The election results in Toronto tell a story the NDP does not want to hear

The NDP's Toronto federal election results really put the lie to a number of the narratives their partisans and organizers are trying to spin.

Already the line -- also adopted by a surprising number of "left" commentators outside the party -- that the NDP would now be more "powerful" even after losing over 600,000 votes and 20 seats because "it will hold the balance of power" has been shown to be an illusion.

Justin Trudeau very quickly ruled out any type of coalition and why wouldn't he. Only needing 13 votes to pass legislation he can turn to the Bloc Quebecois, the NDP or even the Conservatives in some cases. None of the parties will really want to fight another election too quickly for a variety of reasons so it is pretty safe to say the Liberals are likely to get at least a couple of years out of this minority without the need of explicitly pandering to the NDP at all even if you assume the NDP would have pushed a radical agenda in exchange for its support which I do not.

The case of the NDP backing austerity budgets during the minority Liberal government in Ontario shows that their price can usually be had pretty cheap.

There has also been a tendency in some quarters to try to say the party's lackluster results are due largely to "racist Quebec". Dave McKee deals with this bogus line very effectively in the People's Voice piece "ELECTION RESULTS NO EXCUSE FOR NATIONAL CHAUVINISM". As McKee notes:

Upon seeing that the NDP had been reduced to a single seat, CBC anchor opined, “It is fair to also ask whether Quebec was ready for a person of colour to be leading a party.” When Chantal Hebert pointed out that the Bloc Quebecois “ate [all of] the Liberals, the Conservatives and the NDP,” Barton quickly moved to another question. Whereas elsewhere in the country, the NDP’s poor results were packaged into somewhat understandable or even supportable excuses, its near wipeout in Quebec was immediately attributed to racism.
Never mind that Maxime Bernier, leader of the ultra-right racist People’s Party was trounced in the Quebec riding he’d held since 2006. Never mind that a key issue for Quebecers is supply management in agriculture, a system the Bloc squarely committed to defending. Never mind that the same CBC election broadcast included a clip of an anglophone Canadian saying of Jagmeet Singh that “people aren’t ready for his [points to her hair] religion.” And never mind the numerous incidents of racism that Singh directly encountered in English-speaking Canada, virtually all of which were celebrated as examples of the NDP leader’s “principled response” rather than condemned as examples of xenophobia.
The narrative that “Quebec is the racist core of Canada” is not confined to CBC or other media pundits. It has, unfortunately, been echoed by some on the political left, with comments ranging from a smug tsk-tsk to outright bigotry against Quebecers. Much of this discourse seeks cultural evidence by pointing to Quebec’s “Law on the Secularism of the State”, Bill 21, which bans most public workers from wearing or displaying religious symbols and is widely understood to be focused on Muslims. But the legislation has received a lot of opposition within Quebec.

Obviously NDP partisans are upset that the big upsurge in support they were insisting was occurring, despite the rather scant evidence for it, did not happen. If not scapegoating Quebec they have also turned to the notion that "at the last second" voters in places like Toronto changed their minds and voted Liberal out of fear swinging ridings to Trudeau that Singh and crew had been about to win.

To some extent this probably did occur, though as we will see this is a deeper trend than New Democrats might want to admit and cannot be used to explain everything away. Despite their protestations that the NDP was running on a truly "left" platform that was resonating with voters there was actually no indication that this was the case going into the election at all.

In fact, despite knowing when the election would occur the NDP was totally disorganized, its headquarters obsessively blocking or ghosting potential nominees for months meaning they had many ridings with no candidates just a few weeks or even days before the writ dropped, and far from having done the work to build momentum on the ground or in the streets that you need to do to promote a transformative platform the party was only saved from oblivion by the combination of a terrible outing by the Greens and a good couple of weeks from Singh.

The NDP's fate is always tied to electoral shifts like this as it eschews any meaningful movement orientation between elections of any kind and has been entirely electorally focused for decades. I still remember NDP partisans confident that Tom Mulcair's strength as a parliamentarian and during things like Question Period would bring victory and impress the people prior to the 2015 election.  Of course it didn't.

