Thirty years after the publication of the Common Sense Revolution's election platform, media and academics still have it wrong. In fact, it worked brilliantly
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This month marks the 30th anniversary of the release of a document that rattled Canada’s political foundations. In May 1994 the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party, under new leader Mike Harris, produced its election platform, boldly titled “The Common Sense Revolution” (CSR).
The Harris Conservatives went on to win the June 1995 election with a large majority that gave them the authority to launch the promised policy revolution. As we write in our chapter in a new book from Sutherland House on the Harris government — The Harris Legacy: Reflections on a Transformational Premier — the CSR was part of a major ideological triumph of neo-liberal principles over the tax, spend and regulate practices that had dominated Ontario policy for decades.
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The revolution did not endure, however, leaving Ontario — along with the rest of Canada —today mired in endless expansions of government spending and economic interference at the cost of jobs, growth and economic freedom.
Our chapter looks at fiscal policy, which we’ll write about tomorrow, and privatization.
Privatization was actually one of the least significant themes in the original CSR platform. But it has since become one of its most controversial elements, for what the government both did and didn’t do. It did not unload the government monopoly Liquor Control Board of Ontario. What it did successfully privatize — especially the Highway 407 toll road, the province’s testing laboratories, long-term care facilities, and the Bruce Power nuclear facilities — remain hot topics for critics whose aim is to tarnish the Harris record and the “neo-liberal” economic principles that drove it. In our view, the critics are wrong. Here’s why.
The LCBO: Failure to tackle the LCBO privatization deserves a capital “F.” Not only did it allow a consumer-gouging monopoly to survive as a cash machine for government, foregoing the benefits of competition and market freedom, but it also helped establish a state corporate control model that, to this day, influences policymaking. One can only imagine how the debate over the provision of government services such as health care would have evolved if only the Harris “revolutionaries” had forced the conversion of the LCBO into just another competitor in a free-market-driven wholesale and retail sector.
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Walkerton: In May 2020, e-coli contamination of the water supply of the small town of Walkerton killed seven people and caused severe illness in 2,300 others. Ever since, the Walkerton scandal has been a prime source of political smear campaigns against the Harris government and its neo-liberal idea that privatization can deliver better products and services more efficiently.
The claim of the anti-privatization left is that if the Harris government had not privatized the labs — as the NDP government of Bob Rae had in fact planned to do — boil-water warnings regarding contamination would have been passed on to the province’s environment ministry, which would have issued a boil-water advisory well before the one issued May 21. That falsehood was expressly contradicted by Ontario Justice Dennis O’Connor in his 700-page Report of the Walkerton Inquiry. O’Connor concluded that even if a boil water notice had been issued “approximately 300 to 400 illnesses would probably have been prevented, but it is very unlikely that any of the deaths would have been avoided.”
The real story of Walkerton is that the contamination occurred because of previous decades of provincial and local government failure, political bungling and bureaucratic mismanagement.
Highway 407: The privatization of Highway 407ETR continues to rattle Ontario politics more than two decades after the 1999 highway deal was signed. During the 2022 provincial election, Harris’s Conservative successor, Premier Doug Ford, used the highway in a vote-winning policy reversal. Tolls are “unfair and expensive,” he said. Later he added that had he been premier in 1999, “I would not have sold it.”
While still under construction, the 407 was sold to a consortium for $3.1 billion. Critics called the sale a money grab by a cash-hungry government that gave financiers fat and easy returns on investment. But critics ignore that: the highway had not been finished, the toll technology was new, and there were uncertainties about whether drivers, especially truckers, would use it. As one executive told us: “For a long time after the road was built truckers boycotted it until they couldn’t live with the 401 parking lot.”
Over two decades, the 407ETR has shown that major highway projects can be undertaken without loading debt onto governments and taxpayers. Under privatization, motorists pay for highways, as they should. The 407ETR should be seen for what it has become, namely a superb highway transport experience that relieves taxpayers of the burden of paying for other people’s transport needs.
In our view, the most enduring legacy of CSR privatization is the degree to which academics and the media have distorted it. Misrepresentation of the Walkerton tragedy, in particular, is a political scandal in which the deaths of innocent people are used to push the false ideological message that privatization kills jobs and people.
To paraphrase Mike Harris himself in a retrospective interview, if the CSR had taken privatization further and faster, Ontario might today enjoy more and better highways, an open alcohol market, and, most important and promising of all, a more diverse and more privatized health-care system.
Tomorrow: How the Harris government cut taxes — and reduced the deficit.
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