The last Ontario Liberal premier, Kathleen Wynne, closed out her time in government with a tax increase on the province’s highest earners. The 2018 budget, passed by the legislature shortly before the election that would render it irrelevant, created a new higher-income tax bracket to help cover the costs of expanded social programs. The tax increase was short-lived, as then-opposition leader Doug Ford promised to reverse it immediately if his party formed government — which it soon did.
Two Liberal leaders later, Bonnie Crombie wants to go in a different direction. She hasn’t been shy about arguing that the party went the wrong way under Wynne — she launched her leadership bid saying she’d do things differently — and she was, on Tuesday, even more emphatic.
“Ford’s conservatives are content to have the single-highest small-business tax rate of any jurisdiction in this country,” the former Mississauga mayor said at Queen’s Park on Tuesday. “Ontario Liberals are cutting taxes: we are the tax cutters.”
Crombie and her finance critic, Stephanie Bowman (who holds the seat Wynne once did, Don Valley West), are proposing to cut the small-business tax rate from 3.2 per cent to 1.6 per cent while also raising the threshold to qualify for the lower tax rate, which they estimate would cost the provincial treasury something like $500 million.
A proposal to cut business taxes by the third party in the legislature isn’t terribly interesting in itself: there’s such a long way to go between where it currently sits and being in a position to actually make policy in Ontario that almost literally everything could change between now and then.
What was substantially more interesting was how Crombie framed her proposal as a form of populist attack on Ford’s government.
When asked by TVO Today, the Liberal finance critic put a sharp point on the possible costs to the treasury from offering up a tax cut to small businesses.
“We’ve estimated this would cost about the same as the parking lot at Ontario Place — about half a billion dollars,” Bowman said. “This government chooses to prioritize things that don’t benefit Ontarians. They could have taken that money and said, ‘We’ll give small businesses a tax break,’ and I hope they still will.”
(For clarity, the Liberals did concede that the costs of their proposed tax cut would be half a billion dollars annually, while the parking lot at Ontario Place will presumably be built only once; Crombie later added that the annual costs would also be comparable to what Ontario currently spends on agency nurses.)
If you were wondering what the Liberal attack line on Ford will be for the next two years (until the 2026 election), Crombie and her colleagues aren’t being shy about it, and Tuesday’s press conference included a litany of Ford’s alleged sins against small businesses — which he’s committed, the Liberals assert, in service of helping out big businesses (and worse, foreign-owned businesses) that make generous campaign contributions.
“It’s clear that Doug Ford’s Ontario is only open for big businesses and only concerned about lining the pockets of wealthy donors and well-connected friends,” Crombie said.
The Tories haven’t exactly made it hard for their critics lately. The rapid growth in the size of the premier’s office and its well-compensated staff saw the opposition parties howl about the hypocrisy of a man who ran against the “gravy train” in his city-council career. The appearance of one Ontario municipality proposing to hire a former Ford staffer for the nakedly transactional purpose of getting a lobbyist close to the premier was terrible, even if the decision was quickly reversed. Naming a defeated Tory candidate to the make-work position of a redundant “Ottawa regional office” is almost beyond mockery (almost). And those headlines are all just since April Fools’ Day of this year — it’s not yet June.
At least as interestingly, Crombie seemed to suggest on Tuesday that even the apparent consensus move of handing over billions of dollars to automakers for electric vehicles deserves more scrutiny than it has received under Ford.
“I was in the north this past weekend in Sudbury… and they’re a little bit concerned about the EV market, about battery-powered vehicles that won’t have the range to drive in the north, so they’re wondering if this is a southern-centred policy decision to build EVs when they need a critical mineral strategy,” Crombie said. “We believe in small businesses, not just big businesses.”
If the premier and his allies haven’t exactly made it difficult for his critics lately, it’s also true that prior opposition leaders tried to use Ford’s record against him and failed miserably. In 2018, the Wynne Liberals tried to use Ford’s extensive record of inflammatory quotes to undermine the idea that he was the defender of the little guy; they might as well have burned the money spent for office heating. Ford’s supporters have been willing to forgive a lot, not least because Ford does actually ask for forgiveness with some regularity.
So far, under Crombie, the attacks on Ford haven’t translated into political success — at least, as shown by the results in the recent Milton byelection, which saw the Liberals lose to the Tory candidate by an even larger margin than they did in 2022. But this isn’t the kind of strategy that’s going to pay off in weeks or even months. If it works at all, that’ll be because events over the next two years fit into the framework the Liberals are offering voters. It’s fair to argue the Tories have nothing to worry about right now. But what happens if the RCMP announce charges in the Greenbelt scandal — however distant from Ford personally they may be?
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