Show Transcript – January 1

Transcript for Saturday, January 1, 2011 – 1830

Also airs Sunday, January 2, 2011 – 0700 and 0000

Monday, January 3, 2011 – 0630

The Year in Review

GUESTS –

Christina Blizzard, Sun Media

Robert Benzie, Toronto Star Queen’s Park Bureau Chief

Keith Leslie, Canadian Press

SEAN MALLEN: Well, look what Santa Claus brought Focus Ontario, a brand new set. The truth is the place where I’m standing is actually shared with our friends on the News Hour. We’ll show off our nice new desk in a moment, but this part of the studio allows us to do some fancy, shmancy effects. For example, if I’m talking about Dalton McGuinty or Tim Hudak or Andrea Horwath, they magically appear – three faces we’ll be seeing a lot in 2011. As we enter a new year with what promises to be a closely-fought election on the horizon, it’s a good time to look back at what happened in 2010 and to make some fearless and perhaps foolish predictions for the months to come.

(video clips)

Herewith some highlights of the Ontario political year that was. In January the Premier announced a seven billion dollar deal with the Korean giant Samsung, to help build a clean energy industry.

Premier Dalton McGuinty: Today Ontario is taking a giant step forward in a green economy.

A sweetheart deal with a foreign company, thundered the opposition. In March the budget delivers a $20 billion deficit and the proposal to freeze public sector wages, which don’t stay frozen.

Finance Minister Dwight Duncan: We’re asking everybody to contribute today.

April brings a war of words with pharmacists, as the Health Minister cuts both generic drug prices and special payments to the people that prescribe them. But the government plan goes through anyway. Not so with another contentious idea.

Premier Dalton McGuinty: It has become pretty obvious to us that we should give this a serious rethink.

The Liberals pull back a new sex education curriculum, after an uproar from some religious groups.

In June the G20 roars into town and the centre of Toronto is taken over by running confrontation between police and protesters. There’s an uproar over a policing regulation passed in secret by the government, and later damned by the Ombudsman.

Andre Marin, Ontario Ombudsman: The most massive compromise of civil liberties in Canadian history.

July 1st and the era of the HST arrives, a job creator says the government; a tax grab according to the opposition.

Tim Hudak: Basically thanks to Dalton McGuinty we’ll see gas prices leap over a buck a litre, taking more money out of our pockets.

Andrea Horwath: Pushing a tax through that nobody wants is a sign of an arrogant and out-of-touch government.

Those summer days are quickly overtaken by heat from new so-called eco fees, quickly withdrawn by the government after an admittedly bungled launch.

… Can you spell fiasco?

September, full-day learning starts to come to Ontario kindergarten classes, but school boards complain it’s underfunded. October, the Liberals put out another brush fire.

Kevin Flynn, MPP Oakville: The proposed Oakville power plant has been stopped.

They said the plant was needed until powerful opposition arose in a swing riding.

November’s municipal elections bring an earthquake. Incumbents fall all over the province. The political career of former deputy premier George Smitherman, is derailed, and penny-pinching rebel Rob Ford wins the race for mayor of Toronto.

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford: This victory is a clear call from the taxpayers enough is enough, and I want respect.

Energy issues continue as a dominant theme through the end of the year. The government rolls out a 20-year plan to keep the lights on, and in the face of ratepayer outrage over rising hydro bills, cuts everyone’s by ten per cent over the next five years.

Premier Dalton McGuinty: We’ve been listening to families and they’re telling us that they’re under tremendous financial pressure.

Tim Hudak: I think people are going to see through this. Dalton McGuinty has increased rates by 75 per cent and they’re going to go higher still.

And now they’re all home for the holidays, a temporary lull before the electoral battle to come.

From the Global News room in Toronto, this is Focus Ontario with Sean Mallen.

SEAN MALLEN: Thanks for joining me again and Happy New Year. Hope your head isn’t aching too much to listen to a half-hour of political talk. This is, as promised, our new desk, and joining me to christen it three long-time friends of the program. Christina Blizzard is the Queen’s Park columnist for Sun Media; Rob Benzie, the Queen’s Park bureau chief for the Toronto Star; and Keith Leslie, the senior correspondent for the legislature for Canadian Press. Happy New Year to you all.

