Performance Measurement

In 2003, Dalton McGuinty led the Liberal party to victory by promising to balance the books and still bring improvements to Ontario's health care and education sectors.  The Common Sense Revolution, designed for the 1995 election to gain support from the average voter for the Conservative party, had not succeeded.  The idea that reforming government only required cutbacks in spending, and more use of the private sector to deliver services, did not improve life for the average Ontarian.  The Walkerton crisis, the giveaway of assets like Hwy 407 and the privatization of MTO highway maintenance all gave the "common" folk reason to believe they were not gaining the full benefit of the tax cuts given to a lot of them.

The latest election that granted a majority government to Kathleen Wynne's Liberal party showed that the outrage over government scandals like ORNGE, eHealth and gas plants was attributed to Dalton McGuinty.  Ms Wynne's role in those debacles was not deemed strong enough to warrant a return to the wholesale reduction of government pitched by Tim Hudak.  

That platform has lost even more credibility due to the performance of California under Governor Jerry Brown.  During the last campaign, the PC's used California as a warning of Ontario's future and would not likely be able to reconcile their plan with that State's return to surplus after raising taxes, not cutting them.
California is not out of the woods yet, but clearly gutting the government is not necessary to turn the trend around.

A recent Toronto Star article uses the headline "The year taxes make a comeback" to suggest the public is ready to contribute more to the government coffers in order to build a better society.  It would be a mistake though, for any party to think that funding will flow willingly, without any checks and balances.

While Ontario has been trying to find a party that can deliver better government services yet keep its finances under control, the rest of the world has been taking steps to achieve that balance.  This OECD Report shows that performance and accountability are essential ingredients of a better government.  

Ms. Wynne's government has taken some steps towards this, with the Open Government initiative, the publishing of Ministers mandate letters and the expansion of the Ombudsman's jurisdiction, but much more remains to be done.  There is not much in the way of measured performance results, publicly available, for any part of the provincial government.  If Ontario is to follow California's example in reversing deficits into surplus, they would be well advised to follow their lead to decentralize and push more power down to municipalities.

There is already a comprehensive program in place to measure municipalities performance, the Municipal Performance Measurement Program.  But even here there is much work to be done.  The results of this program are publicly available here, but there should be an easy way to compare municipalities of similar size and individually by year over year results to show trends.
There will always be factors that are not easily captured in the numbers, but if results were publicly discussed, questions would be asked and by discovering the answers, society as a whole would be much better served.

No matter which party is in power, the road to re-inventing government is a long one that will require firm leadership to marshall all Ministries onto the same path.