels; the average after-tax income, adjusted for inflation, is lower than it was in 1973.

Harris was plunged into an election immediately after winning his party's leadership in 1990. He campaigned on a "no new taxes" pledge -- and was clobbered. Federal Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney had just introduced a new goods and services tax, and polls found the Conservatives to be the least credible of Canada's parties on taxes.

So Harris took a gamble unprecedented in the annals of Canada's timid politics. He and his young advisors drafted a plan for a "Common Sense Revolution," with a 30 percent tax cut and a 20 per cent spending cut at its heart. They published the plan in 1994, a year before the next election, and distributed hundreds of thousands of copies.

Experts scoffed. And for a while the experts seemed right. The Liberals, under a bland, matronly leader, sat comfortably at 50 per cent in the polls for more than a year before the June 1995 election. Then, in the crucial three-way leaders' debate just two weeks before the election, the Liberal leader scolded Harris for the irresponsibility of his tax-cut promise.