Liberal leadership hopefuls touch on taxes in last debate before voting begins - Toronto Star

Stephanie Bowman and Navdeep Bains pledged a tax freeze while Lee Fairclough and Dylan Marando talked tax reform at Wednesday night’s debate.

Ontario Liberal leadership candidates, clockwise from top left, Navdeep Bains, Stephanie Bowman, Dylan Marando and Lee Fairclough.

Two Liberal leadership candidates made that pledge Wednesday night in their last debate before voting begins in the Nov. 21 race.

It’s the third-place party’s third such contest since 2020, a period that has seen a revolving door of leaders who have failed to catch on with voters.

“People are struggling,” said MPP Stephanie Bowman (Don Valley West), an accountant and former banker who has previously proposed a private member’s bill on a middle-class tax cut.

“We need to actually be thinking about how we give more money back in a responsible way, so that people can have some relief,” she added at the debate hosted by veteran journalist Steve Paikin at TVO. 

Former federal industry minister Navdeep Bains agreed, saying the province needs to better prioritize its spending under Premier Doug Ford.

“We’re in an affordability crisis, right?” he added as he sat at a table with fellow hopefuls MPP Lee Fairclough (Etobicoke-Lakeshore) and Dylan Marando, a former policy analyst for Dalton McGuinty, Kathleen Wynne and Justin Trudeau when they were in power.

“We know there’s mismanagement ... we know this government’s not highlighting on and focusing on the priorities that will give us the greatest return on investment, which is education and health care.”

Fairclough said she is looking at tax reform.

“So not necessarily to a tax increase, but changing the way we think about taxes,” added the former hospital CEO who played on Canada’s 1998 World Cup rugby team.

“There’s been lots of discussion about how the HST is currently used. We know the municipalities have asked for one per cent of it.”

When Paikin asked the tax question, Marando replied: “I’ll take the bait.”

“I don’t have a plan to increase taxes, but if push comes to shove, I wouldn’t mind increasing taxes on big businesses,” added Marando, who has never held public office. 

“If we have to make ends meet as a province without doing that on the back of students and the back of patients, I’m going to them for money ... I’m pretty sure the big telcos and big tech have some spare change in the couch cushions.”

In a campaign criticized as boring by many political observers in part because the candidates haven’t taken off the gloves at each other, Bowman tried to shake her staid image.

Describing herself as “competent, responsible and serious,” she joked that her team calls their campaign vehicle the “Bow-van” and said she has something in common with a prominent politician in Ottawa.

“Turns out bankers make pretty good political leaders,” she quipped in a reference to Prime Minister Mark Carney.

It was the first televised debate of the campaign — the previous two were livestreamed on the Liberal YouTube channel — and sets the stage for two weeks of ranked ballot voting by 55,000 party members that begins online Monday and runs to Nov. 20.

Until then, the candidates and their teams of volunteers will be reaching out to members, identifying supporters and reminding them to cast ballots, ranking the candidates in order of preference.

Several party insiders have told the Star a first-ballot win is not expected when results are announced at a leadership convention Nov. 21.

The Liberals, who now have 14 MPPs, have been mired in third place at Queen’s Park — behind the official opposition New Democrats — since their crushing 2018 defeat by Ford’s Progressive Conservatives after almost 15 years in power under McGuinty and Wynne.

Bains remains the fundraising leader in the race with $727,081 in donations, according to the latest Elections Ontario real-time disclosure Wednesday at 6 p.m. He is followed by Fairclough at $539,521, Bowman at $507,229 and Marando at $186,319. The disclosure measures donations of $200 or more. 

The last two Liberal leaders, current Vaughan Mayor Steven Del Duca and former Mississauga mayor Bonnie Crombie, could not win seats in the 2022 and 2025 provincial elections, respectively. Both resigned from the leadership post.

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Rob Ferguson is a Toronto-based reporter covering Ontario politics for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @robferguson1.