Ontario goes to the polls on Thursday, October 6, 2011.
As a publicly-minded Northern economist, I feel it is my duty to dig into the party platforms for proposals that will promote economic development in the North. It is dirty work, but someone has to do it.
Alas. There is no gold in them thar hills. The party platforms have very little to offer Northern Ontario, and nothing to kick-start my wrinkled economist’s heart.
I would like to see evidence the parties understand what is holding Northern Ontario back. Why, after more than a century is this rich region actually losing people? Why is the western half of Northern Ontario one of the most economically depressed regions in the country?
I would like to see some big ideas. How do we make the North a magnet for talent? Why don’t we create a regional transportation authority and a regional power authority? How about devolving responsibility for spending to a regional sub-parliament? How about local control of the forest resources? How do we make sure that more value is added to resources before they leave the North?
These are not nutty ideas. Some of them are being tried in Quebec, others in Scandinavia and Latin America. Some have even been adopted in the U.S.A. Our parties seem terribly timid and uninformed about what is needed and what can be done.
The most interesting proposal comes from the Conservatives. They promise to share the revenue from new mines with local communities. It is a small step toward keeping resource revenues in the region. The Liberals support limited revenue sharing with Aboriginal communities under the Far North Act. In practice, the Conservatives’ proposal will have little impact on communities with established mines, like Sudbury, but it could make a few small communities near the Ring of Fire rich.
The best thing in the NDP platform is a promise to amend the Mining Act to say Ontario’s natural resources must be processed in Ontario. It doesn’t say Northern resources should be processed in the North, but to be fair, it isn’t likely that the NDP wants to build smelters and sawmills in Toronto. On the other hand, they don’t talk about building value-added industries in the North based on the resources.
The strangest thing about the NDP platform is how much it resembles the Conservatives’ policies. Both parties want to cut the HST on gas, heating and electricity. They both want to cut business taxes, restructure the electricity system and scrap the Local Health Integration Networks. They both want to spend on transit, education and health care. It might be fun to see the two parties form a coalition.
In 2007, the Liberals took an unusual step. They produced a special policy document for Northern Ontario in which they promised roads, hospitals, money for the Heritage Fund, support for local electricity projects, and Northern universities. They promised to fund a bioenergy centre in Thunder Bay, a mining centre in Sudbury and an Invasive Species Research centre in Sault Ste. Marie, and complete the Northern Growth Plan. The strange thing about the Liberals' 2007 platform is that they actually did all the things they promised.
For this election, the Liberals haven’t released a distinct Northern policy – unless you count the Northern Growth Plan and Open Ontario Plan unveiled in the 2010 Speech from the Throne.
The Conservative platform says that “decisions made at Queen’s Park are often out of touch with the reality in Northern communities.” Most Northerners seem to agree. None of the parties proposes a solution, however. The Conservatives' Changebook goes on to say grandly that “Families in Northern Ontario deserve a strong voice in government. They also deserve the right to be heard and to plan their own future.” They probably don’t mean that families in the south don’t deserve a strong voice in government, or that single persons don’t deserve a strong voice, so this amounts to saying everyone deserves a strong voice in government.
And that pretty much sums up the policies for the North so far. The parties seem to suspect something is wrong, but they don’t know what to do.
