Walkom: Ontario budget bill is McGuinty’s Trojan horse

By Thomas Walkom Toronto Star June 19 2012

Like Stephen Harper’s controversial omnibus bill, Ontario’s proposed budget legislation is a Trojan horse, one chock full of unexpected surprises.

Under the guise of implementing Finance Minister Dwight Duncan’s March budget, the Strong Action for Ontario Act would casually whittle away at environmental protection.

More alarmingly, it would appear to give Premier Dalton McGuinty’s cabinet extraordinary authority to restructure or privatize public institutions such as hospitals and schools without consulting the legislature.

McGuinty and Duncan are furious that the opposition New Democrats, having agreed to the broad strokes of his budget, are balking at this bill — a bill that at one swoop would amend or create 69 statutes.

But the real question is why Andrea Horwath’s NDP didn’t dig their heels in earlier.

So far, most attention has focused on McGuinty’s threat to call a snap election if his budget bill isn’t passed intact.

Given that no party — including McGuinty’s Liberals — wants an election, that’s a hollow threat.

The more interesting and largely unexamined issue is what happens if the bill is passed.

First, Ontario’s budget bill aims to weaken environmental regulations that might interfere with resource activities such as mining and forestry.

It would amend the Crown Forest Sustainability Act to let cabinet exempt timber companies from their current obligation to prepare management plans every five years. And it would give the cabinet broad authority let such companies ignore cutting limits.

In a bow to mining firms, the bill would weaken the Endangered Species Act by allowing those engaged in “infrastructure maintenance, repair or replacement” to kill animals at risk or destroy their habitat.

Another section of the bill would give cabinet the right to override certain requirements of the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Act.

Second, the bill would give the cabinet extraordinary power to off-load government services.

Initially, the bill as written would have allowed the cabinet, without consulting the legislature, to sell off or give away any government service — from the LCBO to Hydro One to Queen’s Park itself.

To the Liberals’ credit, they backed away from that and last week proposed amendments that, in most cases, would limit privatization to those activities (such as drivers’ licence renewals) currently carried out by ServiceOntario.

But Natalie Mehra of the Ontario Health Coalition makes a convincing argument that schedule 28 of the bill would still give the cabinet the right to let corporations, either profit or non-profit, take over a host of services in the broader public sector — ranging from hospitals to schools.

Would that lead to more disasters like ORNGE, the troubled company originally set up by McGuinty’s government to handle air ambulance services?

We don’t know because the Liberals insist that schedule 28, otherwise known as the Government Services and Service Providers Act 2012, must be passed now as part of Duncan’s omnibus budget bill.

To be fair to the Liberals (and to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, that other purveyor of Trojan horses), budget-making is notoriously difficult.

First the government of the day must lay down a blueprint of how it intends to spend money and levy the taxes that pay for this spending.

Then it has to translate its intentions into specific legislation that members can vote on.

Because so many statutes are interrelated, such legislation often takes the form of an omnibus bill.

But sometimes governments get greedy. Under the guise of budget-making, they try to jam too much in. Harper did so and was called on it.

Now McGuinty is being taken to task in Ontario. And rightly so.