Cuts are political violence, not mock guillotines

Image via Facebook used with permission

On May 1, International Workers' Day, a few hundred people braved the terrible weather to protest the vicious austerity cuts of the Doug Ford government on the grounds of Queen's Park in Toronto.

As is always the case at such events there were lots of colourful and somewhat "off-colour" signs and placards like "Stop the Cuts", "Cuts Hurt Kids" and "Fuck Ford". There was also a group that brought a mock guillotine that said along the side "Cuts Are Political Violence".

The guillotine has led to considerable faux outrage on the part of the mainstream media and various hand-wringing bourgeois politicians.



The Sun went all in on its front page:

NDP MP Charlie Angus seemed to feel it was an attack on the very basis of our precious liberal democracy.

Charlie needs to get a grip.

Ford and his crew even called on the OPP to investigate the mock guillotine. This brought a bemused reaction from former Ontario Premier Bob Rae:

It is a bit sad that Rae's reaction was significantly better than Angus'. 

Of course, the protesters are right. The Ford cuts ARE political violence. Unlike a mock guillotine, cutbacks to essential services like Toronto Public Health programs will, in fact, lead to people's deaths. Austerity does kill. It has killed from Greece to the United Kingdom and did right here during the Mike Harris era.

It also sows despair, destroying lives and futures from the education cuts, to the stopping of the minimum wage increase and changes to labour laws, to the gutting of environmental initiatives, to the cruel ending of the basic income pilot project and on and on and on.

These are actions that are actually violent, actually cruel and that will actually kill people.

So save your outrage for silver spoon Ford and his crew of flunkies. It is their attack on civil society that deserves it. 

The Adam's Place Cookbook w. Crab Mousse, Spicy Indonesian Salad, Apple Squash Soup & more -- Vintage Cookbook TBT

Vintage Cookbook: The Adam's Place Cookbook 

Publication Details: Self-Published, c. 1994

The cookbook we are looking at today is of the community / fundraising type that we have looked at several examples of over the years. In this case the aim was to raise money for a renovation to a facility for autistic adults near Orangeville, Ontario.

As is often done with this genre of cookbook the recipes were submitted by various community members or supporters. What makes this somewhat novel -- especially for Canadians who remember and were around in the early 90s -- is that a number of the recipes were from well-known politicans or musicians at the time.

Anne Murray offers up Mom's Cherry Cake while country music legend k.d. lang gives us a (of course) vegetarian spicy Indonesian style salad. There are entries from Kim Campbell, Flora McDonald, Princess Diana (a Watercress Soup lol!) and Aline Chretien. Bob Rae and Hal Jackman have competing cookie recipes. Meanwhile the federal NDP leader at the time, Audrey McLaughlin contributes an interesting chili / pasta sauce she calls Yukon "Chilly" Sauce.

I have added a few other recipes such as a "Charlie Brown" one, one for Yugoslavian Meat Rolls and one for Taco Burgers just because. Since I have a tradition of posting mincemeat recipes I tossed in one of those as well.

(Click on scans to enlarge)

Ontario's poverty gap puts the lie to Wynne's 'social justice' pretensions

Back in 2013 when she was running for the leadership of the Ontario Liberal Party, Kathleen Wynne famously told the Toronto Star that she wanted to be known as "the social justice premier". She also said that when it came to "liberal values", "I believe social justice is what drives us". 

Yet, when it comes to social assistance rates and those trying to live on them in Ontario, after 13 years in office this alleged liberal value of social justice is, to say the least, on scant display.

In fact, the Liberals in office have continued with Mike Harris' devastating war on people living in poverty that began when the Conservatives defeated the Bob Rae NDP government in 1995.

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) released a report today that looks at the "poverty gap" for people on both Ontario Works or the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP). The poverty gap is "the distance between total benefit income and the poverty line".

The report found that not only had the Liberals not reversed the dramatic increase in the gap created during the Harris years, they had maintained it. When one looks at the numbers, the vicious and cruel social assistance rates that force to people to try to survive on an "income" that is as much as 60% BELOW the poverty line continues to this day and has seen no significant improvement under the Liberals or Wynne.

