Despite eight long years in office, the Ontario Conservatives still seem to have no trouble coming up with creative new ways to wage class war.

From the beginning, the revolution launched by Mike Harris has been based on a kind of class war — blaming the poor for the deficit and other economic woes in the hopes that middle-class voters, with the poor to kick around, would happily align themselves with the Tories and the financial elite.

Within three weeks of taking office in the summer of 1995, Harris (and his finance minister, Ernie Eves) slashed welfare rates, slicing the incomes of the poorest Ontarians by 22 per cent and virtually guaranteeing the homeless population would rise — as it did. After a while, the sight of a cold body wrapped in a blanket on a downtown street corner no longer attracted glances; it just became part of the streetscape of the new Ontario.

Barbara Amiel helped stir up hostility to the poor when she wrote in Maclean’s that year about “the underclass that menaces our streets.”

Of course, taking money away from the poor was a sideshow to the main event — tax cuts made possible by deep spending cuts to virtually all public programs.

And not just any tax cuts. A cut to the provincial sales tax, for instance, would have particularly benefitted the non-rich, who have no choice but to spend all their income on basic living expenses. (It would have also stimulated the economy.)

But Harris and Eves weren’t interested in that sort of tax cutting. Instead, they cut income taxes so that the bigger your income, the bigger your tax saving. (In their first round of tax cuts, when the issue of fairness still lingered, they capped individual tax savings at $5,000. In the second round, the sky was the limit; someone with a million-dollar income could save $35,000.) All this was eagerly cheered on by Amiel and her husband, Conrad Black, who could be said to belong to a menacing overclass.

Now, hoping to win a third mandate to shoulder on with this mean-spirited revolution, Eves has struggled to come up with fresh meat to offer the already overfed. One flashy new item is his proposal to allow homeowners to deduct part of their mortgage costs. This might seem like small potatoes. Once fully phased in, the maximum tax saving will be $750 a year.

But the scheme offers a snapshot of the favouritism toward the well-heeled that has shaped the policies of this government.

Promoted as a way to give struggling first-time buyers a chance at home ownership, the scheme offers nothing of the sort. In fact, creating a new tax break for home ownership would only drive up house prices, making home ownership even more unattainable to those with lower incomes. “It would actually hurt people who don’t already have a house,” notes Neil Brooks, who teaches tax policy at Toronto’s Osgoode Hall Law School.

The benefits would instead go to existing homeowners, who would experience a windfall — a new annual tax saving, plus a one-time appreciation in the value of their homes.

But homeowners are a privileged lot and they already enjoy one of the most generous tax breaks available to Canadians — the tax exemption on profits earned on the sale of their homes. Selling one’s Rosedale mansion can easily result in an untaxed profit of hundreds of thousands of dollars, which amounts to a huge subsidy from the public purse. Housing expert David Hulchanski has noted that one could live in a public housing project for more than a hundred years before receiving a subsidy as large as the ones enjoyed by some rich homeowners.

Now Eves is proposing further enriching the subsidy for already-privileged homeowners — even after the Conservatives have slashed funds for public housing.

Interestingly, Eves’ proposal is less equitable than the mortgage deductibility plan proposed by federal Conservative leader Joe Clark in 1979. Unlike the Clark plan, Eves’ scheme provides bigger savings for homeowners with bigger incomes. Surely an oversight.

If the goal were really to make home ownership more widely available, the sensible approach would be to set up programs to assist first-time buyers.

But then nobody really believes the mortgage deductibility plan has anything to do with helping lower income people. They’re just counting on the menacing underclass not to vote.

Linda McQuaig

Journalist and best-selling author Linda McQuaig has developed a reputation for challenging the establishment. As a reporter for The Globe and Mail, she won a National Newspaper Award in 1989...