Guests: Happy New Year, Sean.

SEAN MALLEN: Welcome back to the show and our new look. One thing I didn’t mention in that little report was the polls, got increasingly bad for the Liberals as the year went on. Our most recent Ipsos poll had them nine points back of the Tories. Theories as to what went wrong, starting with you, Chris.

Christina Blizzard: Well, I think that last year was the year the Teflon wore off for Dalton McGuinty. Up until then he’d had no problems, nothing had really stuck to him, but I think that 2010 was the year when everything fell apart, the HST kicked in, there were just so many issues that really started to tarnish this sort of golden boy image.

SEAN MALLEN: What about you, Rob? What went wrong with him to lose that support?

Robert Benzie: Remember it’s the third year of the second term. So at some point voters just get sick of looking at the same old crew, and I think that’s some of what we’re seeing. I don’t want to say that the rot sets in because I don’t necessarily think that it’s that, I mean there are still capable people governing the province.

SEAN MALLEN: Plus it sounds too much like a Tim Hudak speech.

Robert Benzie: There you go. I think they coasted through the 2007 election so much that they kind of had a false sense of security from that, so the ensuing three years have been more challenging than I think they predicted.

SEAN MALLEN: What do you think, Keith? Were there some managerial issues, because some things were rolled out and then once they got out there, they realized – woops!

Keith Leslie: Yes, there absolutely were some bad management problems with the Liberals this time. I mean mixed martial arts – we’re not going to do it, it’s not a priority, then we are going to do it. Full-day day care at school, well, we’re going to have to change that, and not make the schools run it and let the privates keep running that. The electricity – the government warns the hydro bills are going to go way up, 46 per cent in five years because we need to pay for that. Oh, ten per cent rebate because people were upset about that. The eco fees, which were a disaster, the same day the HST came in, people paying forty cents to forty dollars on a product, they had to completely retreat on that. The sex education curriculum, coming in and change that. So all that, it made the Liberals look like they had lost the agenda.

SEAN MALLEN: And some kind of poor handling on the part of some of those ministers. You mentioned eco fees, and John Gerretsen’s news conference – now former environment minister – did he handle it well?

Christina Blizzard: Well no, absolutely. But what on earth made them think, was this a deliberate policy to bring it in on July 1st, the same day as the HST came in. They thought what, consumers wouldn’t figure it out, we wouldn’t be looking at our bills to figure out how much HST was kicking in that day. Was it deliberate, or was it just a complete bumbling of any communications on this? There has been a very effective campaign on behalf of John Wilkinson over the HST to try and explain why this was going to kick in. But there was no explanation that eco fees would also be arriving on your bill for all these items at the same time, so suddenly we went to whatever – Canadian Tire and bought our fertilizer and suddenly there was an extra four or five dollars, up to seven dollars in some cases for some items with no explanation for some organization, this sort of quasi, not a government organization, this Stewardship Ontario, that no one really knew anything about.

SEAN MALLEN: And did not return reporters phone calls very often.

Christina Blizzard: Exactly. They thought it was going to work well.

SEAN MALLEN: Sometimes I had the sense, tell me Rob, if you had this feeling, it was a little bit like the little Dutch boy put his finger in the dyke, oh, there’s a leak over here; oh, there’s a leak over here, a leak over here, and they’re running out of fingers.

Robert Benzie: Yes, but I think that comes with age in a sense that you can only put out so many fires. You also don’t have frankly the people that you had, that got you there. A lot of the folks that helped Mr McGuinty behind the scenes and in front of the scenes, whether it’s cabinet ministers or staffers, those people they either burn out or fade away, they go off and do other things.

SEAN MALLEN: Make some money.

Robert Benzie: Yes, make some bread. And you have a new generation of folks coming in, and maybe that new generation is not as effective.

SEAN MALLEN: That’s our time for this segment. I have to stop there, and take a break, and back in a moment to talk about the year that was.

