By Ian Urquhart
Ian Urquhart was the Queen’s Park columnist for the Toronto Star from 1997 to 2008.
BOOK REVIEW
The Harris Legacy: Reflections on a Transformational Premier. Ed. Alister Campbell. Sutherland House, 2023.
A QUARTER-CENTURY ago, in the early days of the Mike Harris government at Queen’s Park, I found myself in conversation with former Toronto mayor David Crombie, who was heading up a provincial task force at the time. Since he was in direct contact with Harris, I asked him for his assessment of the new premier.
“This is a radical premier,” said Crombie, with his index finger striking the table in front of him for emphasis.
I was taken aback.
Of course, I knew that Harris’ campaign platform, the so-called Common Sense Revolution (CSR), was a radical document. But surely, I thought, its more radical elements would be junked and replaced with the sort of middle-of-the-road policies that had been the hallmarks of previous Progressive Conservative regimes in Ontario during that party’s 42-year dynasty at Queen’s Park.
As it turned out, I was wrong and Crombie was quite right. Not only did Harris implement most (but not all) of the CSR; he went even further with a range of initiatives that were not even mentioned in the CSR.
These were ideas that, no matter how common-sensical, previous governments of all stripes had shied away from because they feared the political backlash. But Harris and his cohorts bulled ahead and, to the surprise of many, won re-election.
All this is recounted, in great detail, in The Harris Legacy, subtitled Reflections on a Transformational Premier.
It is a collection of essays pulled together and edited by Alister Campbell, who worked on Harris’ campaigns. Like Campbell, many of the essayists were political allies of Harris. But, with the benefit of hindsight, they are not uncritical of his work. Some accuse him of meddling in areas that were beyond the scope of the CSR and orthodox conservative thinking. Others think he did not go far enough.
Because the book has multiple authors, it is, I think, advisable to critique it by breaking it down by chapter, starting with:
Economic Impacts & Fiscal Policy
These are actually two chapters back-to-back that go over much of the same ground.
In the first, Eugene Beaulieu, professor of economics at the University of Calgary, assesses whether the CSR, with its combination of tax cuts and spending cuts, met its goal of creating 725,000 jobs in Harris’ first term (1995-99). The numbers say it did. Of course, the late 1990s also saw a major rebound in the world economy, particularly in the United States, Ontario’s biggest trading partner. So would the economy have rebounded even without the Harris plan? The best that Beaulieu can do is to say that “the CSR had at least something to do with (it).”
The second chapter is co-written by Terence Corcoran (columnist for the National Post) and Jack Mintz (another professor at the University of Calgary).
They note that the Harris government confounded the sceptics by meeting the CSR’s goals of a major tax cut (30% on the personal income tax) and a balanced budget in its first term. “Columnists at the Toronto Star and in other media routinely ridiculed” the idea you could do both, they gloat. (Full disclosure: I was one of those columnists.)
But Mintz and Corcoran downplay the way the budget was balanced in the pre-election budget of 1999: through a major asset sale (Highway 407), which raised $3.1 billion. That is a sale that remains controversial to this day because the price was too low. One recent valuation puts the highway’s value today at 10 times that amount.
Corcoran and Mintz describe this as “the fake brilliance of hindsight masquerading as economic insight.” Of course, the whole book is an exercise in hindsight.
The authors also lament that there were not more privatizations during the Harris years. They call this “a real missed opportunity to demonstrate the true benefits of privatization, a message that could have been transferred to other sectors of the economy, particularly health care.”
They are particularly scornful of the Harris government’s failure to privatize the LCBO, as it had promised in the CSR. “Not only did it allow a consumer-gouging monopoly to survive as a cash machine for government, preventing the benefits of competition and market freedom. It also helped establish a state corporate control model that, to this day, influences policymaking.”
They give Harris a “capital F for failure” on this score.
