Doug Ford’s critics give him too much credit for privatization

Six sins committed by the premier. How did he get away with remaking Ontario in his own right-wing image?

Answer: He didn’t — he’s just doing more or less what previous premiers did before him.

That’s the paradox of politics in this province. While the six changes listed above largely predate Ford’s turn in power, most people and pundits talk as if he has orchestrated a revolutionary U-turn in Ontario’s political culture and economic outlook.

Thanks to his pugnacious persona — brash and in your face, populist and provocative — people assume the worst and blame him for all of it. If you listen to opposition and union leaders, you’d think that Ford’s agenda of privatization is unprecedented in the province’s history.

In fact, the premier’s less bombastic Liberal predecessors — Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne — got the ball rolling and the beer flowing in many of these areas. That’s politics — and that’s perception.

To be sure, much of the premier’s agenda is controversial. To be clear, many of the things he says are nonsensical — from liberating the Greenbelt to axing the carbon levy.

But in 2024, it’s surely time for an honest conversation about privatization — where it helps, where it hurts. The least we could do is have an informed debate, rather than misinformed diatribes and misleading dogma.

The biggest and boldest liberation of beer and wine in Ontario’s history came under Wynne’s Liberal government, when she phased in supermarket sales that cut the (privately held) Beer Store down to size. Ford’s incessant boasts about bringing beer to corner stores are a pale echo of Wynne’s willingness, a decade ago, to stare down the big breweries (plus their union allies and the NDP) by easing the stranglehold of The Beer Store’s unholy duopoly with the LCBO.

On the picket line, OPSEU is framing its strike as pushback against privatization. But Ford’s Tories aren’t about to wind down the LCBO behemoth, with some 680 stores; just look at how Quebec’s publicly owned SAQ coexists with private distribution in corner stores.

When Wynne’s Liberals attempted the partial privatization of our Hydro One transmission utility — which deals mostly in boring fixed assets such as wires and poles — while still safeguarding the government’s control as the largest single shareholder, New Democrats rallied public opinion against her by conflating it with dismantling the old Ontario Hydro. Never mind that Ontario Hydro was carved up decades ago.

Equally with Ontario Place, people are blaming Ford for finishing it off as a public enterprise. Yet it was McGuinty’s Liberals who shuttered the site more than a decade ago because attendance and revenues had dropped to unjustifiable levels.

Ever wonder why the water slides of Ontario Place lost ballast? They couldn’t compete with the wild roller-coaster rides of Canada’s Wonderland — a private entity that invested big money in supersized attractions.

Belatedly, Ford has embraced a long-standing recommendation from public servants to relocate the outdated Ontario Science Centre to a reborn Ontario Place, alongside a water park rebranded as a Therme “spa.” Predictably, that has raised the hackles of the hair-shirt brigade, but what business does government have in the waterpark business?

It’s a similar story of perception versus reality — and history — with ServiceOntario, which helps people renew driver’s licences and OHIP cards. When the media reacted with astonishment that some outlets would be relocated to Staples stores, I happened to be shopping at my local Canadian Tire location where — shock — a ServiceOntario branch, already privately owned, has been located for years. Same with public-private partnerships for building new hospitals, which the Liberals long relied on.

None of this is to argue that privatization and devolution are good or bad on ideological grounds. The point is to consider it on efficiency and equity grounds.

The debate gets more complicated with private health-care clinics. Opposition politicians and health-care unions love to scaremonger about people being asked for credit cards instead of OHIP cards, but private delivery of publicly financed health care (by self-employed doctors in stand-alone clinics or labs) is as old as medicare itself.

It matters little, from a public policy perspective, whether you buy stamps or renew a driver’s licence from a government building, a Staples or a Canadian Tire. It matters a great deal whether people are getting health care from the right provider without being out of pocket.

But after all these years (not just the last six under Ford), isn’t it time for an intellectually honest conversation about the perils of privatization, versus the exaggeration about experimentation?