* * *

SEAN MALLEN: And welcome back to our conversation about the political year that was. We had much more than in the lead-up to the 2007 election, quite a few government members leaving, and more to come, we think. Keith, you talk to these back-benchers a lot, especially as you file for all over the province. Are you sensing some real nervousness on their part, looking at the polls, looking at the way things like energy prices are going over back home?

Keith Leslie: Absolutely. Certainly the Liberals on those back benches, and all the Liberals, even the cabinet ministers, when they’re going home they’re hearing about the electricity bills in particular, the harmonized sales tax to a lesser degree, but the combination of the two, and that’s where the NDP has had a good point, the HST on the hydro bills. Because you’re always saying the hydro bills are going to go up so much because we need to make these investments, then you had that eight per cent on top of that, which was the provincial portion of the tax, it hadn’t been on there before, and that just really is getting them a lot of negative publicity, a lot of e-mails, hence why we have these ten per cent rebates that are going to start this month, going to everyone for electricity for the next five years.

This is clearly an attempt to really try and defuse that issue for these back-benchers, but that’s why we’re seeing a lot of decisions about whether should I run federally, should I consider running again now. We’re seen more than a half dozen already saying they’re not going to run again.

SEAN MALLEN: Some cabinet ministers, which is unusual. One, Mr Fonseca, made it a little bit faster than the NDP had anticipated.

Keith Leslie: Well, when you see someone like Minister Fonseca, a cabinet minister, who thinks he stands a better chance of getting elected next to Michael Ignatieff running federally, than with Dalton McGuinty provincially, that sends a terrible message to the Ontario Liberals. And that’s not the kind of thing they want to have to explain, why was this man thinking he can have a better chance of getting elected with Ignatieff than with Dalton.

SEAN MALLEN: We have to think Chris, that leading into the next year the Liberals are going to have to come up with the next big idea. They have to come up with more than last year’s Throne Speech. What do you think they’re going to try to come up with? What area do you think they’re going to have to work on to try to get those poll numbers turned around?

Christina Blizzard: Well, I think they’re going to concentrate on full-day kindergarten. I think that’s the only real issue they’ve got that is any kind of a winner going into the next election. Some of their other policies they have a lot of difficulties with them, or they’re deeply flawed. Frankly I think that’s why they keep challenging the NDP and the Conservatives to release their platform. I think they just want to have them roll it out so they can steal it.

SEAN MALLEN: It’s a target.

Christina Blizzard: Exactly, it’s a time-honoured political ploy to find out what your opponents are going to be doing, and the Tories clearly are well aware with what they’re trying to do and why they’re challenging them to release that platform. The same for the NDP. So I think they’re all being a little bit cagey about just what they’re going to take into it. But I think the Liberals, all they have really is education. Mr McGuinty has always wanted to be known as the education premier and I think that’s what he’s going to concentrate on.

SEAN MALLEN: Well, let’s talk a little bit about the opposition, because we haven’t much yet. Tim Hudak is in first place, but do you think Rob, that that’s more a none-of-the-above. You can’t say that people really know who Tim Hudak is, and the Liberals must be counting on that.

Robert Benzie: Yes, and we had a poll late last year and it said that Mr Hudak was at 41 per cent. I would be astonished if even 41 per cent of Ontarians have heard of him. You know the leader of the opposition is in an obscure job frankly, and he can probably walk on set here and the four of us would recognize him, but no one else in the building would, and it’s just a function of being the leader of the opposition. Andrea Horwath, the NDP leader, has the same sort of lack of profile, but they will get that profile later this year as we head toward the October 6 election. But you’re right, people are parking their vote somewhere. I don’t think that this election has been decided yet, I don’t think you can say that.

SEAN MALLEN: No, certainly not. Lots of change right in the middle of it. Keith, on Tim Hudak personally, they’ve really taken a hard-ball approach, really hard-ball approach, much more than the gentlemanly Mr Tory did. How do you think that’s going to play once we get to the point of actually making decisions about who we’re going to vote for?