"The authors here are particularly scornful of the Harris government’s failure to privatize the LCBO, as it had promised in the Common Sense Revolution."
On the other hand, Corcoran and Mintz offer a spirited defence of the Harris government’s conduct in the Walkerton disaster, which killed seven Ontarians and made many more sick from drinking tainted water. This has been blamed on Harris’ decision to privatize tresting of municipal water supplies. But the authors argue that Harris is the victim of a “manufactured leftist smear” and say the real culprit is the previous NDP government, under Bob Rae, which had approved the privatization shortly before the (1995) election.”
Two footnotes on this chapter:
Corcoran and Mintz repeatedly use the term “neoliberal” to describe the CSR and its policies. That is not a term that was in use three decades ago, when the CSR first emerged. Rather, it was routinely described, by its authors and critics alike, as a “neoconservative” document. And in the rest of the book, that is the term used by most of the writers. But Mintz and Corcoeran see that as a “disparaging” descriptor. Semantics, perhaps. But in a province with both Liberal and Conservative parties, semantics can matter.
Corcoran and Mintz also trace the roots of the CSR to Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian economist and political philosopher, and his book, The Road to Serfdom. It is doubtful Harris ever read it. But some of his acolytes certainly did. The question is: was the CSR their document or his? The question is never answered or even asked in the book.
Health Care
This chapter is written by Will Falk, a fellow at the C.D. Howe Institute and U of T’s Rotman School of Management.
Falk notes at the outset that the CSR had little to say about health care, except to pledge that it would be exempt from any spending cuts. “We will not cut health care spending. It is far too important.”
Nonetheless, there were profound changes in the delivery of health care during the Harris years, mostly implemented through the Health Services Restructuring Commission (HSRC) under Duncan Sinclair, which was established in the first year of the Harris government. The commission prompted the closing of 31 hospitals.
The impetus for this seemingly Draconian move was that Ontario had spent too much on the “bricks and mortar” of the system and had too many hospital beds. Indeed, says Falk, “the whole country was over-bedded” and the system needed to be rationalized.
“Whether this remains true today, 27 years later and post-covid, has become an arguable proposition. But in 1995, with a new government taking power, there was very broad agreement on this reality among healthcare central planners and all three major political parties recognized something major had to be done. The case for change was clear.”
And it needed a “ruthless” premier to get it done, says Falk. “Think Lenin. Think Robespierre.”
As Falk notes, there is a paradox here. “The Harris health program represents exceptionally well-done central planning. This is striking and ironic because a true revolutionary of the common sense school should not believe in central planning at all.”
In fact, says Falk, “The basic analytical methodology used (by the HSRC) had been being developed under the Rae government …” In fact, Bob Rae and his team almost certainly deserve significant credit for giving the commission (HSRC) a running start.”
So is the closing hospitals the entire legacy of Harris on the health care front? No. Falk also points to some other accomplishments, including the creation of 25,000 new long term beds, more than any other government, and the use of P3s (public/private partnerships) to build new hospitals where needed — an approach that McGuinty and the Liberals ran against in 2003 and then adopted under a new name.
Overall, Falk gives him an A-minus. “Mike Harris did a good job in health care.”
Education
William Robson, CEO of the C.D. Howe Institute and former chair (appointed by Harris) of the Ontario Parent Council, gives the Harris government an A-minus for its overall handling of the education file.
Unlike health care, about which the CSR had little to say, the campaign document had several pages on education. But as Robson points out, it was short on specifics. For instance, the CSR pledged to make schools more autonomous but said nothing about vouchers or funding for private schools, which would later become a major issue.
But the Harris government inherited a very specific set of directions from the NDP-appointed Royal Commission on Learning, which recommended, among other things, a return to province-wide testing and establishment of a College of Teachers to certify new teachers and enforce a code of conduct (previously the responsibility of the teachers’ unions). The Conservatives quickly adopted these recommendations as their own.
