Ontario’s New Democratic Party rolled out its election platform last Saturday, to thundering applause at a party convention. But it will face a tougher audience—Ontario voters who remember the Bob Rae years.
The NDP hopes to take control of the Ontario Legislature with a campaign called “public power,” full of promises on health care, hydroelectricity, and university tuition. Currently holding nine seats in Queen’s Park, the party is anticipating that the governing Progressive Conservatives will send voters to the polls before summer.
“This election presents an opportunity for us to make a real difference in people’s lives. And that’s the strongest motivator for me. It’s everything I believe in,” said NDP leader Howard Hampton.
The platform, called “Ten practical solutions for Ontario,” promises to end the privatization of most public services.
It pledges to stop the deregulation and privatization of Ontario’s power grid, effectively resurrecting the old Ontario Hydro.
The NDP also promises to create 100 “Community Health Centres” that will provide round-the-clock primary care. Private MRI and CT clinics, as well as private hospitals, will be outlawed. “There is no room in this province for privately-owned, privately-operated hospitals,” Hampton said. The platform also called for ending the privatization of water utilities.
Hampton’s party also pledged to add $2 billion to the education budget for public schools and revamp the standardized testing system introduced by the Conservatives. The minimum wage would rise to $8 per hour, and it would become illegal for striking workers to be temporarily replaced.
The NDP pledged to build 32,000 new affordable housing units, and create a transportation trust fund to lower public transit fees, which would be funded by a three cent per litre gas tax. Rent control would be re-instated and rents would be frozen for two years.
A system of $10 per day childcare, modelled on the system currently in place in Quebec, would be implemented, and 20,000 new spaces would be created. Pensions would become inflation-adjusted and would be portable from job to job. Income taxes would rise for those earning over $100,000 per year, and business taxes would rise.
But the NDP’s promises on postsecondary education are perhaps the most ambitious part of their platform. Hampton promised to cut tuition by 10 per cent: “merely freezing tuition at the sky-high rate it is now won’t do.” Tuition for professional programmes would be rolled back and re-regulated. Provincial funding for colleges and universities would be increased to “at least the national average,” the party’s platform said—meaning an increase of $400 million per year in post-secondary spending.
A student assistance plan—originally scrapped by the NDP’s only previous term of office—would give grants to needy students, including disabled and part-time students. The party estimates these grants would cost $75 million per year. Private universities would become illegal: “Let me say private universities are not the answer,” Hampton said.
The chair of the Ontario wing of the Canadian Federation of Students was thrilled at the provisions for post-secondary education in the NDP platform.
“It’s excellent, in terms of commitments,” said Joel Duff. “With the NDP saying ’10 per cent reduction,’ with the Liberals saying ‘tuition freeze’…we have the perfect landscape for making postsecondary education a hot-button issue.”
Duff was also enthusiastic about Hampton’s plan for student grants. “Having grants featured prominently under the NDP platform is essential, because it’s basically undoing the damage.”
The NDP’s promise to increase core operating grants to universities was another policy applauded by Duff: “One of the main reasons that our administrators are clamoring for tuition fee increases” is the current funding level, he added.
Duff said the proposed rent freeze will help students. “Rent de-control… has had a damaging effect on student housing.” He also supported the increase in the minimum wage, which he said was “important to students from low-income backgrounds.”
But the head of U of T’s Progressive Conservative Association said the NDP’s election platform was nothing but empty promises.
“I would say if one looked back at the record that the NDP had under Bob Rae, students will see that there were no tuition rollbacks, and in fact, tuition went up under the NDP government, so they lack credibility on that issue,” said Matt Curtis.
“Their whole 80-page platform is kind of a reincarnation of their failed policies of the past that put Ontario in a massive recession and created a huge deficit of over $11 billion.”
Curtis was also critical of the NDP’s proposal to re-instate rent control.
“There is already rent control under the Tenant Protection Act. What needs to happen is that more apartments need to be built within the city of Toronto, and I don’t think that would happen with a total rent freeze.”
Curtis said the NDP’s spending proposals are expensive, and that without a strong economy such spending would result in a deficit. “It virtually guarantees a recession in Ontario if you pursue the failed economic policies of the Bob Rae government…. They should be cutting taxes and trying to promote investment from the private sector.”
