In my dreams, this Ontario election will be a referendum on the neoconservative (or, as they call it elsewhere, neoliberal) ideology that has dominated politics in the West for about 25 years, starting with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Their governments won and ruled by attacking government itself, while praising the individual and the free market as forces that simply needed to be set free.

It is time for a referendum because there is at last some data in on the neocon project. At the start, it was all promises and rhetoric. I recall, 12 or 15 years ago, Fraser Institute products like John Robson, now at the Ottawa Citizen, rising at meetings to say we now know which economic policies work. They would list a set of practices — mostly slashing programs, deficits and taxes — that were yet untried. It was hard to argue, except with more theory and rhetoric.

Ontario came late to the project, with Mike Harris’s Tory victory in 1995. Its experience has been thorough, and the results are visible, so it’s an excellent place to do an evaluation.

So far, a few days in, the debate actually seems to be happening. Premier Ernie Eves, who toyed with being a kinder, gentler Tory, has reverted to Harris type, basing his appeal so far on lowering taxes further. (Mike Harris began his rise by styling himself the Taxbuster.) His Liberal opponent, Dalton McGuinty, instead of trying to compete on that ground, as he did in the last election, derided the Eves cuts as trinkets and baubles, which will do nothing to restore quality of life in Ontario.

Well joined, Dalton. What are people supposed to do with the $100 or $200 they get back: install their own water-treatment system plus an inspection team to monitor it, so they don’t sicken and die, as people did in Walkerton? Improve their own personal power-delivery grid?

Strangely (for electoral politics), this exchange clarified rather than muddied the differences between the leaders. Are you going to rely on individual consumer decisions and market dynamics, or are you going to make collective social choices through the political process?

Along the way, some new alternatives to neocon meanness and angst — as much as anything is ever new in politics — may be emerging. These alternatives imply not a return to the past, but a strange new combo: fiscal conservatism with an activist state.

It may sound as odd as Quebeckers wanting an independent Quebec in a united Canada, but it really just amounts to paying your way as you go. For reasons I don’t fully understand, deficits have become unacceptable as a way to finance what are seen as necessary public goods, like health and education. Maybe it has to do with many people’s private experience of the horrors of debt and bankruptcy in recent decades. At any rate, Keynesian solutions like running a deficit in bad times, are excluded; maybe just as well. They arose as an attempt to save capitalism from the socialist and Communist threats. With those gone, Keynesian deficit financing may depart, too.

What seems weird in the neocon triumph over deficits — the “fiscalization of politics,” as Timothy Lewis calls it in a new book — is that neocons themselves don’t take it seriously. Ronald Reagan ran huge deficits. So did Brian Mulroney. George W. Bush has just set a U.S. record. And Ernie Eves is trying to conceal a humdinger. It looks as if they never truly cared about deficits; what they wanted to do was redistribute wealth upward, by cutting programs for the poor and middle, and passing out the consequent savings through tax cuts that mainly served the rich. It fell to the “left” to actually balance budgets: Roy Romanow, Jean Chrétien, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and, probably, Dalton McGuinty. Unlike the vrai neocons, they take the neocon rhetoric seriously.

The notion of reviving an activist state is also a bit odd. Regimes like Margaret Thatcher’s and Mike Harris’s were hyperactive: destroying programs, attacking the poor, teachers or unions; signing Procrustean trade deals that made new public initiatives or regulation for public safety nearly impossible. Maybe it’s clearer to say that there is a new interest in state activism — in the pejorative, neocon sense.

The kicker in all this is taxes. If you rigidly refuse to raise or alter them, even when the situation is dire, then your activism is held hostage to set revenues. Voters seem to be thinking this over, too, after seeing the results in places like Ontario. If public goods like schools and air are imperilled, and borrowing to finance them is out, then taxes, even some new ones, may be unavoidable. Out in crazy California, Schwarzenegger adviser Warren Buffett and Schwarzenegger foe Cruz Bustamante both advocate more taxation. As for Ontario, this one could get interesting.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.