MPPs returned to the legislature for the spring sitting on Tuesday, and the government’s first priority is a beefy new omnibus bill dubbed the “Get It Done Act.” Much of the bill had been previewed last week in press conferences by Premier Doug Ford, who announced that the government would introduce new legislation that would prohibit the use of road tolls on provincial highways and that, in a separate section, would prohibit the province from introducing a carbon tax without first submitting it to a referendum.
These two provisions, in particular, will undoubtedly please some voters, albeit mostly ones the Tories already had in hand. But they are profoundly silly acts to put before the legislature: they don’t accomplish anything concrete, they can’t do what they claim to, and they can’t be changed into anything meaningful without committing a form of constitutional vandalism. And that’s before we get to the part where they’re also bad policy.
Let’s start with the remedial civics lesson. One of the most basic tenets of the Westminster parliamentary tradition is that no parliament (or in this case, legislature) can bind the hands of a future parliament with simple legislation. What a majority of MPPs can pass by a simple vote at Queen’s Park, a future, differently constituted majority can repeal with a simple vote. There have been some suggestions about how a clever legislature could try to get around this bedrock principle — could MPPs write legislation that included a supermajority requirement for its own repeal? — but none of that cleverness is in evidence in the text of the bill introduced by Transportation Minister Prabmeet Sarkaria on Tuesday afternoon.
Instead, in the Protecting Against Carbon Taxes Act, 2024, what we have is the inheritor to a relic of the Mike Harris and Ernie Eves governments: the Taxpayer Protection Act, 1999, an election-year law that nominally prohibited any tax increase that wasn’t preceded by a referendum or an extremely specific promise made during an election campaign. Even half-aware observers of Ontario politics will note than 1999 came before 2004, when the Liberals introduced their Ontario Health Premium, an increase in income taxes that did not come after a referendum or campaign promise. The 2024 edition doesn’t even allow for a carbon tax if a political party expressly runs on and wins an election over it, so it’s not even unambiguously democratic. It does, hilariously, exempt the Tories’ own industrial carbon price from its operations.
These kinds of laws are so toothless that the Liberals didn’t even need to repeal the Taxpayer Protection Act to bring in their income-tax increase. They simply changed the definitions of what was covered by the TPA so that their health premium didn’t count as a tax increase for the purposes of the law. Under Kathleen Wynne, the Liberals would do the same in 2018 with straightforward increases to upper-income-tax brackets just before that year’s election.
Some laws aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on; the Protecting Against Carbon Taxes Act may as well be damp Kleenex for all the constraints it imposes on a determined government.
The government’s legislation on road tolls is, if anything, more galling. It’s just as weak as its counterpart when it comes to meaningfully constraining the power of future governments. And it’s been put forward by a government that isn’t doing anything concrete about road tolls. The premier is not proposing to remove them from the provincially owned and operated 407 East, nor is his government proposing to ease gridlock by, for example, paying the tolls for freight trucks to use the 407, thereby shifting traffic from the badly congested 401 (something that could be implemented relatively quickly).
And the government certainly isn’t proposing to breach the 99-year lease on the privately operated part of the 407. That would amount to a nuclear option, but it would at least arguably be within the powers of this legislature — indeed, it would just mean the Tories would have to treat the 407’s operators the same way it treated renewable-energy companies in 2018.
There are several plausible reasons the government shouldn’t do any of those things, but they would at least be real, non-performative things the government could do with its majority. What they all have in common is that they would likely cost a great deal of money, though possibly not as much as building the 413, which the government remains devoted to with an ardour that borders on the unseemly. That’s the reality of governing, though: doing meaningful things usually costs money, while performative nonsense is free.
There is, of course, one way the Tories could bind the hands of a future legislature: they could propose a constitutional amendment, applying only to Ontario, that constrains the powers of the legislature. Such an amendment would need to be passed only by Queen’s Park and the federal Parliament to take effect, and the makeup of the current federal Parliament explains why this isn’t on the agenda: it’s unlikely it could pass the Commons and the Senate. Even if they could pass an amendment, doing so would set a terrible precedent — the whole point of politics is to enjoy or endure continuous argument, the push and pull of competing political goals. Amending the Constitution to entrench a specific policy outcome is simply a bad idea.
In the meantime, we’re left with the irksome elements of the so-called Get It Done Act. We could call it a stunt, but stunts are usually captivating or entertaining. This bill is a dull retread of an idea that was bad the first time. And if it does anything at all, it will be to make the electorate even more ill-informed about governance than it already is. In a better world, the government would never have introduced it. In the world we actually have, we can perhaps just pass it speedily and never speak of it again.
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