But perhaps the most significant measure was the centralization of school funding, also unmentioned by the CSR. Previously, funding of local schools was supplemented by the province, but the bulk of it came from property taxes levied by school boards. This meant that boards in relatively wealthy areas (eg: Toronto or Ottawa) could raise more and spend more per student than in the rest of the province. Under the Harris government, this money was pooled and spread around the province on an equal per-student basis. Progressives in the United States have long favoured such a move. Here it was implemented by a government that is usually described as right-wing.
The Harris years were also marked by nearly constant conflict between the government and the teachers’ unions. The unions opposed all of the above measures and responded with strikes and work-to-rule campaigns. The resulting disruption was exasperating for parents and was, in Robson’s view, “a key factor” in the government’s loss to Dalton McGuinty and the Liberals in the 2003 election. He is undoubtedly right in this assessment. There are roughly 1,000 unionized teachers in every riding in the province, and many of them pounded the pavement to elect the Liberals.
Teachers were not the only ones annoyed. So were school trustees, after the government capped their salaries at $5,000 (some boards were paying 10 times that) and cut the number of school boards from 129 to 72.
Unmentioned in this chapter (or in the CSR, for that matter) is any thought of abolishing school boards altogether or merging public and Catholic boards into one publicly funded system. Such a measure was too radical even for Harris, it seems.
But he did eliminate grade 13. While this was a cost-saving measure, it also had the beneficial effect of bringing Ontario into line with the rest of the continent, where 12 grades are the norm.
Almost all of these reforms survived under the governments that succeeded Harris. One exception is the private school tax credit, introduced in Harris’ last budget before he stepped down. It would have paid parents 50% of private school tuition, up to $3,500 per child. It was opposed not only by the unions and school boards but also by middle-of-the-road Ontarians who feared the money would go to fundamentalist religious schools. McGuinty ran hard against it in 2003 and promptly repealed it when he took office.
On the post-secondary side, Harris cut funding for universities but partly compensated them by allowing tuition fees to rise at a 12% annual rate and deregulating tuition for professional programs like law and medicine. But he did not implement an offsetting income-contingent student loan program. Robson calls this “a notable fail.”
Overall, Robson gives the Harris government an A-minus for its performance on education.
Workfare
One of the focal points of the CSR — for the media and the opposition parties — was the promise to slash welfare payments by 20%, crack down on cheaters, and require able-bodied recipients to work (“workfare”) or undergo training (“learnfare”) for their benefits.
Notwithstanding the avalanche of criticism, Harris charged ahead. “It proved to be one of the biggest and most controversial parts of the premier’s governing record,” say Sean Speer (former aide to Stephen Harper) and Taylkor Jackson (Ph.D. student and former staffer in the Ford government), co-authors of this chapter.
It was also popular with the general public, and the basic structure created by Harris is still mostly in place, 25 years later. Paradoxically, say the authors, workfare remains “a major source of antipathy toward Harris and his party that persists to this day.”
Workfare did not emerge out of nowhere in the CSR. Similar moves were under way in other jurisdictions, including the U.S., where President Bill Clinton and the Democratic majority in Congress were implementing their own version of welfare reform. As Speer and Jackson point out, Clinton’s plan was “arguably even more radical,” including a five-year lifetime limit on benefits.
Such measures were a response to the recession of the early 1990s, when unemployment shot up and “welfare became a long-term substitute for paid work for a growing number of people in the province,” say the co-authors, noting that the number of welfare recipients in the province more than doubled from 1989 (575,000) to 1994 (1.3 million). Harris argued that “a cycle of dependency” had been created in the province.
At the same time, federal grants to the provinces for their welfare programs were being cut back, first by Brian Mulroney’s government then by Jean Chrétien’s, as Ottawa struggled with its own deficit problems. The double whammy made a compelling case for action.
Today, say the co-authors, workfare-style programs have become broadly accepted. “Now even many progressive voices are at least rhetorically committed to this principle, although recent calls for a guaranteed income would represent a significant departure from the status quo.”
