The sacking, and plunder, of Ontario

Toronto Star - Sunday, January 24, 1999
by Dalton Camp (a former President of the Conservative Party of Canada)

For today's inspirational thought, try this: "Government's role is not to see how many people we can employ, it is to deliver the services that the public wants government to deliver with the best quality and the best price." Today's high-minded message comes to you through the mouth of Mike Harris, Premier of Ontario and dear leader of the Common Sense Revolution.

The leader was quoted so saying in June of 1996, not long after the Socialist Hordes had been driven from Queen's Park. Revolutions, however, are perversely unpredictable and tend to follow their own course; as the Hegelians put it - thesis, antithesis, synthesis. So, if you take all that revolutionary ardour, dilute it with power, what you get is not a Common Sense Revolution but a putsch, engineered by a corporal's guard; the antithesis then looks more like old times than the new tomorrow.

Once the Queen's Park bridgehead had been overrun, the surrounding battlements secured, the welfare cheats routed, the itinerant poor put to work, the hospitals shut down, teachers routed, 10,600 lackeys of the previous regime put to the sack, and the horses fed, the dear leader then dispatched his chief lieutenants - the brave Paul Rhodes, the dauntless Tom Trbovich, the intrepid Tom Long, and the heroic Leslie Noble - to consolidate the revolution. At Ontario Hydro.

With William Farlinger, a retired rocket scientist and real estate salesman sent to command Hydro and to complete the revolution in the nether regions of the realm, further steps needed to be taken to assist the new chairman through the provision of ancillary services supplied by designated experts loyal to the revolution and its glorious leader. Chairman Farlinger, toiling on a $350,000-a-year salary, needed help in writing speeches and on how to behave when confronted by media people.

Meanwhile, the executive director of the National Anti-Poverty Organization had complained the revolution had already (at hardly a year old) harmed more than it helped, accusing the dear leader of having done "substantial and profound damage to the social safety net." But how many true Ontario Tories would belong to NAPO?

Indeed, speaking in Maclean's magazine, the revolution's Long March Canteen Fund Chairman, Tom Long, retorted, "Average people have made adjustments in their own lives. The only major player who had not caught on to the fact that the world had changed was government."

According to my morning paper, information plied from the sealed vaults of the revolution released under the writ of the Information and Privacy Commissioner (may his tribe increase) revealed the extent of Chairman Farlinger's need for speech writers, media handlers, personal advisors, counsellors, and other sorts of hand-holders and minders - and how much it would cost.

The brave Paul Rhodes, charging a daily fee of $2,000, took home a total stipend of $225,000 from an untendered consulting contract. Hydro has explained that Rhodes, after all, was a sui generis kind of guy: his contract was based upon his consulting firm's "unique experience in working with the Premier's Office."

Even allowing for that, $2,000 a day paid out by a public corporation, so far as I know, or anyone else I know knows, is something for the Guinness Book of Records. A man experienced in fees, private and public, says the federal government paid veteran Liberal road warrior Robert Nixon $1,000 a day for his report on the Pearson airport controversy, an amount believed unusually high. The top federal rate is between $800 and $900 but averages between $200 and $300 a day.

Other heroes of the revolution included the dauntless Trbovich who earned $136,000 in counselling fees from Ontario Hydro, plus $927 for meals, and a further $5,000 that somehow went to Rhodes. The intrepid Tom Long helped with writing speeches - $650 an hour - while a firm linked to him was paid $250,000 (US) for executive recruiting.

Leslie Noble, a hero of the revolution if ever there was one, received a mere $7,000 a month consulting contract, a glaring example of the need for pay equity in Ontario.

That aside, there is about these revelations a lot not to like. The idea that Rhodes was hired by Hydro because he knew his way around the Premier's office would, in most professional relationships between a crown corporation and a government, be the best reason for not hiring him. As for the size of the fee, it seems unconscionable and it suggests that the public utility was being meekly compliant and co-operative with whomever darkened its door, coming from in, or around, the Premier's office.

It is simply breathtaking to contemplate these box-car numbers of dollars in fees for people whose singular notoriety in their thus brief and ordinary lives has been to strike it rich with Mike Harris and soon thereafter to become invaluable as instant advisers to Ontario Hydro. Or we may simply consider Ontario Hydro as a present dumping ground for those Harris hacks and hangers-on whose expectations of gratitude for services rendered know neither limits nor a decent end. As for Farlinger, he should be told to write his own speeches or remain silent. (Invoice now in the mail: FOR COUNSELLING, (23 seconds)....$1,836.49.)

Dalton Camp is a political commentator. His column appears Sundays and Wednesdays.

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