It's too bad that even when the Liberals are sucking, the Conservatives are often still a shittier option.
Mike Harris got a lot of hate but I don't think I hate what he did overall. His first term was actually somewhat successful. He cut taxes a lot, which is how he got elected, and maybe in the end it turned out to be a bad move. Cutting some of the overspending by the NDP on social services was fine, but firing nurses wasn't cool. Neither was cutting public transit in Toronto, the city which needs public transit the most, and where public transit is most efficient. Also, he sold Highway 407 to a private consortium for way too cheap ($4B when it cost $100B just to buy the land for the highway and $1.6B to build it), a highway that was built with taxpayer dollars. Breaking up Ontario Hydra was kinda pointless and probably overall a bad move. However a lot of his moves helped eliminate the debt in Ontario so overall his first term was probably positive. Merging municipalities was sorta good, sorta bad. He offloaded some costs to cities by doing it, but it did reduce a bit of unnecessary overlaps in government too.
His second term went to shit though with Walkerton (not exactly his fault, the guy running the place was too lazy to do real testing and just made up reports for years, although Harris cuts to inspection were blamed). He also made literacy and job training/placements a requirement for welfare, kicking 500,000 people off it. Not sure how I feel about that, I do think people on welfare should be getting job training and placements, but if they didn't know how to read, I think they should've been given tutoring classes instead of immediately kicked off welfare. Weakening school boards and putting in standardized testing may have pissed off teachers but I think that was fine. Cutting the number of prep hours teachers got by requiring them to teach an extra class pissed off teachers super hard but I don't know if it was really that bad. The thing I disgreed with most during this term was his plan to give tax rebates to people who sent their kids to private Christian schools. I don't think that passed so that's fine. Oh and he cut out OAC, the 5th year of high school, but that's fine, it wasn't necessary and a lot of people graduated without it anyways.
I guess upon reflection, Mike Harris wasn't so bad. He did some crappy things but also did some good and necessary things to balance the budget.
I'd rather have Conservatives running Ontario than Canada. The worst they can do in Ontario is keep trying to fund private Christian schools and sell off Crown assets. I think Ontario needs some business tax cuts to help revive the economy (it's better than the cash bribes for businesses to setup shop in Ontario that the Liberals are doing) but the Liberals won't do it so it might take a term of Conservatives at the helm to get that done.