Municipal Reform
This is another area on which the CSR was silent, beyond a vague commitment to eliminate “overlap and duplication” in government. But once in office, the Harris government hit the municipal sector like an earthquake with amalgamations (notably of Toronto, but also Ottawa, Hamilton, and others), downloading of responsibilities (including social housing, public health, highways, long-term care funding), and property tax reform (market-value assessment).
Some of these ideas had been debated for years but shelved by politicians wary of the political backlash.
“Harris and his team made difficult, imperfect decisions, and many of them still stand today, making the implicit case that imperfect change was actually preferable to indefinite delay,” says Ginny Roth, a public affairs consultant and author of this chapter.
Roth partly blames the bureaucrats at Queen’s Park for foisting this agenda on Harris. However, she also notes that, in his travels around the world, Harris himself had discovered that no one had heard of Ontario but everyone knew Toronto. Thus was born amalgamation, or, as it came to be known, the megacity. “The premier wanted Toronto to compete for business as a world-class North American city.”
The premier’s inner circle of advisers tried to counsel him against pursuing the idea, reports Roth. They feared that opinion leaders in the city would oppose amalgamation while “most regular people didn’t care that much.”
The advisers were right. When amalgamation was rolled out, it was opposed by local mayors (some of whom were Conservatives) and “left-wing activists” like former mayor John Sewell, but also business leaders like the Toronto Board of Trade. And in a city-run plebiscite, 76% of Toronto residents voted against the idea.
But Harris charged ahead, and the megacity was created. “Many analysts concede that it’s hard to imagine Toronto today — its culture, its tourism, its growth and its wealth — without amalgamation,” says Roth, adding that even “the Toronto Star (of all places) determined amalgamation to have been a success.”
This betrays a certain ignorance of the Star, which had advocated amalgamation for decades before Harris. Indeed, prior to implementing the measure, Harris had a private lunch with Star Publisher John Honderich and asked if he and the paper would be onside with him on amalgamation. “Unless I have the Star’s support, there’s no way this will fly,” said Harris. “You can count on our support,” replied Honderich.
And, of course, no government since has tried to de-amalgamate Toronto.
Not so successful was the whole “disentanglement” exercise, aimed at reducing overlap between municipalities and the province and, it was hoped, save money.
The result was the downloading of many previously provincial responsibilities, notably social housing and urban highways (like the Don Valley Parkway and the Gardiner Expressway) onto municipalities. The move put Toronto and other cities in a fiscal bind that remains to this day.
Roth blames the bureaucrats in the municipal affairs ministry for much of this. But the fingerprints of the CSR (which called for “efficient local government”) are all over it as well. And the aforementioned David Crombie was appointed by the Harris government to head up a “who does what” panel that recommended sweeping changes (not all of which were implemented).
Roth quotes David Lindsay, Harris’ principal secretary, as comparing disentanglement to “a home renovation project gone awry … turning a short, low-budget task into a years-long project.”
“In retrospect,” says Roth, “they could have had a nicer kitchen without gutting the whole house.”
A municipal problem tackled with more success was assessment of property for the purpose of taxation. In some municipalities — Toronto, in particular — there were gross inequities in the assessments, which meant a mansion in Rosedale would pay the same property tax as a bungalow in Scarborough. Again, everyone recognized the problem but no one wanted to tackle it, until Harris came along and introduced market-value assessment. While the new system has experienced some difficulties recently, it remains in place today.
IN ANOTHER gutsy move, Harris eliminated rent controls, which had been introduced by the Bill Davis government back in the 1970s. Controls were welcomed by tenants, but the unintended side effect was that developers stopped building rental units.
Rae’s NDP government attempted to tackle this problem by exempting new buildings from rent controls. Harris went further and ended controls altogether. This led to another unintended side effect: rental units became increasingly unaffordable for low-income tenants.
