- Title: The Harris Legacy: Reflections on a Transformational Premier
- Author: Allister Campbell (ed.)
- Genre: Politics
- Publisher: Sutherland House
- Pages: 360
Handout
After winning victory in the 1995 Ontario election, Progressive Conservative premier Mike Harris launched wave after wave of radical reforms, accompanied by wave after wave of tumultuous protests.
Almost 30 years later, The Harris Legacy: Reflections on a Transformational Premier offers a compelling re-examination of both the strengths and the weaknesses of a divisive, populist government that reshaped Canada’s heartland.
The years of the first Harris government were wild: Protesters pounding on the barricaded doors of Queen’s Park. One-day general strikes that shut down entire cities. Weeks-long strikes by public servants and teachers. There is little mention in The Harris Legacy of any of this.
Instead, editor Alister Campbell and the book’s contributors – most, though not all, of whom were part of the government or viewed its actions sympathetically – seek to explain the how and the why of what they called the Common Sense Revolution. This is a book by policy wonks, for policy wonks.
(Disclosure: I was asked to contribute, but declined because I was working on a book of my own.)
In the mid 1990s, Ontario was in crisis. The province’s confidence had been shaken by years of recession. Successive Liberal and NDP governments had expanded entitlements, amassing huge deficits along the way. Unemployment had almost doubled between 1990 and 1993 and one in 10 were on welfare.
A group of young ideologues who advised Harris crafted an election platform that promised to slash both entitlements and taxes. On June 8, 1995, an angry electorate shocked conventional wisdom by vaunting the Tories from third place to majority government. The people wanted change. They got it.
The government closed and amalgamated dozens of hospitals, cut welfare benefits by more than 20 per cent and slashed the number of school boards by almost half. The Tories also gutted the boards’ powers, while introducing standardized testing and a new curriculum. It cut both personal income taxes and government spending, while balancing the budget. It forced the amalgamation of Metropolitan Toronto and consolidated other municipalities across the province.
Opponents fought back. Teachers and public servants both struck provincewide and there were too many protests to count. But in the election of 1999, Ontarians rewarded the Harris Tories with a second majority government. The Common Sense Revolution was a success.
The book explores both the CSR’s strengths and its contradictions. Health care strategist Will Falk (a good Liberal) writes: “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.”
Public affairs consultant Ginny Roth points out that reforming municipal government was not a core objective of the original CSR, but that bureaucrats believed it was long overdue and “Harris and his cabinet got so much of the cut-and-dried CSR policy done in their first year that they were able to quickly channel their unbridled energy into tackling different, more complicated issues.”
Communications strategist Jaime Watt writes that “Mike Harris and the City of Toronto have a complex relationship.” The small-business owner from North Bay fought progressive downtown elites relentlessly. But he also launched the restoration of the waterfront and the expansion of the Royal Ontario Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario and other institutions.
Gordon Miller, who served as environment commissioner under both Conservative and Liberal governments, gives the Tories high marks for preserving the Oak Ridges Moraine, improving air quality and greatly expanding the province’s protected lands.
“Mike Harris was not a product of the elite culture that permeates the GTA [Greater Toronto Area] and the university cities of southern Ontario,” Miller writes. “He was, and is, a northerner, and even now that concept is alien to the understanding of much of the southern Ontario populous.”
On the other side of the ledger, Guy Giorno, who served as Harris’s chief of staff, laments that the premier abandoned plans for citizen-initiated referenda. He calls it “the lost promise of Harris’s early embrace of direct democracy.” Journalist Terence Corcoran and professor Jack Mintz believe the Harris government “deserves a capital F for failure” to privatize the liquor stores.
What matters most, as several contributors note, is that however contentious the Harris government’s reforms in education, health care, municipal governance, property-value assessment, energy privatization and much else may have been, they largely remain in place today. Today’s Ontario is Mike Harris’s Ontario.
This book is not without flaws. The prose, though always clear, is sometimes dry. The government’s role in the Walkerton tragedy – cutbacks and deregulation contributed to a failure to detect tainted water, which killed seven and sickened thousands – is either glossed over or denied. And the book largely ignores the reality that, however revolutionary the Harris government’s first term might have been, the second lacked direction.
Nonetheless, The Harris Legacy offers a powerful defence of the most transformative government in Ontario’s history, at a time when the public was angry and impatient with the status quo. They are angry and impatient again today. In that sense, the timing of this book is perfect.
John Ibbitson is writer-at-large at The Globe and Mail. His latest book is The Duel: Diefenbaker, Pearson and the Making of Modern Canada.
John Ibbitson