Tim Hudak: Early Impressions

It's not inconceivable that circumstances could eventually deposit Tim Hudak (whom Ontario Progressive Conservatives chose as their leader a week ago) in the Premier's chair. But they would have to conspire in slightly peculiar ways to do so. Hudak is not altogether devoid of appeal; in his public appearances (I have never met him in person) he seems genial enough, if in a rather calculating manner too obvious even for a politician. While I would not go so far as to pronounce him a stupid man, he appears not be a very reflective or curious one. And in his over-emphatic solicitude for what he styles 'middle-class values' and his ostentatious display of the family that might have emerged from a 1950s sitcom, he fits an older voter's notion of what a young man should be like. Though a dozen years younger than Dalton McGuinty, in his demeanour and discernible attitudes he seems a few years older. One can, without any effort, actually close one's eyes and imagine him addressing a crowd of constituents as 'folks.'

It is, then, no surprise that he goes down better the further one gets from the urban centres of the Province. Nor is it shocking that he would emerge as the favourite of those PCs who attribute John Tory's defeat in the last election to his cautious centrism. Hudak's insistence that his party prospers when it articulates an unabashedly conservative message was nectar to party activists pining for the ideological clarity of the Common Sense Revolution. Yet nostalgia for the glory days of Mike Harris is not so widespread as to look like the foundation of a Conservative restoration at Queen's Park, and current conditions differ in important ways from those that brought Harris to power.

For one thing, the NDP government of Bob Rae was seen, fairly or otherwise, as not only spending recklessly but either to no good effect or to that of worsening the early 1990s recession as far as Ontario was concerned. While plunging revenues and rising unemployment were part of Rae's inheritance, the popular perception was that his government's early measures had forfeited the confidence of the business community that was a prerequisite of recovery.

The McGuinty government, on the other hand, has stepped up spending, but not to a degree that strikes a majority of the electorate as unwarranted; moreover, it has avoided the symbolism-laden missteps that an NDP government deemed obligatory in such fields as labour relations, and which so troubled business. As well, the government's critics have yet to find a convincing case for blaming Ontario's economic woes on McGuinty and his colleagues, so obvious is the principal role of extraneous forces. And if the deficits of the Rae era are a distant memory (and a vague one, insofar as they had little tangible impact on the lives of most voters), the Harris cuts are more vivid ones, and not of a pleasant variety. At the time, Harris and his colleagues could successfully invoke Ontario's deepening indebtedness as justification for reductions in social spending; it is now widely understood that this was essentially an excuse for doing what they already wished to do on ideological grounds. That suspicion is likely to shadow Hudak (whose wife was one of Mike Harris's key advisers, and whose early supporters included the former Premier himself).

As parties out of power often do, Ontario's PCs have become a cranky, eccentric, and arguably extreme bunch in recent years. Either out of conviction or to win the second-preference support of those who backed others (notably the loopy rustic Randy Hillier), Hudak has embraced some decidedly dodgy policies. One of these is a legislated cap on increases in property assessments, along the lines of legislation in California and Florida. Such measures have been plausibly criticized as impairing the efficient operation of the real estate market and effectively subsidizing homeowners, and in California, they have contributed to the structural gridlock that makes mere passage of a budget occasionally impossible. Hudak has also echoed Hiller's call for the abolition of Provincial Human Rights Commissions. There is an unanswerable case for restricting the authority of HRCs, and doing away with their ability to threaten liberty of expression; the indispensable Liberal MP Keith Martin has a Private Member's Bill that would largely do this.
To call for outright abolition, on the other hand, is to align oneself with eccentrics in Hillier's mold and to make a substantial gift to one's political opponents; Liberal apparatchiks have already indicated they will not be timid in warning urban swing voters about the extent to which Hudak has accepted Hillier's platform as his own.

There are, of course, parts of Ontario where this unambiguous shift to the right is likely to prove more palatable than John Tory's uninspiring centrism; the problem for the PCs is that they already hold these seats. So it would seem that at least the short-term impact of Hudak's victory will be to strengthen his party where it has nothing more to gain but to leave it more vulnerable where it is now weak, and needs to recover in order to have any realistic chance of winning the next election.