“It’s not that Harris and his advisers didn’t care about making sure there was a mix of housing in the market that included affordable housing,” says Roth. “It’s that they thought the benefits of an open market would trickle down.” They didn’t, and that’s one of the reasons why we now have people living in tents in parks.
“In summary,” says Roth, “Harris’ messy municipal reforms do not add up to one coherent ideological or political agenda. They represent the ambitions of an action-oriented government tackling complicated problems that remain just as intractable to this day.”
Labour Relations
One of the features of the Harris government was its combative relationship with unions, both public- and private-sector. Unlike Doug Ford, the current Conservative premier who has made successful appeals for support from private-sector unionists, Harris seemed to prefer picking fights with them.
One of Harris’s first acts was to repeal the Rae government’s labour-law reforms, known as Bill 40, which made it easier for unions to organize and prohibited the hiring of replacement workers (“scabs”) by employers during a strike. In the process, the Harris government imposed some new restrictions on organizing, including a requirement for a secret-ballot vote in every case where a union sought certification. (Previously, a vote was not required if a certain percentage of the bargaining unit had signed membership cards.)
The government also froze the minimum wage (at $6.85 an hour). And, presuming that union leaders were enjoying lavish benefits, also compelled public disclosure of their pay. (This move backfired as it turned out that their pay was quite modest.)
Most of these changes did not survive the election of McGuinty and the Liberals after the 2003 election. Howard Levitt, the labour lawyer who is the author of this chapter, accuses them of pandering to unions in exchange for votes and donations.
“Interestingly,” says Levitt, “the Ontario Liberals have, since the Harris policy measures, become the party of labour more so even than the Ontario NDP.”
Levitt also questions the need for unions in the 21st century, given that governments already legislate a floor for workers and courts provide recourse for wrongful dismissal. “There is less need for unions than ever before,” he writes. “The rigid structures, byzantine inefficiencies, and lack of motivation (because of the difficulty of dismissing them and the inability to provide merit-based increases) have put unionized employers at a distinct disadvantage. … Today, as a result, unions are fighting to find purpose.”
Premier Ford might beg to differ.
Energy
This is another area that underwent dramatic changes under Harris, starting with the break-up of Ontario Hydro, the agency created by another Conservative premier (James Whitney) early in the 20th century.
The chapter is written by Will Stewart, who worked for John Baird in his various roles in Harris’ cabinet, latterly as minister of energy. Stewart notes there was not much in the CSR about Hydro, beyond a paragraph promising to freeze electricity rates for five years and suggesting there might be privatization of some of Hydro’s non-nuclear assets.
In fact, the only Hydro asset privatized during the Harris years was nuclear: the Bruce power plant. There were moves afoot at the end of Harris’ term to privatize Hydro One (the transmission lines agency split off from Ontario Hydro). But these plans were scuttled by the incoming Conservative premier, Ernie Eves. It was a Liberal premier, Kathleen Wynne, who privatized Hydro One more than a decade later.
THE BREAK-UP of Ontario Hydro into smaller pieces was still a significant move by Harris. It passed through the legislature with surprisingly little public debate, probably because the opposition parties (both the Liberals and NDP) had been so critical of Hydro over the years and mostly welcomed its break-up.
But Stewart points out there was an accompanying move by the Harris government that was more controversial: the introduction of market pricing for electricity. Technically, says Stewart, this move was a success. “But market theories don’t vote.” And as electricity prices skyrocketed, Harris’ successor, Eves, scrapped the plan.
Stewart blames this on the Liberals and NDP for politicizing the issue, which, of course, the Conservatives did when electricity prices began to soar again under Kathleen Wynne.
One last element of the Harris legacy covered in this chapter is the closing of the province’s five coal-fired power plants, which were major sources of both smog and greenhouse gasses. The seeds of this initiative were, indeed, planted during the Harris years, but implementation came under McGuinty. Stewart reluctantly acknowledges this but blames the Liberals for botching the exercise.
