This Week in Ontario - And They're Off!

Political excitement at the federal level may have evaporated faster than water in downtown Toronto, but the provincial scene is still very much alive this summer across Ontario.

Among this week's highlights:


1. The Liberals scored a big endorsement from David Suzuki, whose foundation criticized the Ontario NDP last week.


2. The NDP played up their "Buy Ontario" platform. Which is a great idea, until the inevitable news story comes out that their lawn signs were made in Michigan, or some equally trivial offense.


3. Tim Hudak is promising to cut red tape - in fact, he's willing to create a whole new ministerial office to do just that. I feel like that should have been a West Wing walk-and-talk, along the the lines of:

"So he wants to cut $30 million in government spending and waste in the Department of Agriculture. How's he going to do that?"
"He'll hire someone, staff him, and have him conduct an extensive review of all spending."
"How much will that cost?"
"$35 million."

I'm sure Aaron Sorkin would have a wittier way to go about it, but you get the point.

Still, Rob Ford rode the gravy train to victory, and Hudak has made the very clever promise to dock his own pay if he can't de-gravy Queen's Park. A pledge like that creates a sense that he's serious and that it's more than the usual political doublespeak.

Tale of the Tape

The other interesting element from Harper's speech, which has been mostly overlooked by commentators to date, was his declaration of war against red tape. Take a look:

This report will emphasize the extent to which we are expediting approval processes - cutting so-called “red tape” - to ensure that stimulus spending, spending that is temporary and targeted hits our economy in a timely manner.

Let me just emphasize this:

We are cutting enormous amounts of red tape and we are doing it quickly.

[...]

That’s why, as I mentioned at the outset, in the 42 days since our action plan was
presented, we have taken extraordinary steps to cut red tape.

[...]

We are, as I’ve said, cutting bureaucratic red tape. And we need Parliament to cut its red tape too.

We cannot have the opposition in Parliament replacing bureaucratic red tape with political red tape.

This, in addition to six mentions of "bureaucratie" en francais.

Obviously, this is a bit of posturing on Harper's part around the 3 billion dollar "slush fund" battle with Ignatieff. But, I also suspect that Harper's zeal for cutting red tape has a bit to do with appeasing fiscal Conservatives who are upset at his free spending budget.

With that in mind, I wouldn't at all be surprised to see Harper and Flaherty coming back to this theme on several occasions in the coming months.