Overall the numbers are shocking. As the report lays out:

The poverty gap for a single adult qualifying for Ontario Works was 59%.
It would take an additional $12,301 to close the gap.
The poverty gap for a single parent qualifying for Ontario Works was
35%. It would take an additional $10,386 to close the gap.
The poverty gap for a couple with two children qualifying for Ontario
Works was 38%. It would take an additional $15,686 to close the gap.
The poverty gap for a single adult qualifying for ODSP was 33%. It would
take an additional $6,783 to close the gap.
The poverty gap for a single parent with one child qualifying for ODSP
was 11%. It would take only an additional $3,261 to close the gap.
The poverty gap for a couple with two children qualifying for ODSP was
20%. It would take an additional $8,146.95 to close the gap.

In fact, single people on Ontario Works only just recently began to receive as much monthly in assistance in actual dollars as they received in 1993:

 At that time, a single person on social assistance received $663 a month, the equivalent of about $995 in today’s dollars.
Two decades later, in 2014, after severe welfare cuts by the former Mike Harris government and despite modest improvements to rates and other supports by the Liberals, single people on welfare received $656 in monthly Ontario Works payments and about $75 a month in Trillium benefits and federal GST credits.
Today, the maximum Ontario Works rate is $681 a month.

A government that squanders hundreds of millions on white elephant "infrastructure" initiatives for rich people, over a billion dollars on the eHealth boondoggle, that recently even handed out $32 million to IBM to fix a government software mistake that IBM itself  had made, and that has engaged in round-after-round of unnecessary "middle-class" tax cuts, has done nothing of any meaning to help the most vulnerable in the province.

This shameful situation will not be solved by pilot projects that may, a generation from now, lead to some kind of "guaranteed annual income" that may prove little more than a Trojan Horse.

We need action now. Social assistance rates well below the poverty line are grotesque and unacceptable.

The Liberals have been in power for more than long enough. And Wynne cannot use the excuse that she has only governed for a few of those years, for, as the CCPA report points out, it took the Rae government only three years to cut the poverty gap for single people on welfare from 40% to 20%.

As long as the Liberal government allows this to continue by its inaction, any pretensions by Wynne to claim to care at all about social justice remain a hollow farce.

See also: Joe Mihevc and Toronto politicians are "ripping off" the TTC -- Not transit riders!

See also: Toronto budget prioritizes policing -- Yet again

Tom Mulcair could learn a thing or two from former Ontario Premier Bob Rae

By Fraser Needham 

NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair has been many things during this campaign.

He has been Tom the defender of small business who will cut small business taxes. He has been Tom the leader who will balance all budgets come hell or high water, recession or surplus.

Tom the hardworking guy from a family of 10 who put himself through school, which means don’t expect the NDP to do anything about skyrocketing post-secondary tuition rates for our young people.

And, he has been Tom who thinks taxing the very wealthy is a bad idea.

One thing he has not been is Tom the social democratic leader who will stop Canada’s 20-year path down the road of economic neo-liberalism and austerity. The rhetoric from the NDP during this long campaign has of course been deafening and, more often that not, it appears the public is tuning out as the party starts to slip in the polls.

On Monday, Mulcair took the level of debate in this campaign yet one notch lower by taking a swipe at Ontario’s first and, to date, only NDP premier Bob Rae. Did the Federal NDP leader attack Rae for failing to deliver public auto insurance, breaking a collective agreement with public sector unions and instituting “Rae Days”, or for at times isolating himself from both his caucus and party base during his term from 1990-95?

Of course not. Mulcair attacked Bob Rae for having the audacity to run deficits in perhaps the worst recession in post -war Ontario history instead of cutting services and fighting that recession on the backs of working people.

The NDP Leader has taken a lot of heat, and rightly so, from all sides in this campaign ever since he made the ill-advised pledge to balance every single budget in the first term of his party’s government without raising taxes significantly, regardless of the state of economy. And the heat was on once again Monday night during the Munk debates. So, Mulcair chose to take his frustrations out on an all too familiar political punching bag – the short-lived Ontario NDP government!

Now Bob Rae certainly has his critics as well as his defenders. And, some could rightly accuse the former Ontario premier of being somewhat politically misguided at times. For example, Rae may have been wiser to take a quiet academic posting at a university somewhere rather than deciding to come out of political retirement and make a bid for the Liberal Party leadership ten years ago.