In conclusion, Stewart says the Harris legacy in the energy sector is “the market-driven system we have in Ontario today.” Really? Electricity rates continue to be subsidized, and decisions on new plants are still being made at cabinet.
Environment
The author of this chapter, Gord Miller, Harris’ hand-picked choice as Ontario’s environmental commissioner, credits Harris with “several bold and far-reaching initiatives for which due credit has not yet been paid.” He also cites one “serious failure with disastrous consequences.”
The latter is the Walkerton water disaster in the summer of 2000, which left seven people dead and many more sick. While Miller (correctly) notes there were multiple culprits in this affair, he singles out the government’s decision to contract out testing of municipal water supplies, formerly the responsibility of the provincial ministry of the environment.
The problem, says Miller, was that the government did not require the private testing labs to inform the ministry as well as the municipality if there was a problem with the water samples. This oversight has since been corrected.
On the credit side, Miller mentions Harris’ moves to protect the Oak Ridges Moraine (since subsumed by the Greenbelt), require testing of older vehicles to ensure they still meet emission standards (since scrapped), the first steps toward closure of the coal-fired power plants, and the creation of 61 new provincial parks.
Miller also acknowledges that the Harris government was “filled with newcomers that were ideologically challenged by the concept of ecology, environmental policy, and planning.” But Harris, he says, was nonetheless able “to navigate the challenges presented by the environmental file with reasonable success.”
I would say that is damning with faint praise.
Democratic Reform
The term “populist” was not used to describe Harris three decades ago. But the author of this chapter, Guy Giorno, Harris’ policy guru and later chief of staff, notes that the CSR used populist language. For example: “Government isn’t working any more. The system is broken.” (Echoes of Pierre Poilievre here.)
Giorno expresses strong disappointment, however, that Harris failed to implement one populist measure: referendums. In opposition, Harris promised referendums to let voters decide on a wide range of topics, from new casinos to Sunday shopping to tax increases and to anything that a petition of 10% to 15% of the public wanted to vote on.
Once Harris was in office, draft bills and consultation papers were produced. But not much actually happened beyond a requirement for a referendum every time the government proposed raising taxes. And that measure was subsequently neutered by the Eves government. On the other hand, Harris ignored the results of a plebiscite that the City of Toronto held on amalgamation. “An obvious and not unreasonable take-away was that the Harris government supported referendums except when it disagreed with the results,” concludes Giorno.
What is the explanation for this? “Harris and his cabinet, once in office, soon found that they much preferred the conventional system in which government, not the people, decided,” says a disillusioned Giorno.
In another area, however, Harris made a lasting impact: the reduction of the number of seats in the Legislature from 130 to 103, the same as Ontario’s representation in Parliament.
This move was billed by the Harris government as a “cost-saving purging of politicians.” It was even called the “fewer politicians act,” which had a populist ring to it. The opposition parties and other critics denounced it for depriving communities of representation. But the measure had a side benefit that was good for democracy.
As Giorno notes, especially in larger centres like Toronto, the federal and provincial riding boundaries criss-crossed each other. The result was massive confusion about which riding one lived in. Many people did not even know the names of their MP or MPP. By making the provincial riding boundaries coterminous with the federal ones, Harris helped end the confusion and enhance transparency and accountability in our political system.
And no government since has reversed Harris’ reform, except for a minor tweak by the Liberals to add a riding in the north.
Federal-Provincial Relations
This is actually two chapters. The first, by Craig McFadyen, a former adviser to Harris and other premiers, deals with the aftermath of the 1995 referendum in Quebec. It credits Harris with steering Chrétien and the country away from further unproductive constitutional talks toward “non-constitutional renewal.”
