Saying the north is different, Ontario's infrastructure minister says our region will be taken into account in his 10 year plan. Bob Chiarelli tells municipal delegates in Thunder Bay that must include the Ring of Fire mining development. He says that will including building roads, the electricity grid and communication links. His infrastructure plan for the province will be released next month

Published On Sat Jun 4 2011

• By Angelo Persichilli

Some time ago I wrote a column about the similarities between the policies of the federal Conservative government of Stephen Harper and the Ontario provincial Liberal government of Dalton McGuinty. I wrote about Stephen McGuinty and Dalton Harper. This time I want to write about Tim Ignatieff and Michael Hudak.

You might argue that Iggy is gone while Timmy is here. That’s right, but Iggy’s successor, Bob Rae, has yet to present his own plan for the next 18 months (and beyond?). However, we do know about his predecessor and, according to what I’ve heard up until now, the Ontario provincial campaign is shaping up like a déjà vu of what we saw nationally leading up to the May 2 election — except that the Liberal and Conservative roles are reversed.

Make no mistake, this is not about ideologies — it’s about style and vision. Ideologies nowadays are just like hockey players’ sweaters — they change from season to season. It’s about a slash-and-burn attitude devoted to the implementation of one vision: getting power.

Watching the just-concluded federal campaign and the Ontario provincial contest that is just about to start is rather like being a spectator at a hockey game where the players exchange jerseys in the middle of the second period.

The thrust of the federal Liberal campaign against the federal Conservatives was about making accusations of contempt of Parliament and corruption, tarnishing Harper’s image, and attacking his government’s economic performance, competence and the huge deficit.

The provincial Conservatives are using the same approach against the provincial Liberals — accusing them of economic mismanagement and of incompetence and launching personal attacks against McGuinty.

Another characteristic of the federal Liberal campaign was trying to push hot buttons that divided Canadians, such as abortion. Hudak is doing the same. Last week the Toronto Sun wrote that Hudak decided not to get involved in education issues because “there is little to be gained by messing around with something that is not a hot-button issue.”

But the Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) is.

Doesn’t this look like a rerun of the fight over the GST in the 1990s? That one saw the federal Liberals fuming against this “tax grab at the expense of the poor,” leading Canadians to believe — falsely — that they would scrap it when they formed the government. In reality, the Liberals liked it and still are still defending it today.

In Ontario, provincial Conservatives were in favour of the HST until the day that the McGuinty Liberals adopted it.

Some might believe that comparing the Conservative Hudak with the Liberal Ignatieff is ideological heresy. Hudak, some might argue, is an offspring of the former Mike Harris government, the one that, as the political narrative goes, “ignominiously cut funding for education and health care.” True, but aren’t the federal Liberals the grandchildren of the Chrétien-Martin government, the only federal government that really cut funding to education and health care in the ’90s?

Hudak is no Mike Harris. You could disagree with Harris, but he had a vision, he had the Common Sense Revolution. The Hudak Conservatives have nothing revolutionary — their Changebook sounds more like another tablet competing with the BlackBerry Playbook and the iPad 2.

Another similarity between the Ontario Conservatives and the federal Liberals is the issue of party unity. Even if the wound is not as open and deep as the one still affecting the federal Liberals, Ontario Conservatives are still discreetly dealing with the way former leader John Tory was treated by his party. How much this lingering resentment will impact the October vote is hard to say, but it cannot be ignored.

This doesn’t mean McGuinty will be easily re-elected four months from now. The Liberals have to deal with some issues themselves.

The premier does not enjoy the respect that voters had for Harper, and the provincial Conservatives — unlike the federal Liberals — are entering the fray ahead in the polls, not behind.

But the race is still wide open, and Tim Hudak needs to come up with a campaign that is longer on substance and shorter on gimmicks.

What didn’t work for Tim Ignatieff won’t work for Michael Hudak.

Angelo Persichilli is a political analyst whose column appears Sunday