However, one thing Rae has never been questioned for is his integrity or commitment to public service – agree or disagree with him. Further, Bob Rae has always tried to conduct himself with a certain degree of decorum in the public arena and refrained from political cheap shots. The same cannot be said of the current NDP Leader and not surprisingly Rae immediately took to Twitter to give Mulcair a good thrashing after the political insult was unleashed.

It actually wasn’t all that long ago that the NDP used to be about doing things – social democratic things. Sure, the party wanted to get elected but it wanted to do so in order to implement social democratic policy.

Unfortunately, it now appears those days are gone for good. Today’s NDP has learned the trick that if you promise next to nothing or no change during an election campaign, then maybe the public will expect very little of the party if it happens to get elected to government. This strategy failed miserably in the recent B.C. and Ontario election campaigns and for the one-term Dexter NDP government in Nova Scotia -- but that hasn’t stopped the federal party from trying it again in this election.  

Hence, always stay on the attack against your opponents, misconstrue facts, numbers and history (Tommy Douglas anyone?) and never, ever promise to really do anything – at least anything social democratic anyway. And always remember, no political low blow is too low as long as it may get you some sort of advantage over your opponent.

Did Bob Rae’s Ontario NDP government fail? In many ways, yes it did. However, did Rae try to do what he felt was right during very difficult economic circumstances and did he put in place some social democratic policies during his five years as premier? Yes he did.

The truly unprincipled intentions of Thomas Mulcair and those surrounding him have been on full display during this election campaign. The group of them could learn a thing or two about the right way to do politics from Bob Rae.

Fraser Needham is a freelance journalist living in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. He has been working and writing in Saskatchewan for the past 15 years. Aside from the Saskatchewan CCF/NDP, he follows Aboriginal issues and politics closely.

See also: Tom Mulcair, Bob Rae and balanced budgets

See also: The NDP's phony “credit card” analogy: a neoliberal conception of the public household

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As "Third Way" politics suffers a huge defeat in the UK, in Canada it has now triumphed

"Inequality isn't natural. Poverty isn't inevitable. Things can - and will - change." - Jeremy Corbyn

In a stunning rebuke to and repudiation of a generation of the Labour Party's leadership and its "Third Way" strategy by the party's membership, unrepentant socialist and radical Jeremy Corbyn has won the top job with a rather convincing 59% of the vote.

In the end his campaign, which at first was widely written off as a sideshow, has swept to victory and changed the political game in the United Kingdom totally.

As Adam Bienkov put it today:

As a result the Labour party is now irrevocably changed. It is no exaggeration to describe today's outcome as a revolution. The era of Blair and Brown and their followers is now well and truly over. New Labour is not just dead, but cremated and blown before the wind.

Meanwhile across the pond here in Canada the "Third Way" strategy and approach has, on the other hand, triumphed entirely. We are witnessing an election where the Liberals are actually seeking to portray themselves as to the progressive "left" of the NDP, while the NDP seeks to frame itself as fiscally responsible with right-wing narratives about "balanced budgets" that they then ludicrously attempt to claim are somehow a continuation of the spirit and politics of Tommy Douglas!

Hence today on CBC Radio we are treated to the farcical political moment that sees former Saskatchewan NDP Finance Minister Janice Mackinnon trying to celebrate and justify the total bankruptcy of the NDP campaign while Bob Rae celebrates and defends the Liberal "left shift", such as it is.

The utter emptiness of the tone of this "debate" and the very fact that it can happen at all reveals the trouble at the heart of the social democratic narrative in Canada -- that being that it has ceased to exist as a narrative in this election, and on our political landscape, at all.

The differences ideologically between the two parties have lost any meaning in a context where a radio discussion like this is even possible.

The terrible irony is that New Democrats have to turn to simply saying that the Liberals "cannot be trusted" as opposed to contrasting their own more left policies, when seeking to continue to claim that they are the "sole progressive choice".

New Democrats are, in fact, 100% correct that Trudeau is making a cynical and calculated move by supposedly shifting left, that the Liberals will, when it works for them, campaign left and then govern right. that the Liberals are promising things again that they have promised before but then delivered austerity instead. and that Trudeau's stream of progressive announcements is a political tactic and seems disingenuous.

They are correct to note that historically the Liberals have tried any number of variations of this -- but the critical difference that they do not note is that the Liberals have never before been able to do this on a federal level when the NDP had almost entirely abandoned the left political terrain.

