There is no doubt that the Ontario government’s intention to send every Ontarian a cheque for $200, in advance of what seems to be shaping up as a spring election, is an unusually blunt effort to please voters. When Premier Doug Ford’s predecessor Mike Harris sent everyone $200 in 2000, he had just balanced the budget. When Ralph Klein’s Progressive Conservative government in Alberta sent everyone $400 in 2006, that came out of a whopping budget surplus.
Ford’s government projects this year’s budget deficit at $9.8 billion. The cheques have a whiff of desperation about them, but the Tories are very comfortably ahead in the polls
The reaction has been as you’d expect. “Ontarians see right through these stunts,” sniffed provincial NDP Leader Marit Stiles.
It’s a “gimmick” in lieu of a tax cut, Ontario Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie complained. (A very fair point: Why not just take $200 less from people in the first place?)
“Imagine: Galen Weston getting a $200 cheque in the mail,” Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner suggested. Randy Robinson added to that list in a Toronto Star op-ed: “Tony Staffieri, CEO of Rogers, gets $200. RBC boss Dave McKay gets $200. Hockey star Mitch Marner gets $200.” (The latter was an especially good choice, considering the way the Leafs’ right winger is playing this season.)
In the Globe, columnist Robyn Urback accurately described the cheques as “a gift from your own wallet.”
What confuses me somewhat is how profoundly offended some people seem to be by this. Surely every election platform offers people gifts from their own wallets, or from other people’s. What else are the new federal-provincial dental and pharmacare plans? What else were the Conservatives’ much-beloved boutique tax credits? What was the Liberals’ 2019 promise of a tax credit for camping — possibly my favourite election promise ever, and never delivered by the way?
Unlike most cheques politicians write, you can be sure Ford’s will clear.
(Program spending and tax credits are often means-tested, of course. When the Quebec government mailed out millions of $500 cheques in 2022, as a sort of runaway-inflation bonus, it excluded those who make over $100,000. The “cheques for millionaires” gambit strikes me as the most effective if not the most substantial rebuttal: Fight one brand of populism with another.)
Some of the gifts we’re offered at election time are good ideas, of course. “Universal” health-care coverage without universal pharmacare or dental coverage has always been a bad joke. The Parliamentary Budget Office reported last year that a single-payer pharmacare plan along the lines of what already exists in Quebec could save the country money overall, thanks to greater collective purchasing power with pharmaceutical firms.
But that’s assuming that the plan is agreed to by all the provinces (Alberta and Quebec aren’t interested), and that it’s implemented and operated properly — which the rest of our health-care systems very often are not. That’s assuming that it is, in fact, a single-payer system. And it’s assuming apparently incoming prime minister Pierre Poilievre doesn’t cancel the program outright … which he has said he will.
“They want to ban you from having a private drug plan with the hope and the promise that one day you might get a government plan,” Poilievre alleged last month. The Liberals insist they don’t want to cancel anyone’s existing drug coverage, of which roughly 80 per cent of Canadians have at least some.
But the government’s own press release announcing the first phase of the program mentions “establish(ing) a committee of experts to make recommendations on the operation and financing of national, universal, single-payer pharmacare in Canada.”
“Single-payer” is right there in the government’s own description.
Pharmacare is just one example, but a good one I think, of the central point I’m trying to make: $200 in hand is worth (at least) $400 in tax dollars entrusted to governments to get things right.
It’s still a naked vote-buying exercise, don’t get me wrong: $200 cheques, including for the province’s richest people, drawn against an account that’s nearly $10 billion overdrawn. It deserves the criticism it’s getting. But conservatives should never apologize for the instinct to put (or very preferably leave) money in people’s wallets to spend as they choose, as opposed to the Liberal-NDP instinct for endless national strategies and programs.
In Ontario, certainly, it’s one of the only remaining predictable differences between Liberal governance and Progressive Conservative governance: Trust in individual citizens to run their lives properly, versus “they’ll just blow it all on beer and popcorn.” It’s a good look for Tories, even if these particular cheques aren’t.
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