02) HOW AUSTERITY POLICIES SLAM ONTARIO WORKERS

Excerpts from the keynote address by Ontario Communist leader Liz Rowley to the Party's Ontario Nominating Convention, held March 23-24 in Toronto.

            As we meet today, it's on the heels of a Statistics Canada report showing that for every job posting, there are six unemployed Canadians trying to snag that job. This accounts for 1.3 million officially unemployed Canadians, but excludes those who have given up looking for work - "discouraged workers" who have dropped out of the labour market figures. It also excludes the under‑employed, part‑timers and others in precarious employment, who account for more than 400,000 workers in Ontario alone. If all of these were included, the real figure would be close to 2 million unemployed across Canada.

            A new report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives - "More Harm Than Good" ‑ shows that Ontario, once the driver of the Canadian economy, now has the highest unemployment rate in the country after the Maritimes. In December, the official unemployment rate in Ontario was 7.8%, and even higher in many cities: 9% in Windsor‑Sarnia; 8.6% in Toronto; 7.9% in London; 7.3% in northeastern Ontario and in Kingston; 7.2% in Hamilton‑Niagara.

            The hardest hit sectors in Ontario continue to be manufacturing and forestry; including 250,000 jobs lost in manufacturing alone since 2004. Tens of thousands of these lost jobs were in the auto industry - the engine of the Canadian economy - a consequence of the loss of the Auto Pact, free trade agreements, the high Canadian dollar, and gun‑to‑the‑head negotiations following the 2008 economic crisis.

            In December, youth unemployment in Ontario officially stood at 19%. The real rate is probably twice that much. During recessions, youth generally go back to school, but with tuition fees the highest in the country that has become exceedingly difficult for students loaded down with debt. Ontario universities now receive 44% of their funding from student tuition fees.

            At the same time, the number of Ontario seniors in the workforce in 2012 has tripled to 240,000 people, or 12.5% of seniors. The jobs they are doing are in retail and food services - jobs usually filled by youth. They are working because their pensions are too small to live on, and because the federal government wants them to stay in the workforce as a source of cheap labour. That's why the Tories have raised the qualifying age to 67 for Old Age Security and the Guaranteed Income Supplement - which benefit the poorest seniors.

            Yet, access to Employment Insurance coverage by unemployed Ontario workers who have paid into this public insurance plan, dropped to just 21.2% of the insured unemployed in October 2012. Only 1 in 5 unemployed workers in the province was able to access EI, the lowest rate of coverage ever recorded. Across Canada, the rate of access is 37%.

            Of the almost 80% of insured workers who don't qualify in Ontario due to changes in legislation by the Tories, most have been forced to take low paid jobs instead, or throw themselves on the mercy of family and friends. More changes this year will force workers who do qualify to accept low paid jobs and to travel up to an hour to get to them. Seasonal workers across the country, who are hardest hit, are up in arms protesting the changes. Vicious provincial "workfare" policies have also prevented most unemployed workers from accessing social assistance in Ontario...

            Incomes in Ontario have either stalled or fallen over the last 30 years, driven down by corporations and right‑wing governments. While Ontario's 1% saw their incomes rise by 71% from $280,000 to $478,000 a year; 90% saw their incomes creep from $28,700 to $30,000 in the same period. In Toronto, 90% saw their incomes fall by $1,900 (adjusted for inflation).

            In Ontario the top 1% made 16 times more than the bottom 90%; and in Toronto, 23 times more than the bottom 90%. In January, the provincial government has also used Bill 115 to impose wage and benefit cuts in the education sector, which both government and opposition parties have stated they will extend across the broader public sector.

            The federal Tories have slashed immigration and replaced it with the temporary foreign worker program, which contracts workers to employers who can pay 15% less than the wages paid to Canadian workers, and can deport them at any time. Temporary foreign workers are forced labour in Canada. The government's main objective is to drive down wages even further, and to split and divide the working class between free and indentured labour, Canadian born and foreign born, by colour, and by gender (and any other way they can think of).

            Household debt - which bankers and governments have all warned against ‑ now stands at an average of $124,700 in Ontario, much higher than the Canadian average of $114,400. Ontario has the third highest household debt load in the country. This is a result of the inflated housing market and housing bubble in Ontario, as well as the massive job losses in manufacturing and forestry, cuts to real wages and incomes, and rising prices for food, fuel, housing, post‑secondary education and childcare.

            Across the country the situation is bad and getting worse.

Corporate income tax cuts that have made Ontario and Canada the lowest corporate income tax jurisdictions (at 11% and 15% respectively) in the industrialized world, have cost the Ontario government $17 billion a year in foregone provincial revenues. More foregone revenue in a single year, than the entire provincial deficit. The federal government has lost $14 billion a year in foregone revenues, illustrating once again, that the problem is not about expenditures, but about revenue streams that are being deliberately turned off. It's a problem created by, and about, a system geared to the insatiable greed of the biggest corporations, and the wealthiest 1%.

            While the biggest corporations sit on huge pools of aggregating capital generated by corporate tax cuts and a virtual flat tax, Ontario is starved of public investment in healthcare, public and post‑secondary education, childcare, affordable housing, cities, public services and social programs, an adequate minimum wage and income security, job creation and an environmentally sustainable industrial strategy for the province.

            All by itself, this is the case for public ownership and democratic control of the economy; for fundamental social change and for socialism.

            Yet, in defiance of all logic, governments - including Kathleen Wynne's Liberal government in Ontario - are moving to introduce more austerity to discipline the working class and reduce wages and living standards even further, with the aim of eliminating the deficit and increasing profits, and in the process pushing Ontario ever nearer to the fiscal cliff of another deep recession - caused by corporate greed and austerity measures.

            If there was any doubt about the direction being charted by Premier Wynne, it was dispelled with the statements of provincial Treasurer (and former Royal Bank of Canada executive) Charles Sousa, who praised the federal budget saying it had "made some progress in moving Ontario forward", and called for "cooperation and a strong partnership" with the federal Tory government.

            This is a federal government that will cut $4 billion in program spending this year, throwing thousands of people onto the unemployment lines, attacking and eroding universal social programs, under‑funding provincial transfers, privatizing Medicare by stealth, while simultaneously spending billions on arms, prisons, and the military, and folding up international aid and development into Foreign Affairs - the unofficial ministry of war. Not least, the budget contains proposals - once again hidden deep inside - for right‑to‑work legislation that would eliminate the closed shop and roll back workers' rights 75 years.

            It is austerity, embraced by the Liberals in Ontario and the Tories in Ottawa, that is pushing our province and our country to the brink of another deep recession - and depending on developments in the US and in Europe, into a full‑fledged depression. Most regrettably, we note that austerity has also been embraced by the NDP and the Greens, who accept capitalist dogma that the working class must pay for the economic crisis, through reduced wages and living standards, privatization, deregulation, tax cuts, and curbs on labour rights.

            Yet the capitalist prescription for ameliorating the deepening economic, social and political crisis caused by austerity, is to double down on austerity, delivering even more of the medicine that has so patently failed, generating massive strikes, protests and resistance struggles around the globe.

            The only way out of the current crisis is to reject austerity, defeat the right‑wing governments delivering austerity, and adopt policies and elect governments that will put peoples' needs before corporate profits and curb corporate power...

            The vehicle for this change is a powerful people's movement, a common front of labour and its allies including the Communist Party, engaged in escalating mass independent political action, in the streets, in the workplaces, at the Legislature and on Parliament Hill.

(The above article is from the April 1-15, 2013, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)