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The recovery from the 2008 economic slump has been feeble. Against that backdrop, all three parties are flailing. Time to get serious about jobs.
The party that best persuades voters it is serious about Ontario’s economic future will be best positioned to win the next campaign.
The recovery from the 2008 economic slump has been feeble. The political leadership has been equally weak. All these years later, all three parties are flailing.
The Tories have produced a dozen discussion papers that retreat into union-bashing and privatization to drive economic renewal. The New Democrats are obsessed with hiking corporate taxes as a panacea for prosperity.
And after a decade in power, the governing Liberals are adrift. Seven months after taking over, Premier Kathleen Wynne has yet to make her economic mark or even hint at a new vision for growth.
Lacking strong economic credentials, her default tactic has been to convene conversations in economic round tables across the province. Finance Minister Charles Sousa is following up with his own consultation tour. Before quitting, Dalton McGuinty’s last big idea was to outsource economic brainstorming to his Jobs & Prosperity Council, made up mostly of blue chip business types who mostly offered more of the same.
Against that dismal backdrop, there is still time for the rival parties to come up with a coherent plan to steer Ontario’s still-shaky economy. Industrial policy is the best place to start.
Industrial policy has become something of a taboo in recent years — vilified by the business press and disowned by conservative governments around the world. But it still plays a vital role in generating economic growth and is making a comeback, argues a recent study from the Institute for Research on Public Policy by former federal government economists John Curtis and Dan Ciuriak.
As industrial policy fell into disrepute in recent decades, it led to deregulation, disinvestment and privatization across the U.S., U.K. and Canada. Even Ontario’s supposedly activist Liberal government copied the fashion of “getting the fundamentals right” by vainly lowering corporate taxes, striving to balance budgets and cutting red tape.
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