With a party's outcomes being based on the whims and short-term currents of bourgeois electoralism you can be up one week and down the next given the reality that most voters do not really think there is all that much that fundamentally separates parties like the Liberals and the NDP.

They are not wrong. Decades of the NDP in "power" in many provinces as well as in opposition have shown this to be a basically sound assessment regardless of whether the NDP brass have decided to cycle rhetorically more left or more centrist in this or that election and in response to this or that trend. So if the one looks the more likely to win than the other many progressives often don't really care either way.

That the NDP's various incarnations over the years have failed to build a serious base of support and left movement in places where they absolutely need it to "win" or to have any true influence on the country's political agenda is made nowhere more clear than in its results in Toronto.

Doug Nesbitt compiled a very telling chart of the NDP's fortunes in the city of Toronto since 1962 federally which I am using here with permission.

These are not relative numbers they are the NDP's vote and seat wins in absolute terms meaning that in 2019 the party only took just over 1,000 more votes in Toronto than it did in 1972 and won 5 fewer seats. As we all know, Toronto's population is much higher now and there were 5 fewer seats to win in 1972 so this looks even worse once that is factored in.

Not only did the Liberals win far more votes in Toronto in 2019 (681,551) so did the Conservatives (291,776). Only in the riding of Davenport did the NDP come close enough to winning for a last second shift to be a believable explanation for the loss.

Toronto is quite possibly the most diverse city in the world. It is politically progressive overall and given the pressures many Torontonians face in terms of housing, transit, the high cost of living and the consequences of social inequality and stratification, the failure of the NDP to build support that is not ephemeral in it tells a story the party does not seem to want to hear or learn from.

If you spend decades running on platforms that are just ever so slightly to the "left" of the Liberals, that are indistinguishable now from the Greens and that are packaged and framed with all the usual cynicism and "what is in the news this week" electoral thinking of bourgeois party politics then this is the likely result.

The NDP can try to spin the 2019 election as if it is detached from a broader reality all they want. But it is not and the fact that they are getting the same number of votes in Toronto that they did 47 years ago makes that pretty clear.

See also our other related pieces on the 2019 election results The NDP's election disaster shows again the need for something new on the left and No, the NDP losing over 600,000 votes and 20 seats is not a "victory"

Ontario Student Walkouts and Rallies, "Dinner With a View of the Rich", Israeli Elections & more -- The Week in News, Opinion and Videos March 31 - April 7

This week's list of articles, news items, opinion pieces and videos that I see as a must if you are looking for a roundup that should be of interest to The Left Chapter readers.

This list covers the week of March 31 - April 7.

The installment begins with a section and photos about to the student walkouts and rallies in Ontario, a look at the "Dinner With a View of the Rich" protest organized by the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty against the grotesque popup restaurant for wealthy diners in Toronto where homeless camps had been bulldozed by police and the city, and a section related to the disturbing Israeli election. It also ends with articles related to developments in Venezuela. 

1) FORD’S CLASS CHANGES TROJAN HORSE FOR SCHOOL CUTS

Dave McKee, People's Voice

If you read, and trust, the mainstream corporate media, the Ontario government’s March 15 announcement that it will loosen restrictions on class sized is a straightforward change that will align Ontario schools with those in the rest of Canada. There will, the story goes, be no loss of jobs for currently employed teachers and little if any impact on students’ classroom experience. Current class sizes are based on an average student-to-teacher ratio of 22:1, and the government intends to change that to 28:1 in the provincial budget due in April.

“Sure,” say the Tories, “we’d all like our kids to have classes of 22 or fewer, but it’s a perk that Ontario’s deficit just can’t afford any longer. Besides, we’re only adding 6 students and that’s only in high school.” Sounds like good old common sense.

Except, that’s not the whole story.


2) Provincial memo lays out plan to cut 3,475 Ontario teaching positions in 4 years

CBC News

A provincial memo obtained by CBC Toronto lays out the Ford government's plans to cut thousands of full-time teaching positions in Ontario beginning this fall.

