Mike Harris and the "Common Sense Revolution"
Harris catapulted his party from third place to an election victory, running on a neoliberal platform known as the "Common Sense Revolution" that highlighted a number of "wedge issues" and promised significant tax cuts, cuts to welfare, the introduction of workfare, and privatization of social services. Harris went on to win a second majority in 1999 despite the strikes and protests that plagued his first term in office.
The Harris government was criticized on issues such as health care, the environment, education, and its tax policies, though it remained generally popular until Harris's departure as party leader.
The slide in Conservative support began in early 2000, according to the Ipsos-Reid polling company (Ipsos-Reid website), when the Tories fell behind the Liberals in the public opinion polls for the first time since the 1999 election, with 36% support of those polled, compared to 42% for the Liberals and 17% for the NDP. Later in 2000, Liberal support rose to about half of those polled, while Conservative support remained in the low 30s. This pattern held through to the 2002 leadership campaign, when Conservative support rose to 37%, while the Liberals retained the support of about half of those polled.
Ernie Eves: distancing the party from the "Common Sense Revolution"With the resignation of Mike Harris in 2002, the PCs held a leadership election. Ernie Eves, who had been Harris' Minister of Finance, and who had the backing of almost all PC MPPs, won the campaign, defeating his successor as Minister of Finance, Jim Flaherty.
Eves was a Red Tory, unlike Harris. He'd tried to blunt some of the edges of the more radical elements of Harris' platform while in Cabinet. His rejection of the "Common Sense Revolution" continued after he became premier. He killed plans to sell off Hydro One when deregulation of energy prices resulted in a dramatic increase in energy rates and threatened a consumer revolt. This led him to re-impose retail price controls on electricity, capping the price at 4.3 cents per kilowatt/hour, and vowing to keep it capped until at least 2006. The result was a quickly escalating public debt that made up for shortfalls in the price of electricity.
During the summer after Eves’ election as leader, the Conservatives closed the gap in popular support considerably, placing only two percentage points behind the Liberals in two summer public opinion polls. By the autumn of 2002, however, Eves’ ‘honeymoon’ with the voters was over, and the party fell back in the polls, hovering in the mid-to-high 30s, while the Liberals scored in the mid-to-high 40s.
