>I'm all for reduction in the size of bureaucracies and addressing financial issues realistically.
I feel people misunderstand these issues so often, everyone just wants bigger government always. What happened during Mcguinty was well forecasted. He upon coming into power increased taxes on manufacturing. The consequence was that manufacturing dropped significantly. Ontario shed somewhere around 800,000 jobs because of that move and mcguinty trying to hide his shame increased the size of government to artificially hide abysmal unemployment. Population of Ontario was roughly 12 million at that time i believe. Labour participation was roughly 60%. Dropping 800,000 is more than 10% increase to unemployment. 10% unemployment is pitchforks at the capital.
The consequence? You converted tax paying people to tax deficit. It broke the balance by alot and it was all to hide the bad idea of raising taxes and harming ontarians.
Flipside, while this is an obvious failure, it shouldn't detract from a big government. Healthcare was obvious context above. What exactly is OHIP? It's a crappy basic health insurance provided by the government that has much less coverage today compared to years ago. It's not that we shouldn't do that, we simply don't cover everything. We know it's a good thing to cover the basics. It's just a definition of 'what are the basics'. Should diabetes meds be included? Type 1 vs Type 2? On top of that, it being single payer means most of society receives their healthcare from the rich.
>It's a strong hammer aimed at a few well deserved targets but hits broadly across a wide group where it doesn't always make sense. It's like a one size fits all approach.
It does make sense. What comes in bankruptcy? If we don't control those costs we are forced into austerity measures. Greece's Syriza is a communist party and they chose austerity out of their options. If we go into that, it will mean way more than 100,000 jobs fired abruptly. Which wasn't Hudak's plan. He was going to allow anyone who wants to keep working to keep working. Retirements, job hopping, etc being the plan.
The reason why you dont hear much of a chirp from the ultra strong unions is that they know the alternative is far worse.
>But I don't know enough about provincial politics to debate the policies. You seem to have a better grasp of that.
When Wynne got a majority. She took this power as her winning and not hudak losing. I called exactly what was about to happen. Wynne who was at the feet of all the scandals was going to be even worse because she would be under much more scrutiny. Not much of a prediction obviously, no future sight needed.
She actually was not bad besides the obvious corruption, she very nearly balanced the budget. Yet she made history books. She's the lowest approval rating for ontario premiers ever, and she provided the worst election result for the ontario liberals.
When doug ford got into power, I predicted exactly the same. doug ford didnt win, wynne lost. He's going to make decisions to fix the disaster of the liberals and take the blame. Flipside, he seems to be highly approved of because of covid and his response being objectively good. So I might be wrong on that front but he didnt fix the liberal corruption.