This is the reason the Liberal "left shift" may very well work despite all of these arguments. Mulcair has shifted the tone and much of the content of the NDP campaign with such overtly reactionary nonsense that they have literally opened up this space for the Liberals themselves. It is the NDP's Third Way thinking and strategy that has allowed Trudeau to reframe the election, to revive what was a failing campaign and to show such a recent and clear rise in the polls.

They have allowed Trudeau to seem to be bearing the anti-austerity torch as absurd as that is and despite the fact that the Liberals are an inherently Third Way party.

One could, of course, also point out that there is no reason to think that Mulcair, after running from the right, will suddenly govern as a leftist. In fact, all of the evidence of recent NDP provincial regimes run by centrist NDP leaders, like those of Nova Scotia and Manitoba, would indicate the opposite.

The present Liberal reversal of fortune may not last. as there is a long way to go, but if the NDP stays on this strategic course there is every reason to suspect it will.

More broadly, however, the past history of Liberal opportunism and cynicism does not in any way, shape or form justify the cynicism and opportunism of the NDP in the "here-and-now", whether that opportunism and cynicism ultimately works or not.

And calling out the Liberals as not really being on the "left" as if there is some great leftist platform on offer from the NDP is simply a transparent joke.

While it took the NDP many years to transition to a fully Blairite party in imitation of its sister party in the UK, one can only hope the road back to the left takes considerably less time than it did for Labour.

See also: It appears the NDP strategists are stuck in the 90’s – again

See also: Playing the progressive card -- Trudeau's cynical, but clever, "left shift"

It appears the NDP strategists are stuck in the 90’s – again

by Fraser Needham

As NDP strategists mull over the polls this weekend and try to figure out why their shift to the right of the Liberals on the issue of balanced budgets and deficit financing doesn’t seem to be playing out as they hoped in Ontario, they might be wise to take some time out and do a little research on the British Labour Party leadership election.

Early projections seem to indicate rogue left wing MP Jeremy Corbyn is poised to win the party’s leadership race on Sept. 12. Corbyn is not only left wing, if he wins the Labour leadership, he would be the party’s most left leader in more than three decades dating back to the early 1980’s when Labour was led by Michael Foot.

The longtime Labour politician has also remained unshakeable in his convictions of what he believes constitutes a truly social democratic society. Or, to put it more succinctly, Corbyn has never advocated tax cuts for the middle class as one way of achieving social democratic goals.

The Blairites are of course horrified but it doesn’t really matter what they think if the majority of the Labour Party membership is behind Corbyn which they appear to be. The British press is already speculating the MP from Islington -- who chooses to wear a suit and tie as little as possible and likes to speak his mind about his left convictions -- could pose a real problem for David Cameron and the Conservatives and actually become Prime Minister in the near future. Some journalists are accusing the Blairites of being stuck in the past and failing to see the on the ground appeal of a guy like Jeremy Corbyn to a significant constituency of voters.

Let’s shift over to the Canadian political scene for a moment.

Although the people running the Federal NDP and its provincial wings these days will never admit it publicly, they are strongly influenced by Third Way politics and the vision that Tony Blair very firmly stamped on the British Labour Party in the early 1990’s. Third Way politics basically says there is no way social democratic parties can get elected anymore on the types of platforms they ran on from the post World War Two period up until the early 1980’s. They believe all voters, including working class voters, have moved on from any opposition to capitalism, favour neoliberal ideology without question, do not believe an interventionist state in the economy can ever have a positive influence, are anti-labour and much more individualistic than they had been in the past.

So wherein lies the hope for social democratic parties as far as how the Third Way sees it? There is a "third way" that can be instituted which means social democratic parties have to far lower their expectations of the past by fully embracing the inequities of the free market, eliminating government intervention in the economy from the policy book, sometimes reducing income taxes and certainly never raising them, being firmly committed to balancing the budget, trying to appear as business friendly as possible and never, ever doing anything pro-labour.

If social democratic parties are willing to accept the cold and harsh realities that the general public has moved significantly to the right, they can then make themselves palatable to voters and actually win elections. What is their advantage over the right wing parties? They are a kinder, gentler form of neoliberal party than the mean spirited right. They seek not to destroy the state but to try to preserve it in the current harsh realities that we live in. Their goal is not to completely eliminate taxes but maybe just keep them where they are or reduce them slightly. These parties are also much more easily able to present themselves as more open minded and liberal parties on social issues than the right wing parties who are really neoconservative parties and believe in a much less socially liberal society.

