Tim Hudak
Abbis Mahmoud owns bars in Toronto and Ottawa, including the legendary Brunswick House in the Annex. He has just finished a meeting in a café in the Byward Market with a representative of Ottawa Police to complain about new security regulations when Tim Hudak wanders in.
The Progressive Conservative leader receives a friendly welcome from most of the patrons of Café 55 but Mr. Mahmoud is positively thrilled. He tells Mr. Hudak that new regulations brought in by the Liberals mean his security staff now need a licence that can cost up to $800 and 40 hours of training to acquire.
He said football players who used to work Friday and Saturday nights at the Brunswick House for $80 can no longer be bothered. “It’s a big issue for us,” he says.
Mr. Hudak is equally delighted that one of his key campaign promises has been raised spontaneously. “Ontario has the worst regulatory burden in Canada but we will reduce it by one-third, peeling back those outdated rules that don’t make sense,” he says.
The strange thing is that this is happening quite often to Mr. Hudak.
He has a fistful of policies this time around that mirror the concerns of voters, who worry the province is facing an economic crisis.
Ontarians are generally unhappy with the direction of their province — nearly three in four say it’s time for another party to take over, according to Ipsos Reid (which says this is the highest response to this question anywhere in Canada in the last 25 years).
When voters are asked what concerns them, the economy and jobs rank highly, along with the budget deficit, provincial debt, gas prices, electricity prices and accountability in government.
On all these issues, the ruling Liberals are perceived to have performed poorly; on all of them, the PCs have pledged to enact change.
Yet voting intentions have the PCs and the Liberals essentially neck and neck. The other parties should be sniffing Mr. Hudak’s vapour trail by this stage in the campaign, but they’re not. The reason: it’s all about Tim.
The PCs discovered in 2011 that a pent-up desire for political change is not enough to boot an aging government, if their own leader is not positioned as a credible alternative premier.
Nearly two-thirds of Ontario voters reported it was “time for change” three years ago, yet still plumped to stick with Dalton McGuinty come polling day. Mr. Hudak came across as too slick, too callow, too untrustworthy.
He still has the weakest personal numbers of the three main provincial leaders when voters are asked who would make the best premier.
The saving grace for the PC leader is that one-third of voters are still unsure whom they favour. This still gives Mr. Hudak time to shift negative perceptions that may have been formed during his uninspiring per- formance in 2011.
Tory insiders say he is doing much better of late but then, they would. Still, there is some validity to the claim.
One friend says the recent birth of his second daughter, Maitland, has had a major positive impact. “He’s overjoyed — life is a whole lot better. He’s looser,” he says.
The PC leader still waves his arms around unnecessarily, as if he were directing traffic at an airport, but he no longer comes over as an angry person in public. One criticism levelled at him in 2011 was that he was shifty. He has decided to confront that charge head on by being honest to the point of foolhardiness.
The Tory platform said the party would decrease the government payroll by 100,000 jobs — about 10% of all people employed by the broader Ontario public service. There were no weasel words about reducing job numbers back to 2009 levels, which would have been accurate.
It certainly generated headlines but it also appears to have dented PC support, according to the most recent Ipsos poll, which says 61% of voters oppose the cuts.
Mr. Hudak is unapologetic when asked if it was a mistake. “No, it was bold. It’s the kind of honest talk we need to have with voters in this province. It’s not a matter of ideol-
He has a fistful of policies this time around that mirror the concerns of voters
ogy or party preference. It’s simply that if you are spending more than you earn in any household, you have to spend less or you lose the house.”
One PC candidate said that all the job losses would come through attrition in the public service. But Mr. Hudak refuted that claim. He said the public service will shrink through a combination of layoffs, attrition and contracting out. He provided the example of GO Transit, where the trains are contracted out to Bombardier but buses are still run by the government. “We could deliver better service, at better price and people still keep their jobs [by contracting out],” he says.
Another operation likely to experience some form of private-sector involvement is OLG’s slots at racetracks across the province.
“Do we need to hire someone operating a roulette wheel or another nurse?” he asks.
Mr. Hudak was explicit that nurses, doctors and police would be spared the pink slips he intends to hand out to others.
That has not stopped the first salvo from the public-ser vice unions, who routinely spend millions in advertising every provincial election against the Tories. An Ontario nurses ad has already accused Mr. Hudak of planning to close hospitals, fire nurses and “put your family’s health at risk.”
It says much about the success of the union demonization of Mr. Hudak that, while everyone seems to believe he’ll cut 100,000 jobs, no one believes he will create one million new jobs. Only one-third of voters say the plan is credible.
It’s true, many of the estimates seem fanciful — 84,800 new positions by cutting red tape; 96,000 by easing gridlock, 119,808 by cutting corporate taxes. The One Million Jobs plan would require Ontario to create 125,000 new jobs every year for eight years, when the average since 1976 has been 83,000 a year. Even the Tories admit that a half-million of the new jobs will be created by economic growth, no matter who is in power.
Again, Mr. Hudak makes no apologies. “We can have an argument about how many jobs will be created by lower taxes or lower electricity prices but the economic evidence suggests that lower taxes and lower electricity prices mean more jobs,” he says.
The battle for Ontario is straightforward: “Time for change” or “Stop Tim.”
There does not appear to be much enthusiasm for the policies being offered by either the Liberals or NDP, including the much vaunted new Ontario Retirement Pension Plan promised by the Grits.
Their campaigns are really about urging voters to follow W.C. Fields’ advice — never vote for, always against. It is not a comfortable default position for the affable Ms. Wynne.
Mr. Hudak is not courting popularity, in fact he openly spurns it. “If you want a popularity contest about promising more big spending, then that’s not me. Vote for Kathleen Wynne or Andrea Horwath, who are both paralyzed by a desire to be liked.
“Let’s let voters decide if they want a competent economic manager with a turnaround plan. I’ve learned in public life that voters look into the eyes of politicians to see if they believe them and judge intuitively if their plan fits together,” he says.
We have seen at the federal level that you don’t need to be loved to be elected, as long as you’re respected.
Mr. Hudak is not there yet and he may want to play down the polarizing rhetoric as we move toward polling day — he risks looking like he is speaking for only a small segment of the province.
To win, he needs to convert swing Tory/Liberal voters. He also needs a much more vigorous performance from an NDP leader who seems unsure of why she wants to become premier.
But the PC leader is in a much better place than he was three years ago — he knows it is not enough to convince voters they are poorer under the present government — they need to be convinced they will be better off under a Hudak government.
He has three weeks left to persuade the 35% of voters who haven’t made up their minds on who should run Ontario that he is a straight shooter who can be trusted to provide the stability and consistency many appear to crave.
He doesn’t have to convince them he’s the greatest — just the best available.