Keith Leslie: I think it’s going to help the Conservatives get the Conservative vote out. The Conservative vote stayed home under Mr Tory in 2007, an awful lot of Conservatives stayed home because they didn’t like the faith-based education policy that he was advocating. But they were just upset, he didn’t have control of the caucus, it wasn’t united behind him. So this is where I think Hudak, they’re going to stick to that message, they’re going to play hard-ball all the way through, but it will indeed drive the Conservative vote out because they like to hear a straight Conservative message. Hence the Rob Ford message, get on that message, hammer it all the way home. Hudak’s going to ride that same sort of – not gravy train – but he’s definitely going to ride that same sort of message home.

SEAN MALLEN: Okay, we’re going to stop right there and come back in a moment to talk a bit more about the opposition.

* * *

SEAN MALLEN: I want to spend a bit more time talking about the opposition in this segment. We mentioned Tim Hudak’s hard-ball tactics, Rob. One thing that I heard a wise political sage that I share an office with at Queen’s Park suggested you know what, they might not come up with a very specific platform. If they’re still nine points ahead in the polls they might just stick to the simple message these guys are bad and we’ll do better. What do you think of that?

Robert Benzie: I think that would be really foolish if they did do that. The voters are smarter than that, I think, and I think that Mr Hudak is very good at slogans, you know the “˜tax and spend Liberals’. He’s very good at that kind of stuff, but he’s not been very good at telling Ontarians what he would do if he were elected. So do you want to hand the keys to the kingdom to someone without knowing what are they going to do to the health care system, what are they going to do to the education system, are they going to change municipal funding the way the last Tory government remember amalgamated cities like Toronto and Ottawa. That didn’t go over so well.

SEAN MALLEN: He sticks pretty grimly to the message track, doesn’t he, no matter what.

Robert Benzie: He’s very, very disciplined and he’s very effective at that and I think his staff appreciate that. He’s not out there freelancing, but he’s going to have to tell us what he would do, and I believe that they will have a platform with some detail. I don’t believe it will be 52 pages like it was in 2007.

SEAN MALLEN: And no religious school funding, we can be almost certain.

Robert Benzie: Probably not.

SEAN MALLEN: Well, we haven’t talked much about Andrea Horwath, Christina, but I think most people say she’s performed pretty well. The polls are up a little bit. What’s the challenge for them to try to be heard above the din here?

Christina Blizzard: Well, I think her problem frankly is to overcome the NDP label because a lot of people have problems with that. Now I think that she will be the big surprise at the election. She’s working very hard, she’s very attractive. I think that as people meet her and talk to her they find her message very compelling and I think that she will do extremely well in the debate for example, where you will have two men on either side and you know this woman in the middle. She reminds me of some of the European socialist women leaders there. She has that sort of modern look to her that I think will appeal to young voters, and I think if she can sort of look for that Tony Blair third wave, what hopefully won’t be the third rail, that she will do very well. But she does have a lot of challenges, she does have the union label, although interestingly enough it’s more the Liberals who have the support of the unions right at the moment.

SEAN MALLEN: Oh yes, that famous group, the name of which escapes me, that campaigned on their behalf –

Robert Benzie: Working Families Coalition.

SEAN MALLEN: Working Families Coalition that the Tories really dislike. It looked like the NDP might at least have the opportunity for gains around Hamilton, maybe in the North, where maybe some incumbents are not running again.

Christina Blizzard: Well, I think what happened in the ’07 election was the collapse of the Conservative vote really hurt the NDP in northern Ontario, and I think that some of the issues – there were some regional issues there as far as forestry and natural resources – where a lot of people in places like Sudbury, Thunder Bay, are really unhappy with Linda Jeffrey, the Minister of Natural Resources, from Brampton, and a lot of those communities really are not pleased with the Liberal government, and frankly one Thunder Bay riding almost went NDP, and I could see that happening. Algoma-Manitoulin, places like that. Even Sudbury, if Rick Bartolucci doesn’t run, that went NDP federally.

SEAN MALLEN: Just about a minute left in this segment. Keith, back to the Liberals, one presumes they will be doing a cabinet shuffle early in the new year. I think a lot of us expected Mr Sousa to replace Mr Fonseca. Any other names that come to mind who might be possible candidates for running again, or to be dropped.