The Third Way is the strategy New Labour ran and was elected in Britain on in the 1997, 2001 and 2005 elections. It was the platform that was used in Saskatchewan that saw four straight NDP governments elected from 1991 to 2003. It is also the strategy that has been used by the Manitoba NDP that is now in its fourth consecutive term after winning power in 1999. A lot of NDP strategists would probably argue that the short-lived Bob Rae NDP government in Ontario in the early 1990’s might have lasted longer had it been willing to accept Third Way strategies a little more fully or at least a lot sooner.

However, all of a sudden the Third Way strategy doesn’t seem to be working as well as it once did. New Labour lost the 2010 British election and was soundly defeated in this spring’s election by the Conservatives. Many of its losses came at the expense of a much more left Scottish Nationalist Party.

In Saskatchewan, the NDP was soundly defeated by the right wing Saskatchewan Party in the 2007 election and then thoroughly routed by them again in the 2011 election – suffering the party’s worst electoral loss since its very early CCF days. The once formidable Saskatchewan NDP now sits rudderless and directionless in opposition with only a rump of nine seats. The party is not positioned to win the next election and it could be a number of years before they are competitive again. To give the Saskatchewan Party credit, they were forward thinking enough to shift slightly left after their surprising 2003 election loss – eliminating any public fears that they would privatize Crown corporations, generally maintaining existing government services and shedding the image of being nothing more than a neoconservative party trying to move the province to the hard right.

The B.C. NDP was supposed to be a shoe-in for government in the 2013 election as a discredited Liberal government appeared to be on its way out. However, the party ran on a moderate centre-right platform and was soundly defeated. The Manitoba NDP is likely headed for defeat in the next provincial election. The Nova Scotia NDP was elected for the first time on a centre-left platform in 2009 but only lasted one term being defeated by Liberals in the 2013 election.

And perhaps the biggest screw up of them all – the Ontario NDP’s bizarre decision to trigger an election in the spring of 2014 and then run on a right wing populist platform. Right of, you guessed it, the Liberals this time around.

Every thing they did in the campaign seemed designed out of some sort of Mike Harris/Rob Ford handbook. The NDP railed out against government excess and tried to position itself as the party of small business. It lashed out at the Toronto “elites,” which was pretty much anyone who questioned their ethics or motives, and wondered why many unions in the province decided not to support them after the NDP was running a campaign that was in many ways hostile to labour. They accused the Liberals of running a fiscally irresponsible campaign when in reality the Liberal campaign was hardly fiscally ambitious at all. The party even decided to place a cover ad in the Toronto Sun of all newspapers – you know – to reach out to all their blue-collar right wing friends who read it.

And it all made such “common sense.” Except to voters of course who decided to re-elect the Liberals to a majority on election day and reward the NDP with a third place finish.

Now the Federal NDP strategists will tell you the party ran on a centre-right platform in the 2011 election winning more seats than it ever has and becoming the official opposition for the first time in the party’s history. However, if they were actually honest -- and in their current state of hubris they most likely wouldn’t be -- they would admit that the party’s good fortunes had much more to do with the strange circumstances of that particular election than anything that was in the NDP platform.

First, the Liberals hit what will be for them likely rock bottom running under a leader which is the worst the party has ever seen in its modern history in Michael Ignatieff. Ignatieff wasn’t even able to hold his own Toronto seat.

Second, after almost 20 years of successful campaigns in Quebec, the Bloc Quebecois completely imploded and bit the dust leaving a tremendous opportunity for another party to become dominant in the province. With the Liberals remaining largely discredited in Quebec since the sponsorship scandal and the Conservatives quickly wearing out their welcome after the 2006 election, the NDP was able to seize that opportunity and fill the gap.

Third, and most important, the NDP was very well served by their late leader Jack Layton who admirably decided to fight the campaign despite suffering the effects of a recent hip replacement and what later came to be known was terminal cancer. In his fourth campaign as party leader, Layton caught on like wildfire across the country but no more so than in Quebec where his meteoric increase in popularity there sealed the deal for the NDP in the province.

