Its Time We Dispel The Myth Of 'Progressive' Liberalism In Ontario
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- Published on Wednesday, 17 October 2018 22:50
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 1688 ... October 18, 2018
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It’s Time We Dispel The Myth Of ‘Progressive’ Liberalism In Ontario
Carlo Fanelli
There is an emerging orthodoxy, rooted more in fiction than fact, that the 15-year regime of the Ontario Liberals somehow swung the ideological and policy spectrum sharply to the left. But this is a gross misinterpretation of actual history. While the Liberals did indeed implement a hodgepodge of policies that might selectively register as ‘progressive’, their time in power was never about a wholesale repudiation of the Conservative’s Common Sense Revolution but rather about deepening and extending it in ways that were more palatable to a public increasingly fed up with the uncompromising and aggressive style of their Conservative predecessors. In other words, it was continuity, not change, that defined the Liberals’... time in power.
Those at the centre of this historical re-imagining are increasingly recasting the Liberals’ time in government as an extreme left interregnum inconsistent with the ‘progressive’ conservative values of Ontario. They point to all day kindergarten, the expansion of prescription-drug and dental benefits, the subsidization of tuition fees for some post-secondary students, proposed pension reform, modest increases to high-income earners’ taxes, changes to labour legislation, and some investments in new infrastructure and social programs as key illustrations. But these new investments barely made up for inflation and population growth, let alone a reversal of the fiscal legacy of the Harris Conservatives.
Through their first term (2003-07), modest savings were made through the privatization of services formerly covered by the Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) like chiropractic therapy, physical rehabilitation and optometry exams. The Dalton McGuinty government also spearheaded the expansion of private healthcare clinics, introducing a graduated healthcare premium that ranged from $60 to $900 per year depending on income level. But this was the calm before the storm.