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Mario does Ontario: Taking the ruling class by storm

Mario Dumont is a campaign manager's fantasy come true. The tall, dark and handsome features. The charm. The youth (32, but not too baby-faced). The fluency in English. The friendly handshake and terrific suit. The confident but low-key delivery (no jet skis for this guy). As they say in TV, Mr. Dumont has a lot of Q.

Yesterday, in his maiden speech outside Quebec, at an oh-so-establishment Canadian Club luncheon in Toronto, the formerly obscure leader a tiny right-wing party from Quebec took Ontario's ruling class by storm.

"Best political speech I've seen in quite some time," pronounced a prominent former diplomat.

"Mario for Ontario!" swooned several smitten matrons.

Quebeckers feel the same. If an election were held today, Mr. Dumont, whose Action Démocratique du Québec has only five seats, would be premier tomorrow.

To be sure, Quebeckers are so mad at the Parti Québécois government that they'd vote for a rosy-rumped baboon. But something about the ADQ has struck a chord. For starters, Mr. Dumont is promising not to talk about referendums or the Constitution for a long, long time.

"Neither are on our radar screen," he said yesterday. "We already have a full plate in order to put Quebec back on the way to prosperity." In fact, he worked for the Yes side in the 1995 referendum. But so silent is he on the subject that has consumed Quebec politics for a generation that 47 per cent of Quebeckers have the impression he's a federalist, and another 47 per cent have the impression he's a sovereigntist.

As for the rest, he laid out an agenda that is (or ought to be) straight small-c conservative -- smaller government, lower taxes, an end to public monopolies of service provision, more choice.

The ADQ has been called a clone of the Canadian Alliance -- a populist party with small-town and rural roots. But Mr. Dumont was careful to avoid the redneck rhetoric that makes urban, socially liberal folks break out in hives. He is a more impressive speaker than the flyweight Stockwell Day. His aim is to position himself as Tony Blair -- progressive, not Jurassic; compassionate, not Darwinian.

"Compassion does not necessarily imply statism," he said yesterday. "You can redistribute wealth without killing the motivation to create it. And the state can ensure access to public services without necessarily producing them itself."

In Quebec, the most statist province in the nation, this message is also playing well. That's because big government has hit the wall. The quality of government is generally wretched, the spending scandals never end, and people have turned venomous about the politicians.

"Public services are decided on, managed, changed -- or, increasingly, cut -- by a handful of people at the top," Mr. Dumont said. "Squads of managers then push the decisions down through the various layers of the bureaucracy all the way to the people in the field. . . . Conventional government wisdom says that a few decisions made at the top, in a well-ordained process, will produce superior results than a great number of decisions made by many, on the ground, without co-ordination from above. I disagree."

Across Canada, all provincial governments, even Tory ones, micromanage their health-care and usually their education systems from the top down. That is a large part of what's wrong with them. They're in the grip of special interest groups, and almost totally inflexible. They don't lack for good ideas. But those ideas never can be implemented.

Mr. Dumont wants to break the public monopoly by separating the financing from the delivery of services, and by allowing choice. "In order to ensure everyone had access to health, education and other public services, our government over the years has turned into a massive service provider," he said. "Slowly but surely, we ended up with a number of quasi-monopolies. Service delivery models were standardized. Citizens' choices have been curtailed."

Radical stuff? Only in Canada, where even Tories don't dare to mention the word "choice." The word has been successfully demonized as a synonym for privatization, Americanization, the punishment of poor people, and the end of Canadian values as we know them. Mr. Dumont says things that many other politicians secretly believe but don't have the courage to articulate. More important, he says things many, if not most, Canadians are beginning to believe, too.

Columnist Lysiane Gagnon is skeptical of the Dumont wave. She sees his popularity as a result of Quebeckers' overwhelming desire for change. And talk and charm are cheap. Governing is a different matter altogether.

Yet people are hungry for the message, and not just in Quebec. The real question is to what extent Mr. Dumont is part of a much broader generation change. Some day, a person with many of Mr. Dumont's views will be prime minister. The question is not if, but when.
mwente@globeandmail.ca