Ideas
By Eric Dowd
Toronto – Candidates for leader of Ontario’s Progressive
Conservative Party are coming up with some provocative and aggressive
ideas that could set sparks flying and make the 2011 election more
competitive.
Finance
critic Tim Hudak, who is generally considered the front-runner, has
suggested a Conservative government should scrap the province’s wage
agreements with public sector unions and negotiate others more affordable
in today’s tight economy.
The
Liberals under Premier Dalton McGuinty before the economic downturn signed
agreements providing as much as 3 per cent pay increases a year for
several years that seem excessively generous now many in the private
sector are losing jobs or having pay cuts.
The Liberals have benefited by less friction with the unions and the public by fewer public sector strikes, but many will feel the price is too high.
Hudak
also would freeze the pay of the province’s non-unionized employees as
long as the recession lasts, and go even further than the former extreme
right wing premier, Mike Harris, on whom he has patterned himself. Harris
was strongly anti-union and for a time even refused to speak to their
leaders.
Hudak
would underline his differences with unions in both the public and private
sectors by demanding secret ballots when workers consider joining unions.
Balloting
now takes place ostensibly in privacy, but both sides, employers as much
as those favoring unionizing, often put pressure on employees for and
against.
Hudak
also would enable members to opt out when their union wants to use their
dues to fund activist campaigns outside work. Current examples include a
union bringing and maintaining here a Mexican labor leader it says was
victimized in his own country.
Hudak
says “workers deserve a say as to how their dues will be spent by their
unions on issues that deal with political activism outside their
workplaces.”
Hudak’s
proposals would start a war between government and unions and the prospect
of major strikes not seen since Harris stepped down, but he is calculating
voters, the vast majority of whom are not unionists, would support
reducing union power particularly when business is struggling.
Christine
Elliott, who appears to be running second, has opposed his proposal to
scrap wage agreements with pubic sector unions, saying it would result in
“outright confrontations” that would hurt the province in difficult
economic times.
She
said the province instead should look at saving money by working with the
unions, who are doing a tough job in difficult circumstances that should
not be undermined.
Elliott,
wife of federal finance minister Jim Flaherty, an extreme right winger,
has made a big effort to position herself as a moderate Conservative of
the type that ruled Ontario most of the past 60 years.
But
in a surprising contradiction she has proposed the province replace its
income tax rate on
residents, now graduated so it increases according to how much they
earn, with a single percentage “flat tax” on all incomes, which is
something beloved of far right-wingers.
Arguments
for a flat tax include it would be simpler, easier to understand and less
costly to administer and end a system that discourages hard work and
success.
The
main argument against is it would end the progressive element of requiring
people who earn more to pay a higher proportion of their incomes.
Frank
Miller, a Conservative premier in the 1980s, whom Harris has cited as his
mentor, toyed with imposing a flat tax, but no-one in Ontario has
implemented it, and proposing it hurts the image Elliott has been trying
to create as the moderate in the race.
Randy
Hillier has proposed eliminating all human rights commissions, which
recently has become almost a holy crusade of the far right.
And
Frank Klees is refusing to propose policies on the ground they should be
decided by the party as a whole and not just by a leader.
This
would be a welcome step toward democracy, but the elected elite and their
backroom advisers who almost always run this party would never permit it.
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