10. ONTARIO REJECTS FAR-RIGHT POLICY AGENDA

(The following article is from the November 16-30, 2007 issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $25/year, or $12 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $25 US per year; other overseas readers - $25 US or $35 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 133 Herkimer St. Unit 502, Hamilton, ON, L8P 2H3.

By Liz Rowley

Now that the dust has settled a bit, it may be useful to look back on the recent Ontario election, and ahead to the political agenda for Canada's most populous province.

     As various observers have noted, the right-wing platform of John Tory's Conservatives was rejected by voters. Despite the spin-doctoring to paint Tory as a moderate, the public smelled a rat: the neo-liberal agenda of free trade, privatization, deregulation, corporate tax cuts, and assaults on labour, democratic and civil rights.

     The real tip-off was Tory's promise to publicly fund private religious schools, and to open up a parallel private for-profit health care system in Ontario. With a platform unpalatable to most voters, Tory's campaign team bet the margins. They aimed to secure the quarter-million votes attached to the religious school and private health care lobbies, calculating that this support might tilt the balance for a Tory minority government. They also counted on the loyalty of Conservative voters to swallow the poisoned pill in exchange for the promise of government.

     This time, they miscalculated. Conservative candidates revolted, and then thousands of Conservative voters stayed home or voted Liberal in protest.

     John Tory's eleventh hour conversion to "public concerns" about religious school funding, and his announcement that the necessary legislation would be subject to a free vote in the legislature, were too little too late.

     Tory also tried to secure the "redneck" vote with a visit to Caledonia, when he proposed to forcibly evict the Six Nations reclamation site, fine them and their supporters, and jail any who resisted.

     Caught in the contradiction of trying to woo right-wing support while simultaneously downplaying his extremist views, Tory drove voters away.

     The initial inclination of working people was to punish the McGuinty Liberals for delivering the Harris Tory agenda. That gave way to strategic voting aimed to stop the Conservatives.

     Voters were helped to this conclusion by the Working Families Coalition - a liberal-labour coalition including the building trades, the CAW and some teachers' unions, which spent huge sums on anti-Tory attack ads in the media. The Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation put money and workers into several Liberal campaigns, including about 300 workers for Education Minister Kathleen Wynn, who defeated John Tory, leaving him without a seat in the Legislature.

     Faced with an electorate angry over their broken campaign promises, the Liberals finished as the big winners. They started with a platform of vague promises about public education, health care, child care, social programs, affordable housing, poverty and nursing home care. The effect on voters was to confirm that the Liberals were not brewing up a right-wing revolution, even if they were short-changing on social programs and the loss of manufacturing jobs.

     This was the minimum requirement for a Liberal minority, until John Tory's hard-right ideas widened the gap. Only in the last days of the campaign did the media mention that the Liberals had also been courted for the fundamentalist religious vote, and that both the Premier and the Education Minister had said "yes". Asked about her change of heart, Wynn said, "the sands have shifted since then". Yes, indeed.

     Until then, only the Communist Party had warned voters that the Liberals had also supported funding for religious schools, and that a vote to protect public education had to be a vote for one universal, quality, and secular system of public education.

     Regrettably, only the Communist Party and the Greens campaigned for this view. The NDP continued to support public funding for Catholic schools (promised by the Tories and delivered by the Liberals in the 1985 election).

     NDP leader Howard Hampton followed some bad advice when he teamed up with John Tory to attack the Liberals. At the annual meeting of the Association of Ontario Municipalities, Hampton told delegates that Tory was not a bad guy and had been demonized by the media. Tory responded that Hampton was his friend, and both then opened fire on the Liberals. During the televised leaders' debate, Hampton and Tory again focussed their attacks on Dalton McGuinty, a detente so evident that it was one of the main subjects of the debate post-mortems.

     The lackluster NDP campaign on "six priorities" offered little that was new or hard-hitting, or even specific. Proposals to fund education, health and social programs were modest, as was their plan for childcare and social housing. On the crisis in manufacturing, which requires abrogating the free trade deals, along with big shifts in monetary, trade, investment and tax policy, the NDP had little to say. The campaign to raise the minimum wage helped re-elect the NDP's ten incumbents, including Cheri de Novo, who sparked the $10 an hour fight in the legislature.

     Led by the business oriented Frank de Jong, the Green Party fielded a full slate, only to be again shut out of the leaders' debate by the TV networks. But the Greens made progress, securing 352,000 votes or 8% of the popular vote. This time their policies seemed more progressive, with the exception of their regressive taxation policy. In particular, the call for a single, secular public education system was a welcome step away from their 2003 support for charter schools. This policy shift and some statements by candidates seemed to suggest the growth of a more progressive wing in the Greens.

     For the Communist Party, the battle was about democracy first and foremost, as the party fought to be seen and heard in the media and at candidate forums. When audiences were asked to decide on the participation of Communist candidates, the result was almost always for inclusion, putting the lie to arguments of "time and space limitations." The exceptions were business audiences such as the Chamber of Commerce meeting in St. Catharines, and some meetings where the NDP's right wing was influential.

     Communists were the only candidates to speak substantively to economic issues, calling for plant closure legislation, and a range of sanctions from fines to plant take-overs to stop the closures and mass layoffs that have cost 141,000 jobs since the Liberals took office in 2003. The Communist Party also called on the government to block the sale of Stelco to US Steel.

     The CPC (Ontario) fought to support the Mixed-Member Proportional Representation proposal, which garnered the backing of 37% of voters, despite attempts by the corporate media and the political right to smother public debate on electoral reform.

     So what's ahead? Supporting the Liberals to block the Tories is like jumping from the frying pan into the fire: no solution. The new Liberal majority will face a firestorm of opposition to its policies, including more privatization of social programs, deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy, and more attacks on the right to strike and on civil and democratic rights. Stay tuned.