On the eve of the October 2 Ontario election, I made the following prediction: “A lot of people who are voting Liberal are bound to be disappointed with what they get… especially those who say that their heart is with the NDP, but they’re voting Liberal to ensure that we get a change.” Given my experience of watching the Peterson and Chrétien governments break promises, this was probably one of the safer predictions that I’ve ever made. Still, I have to admit that I am surprised at how quickly and how thoroughly the McGuinty Liberals have proven me right.

During the eight years of the Harris-Eves government, the Liberals talked a good game. During the election campaign this fall, they talked an even better game. Now that they have a chance to actually deliver on all of that talk, they seem to have turned into the Tories. Beginning with the Throne Speech, the Liberals have systematically abandoned large numbers of promises, while suggesting that others may be delayed or scrapped at a later date. The Throne Speech did not focus on how the new government intended to keep its promises; it focused on making excuses for breaking them. As NDP Leader Howard Hampton noted, “Underneath the rhetoric, what the government is saying is they don’t intend and never did intend to keep the promises they made in the election campaign.”

After the Speech was read, Premier Dalton McGuinty continued with the hasty retreat from the promises that got him elected: “We’re going to engage the people of Ontario in a very important discussion and we’re going to consider some ideas that to this point of time might have been on the list of unmentionables, those things that might be unthinkable. We have to reform the way government works. If we don’t do that, we compromise not only our plans, but the existing public services.&#0148 Echoing the Speech, he also warned anyone expecting new government money to “temper” their demands. Last week, when asked about the failure of the Speech to include his promise to hand over two cents a litre of the gas tax to cash-starved municipalities, McGuinty merely said that he was “bring(ing) good will” (and would not repeat the promise).

Ontario Federation of Labour President Wayne Samuelson hit the nail on the head when he said the speech had echoes of the Conservatives with the constant talk of deficits and budget woes. “This throne speech could have come from a Tory government.” Toronto Star columnist Ian Urquhart conducted an interesting exercise on the morning after the Throne Speech. Asking rhetorically, “Who won the October 2 provincial election, anyway?” he noted that “a casual observer might well have concluded that it was Ernie Eves and the Conservatives, not Dalton McGuinty and the Liberals.” Urquhart republished excerpts from the first Tory Throne Speech from 1995 and showed how closely the rhetoric matched that used by the Liberals in 2003. The similarities were so uncanny, I’m amazed that McGuinty hasn’t yet been disciplined for plagiarism.

More recent reports suggest that the Liberals are planning to cut over $4 billion in government programs this fiscal year alone. “There are going to be some tough choices, no doubt about it,” McGuinty told reporters. “The fact of the matter is if we don’t address this deficit issue, not only is it going to compromise our ability to deliver on our commitments, it compromises the existing public services.” Another unnamed “senior Liberal” made similar remarks: “One of the challenges we’ve got is that people don’t understand how big the problem is,” said one senior Liberal. “In the meanest, nastiest Tory year, they only cut $2-billion, and that was after five years of a socialist government when there was a lot more fat hanging around, not after eight years of a neo-conservative government.” In other words, the Liberals are saying that the Tories weren’t “mean and nasty” enough.

But, it’s not just spending commitments that have fallen by the wayside. While the Liberals made a big announcement saying that they had kept their promise to stop P3 (Public-Private Partnership) hospitals from going ahead, all they really achieved was to convert the existing deal with developers from a lease arrangement to a mortgage deal. Corina Crawley of the Ottawa Health Coalition calls the new financing model a P3: private pretending to be public.

McGuinty also campaigned on a promise to stop the building of 6,600 homes planned for the ecologically-sensitive Oak Ridges Moraine. He even said he was planning to keep this promise, but negotiations with developers led to a reduction in the number of homes by just 900. “I just think it’s an absolute betrayal,” said Glenn De Baeremaeker, president of the environmental group Save the Rouge Valley. “They’re not in office eight weeks and they’ve totally caved to the developers. Their policies and Mike Harris’s policies — you can’t tell them apart.”

Municipal Affairs Minister John Gerretsen argued — not very convincingly — that the government was “perhaps naïve” in making the original promise. Perhaps he and McGuinty think that it’s the voters who are naive.

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Scott Piatkowski

Scott Piatkowski is a former columnist for rabble.ca. He wrote a weekly column for 13 years that appeared in the Waterloo Chronicle, the Woolwich Observer and ECHO Weekly. He has also written for Straight...