Do the Ontario Conservatives really want us to be more like Quebec?

Jeff Green | May 14, 2015

That would be costly.

I interviewed Randy Hillier on Monday about the new Ontario Conservative Party leader, Patrick Brown. He said Brown had stolen the show from Kathleen Wynne after Quebec Premier Couillard addressed the legislature early that morning and I should check out the media reports.

Indeed, Patrick Brown managed to score a solid blow on Wynne at his very first opportunity, simply by congratulating the Premier of Quebec on his ability to both balance the Quebec budget and keep hydro rates low.

The message Mr. Brown was not so subtly delivering was that hydro rates in Ontario are on the way up and the province has a budgetary deficit of almost $9 billion this year.

There is a lot of history to hydro rates in Ontario and Quebec, and no doubt Mr. Brown and his party will make their policy differences with the Wynne Liberals very clear in the near future. It is not a stretch to say the Liberals are vulnerable on everything to do with hydro.

But as far as the budget deficit is concerned, does Mr. Brown want Ontario to follow in Quebec's footsteps, as he indicated on Monday? Budgets are complicated documents, but they do relate directly to income taxes.

The provincial income tax rate in Quebec is 16% on the first $41,495 of taxable income; 20% on the next $41,455; and 24% on the next $17,000.

The rate in Ontario is 5.05% on the first $41,000 of taxable income; 9.15% on the next $41,000; 11.16% on the next $68,000; and 12% after that.

An Ontario resident earning $1,000,000 a year pays less provincial tax on the millionth dollar they make than each and every Quebec resident pays on the very first taxable dollar they make, 4% less.

I'm no economist, but it's fair to say that if Ontarians paid the income taxes that Quebecois pay, the Ontario budget might indeed be easy to balance.

I don't believe Patrick Brown is seriously proposing that we triple Ontario income tax rates in order to balance the books in Ontario. I believe he was trying to make an impression, to put Kathleen Wynne on the defensive and make a few headlines for himself.

In future he might want to be careful about elevating the government of Quebec over that of Ontario. As mistake-ridden as Ontario politics can be, they have problems in Quebec as well.