Ontario Election: NDP Should Win By Default

I'm still dealing with the culture shock of moving from one of the country's poorest postal codes to one of the wealthiest. Back in Hamilton, the political contest was always between the NDP and the Liberals, with the NDP usually being the incumbent. Here in Forest Hill, it appears that a "conservative" wave is expelling Liberal incumbents. There were a lot of "Rob Ford for mayor" signs. The Liberal MP was replaced by a harpercon. And now, for the upcoming provincial election, the most active team appears to be the Ontario PC's.

It's kind of sickening looking at these young "conservative" activists. They're volunteering. They're knocking on doors and handing out flyers. They're political animals. They're on the make. They're completely ignorant of the fact that the party they're working for is murderously incompetent. They're completely ignorant of the fact that besides being murderously incompetent, their party of choice is massively corrupt.

Dudley George? Who is he?

People dying in ambulances driving around and around trying to find an emergency room that can find room for them? When did that happen?

People dying from drinking tap-water? Where was that?

Sweetheart jobs for "Team Harris" hacks at Hydro One? I don't know what you're talking about.

A super-sweetheart deal for the elite consortium to run the publicly constructed Highway 407? The campaign office never mentioned it.

Just like the careers of Ezra Levant, Margaret Wente, Jeffrey Simpson, etc., are all indictments of our political culture, so too is the continued political viability of the Ontario Progressive Conservative party. After their reign of error, of death, deficits, despair, homelessness, teacher's strikes, and on and on, one would think that the political brand would be toxic. You would have thought that having screwed-over so many Ontarians, for so long, in so many ways, that the people of this province would be sickened by the party and its minions to the extent of never voting for them again. Even determined right-wing voters would demand at least a new party, free of the detritus of the Ontario PC's.

Alas! Ontario, like the rest of Canada, is a maddeningly complacent society. A little bitching to friends and family, and that's all she wrote.

But remember, if you liked all those teachers' strikes, and having a high-school drop-out as an Education Minister who was video-taped saying he planned on creating crises, then I guess the lying simpleton Tim Hudak is your man for more crises and unproductive deficits and more disasters.

I mean, the simple fact of the matter is that Hudak is a buffoon and his party's platform is being derided by commentators left and right as being complete nonsense and lies. Hudak and the gang are betting that Ontario voters are too lazy, stupid, and ignorant to care and that enough people will hear "tax cuts" and start to drool like Pavlov's dog and then go Ontario PC. (Not an outlandish hope, given the low level of democratic spirit in this country, but not anything that I would get behind.)

Which brings me to Dalton McGuinty's Liberals.

I've always thought that corporate Ontario has a pretty neat scam going. They've got the Ontario PC's to be the villain and then they can sell the Liberal Party as the alternative. Either way they get what they want. All the Ontario Liberals have to do is NOT be Mike Harris, and people give them credit for being a sane alternative.

But, aside from my disdain for the Ontario Liberals being merely kinder, gentler neo-liberals, there are somethings that cannot be forgiven and Dalton McGuinty did one of those things.

I'm referring of course, to McGuinty's hush-hush decision to suspend his fellow citizens' Charter rights (only temporarily of course [!]) by empowering Toronto Police Service Chief Bill Blair's men through the 1940's Public Works Protection Act.

Unlike most Canadians, I think our Charter of Rights and Freedoms is an important document and McGuinty's decision to trash them in the dead of night is inexcusable. I mean it. Inexcusable. And unforgivable. If McGuinty did nothing but this assault on our civil and political rights he'd be unacceptable to me.

But McGuinty and the Ontario Liberals deserve the boot for a whole lot of reasons. There's also McGuinty's attacks on First Nations in northern Ontario defending their lands against mining corporations. One could argue that McGuinty is only allowing the laws and the courts to run their course if it weren't for the fact that things like Ontario's 135-year old mining legislation is within his power to change and he has done NOTHING to change it. McGuinty could have issued a statement about how concerned he is about the tensions produced by this archaic legislation and First Nations' concerns for the liveability of their reserves, but I have heard nothing from him. Finally, besides having a legal obligation to allow miners to prospect regardless of who has the surface rights to the land above, McGuinty is also bound by our Constitution to consult with and accommodate First Nations on all new matters that affect their interests.

In Ontario, as in the rest of Canada, it's corporations first, all others second.

The Ontario Liberals have shown their unfitness for government by their inaction on the plague of police brutality that has occurred under their watch. Besides the wholesale trampling of thousands of Canadians' political, civil, and legal rights at the G20 Summit in Toronto, wherein the province's Special Investigation Unit has been revealed as an irrelevancy, Jim Bradley, McGuinty's Minister of Community Safety and Correctional Services, has been silent on the serial abuses of the Ottawa Police FORCE. There have been no noises from his ministry about changes to the Police Services Act or any other relevant legislation. Presumably then, local police forces brutalizing their populations is an agreeable part of the corporate order in Ontario. "Look what they do to completely innocent people. The last thing you want to do is actually go out and protest."

Then there's the Ontario Liberals' refusal to reverse Mike Harris's welfare cuts. I suppose there are hundreds of thousands of ignoramuses who believe that everyone on welfare has deliberately opted to give up working for $20,000 a year so that they can live on $10,000 a year on welfare. Or that the main reason single mothers are living in poverty on welfare isn't due to there being no affordable daycare but to sheer laziness and a love of "slutty" behaviour. But when you accommodate ignorant voters like that, you negatively impact the lives of thousands of individuals. Mike Harris's welfare cuts increased poverty and homelessness and McGuinty has not only NOT restored this subsistence income to pre-Harris levels, he has allowed it to fall increasingly behind the rate of inflation. And, in truly scuzzy behaviour only moved swiftly to restrict access to the special diet allowance that people were using to offset the Harris cuts.

But what do we get for this Harris-McGuinty-Hudak subservience to corporate interests? What do we get for all these crooked "Public-Private-Partnerships" and corporate tax-cuts? Just like everywhere else, the result has been economic failure. For the first time in its history, Ontario has become a "have-not province" within the Canadian federation. Now, if that sad fate had befallen an NDP government like Bob Rae's, which pursued (for a while) union-friendly legislation and modest increases to welfare assistance, the right-wing and the corporate media would have pounced like rabid hyenas about how Ontario's decline is an irrefutable indictment of pinko political-economy. We hear no such outcry against the Harris-McGuinty regime for this indictment against the corporate agenda though, do we? (Unless it's from far-right nitwits who label McGuinty a "socialist" like the Tea-Party does to the Wall Street puppet Obama.)

A final reason to get rid of the Ontario Liberals then, is because they have no vision for Ontario other than the demonstrably flawed neo-liberal corporate agenda.

Did I say "final"? I forgot that just like Tim Hudak, the Ontario Liberals are eager to insult our collective intelligence with their laughable campaign promises. After years of allowing post-secondary tuition rates to rise, McGuinty pledges in this election campaign to provide grants to lower-income families to offset 30% of their tuition, all the while maintaining corporate tax-rates and reducing the deficit. It's self-evident bullshit, but McGuinty, like Hudak apparently, trusts in the ignorance, apathy, and stupidity of Ontario voters to see him through.

This little screed is entitled "Ontario Election: NDP should win by default." I'm not saying anything about the NDP other than to link to this earlier statement. Given the murderous incompetence of the Ontario PC's under Harris and the fact that their current leader Tim Hudak is his clone, that party should be written-off by sane voters. Given McGuinty's record of failure and his shameful disregard for our political and human rights, he too should be out of the running. End of story.