Hey Fellow Ontarians. Are You Ready For ‘Radical Change’?

A Commentary by Doug Draper 

Well, are you ready for radical change? Or at least a sequel to former Tory premier Mike Harris’s ‘Common Sense Revolution’?

Ontario PC leader Tim Hudak, led forward by his old boss and political mentor, former Ontario Conservative premier Mike Harris

I ventured out my front door in the dark and cold this Monday, February 25 to pick up The Globe and Mail to a front-page headline that read; “Hudak ready to topple Liberals and campaign for radical change.”

The story underneath that headline begins like this; “Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives are shifting to a state of campaign readiness as Leader Tim Hudak declares he’s prepared to bring down the minority Liberal government by the summer and fight an election on a platform of sweeping change.”

And what do Harper and his Conservatives mean by sweeping change. The Globe report goes on to say this; “Not only does he (Ontario Conservative leader and Niagara area MPP Tim Hudak) want to slash spending to rein in Ontario’s deficit, he aims to redefine the scope of government and shrink it, contracting out health services to the private sector and ending state monopolies such as the LCBO.”

Hudak is then quoted saying this about the change he has in mind; “It’ll be a focus of what government should be in the 21^st century.” Oh yah? Sounds more like a warmed over version of the trickle-down economics from the Thatcher/Reagan and Mike Harris eras in the 20^th century to me. And all that led to was generous tax cuts for the richest individuals and corporations, and lower wages and fewer job opportunities for the rest of us, along with cuts to health, education and other social services. 

If that’s the kind of radical change you want in Ontario, then the Tim Hudak Conservatives may be just what you are looking for.

Indeed, there was just that kind of enticement in the early to middle 1990s,when the first NDP government in Ontario’s history, led (believe it or not) by now federal Liberal leader Bob Rae, was wrestling with a crippling recession and asked for spending cuts that included what have become infamously called ‘Rae Days’. They involved asking public sector workers, including the province’s powerful teachers’ lobby, to work some nine or so days of the year for free to help the government through a hard time. Public sector workers – especially the teachers – rebelled against that idea and at least some of them – especially the teachers – voted for Mike Harris’s Conservatives.

Harris and freshly elected Tim Hudak, who would later become a member of Harris’s cabinet, were there to do, not only the cutting of taxes, but the cutting and gutting of services, including those around home care, health care, education, environmental protection and almost everything else. Their philosophy is that if we cut taxes enough for corporate business enterprises (what Hudak now commonly refers to as “the job creators”) some of that extra wealth might trickle down to the rest of us in the food chain and mean more jobs. It didn’t.

Not only did this trickle-down charade not translate into more and better paying jobs for Ontarians that continued losing good-paying – mostly of them in the industrial sector – data from Statistics Canada continued to show the gap between the wealth of the upper few percent (these so-called job creators) and the rest of us grow.

Now Hudak and his party are promising to freeze wages for all public sector unions – something that may seem appealing, even to progressives like me who wonder why some public sector unions might be so irresponsible through the recent recession to continue demanding a three-per-cent per year wage increase while many others, who have to pay these public sector wage increases through their taxes, are lucky to have any minimum wage job at all.

But that is some of the candy the Hudak Conservatives are dangling out there for people who are so angry about what has happened to them in this economy that they might just vote for a party, as they did with Harris almost two decades ago, that gets angry with whoever is left earning decent wages and benefits.

Then there is this “right to work” thing that Hudak and company are dangling in front of us. Sounds like proposed legislation that might be aimed at giving you a job, but what this Orwellian term really means (as it is playing out in Republican-dominated states in the U.S.) is that a person who belongs to a union can be given the right not to pay union dues.

What that fundamentally means is the end of unions. I mean let’s get serious here, who wouldn’t want all of the benefits unions have brought them, going back to the 37 hour work week and weekends off, if they thought they could still take advantage of such fundamental benefits as those, and not pay union dues.

Of course, that isn’t the way it will really work under “right to work” legislation. The way it will really work and Hudak and company will never tell you this, is that if enough people decide to no longer pay union dues, the union will be weakened to a point where it will be crushed and you might as well be stocking shelves at Wal-Mart for ten bucks an hour.

That is what it really means.

I thought that the United States just had a choice between the kind of stuff the Hudak Conservatives are now advocating – stuff that was promoted by Mitt Romney and his Tea Party Republicans – and a majority of American voters were smart enough to reject that and re-elect the other guy.

Please – for God’s sake – let’s not move back to something like that in Ontario.

I know we have to think out of the box, and have the courage to say to powerful unions like the teachers and cops; ‘Can’t you help us. Can’t you share in our sacrifice as we move through some pretty God-damn hard times for many Ontario residents who have lost good paying –jobs and may – just some of them – been lucky to find any kind of work closer to minimum wage? 

Surely we can talk them and their unions to help us in that way without having another Harris-like government coming in and stomping on unions and everything they have fought for to give people a middle-class living over the past hundred years.

By the way, the Kathleen Wynne Liberals and Andrea Horwath NDP should more forcefully be making this argument, but they are not.

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