Q: When is an
economic downturn “good news?”
A: When big
business can use it as an excuse to reduce democratic participation and buy up
public property.
“The Dark Arts,” Severus
Snape told his pupil Harry in The Half-Blood
Prince, “are many, varied, ever-changing and eternal. Fighting them is like
fighting a many-headed monster,
which, each time a neck is severed, sprouts a head even fiercer and cleverer
than before.”
J. K. Rowling couldn’t have provided a better metaphor for
our current political and economic situation here in Ontario.
The fact is that Ontario’s
budget could be balanced without drastic measures if our wealthy citizens – who
are numerous – would cease pressuring
Dalton McGuinty to act as their “no tax hikes”
front man. But why support the working public when you can create conditions for
unlimited profiteering by starving
governments of tax dollars? The strategy has worked wonders for the upper
classes in the U.S.
at the expense of everyone else – why not try it here?
Our outmoded “first-past-the-post”
system of electing members to our parliament and legislatures has
contributed greatly to a steady decline in democratic power across Canada. In enabling
political parties to gain a majority of seats in our governing houses without a
majority of votes, this system ensures that, paradoxically, the minority usually rules the majority.
It's a simple matter for corporations to manipulate the
system so that the governments they control have carte blanche to pass legislation in their interests. The corollary
is that it is extremely difficult for smaller, grassroots political parties
without corporate backing to gain any seats at all, even if they attract hundreds of thousands of votes across
the province or the country. And to top it all off, because the majority of
citizens are not actually represented
in most so-called “majority” governments, public interest in participating in
the electoral system at all is continually declining
while the acceptance of authoritarianism
increases.
It’s no secret that the Conservative Party of Canada under
the leadership of Stephen Harper (the son of an Imperial Oil executive) has
been little more than a front for the interests of the oil-and-gas industry. The voters who turned out in suburban Ontario ridings to support Harper last year, giving him
the unfettered autocratic reign he desired, were placing their bets
on the western oil patch as Canada’s
best potential economic driver.
But did they consider the continued erosion of democratic process and the disempowering of Parliament that is part and parcel of Harper’s big
business agenda, as demonstrated by the “omnibus”
bill currently being rushed through Parliament? This article from the Toronto Star Ottawa bureau chief Les Whittington shows Harper’s assault
on democracy in no uncertain terms.
The situation at Queen’s Park is only slightly different.
Having already enjoyed eight years of autocratic control, McGuinty’s
Liberals, now with a minority of seats in the Legislature, have been forced to share
decision-making power with Andrea Horwath’s New Democrats. In principle, this
means that a majority of Ontario voters are now actually
represented in any vote that passes a bill – for the first time since the
power-sharing agreements between Bob Rae’s NDP and David Peterson’s Liberals in
the mid-1980s.
But the corporate
agenda – not to mention the arrogance bred by the two majority terms –
doesn’t just fade away. McGuinty’s stated aim is to lure another NDP or PC
member away from his or her seat, and/or to win the Waterloo riding recently vacated by Elizabeth
Witmer, and regain his authoritarian power.
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| NDP leader Andrea Horwath |
Liberal caucus members this week expressed their discontent with the NDP
members’ commitment to proper public scrutiny and debate on the Liberal budget
bill on which Horwath and McGuinty had earlier struck a deal, as reported here. McGuinty, like Harper, insists that cost-cutting, privatizing, rights-infringing legislation be passed quickly with no debate or changes,
using economic uncertainty as a excuse to ignore democratic principles and the
law itself. Horwath has responded with her own solution, announced today, as reported by the Globe and Mail.
Meanwhile, Health and Education Ministers Deb Matthews and
Laurel Broten continue to treat doctors and teachers with disrespect, to the point
of disregarding provincial legislation entirely. Broten has reiterated her desire to further erode
democratic control over public schools in the name of saving money by further
school board amalgamations – as if the current monstrosities weren’t massive
enough. Recent articles in the Star and Peterborough
Examiner include wildly inflated estimates of how much money might be
saved by such amalgamations – in stark contrast to our own MPP Jeff Leal’s
statement that he had “yet to see an amalgamation that actually saved money.”
At Fisher Drive we see the same tactics already evident on Parliament Hill and at Queen’s
Park. One might think that education, like the law and public health, would be
an area too fundamentally important to our society to become a mere forum for
power-and-money games. But such is not the case.
KPR trustees and administrators have caught the autocracy bug. It has become evident that their primary function is to
implement the corporate agenda at Queen’s Park. This includes both the closing
of schools and the directing of public money into corporate coffers by the
unnecessary purchase of WiFi technology.
It’s obvious that our current crop of trustees is nowhere
near competent enough to oversee KPR and its $377 million budget. Misspending
millions of dollars, grossly underestimating expenses (as reported in today's Examiner), prohibiting their constituents from speaking at board
meetings, provoking legal action, protests, and petitions in the Legislature –
all in a day’s work for KPR trustees.
But even with a brand new crop, we will
be left to deal with the corporate agenda at the Ministry of Education, which bizarrely
encourages just the kind of behaviour
displayed at KPR.
It’s hard to imagine any deviation from the authoritarian
trajectory of Ontario’s
public education system while political parties firmly in the grip of corporate
interests remain in power. And it’s hard to imagine a future where this isn’t
the norm until we find a way to relegate our antiquated first-past-the-post
electoral system to the dustbin of history and join the rest of the civilized
world with some form of proportional
representation, specifically tailored to Ontario.
Just a few years ago we had a chance to adopt a mixed-member system similar to the one
which has allowed Germany
to become the world’s leading economy in terms of sustainability and innovation.
Such an evolution would have made it much more difficult for big business to
regulate the political agenda – which is why the corporate-owned media
helped McGuinty’s Liberals spread disinformation
and fear when the possibility arose
that a referendum on the electoral reforms might actually pass.
“You are fighting that which is unfixed, mutating,
indestructible,” Snape continues in his
lecture to Harry. “Your defences must therefore be as flexible and inventive
as the Arts you seek to undo.”
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| Constant Vigilance! the price of democracy |
As Mad-Eye Moody reminds us, such defence also requires “constant vigilance!” – a lesson Peterborough citizens
have learned only too well.
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