Card games

The Liberals currently governing the Province of Ontario have racked up quite a track record of sheer incompetence, laced with outright corruption, in recent years.  The expensive cancellation of power plants to curry voter favour, the mess surrounding the privatized air ambulance service, ORNGE (yes, that is how you spell it, and no, it doesn't mean anything), the endless dithering over transit plans in the Toronto region, and on and on.  In the meantime the Province's manufacturing base has been pulverized and the public finances have fallen into a black hole.

But for sheer, comic ineptitude, nothing quite matches the gift card fiasco that has unfolded over the past week.  With the power off for hundreds of thousands of people in the wake of the pre-Christmas ice storm, a whole lot of food in fridges and freezers got spoiled.  Premier Kathleen Wynne, almost certainly without consulting anyone first, persuaded a couple of grocery chains to offer pre-paid gift cards to needy people to help them restock, and pledged to match the value of the stores' own donations.  It was announced that cards would be made available at a number of public offices across Toronto.

You can probably guess what happened next: mayhem.  Huge numbers of people showed up on a frigid morning to get their share of the largesse, and the cards ran out within minutes.  There weren't enough cards in Ontario to meet the demand, so more had to be flown in from Manitoba.  A second day of distribution prompted equally chaotic scenes, and then by Friday, the last day of the program, things became a bit more orderly, possibly because a lot of people had become discouraged.

At the end of it all, about 8,500 people had received cards.  Considering that upwards of 100,000 had been without power for long enough to lose their food, this was (if you'll excuse the pun), the tip of the iceberg.  There were stories of people swanning up in BMWs trying to get their hands on the loot, and one woman even told a TV crew that she'd seen four people arriving at one of the distribution sites in a limousine!

But even if all the cards went to the needy, this would still have been a textbook example of how not to distribute social assistance.  Nobody put even a moment's thought into the logistics of the program, hence the shortage of cards.  Selection of who got the cards was almost Darwinian -- if you got up early and had sharp elbows, you were in luck.  And the program, although initiated by the Province, only operated in the city of Toronto itself, even though people in a whole lot of other towns and cities also lost their power for prolonged periods.

Premier Wynne has defended the gift card program while acknowledging it could have gone better. Her argument seems to reflect the famous syllogism:  something has to be done; this is something; therefore this has to be done.  She seems to be a thoroughly decent person, with her heart in the right place.  All the same, you don't have to be Diogenes to think that the likelihood of an election this spring may have influenced her decision to get involved.

In which case, it could turn out to be a spectacular electoral own-goal.  Those who got the cards, to judge from their reaction, saw this kind of help as no more than their right, and are unlikely to reward the Liberals at election time.  Those who tried and failed to get cards are likely to have long memories.  And for everyone else in Ontario, Wynne has provided a reminder that she and her colleagues couldn't organize a two-car funeral.