3) Students walk out from hundreds of Ontario schools to protest education cuts

Lauren O'Neil, Blog TO

An estimated 100,000 elementary and high school students in Ontario are walking out of their classrooms this afternoon in protest against the provincial government's recent cuts to education.

4) High school students carry the torch of resistance against devastating cuts!

Young Communist League

We know that education is an investment and not a cost. Together, we won’t let the Ford Government get away with screwing with our futures and the opportunities of future generations. The Post-Secondary Education walkout on March 20th and the high school walkout today are only the beginning of what will be an intense struggle for quality, public education, for everyone. Say no to cuts! Say yes to Public Education! Ford wants us to shut up, but instead we’ll shut him up!

5) Thousands of educators hold rally outside Queen's Park

CP24

Thousands of educators from across the province gathered at Queen’s Park on Saturday to protest the planned elimination of more than 3,000 teaching jobs over the next four years and call on the province to boost funding for education.



6) Doug Ford's tax break for minimum wage workers falls short, study reveals

Mike Crawley · CBC News

The Ford government left Ontario's lowest-paid workers with less money in their pockets by giving them a tax break instead of boosting the minimum wage, says Ontario's non-partisan fiscal watchdog.

Related: "We won't allow our future to become a budget cut" - Photos from the student walkout strike in Toronto

Related: Ford and all his MPPs took away your rights at work. Tell them how you feel about it!

7) Posh dome restaurant opens under Toronto expressway weeks after nearby homeless camp eviction

CBC Radio

"The city cleared out homeless people who are living under the Gardiner with no heat. They were evicted. Meanwhile, pop-up restaurants serving ritzy dinners in heated domes under that same highway are granted permits," Acharya, an organizer with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), told As It Happens host Carol Off.

8) Dinner With A View's burst bubble

Natalia Manzocco, NOW Magazine 

Activist group Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) has since launched a counter-event, the snappily titled Dinner With A View Of The Rich, scheduled for Friday (April 5). As part of the event, organizers plan to serve a free, volunteer-cooked dinner to all attendees. "Together we'll eat, be lively and take in the view of the brazenness of the wealthy and the brutality of the city," they wrote on the event's Facebook page.

9) "Appalling": Toronto's Gardiner Expressway dining experience sparks backlash

Megan DeLaire, Yahoo News Canada 

A new pop-up restaurant under Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway bills itself as a “completely luxurious dining experience,” but one anti-poverty group calls it “appalling.”

10) Hundreds of people showed up to protest dome dining under the Gardiner

Tanya Mok, Blog TO

A posh dinner set beneath the Gardiner was disrupted last night after hundreds of people gathered around The Bentway to protest what they called "an obscene spectacle of opulence."

Footage from the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty protest, where hundreds of people registered their disgust over $550 dinners being served below a highway near where homeless people had recently been evicted.



11) San Francisco: residents of wealthy area shout down mayor over homeless shelter

Gabrielle Canon, The Guardian 

“The optics on this are stunning. You have very affluent land owners who are fighting against impoverished San Franciscans whose very lives are at risk because of the housing crisis,” she says. “And who are we talking about? Who is homeless? Primarily people of color, primarily folks who have disabilities or who are elderly people. To equate an entire class of people with crime is the foundation of prejudice.”

12) The Israeli Election Choices: Apartheid or Ethnic-Cleansing

The Palestine Project, Medium 

“Whether Netanyahu and his coalition with the fascist Jewish Power party — that openly advocates the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians — or Gantz, who prides himself on bombing Gaza back to the ‘Stone Ages,’ none of the major parties support a two-state solution or equality for Palestinians in a single state.”

13) Israel Is Voting Apartheid

Gideon Levy, Haaretz

There will be one certain result from Tuesday’s election: Around 100 members of the next Knesset will be supporters of apartheid.

14) Netanyahu Says Will Begin Annexing West Bank if He Wins Israel Election

Haaretz

Netanyahu tells Channel 12 three days before election that he will not 'evacuate any community' nor divide Jerusalem: 'A Palestinian state will endanger our existence'

15) How the Israeli Army Shot Dead a Palestinian Paramedic in a Refugee Camp

Amira Hass, Haaretz 

Sajed Mizher, a volunteer paramedic, planned to arrive at school in time for a test. But as he walked over to a man wounded by a gunshot, he was shot himself.

