Patrick Brown's road map to profit from road tolls

By playing politics with tolls, the PC leader is showing infidelity to his own ideology, and disloyalty to John Tory.

Thestar.com
Dec. 8, 2016
By Martin Regg Cohn

On the long road to becoming premier, Patrick Brown has picked a lane. And taken a shortcut to power.

By throwing roadblocks in front of Mayor John Tory’s request for road tolls, Ontario’s PC leader is finally showing his colours.

No, not true blue Tory colours.

A more faithful Conservative would be more intellectually honest about tolls as the ticket to road pricing - the price of admission for any serious debate on making users pay for costly transportation upgrades. As Stephen Harper once was, while Brown served as a loyal backbencher in Ottawa.

By playing politics with tolls, Brown is not only showing infidelity to his own ideology. He is also being disloyal to Tory’s mayoral vision of making road users pay road tolls to defray billions of dollars in roadwork.

The mayor’s sense of betrayal came through this week as he pushed back at the provincial party he once led:

“If Patrick Brown is trying to score cheap political points in the 905, maybe he should have championed a plan to fix people’s commutes into Toronto,” he said pointedly in a prepared statement. “It’s a smart, prudent, fiscally conservative plan - something the Ontario PCs used to get behind.”

While the PCs are trying furiously to make Premier Kathleen Wynne wear road tolls - merely for saying she wouldn’t stand in the way of city hall’s request - it is their former leader who is unabashedly driving the agenda from city hall. That leaves Brown as a back seat driver, taking pot shots at the mayor trying to repair our potholed roads.

It’s a politically convenient road map for Ontario’s opposition leader - and it may gain traction in the suburbs, where Toronto-bashing can be popular. But it risks a permanent political realignment for the PCs.

By declaring war on Tory and disdaining downtown, Brown is allying himself more firmly with Doug Ford, the failed mayoral candidate from 2014. The current PC leader has jumped on the anti-tax, anti-toll, anti-LRT, anti-gravy train that Rob Ford rode into city hall in 2010 - a path to power that turned into a dead end.

It also runs contrary to Brown’s promise, when he became opposition leader, to keep an open mind - and change his mind - when presented with reasonable arguments. A year ago, I suggested he reposition the perpetually oppositionist Tories into a serious government-in-waiting:

“Get serious about road tolls, which are the ultimate in market economics - price signals to allocate scarce resources. Don’t just talk about traffic congestion, lead the way with road pricing that any serious fiscal conservative could support,” I wrote in September 2015.

No surprise that Ontario’s PC leader doesn’t take advice from a Toronto Star columnist. But it’s a missed opportunity for an opposition leader who is now reduced to repeating the same bromides about fixing gridlock for a prix fixe - no taxes, no tolls.

In politics, you pay a price for being ahead of the curve. But you also pay a price for being behind the times, as Brown has learned on issues such as gay marriage and abortion rights. On the tougher topics, Brown can’t decide whether he’s coming or going - until he sees votes coming his way.

As prime minister, Harper pushed for road tolls to help finance bridge reconstruction in Montreal. When I asked Brown this week whether he supported that position during his time as a loyal backbench MP, he drew a blank.

During the Harper era, Brown voted against gay marriage and in favour of restricting abortion rights. Now he has changed his mind on these matters of conscience, which also happen to be vote-losers in Ontario.

A PC government tried to privatize Ontario Hydro in the late 1990s, and has been promoting the idea ever since. Now that Wynne has opted to partially privatize the Hydro One transmission utility, Brown denounces it daily as a fire sale. Personally, I oppose the privatization on policy grounds; but why on earth are the PCs pretending to hate the notion when it’s actually their idea - and, guided by former TD Bank CEO Ed Clark, is actually exceeding revenue projections?

Wynne may have been wrong to privatize chunks of Hydro One, but at least she picked a lane in order to help lay more track for rapid transit. Wynne flirted with road tolls, but backed down in the face of fierce political resistance - and opted for the path of least resistance by selling off our electrical wires in hopes of raising the money more easily.

The mayor grappled with a similar dilemma, and came to the opposite conclusion - keeping Toronto Hydro but proposing tolls. Give them both credit for being decisive, for better or for worse.

Brown, however, is trying to have it both ways by opting for none of the above: No privatization, and no road tolls.

That’s too clever by half. And a few too many lane changes - providing the illusion of traction without getting any of us any further, faster.