Scott Stinson: Finance minister valued a ‘truly balanced budget’ that took care of vulnerable people’s needs
Scott Stinson, April 10, 2014, Last Updated: Apr 10 11:34 PM ET, Source
Jim Flaherty sits with then-Ontario Premier Mike Harris as they deliver the Budget for 2001.
Thirteen years ago, not long after he had introduced his first budget as Ontario Finance Minister and subsequently been decried as an uncaring bean counter who, along with then-Premier Mike Harris, would undo the very fabric of the province, Jim Flaherty told a newspaper interviewer that he was aware of the criticisms.
He just didn’t believe them.
“I am surprised sometimes that people think that because you are fiscally prudent, that means you are insensitive to the needs of others,” Mr. Flaherty said then.
The member of Provincial Parliament for Whitby-Ajax would chart a course with the Ontario treasury that in some ways he would repeat when he took the same role with the federal government in 2006. As people in Ottawa suggested upon Mr. Flaherty’s death on Thursday that his lasting legacy would be the introduction of the federal Registered Disability Savings Plan, a close read of his early Ontario budget provides a preview of some of the areas that the fiscal conservative felt deserved special attention.
It paid down the debt, yes, and cut corporate tax rates — two areas that would be a focus of Mr. Flaherty’s years in Ottawa — but it also put millions of dollars into services for the developmentally disabled.
“I have a long-standing concern with respect to truly a balanced budget, and that is you balance it in terms of dollars,” Mr. Flaherty said in that 2001 interview. “But you also balance it in terms of the needs of vulnerable people.”
Of course, few people take this view of Ontario in the Harris years. Even though it has been more than a decade since the Liberals came to power, the Harris-Flaherty budgets remain synonymous with slashing and burning.
Those who knew Mr. Flaherty in his Queen’s Park days say he was more complicated than that.
“He was a conservative on a macroeconomic scale, but he believed that government had an important role in helping individuals when they needed help,” a reporter friend of his said on Thursday.
Mr. Harris, like all of Mr. Flaherty’s former political colleagues, seemed stunned and saddened by the news of his passing. “I loved him because he was an honest, good guy,” Mr. Harris told CTV.
Tim Hudak, the current PC leader who was a cabinet rookie alongside his “friend and mentor” in the Harris years, said Mr. Flaherty’s death “was a huge blow to the heart, both personally and politically. Jim was like family in both areas.”
“All of Queen’s Park is in shock,” said Premier Kathleen Wynne. “I loved his feisty, articulate spirit.”
The Ontario Liberal governments of the past 11 years have steadily undone some of the cost-cutting that was the signature of the Harris era, with ever-ballooning costs in health and education, particularly, but the last budget of Dalton McGuinty, the man who knocked the PCs from power, embarked on an austerity agenda meant to correct the province’s troubled finances. Critics, particularly in organized labour, said Mr. McGuinty had “become worse than Mike Harris.”
One imagines Mr. Flaherty must have had a chuckle at that.