Notably, Harris, in alliance with Quebec Premier Lucien Bouchard, championed limits on the federal spending power (through which we got medicare). Much talk between the provinces and Ottawa led to a federal-provincial agreement that the federal government would not introduce any new national social programs without the agreement of a majority of provincial governments.
As McFadyen acknowledges, it is not worth the paper it was written on.
McFadyen also notes that Harris echoed the Rae government in raising concerns about the unfairness of federal fiscal arrangements to Ontario and got Ottawa to make some changes. It is a campaign that was carried on by McGuinty. But in spite of the combined efforts of these three premiers, we are still awaiting a major rewriting of the nation’s confusing (and often counter-productive) set of rules on taxing and spending.
The second chapter was written by Hugh Segal, who died this summer. He had the unique experience of being an adviser to Bill Davis, Brian Mulroney, and Mike Harris.
Segal portrays Harris in the area of federal-provincial relations as essentially a reincarnation of Davis. “During the Harris government’s two terms in office, relations with Ottawa were largely even-tempered, pragmatic and productive,” concludes Segal. As an example, he cites the reform of the Canada Pension Plan, which, of course, is now threatened by Alberta.
1995 and 1999 Elections
This chapter was written by a Liberal, David Herle, former co-chair of Kathleen Wynne’s campaigns as premier. As a political strategist, Herle is an admirer of the CSR and the “tiny Tories” behind it. “They understood the depth of unhappiness and worry among the public” after five years of Rae’s NDP government and a major recession.
“They understood that people really wanted to change. The winner would be the party that was most convincing that it would bring change. To that fight the Liberals brought a Swiss army knife while Mike Harris brought a bazooka.”
That about sums it up.
As for Harris’ legacy, Herle notes that, as a result of his premiership, “Tax increases are seen as politically fatal.”
Mike Harris
Perhaps surprisingly, in a book that puts his name in the title and his photo on the front cover, there is actually very little about Harris the man. Until the last chapter, written by Jaime Watt, an old Harris confidant. “Everything you need to know about Mike Harris and how he made decisions as premier arises from where he came from. From the values forged in small town northern Ontario, where, after family, community means everything. Where the challenges of day-to-day life breed lifelong characteristics of resiliency, respect for the individual, a belief in the power of equality of opportunity, and a level playing field for all.”
From my own up-close observation of Harris as premier, that is a pretty good summary of the man.
WHAT IS THE bottom line here? There are three ways to measure the success of a premier:
Winning elections. Harris won back-to-back majorities (1995 and 1999). These days, with public opinion much less stable than it used to be, that is hard to do. But since Harris left the scene, two other premiers have done it (McGuinty and Ford). So Harris does not stand out in this respect.
Longevity in office. Harris lasted barely seven years, less than McGuinty (a decade). And Ford is a yardstick and will surpass it if he runs again in 2026. So again Harris does not stand out.
Whether his policies survive his time in office. Here Harris is truly exceptional. Amalgamation, market value assessment, province-wide testing, college of teachers, break-up of Ontario Hydro, hospital closings, P3s, workfare — all these and more have been retained by successive governments of different stripes and orientations.
Some of the authors in this book suggest the time is ripe for another common sense revolution and a leader like Harris. But the circumstances are entirely different today from 1995.
Back then, the province was rebounding from five years of Rae government, which was portrayed (ludicrously) in billboards as Marxist, and from a severe recession, which saw unemployment peaking at 11.9%, the highest level since the Great Depression.
Today, we have a Conservative government at Queen’s Park and are not yet in a recession, although that may still come.
We also have a much more unsettled world climate, with active wars in Europe and the Middle East and an American neighbour poised to re-elect a volatile president, Donald Trump, bent on revenge. Ontario’s voters may be looking for stability, not a revolution, in 2026.
Ian Urquhart was the Queen’s Park columnist for the Toronto Star from 1997 to 2008. This review was originally published in the print edition of THE DORCHESTER REVIEW, Autumn-Winter 2023, pp. 57-65.