WE’RE STILL LIVING IN MIKE HARRIS’S ONTARIO
Jim Coyle
By the time May rolls around again, it will have been 30 years since one of the most astonishing happenings in Ontario political history.
Michael Harris, a lightly regarded former golf pro from North Bay, had been thoroughly thrashed in his first outing as Progressive Conservative leader in 1990.
For a party that had governed the province for 43 consecutive years, the shocking fall from grace in 1985, and the two subsequent electoral disasters in 1987 and ’90, had been a humbling of world-class proportion.
Now, Harris was readying for his second chance in the election expected in 1995.
On May 3, 1994, a full year before the campaign to come, Harris released an unusual document.
In format, it resembled a comic book. In colour, it was purple. In tone, it was both furious and hopeful.
It used the words Progressive Conservative not at all. It used the word “reform” a couple of dozen times.
It called for a package of hard-right solutions to what Harris said ailed a province that had once been the country’s place of automatic prosperity.
It was called the ‘Common Sense Revolution.’ Much of the chattering class of the day (mea culpa) laughed, mocked and sneered. This document, conventional wisdom concluded, offended almost everything traditional and decent in Ontario politics and society.
It was a neo-conservative blueprint not unlike Newt Gingrich’s ‘Contract With America.’ It plucked draconian policies – slashing social assistance, cutting government, imposing mandatory workfare and delivering big tax cuts – from Republican governors in the U.S.
“I am here today to respond to a message,” Harris said on that May day in 1994. “A message the people of Ontario have been sending for years now.”
“The message is that government isn’t working anymore. The message is the system is broken.”
“The people of Ontario are demanding to know why things never seem to change in government.”
“Some will call this plan radical,” Harris said. Many did.
But when his campaign hit the road a year later, after the 1995 election was called, it was clear that Harris and his revolution were striking a chord.
The CSR, as it became known, was like Velcro for grievances. It seemed that everyone at his rallies was mad at something. And Harris was happy to hear the complaints, and to nod in sympathy.
At one early stop, at a crafty food shop in Guelph, where Harris attended a small-business roundtable on May 3, 1995, the president of a local employment agency beamed at the PC leader. “My eyes are lighting up as I’m listening to you, Mike,” she said.
Still, Harris had an uphill battle. Entering the campaign, it was a given that Liberal Leader Lyn McLeod would cruise to power.
Polls had her party at a remarkable 50 per cent.
Some PC members of the legislature were confiding to reporters that they expected to lose their seats.
But Harris hammered away on his revolutionary themes.
Once, waiting to board a campaign plane at Kapuskasing airport, Harris reflected on his tenure as leader and his first campaign.
“I wasn’t ready then,” he said. He paused a beat. “But I am now.” And so it seemed.
On June 8, 1995, Michael D. Harris won a landslide majority government. And things in Ontario changed, radically.
To this day, the response to his name is visceral.
To some Ontarians, he will always be the premier of riots in the streets and at the doors of Queen’s Park, of let-them-eat-bologna, of Walkerton’s tainted water tragedy, of the shooting death of Dudley George, of “get the f-----’ Indians out of the park.”
To his backers, he is a man of courage and forthrightness, a “transformational premier” who was willing to take the tough measures necessary to get Ontario on track.
In a new book, The Harris Legacy, edited by Alister Campbell and to be released next month, a roster of Harris loyalists, politicos, academics and analysts argue that we are still living in Mike Harris’s Ontario.
It’s hard to argue otherwise.
Campbell began curating material for the book in the aftermath of a controversy over the appointment of Harris to the Order of Ontario.
Four successors as premier have not, he notes, reversed many of Harris’s major decisions.
The City of Toronto was not unmerged. Closed hospitals were not reopened. The old monolith of Ontario Hydro was not reconstituted. The privatized Highway 407 remains so.
More than that, Harris changed the way government and the legislature operated in Ontario, in ways that are evident today.
In his book Neoliberal Parliamentarism: The Decline of Parliament at the Ontario Legislature, Tom McDowell said the process of manipulating legislative procedures to quickly enact an ideological agenda with minimal scrutiny was clearly expressed under the Harris premiership.
His government “made major reforms to Parliament to secure the institution of a radical, state-wide, administration-restructuring program at breakneck speed.”
Power was centralized. Opposition in the legislature was increasingly robbed of the means to slow the pace and fulfill its duty of scrutiny. Tools that were formerly used only in emergencies became routine.
McDowell said the massive omnibus Bill 26, the Savings and Restructuring Act, which “granted czar-like powers to cabinet,” was without precedent “in terms of either the size or the scope of reforms being undertaken,” McDowell wrote.
The Fewer School Boards Act ushered in dramatic changes to the education system, “largely through a heavy-handed concentration of power in the executive branch.”
While radically restructuring the province, McDowell wrote, the Harris government also employed “aggressive tactics to circumvent the legislature.”
“When the Progressive Conservatives’ mandate ended in 2003, they left the legislative chamber a fundamentally different place than they had found it,” he wrote.
“One of the overlooked aspects of the Harris legacy is the extent to which it changed the customs of the legislative branch to easily accommodate new waves of neoliberal reforms.
“In the two decades since the Harris revolutionaries took control of the parliamentary process with the single-minded aim of applying their agenda in the shortest possible time, the role of the opposition – to scrutinize the actions of the executive branch – has been marginalized by all governments.”
In that doleful sense, and as the current premier, Doug Ford, frequently makes clear, we are indeed still living in Mike Harris’s Ontario.
. . .
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jim Coyle - Jim Coyle spent 40 years in journalism with The Canadian Press, the Ottawa Citizen and Toronto Star. Over his career, Coyle covered breaking news, wrote columns, features, editorials and sports. He was nominated for National Newspaper Awards in four different categories. He has filed from every province and territory in Canada and has covered papal and royal tours, murder trials and judicial inquiries, the Grey Cup and the Calgary Olympics, and more elections and leadership conventions than he cares to recall. After retiring from the Star in 2018, Coyle taught journalism at Humber College. His proudest accomplishments are getting sober almost 30 years ago and, with his wife Andrea Gordon, also a former Star reporter, raising four sons.
The views and opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Air Quotes Media. Read more opinion contributions via QUOTES from Air Quotes Media.