Poverty of ideas plagues McGuinty

from Canada dot com

Randall Denley
The Ottawa Citizen

Premier Dalton McGuinty this week dropped people you've never heard of from his cabinet and replaced them with other people you've never heard of, but that wasn't the real news in one early announcement from his re-elected government.

The premier has created a cabinet anti-poverty committee, and taxpayers should be concerned. Ending poverty is just the sort of quixotic cause that a self-styled idealist like McGuinty would spend your money on at the expense of health care, education, energy and the environment.

The cabinet committee is headed by Deb Matthews, the new minister of children and youth services and the cabinet's top cheerleader in the poverty fight. McGuinty himself promised during the campaign to set poverty-reduction targets, and he re-emphasized the importance of the poverty fight again this week.

The problem is, when Liberals talk about reducing poverty, they aren't thinking about the value of a job-creating economy or the benefits of a tax cut. Those are Conservative policies. PC leader John Tory's promise to start phasing out the health tax next year would have put up to $300 in the pocket of every low-income taxpayer in the province. Even the NDP wanted to benefit low income people with a tax cut.

Liberals reduce poverty not by increasing the pie, but by taking part of your slice and giving it to someone else. Think social programs, and plenty of them.

To see where the Liberals are going next, one need only read the Toronto Star. The Liberals obviously get what few ideas they have from the Toronto newspaper. When it ran a campaign urging a higher minimum wage, the Liberals complied. Then the Star wanted dental insurance for the poor. McGuinty promised a $45-million program.

The paper's latest crusade is ending poverty, and it looks as if McGuinty is getting on board again.

Star opinion writers are urging the premier on. In an editorial yesterday, the paper said the anti-poverty program "will require money, and lots of it." Top Liberal priorities ought to be more affordable housing, "high-quality" child-care spaces, the dental program and a quicker phasing in of the minimum-wage increase and of McGuinty's child benefit program, the Star says. These are priorities mostly not identified in the Liberal election platform, so more money for these social programs will inevitably come at the expense of something else.

One can only hope that McGuinty is insincere about the anti-poverty campaign. His record certainly suggests that he is. In 2003, McGuinty promised lots more affordable housing and child-care spaces, but didn't deliver. People on disability support and welfare received only a couple of rate-of-inflation increases and nothing to help them catch up with past cuts. McGuinty made a big show of his child benefit program, which will end a clawback of federal money to parents on welfare, but not until eight years after the original 2003 promise. The minimum wage will rise to $10.25, but not until 2010.

All of that is reassuring, but provincial revenues have been exceeding the government's official expectations. If there is extra money, it's not difficult to imagine where it will go.

Poverty activists want a plan to reduce child poverty by 25 per cent in five years. It's the sort of thing that appeals to McGuinty, who is certain to focus on buying a legacy in his second term.

In his speech this week, he described his government as "idealists," "optimists" and "activists." As an aside, McGuinty also said, "let others defend the status quo." Pretty rich from a guy who has just spent the entire election campaign doing just that.

There is nothing an idealistic, optimistic government activist likes better than to solve a problem with someone else's money. Expect to hear more about the shocking disparity between the rich and the poor. It's true that in Canada, the rich are getting richer and the poor aren't. We should be happy for the rich. If anything, this country needs more rich people to act as tax cash cows. Without the rich, government's wonderful income redistribution programs would vanish because there wouldn't be the income to redistribute.

The gap between the rich and the poor doesn't mean much to the poor person. It's the amount of money in his wallet that counts. That's why the personal income tax cuts and increases in the basic tax exemption announced by the federal government this week are the best poverty reducers. They don't increase the income level that's used to measure poverty, but they let the poor keep more of their money. Surely that's the goal.

The alternative is making the poor less poor by making everyone else more poor. It's not much of a plan. Watch for it coming soon from a government near you.

Contact Randall Denley at 596-3756 or by e-mail, rdenley@thecitizen.canwest.com