Keith Leslie: Well, that’s just it. There’s lots of names on the Liberal back bench, and he’s got 72 seats. There’s lots of names there, people that should come up, people that have been waiting eight years to get into a cabinet seat, and we all know a few cabinet ministers that probably could be dropped. But whether that’s going to happen or not, Mr McGuinty’s very much a loyal guy, and if his team is loyal he stands by a lot of them. So I don’t know that we’re going to see a big shuffle. What we are going to see is we know the Liberals are going to lose seats, they can’t come back with 72 seats, so who’s going to pick those up. Can it be the NDP, can it be in those ridings that we talked about where they can make gains? But who’s going to come in and out of cabinet, I’m not going to guess.

SEAN MALLEN: Okay, I’m not going to ask anyone for predictions for this year’s election because you’ll probably be wrong. But in a moment we’re going to be back with our choices for the 2010 Play of the Year.

* * *

Play of the Year

SEAN MALLEN: Okay then, well we had 51 Plays of the Week and now we’re going to have a Play of the Year from each of us, and we’re going to start with Christina Blizzard from Sun Media, your Play of the Year for 2010.

Christina Blizzard: Well, Play of the Year was Canada Day last year, July 1st, the fireworks all at the cash register with the HST, eight per cent on just about everything, and then the eco fees, this unknown fee that suddenly kicked in. I think that hurt us all in the pocketbook and I think it’s going to hurt the Liberals in the election.

SEAN MALLEN: Okay, and Robert Benzie, what’s your Play of the Year for 2010?

Robert Benzie: It would have to be the election of Mayor Rob Ford in Toronto, an absolute stunner. No one expected it. I think when Mr Ford launched his campaign on a Friday evening, my colleague David Rider, was the only main stream reporter at the event, and that’s how improbably this rise was. He ran a very disciplined campaign. He said I’m going to stop the gravy train, as Keith said earlier, and he stuck to it, and he won and he deserved to win because he ran the best campaign.

SEAN MALLEN: And got some early victories at City Hall.

Robert Benzie: Yes.

SEAN MALLEN: Keith Leslie, your Play of the Year.

Keith Leslie: Well, it would have to be the passage of the G20 secret law and the Ombudsman’s report into that. The Ombudsman – you ran a clip of him off the top, of course his always subtle style – talking about it being a day of infamy when martial law reigned in Toronto. But the government used a 1939 law that was designed to keep Nazis out of courthouses and public buildings, to try and give the G20 leaders more protection, give police more powers. It lead to mass confusion of course and here’s where the Ombbudsman really teed off on them, the government deliberately did not tell the public. They phoned Toronto police chief Bill Blair and said there were 20,000 officers under your command, they don’t have the right to stop and search people, but they had a news release to tell the public this and they decided not to put it out. They spiked it, they potentially didn’t tell us that, that’s my Play of the Year.

SEAN MALLEN: And it was interesting how Mr McGuinty initially had a very muted response, and on our program two weeks ago said well, there was a response, Rick Bartolucci got shuffled, which I don’t think Rick Bartolucci knew after that, out of that portfolio, although he did stay in cabinet.

My Play of the Year is not so much a political one, but it is related to political policy and public policy. In November we ran a memorable show profiling the transplant unit at Toronto General Hospital, and centred on Cody McClelland from Sault Ste Marie, who was getting a kidney from his Dad, and we got to witness it all the way through, through the procedures and seeing them afterwards. So my Play of the Year goes to Glenn McClelland, there he is, who gave his kidney to his son Cody, who is age 18, with a lot of big support from mother and wife, Patti McClelland, and they’re back in Sault Ste Marie for Christmas. I’m happy to say that all is going very well, and that was my Play of the Year. And a good reminder for all of us of the importance of organ donations, which as we reported last week are actually down in Ontario the past year in 2010.

So that is our show for the first show of 2011. So thanks to Keith Leslie, Rob Benzie and Christina Blizzard.

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And that’s our program, our first program of 2011. I’m Sean Mallen, thanks for watching. Next week my guests will be Tim Hudak and Andrea Horwath. Hope you can join me.

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