The point of all this is the NDP might actually want to try something that would be considered a little “radical” to those people running the party these days. Rather than always shifting right why not shift a little left? Maybe consider that working people might actually be a little bit fed up after 25 years of neoliberal policies and lies that have left them worse off than at any time since before the Second World War. That people may not be so easily tricked into the deficit hysteria as they were 20 years ago. That they even may be willing to pay a bit more in income taxes if this means better public services.

In general, why not just try and run on the values your party was founded on rather than someone else’s? You certainly would make your base happy and give your party members and campaign workers something to believe in again and you might just gain some votes and a little respect at the same time.

It also likely wouldn’t splatter as much egg on your face as promising to balance the budget heading into a looming recession.

Just a thought.

Fraser Needham is a freelance journalist living in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. He has been working and writing in Saskatchewan for the past 15 years. Aside from the Saskatchewan CCF/NDP, he follows Aboriginal issues and politics closely.

See also: The follies of the NDP running a right wing populist campaign

See also: Playing the progressive card -- Trudeau's cynical, but clever, "left shift"

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June: Leadnow, Anti-Choice Extremists, the Greens and more -- The month on The Left Chapter in review

From: Unintended consequences: Attacking Leadnow and "strategic voting" 

June saw 27 posts of various kinds on The Left Chapter.

Here are the top five posts, in terms of hits, for the month of June. June saw what is, so far, the piece with the largest number of hits, by a fair margin, for this blog ever! In fact it has stayed in our "Popular Posts" column for almost the entire month since it came out. There were also a lot of contenders, this month, for the number five spot.

1) Unintended consequences: Attacking Leadnow and "strategic voting"

As I have noted before, partisan political narratives often die very hard -- even when these narratives have begun to do far more harm than good to those who continue to espouse them.

Read More!

2) Anti-choice extremists target Trudeau and women's reproductive rights

Warning: While necessary to the content of the piece, this post contains some disturbing and very graphic images.

The extremist anti-abortion group, the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform, (CCBR) has been distributing leaflets and demonstrating around Toronto lately. Recently they targeted my west Toronto neighbourhood of South Etobicoke both distributing their leaflets door-to-door and demonstrating at a local intersection as well as, disgracefully given the imagery they use, outside of a local high school.

Read More! 

3) Are the Greens a "progressive" party?

Are the Greens a "progressive" party?

While Green voters would certainly appear to think so, some New Democrat partisans would seem to say otherwise claiming they are little more than Conservatives with composters. Recently, as an example, Paul Moist, head of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, in a letter critical of Leadnow and its strategic voting campaign stated “Neither the Liberal Party of Canada nor the Green Party are progressive...Both parties have very right-wing economic policies, do not stand for working families or public services. Only the NDP has a progressive platform.”

Read More!

4) Tom Mulcair, Bob Rae and balanced budgets

As part of Tom Mulcair's bid to eschew any hint of anti-capitalist radicalism on the part of his no longer Socialist even in theory New Democratic Party, he made a pilgrimage the other day into the heart of the Bay St. beast, Toronto's Economic Club, to attempt to allay any remaining fears that the titans of capital may have that he might do anything at all that would meaningfully threaten their power or profits.

Read More!

5) Tory led city council continues Toronto's tragic transit farce

The tragedy and farce that is Toronto's political capitulation to the cult of the car continues unabated.

Mayor John Tory -- despite the recommendations of the city's own planners and health officials, former mayors and many others -- has managed to narrowly get his "hybrid" Gardiner Expressway plan passed by Toronto City Council and to see the Boulevard plan of basically all experts (less narrowly) defeated.

Read More! 

It seems our readers are fans of ironic posts of dubious recipes as the number one food post for the month was Tuna Almondine: Behold the greatness! The number one "serious" food post was Pesto Encrusted Boneless Leg of Lamb.

Do you have a left point-of-view or opinion, a recipe or a story you want to share?

Send them to The Left Chapter via theleftchapter@outlook.com!


Check out our review for the month of May!: May: Bill C-51, the "Men's Rights Movement", taxes & more -- The month on The Left Chapter in review

Tom Mulcair, Bob Rae and balanced budgets

As part of Tom Mulcair's bid to eschew any hint of anti-capitalist radicalism on the part of his no longer Socialist even in theory New Democratic Party, he made a pilgrimage the other day into the heart of the Bay St. beast, Toronto's Economic Club, to attempt to allay any remaining fears that the titans of capital may have that he might do anything at all that would meaningfully threaten their power or profits.

After touting his deeply reactionary and totally unnecessary so-called "small business tax cut" (which is not really much of a tax cut for small business at all) and prattling on about the "middle-class", promoting growth and helping the manufacturing sector, he also took what seems an almost de rigueur swipe at Ontario's first, and so far only, NDP Premier Bob Rae for having failed to balance the books while in office -- in contrast, allegedly, to all those other fiscally responsible NDP provincial governments historically.

To much amusement and laughter amongst his audience comprised of the very same capitalist elite that worked so very hard to undermine and destroy the Rae administration from day one, Mulcair quipped that in contrast to these NDP governments "There was one exception. But he turned out to be a Liberal."

Very clever.

He echoes similar, previous critiques of the Rae government by others like Brian Topp and Andrea Horwath.

The problem is that while there are a great many things that lefties can and should be critical of Rae's capitulationist regime about, the fact that it chose to place services and jobs ahead of balancing the budget during the economic downturn of the early nineties is absolutely not one of them!

Rae's choice on this front was completely correct both from an economic and human point-of-view. It was a decision identical in its thinking to the demands for greater stimulus spending that led to the ill-fated coalition agreement between Jack Layton and Stephane Dion.

In fact it is the same reasoning that lies behind Mulcair's own finance critic's criticism of the Conservative government's fixation on deficit reduction.

It is a basic part of Keynesian, progressive or social democratic economic thinking that tries to not fight recessions on the backs of the people and to stimulate recovery through spending and it stands in stark contrast to neo-liberal ideas around austerity.

In the context of the time Rae was right to do what he did on this front.

Within the capitalist paradigm balanced budgets do avoid over-reliance on loans that do place governments in a situation where they are indebted to and sometimes beholden to capital. They also can cost government greatly in terms of interest paid to service existing structural debt. (Ontario pays $10 Billion a year to service its debt for example, which could be put to much better uses.). So there are valid reasons for left-wing governments to seek to avoid debt. (One notable tool in doing so, personal tax increases, especially on the wealthy, is something that Mulcair is actually opposed to).

But during an economic downturn, having a balanced budget as a principal or even secondary immediate goal makes some form of austerity measures inevitable and makes very harsh cutbacks to services and public sector jobs almost certainly necessary.

The problem is not the desire to balance the books when possible -- it is the fetishization of this as a primary economic goal to which government should aspire regardless of circumstance.

Continuing to portray Rae's decision as fiscally irresponsible and to laugh it up with the barons of Bay St. about it is not only wrong but also really does the left no favours in the event that they find themselves in power during a future downturn. Especially if politicians like Mulcair make what seem to be commitments to keep the books balanced even when the economy is in a tailspin, as it was in Rae's era.

Mulcair should keep this in mind given his aspirations. He might not find it not so amusing to be on the receiving end of a Bay St. intimidation campaign should he be Canada's next Prime Minister.

Miller goes to Metro 1994 - Leftist Throwback Thursday

In 1994 David Miller, future Mayor of Toronto, was elected for the first time as the Metro level council member for the west end neighbourhood of High Park.

These were the four pages of the main brochure that he used during that campaign.

The Metro level, at the time, was a council that had members from across all of Toronto's districts and that was to oversee metro-wide services and programs, while the "cities" at the lower level, like North York, Toronto, Etobicoke, etc., had their own Mayors and councils. These were all amalgamated into the "Mega City" under Mike Harris in 1997.

Miller had run previously for Metro and lost. He also ran for the NDP federally in 1993 and came in a distant fourth. It was a time when social democratic fortunes in Ontario were at an all-time low due to the widespread unpopularity of the provincial NDP Bob Rae government.

This made Miller's victory in 1994, over two right wing candidates including future Harris and

Harper "star" Tony Clement, a small positive in a time of many reversals for Toronto NDPers.

Miller went on, of course, to be Mayor in 2003. Ultimately he ran a fairly centrist administration and he quit the NDP in 2007. Many of his administration's accomplishments, such as they were, were undone by the Rob Ford administration that followed him.

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