16) The weaponising of antisemitism

Alex Snowdon, Counterfire 

The smears against Corbyn and the left are part of a concerted effort to undermine a potential left government and must be opposed.

17) More Than 750,000 Could Lose Food Stamps Under Trump Administration Proposal

Pam Fessler, NPR

Three-quarters of a million people would likely lose their food stamps later this year under a new proposal by the Trump administration. The goal is to encourage able-bodied adults to go to work and get off government aid. But opponents predict people would go hungry instead, if the rule goes into effect.

18) Thousands of workers at US factories in Mexico are striking for higher wages

 Alexia Fernández Campbell, VOX

Dozens of Coca-Cola workers are camping out at a major bottling plant until they get a raise. More than 8,000 Walmart employees were prepared to walk off the job, until management met some of their demands. And 30,000 striking factory workers have finally returned to work after a month-long strike.

19) GM Squeezed $118 Million From Its Ohio Workers, Then Shut The Plant

David Welch, Bloomberg 

The union hall in Lordstown, Ohio, is a hive of confusion, anxiety and anger. Mostly anger.

20) Protesters call for an immediate ban on police street checks

Robert Devet, Nova Scotia Advocate 

Some 80 people attended a powerful community meeting, and several hundreds marched through downtown Halifax this afternoon, calling for an immediate and unconditional ban on the racist practice of police street checks.

21) Canada warming up twice as fast as rest of the world, and it’s ‘irreversible’: report

The Canadian Press

Canada is warming up twice as fast as the rest of the world and that warming is “effectively irreversible,” a new scientific report from Environment and Climate Change Canada says.

22) Two-Thirds of All Assets in Canada’s Economy Are Now Owned By Under 1% of All Companies

Press Progress 

Less than 1% of companies operating in Canada control over two-thirds of its assets,  new figures from Statistics Canada show.

23) With new position on secularism, Quebec Solidaire redefines left-wing politics in the province

Jonathan Montpetit · CBC News

By a wide margin, party members voted instead to adopt a new, and what is these days, more radical position: it's now opposed to any restriction on what religious symbols a public-sector worker can wear.

24) Homes on remote First Nations are mouldy before they're even built, experts say

Marina von Stackelberg · CBC News 

Drywall is transported to remote communities on ice roads and then left outdoors for months, making the material mouldy before the construction of a new house begins.

25) Michael Brown’s Mother Loses City Council Race in Ferguson, Where Her Son Was Killed by Police

John Eligon, The New York Times

Nearly five years ago, Lesley McSpadden appeared distraught before the world after finding out that a grand jury had declined to indict a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., in the fatal shooting of her teenage son, Michael Brown, who was black.

26) Eight years of “spring”

Ana Laura Palomino García, Granma 

What happened? A well-aimed formula of manipulation, lies and “humanitarian intervention,” designed by the United States government and supported by the European Union (EU), was applied against Libya, which sounds suspiciously familiar given the situation facing the Venezuelan people today.

27) “We Are Your Citizens”: Trump Keeps Repeating Lies About Puerto Rico

Nidhi Prakash, BuzzFeed News 

The president has inflated how much disaster money Puerto Rico has received and falsely claimed that the island has gotten “more money than has ever been gotten for a hurricane before.”

28) Democratic socialists now control one-tenth of the Chicago City Council

Ryan Smith, Chicago Sun-Times

By the time the 35th Ward Alderman took the stage at Rosanna Rodríguez-Sánchez’s election-night party at Chief O’Neill’s in Avondale, Chicago had experienced the biggest electoral victory for socialists in modern American history. Members of the group now control one-tenth of the City Council’s 50 seats.

29) Historic Win: Communist Candidate Wins Municipality in Turkey

Telesur 

Communist Party of Turkey’s (TKP) candidate Fatih Mehmet Maçoğlu won the Dersim municipality, which makes the city the first to be governed by communists in the history of Turkey.

30) Erdoğan’s grip on Turkey slips as opposition makes election gains

Bethan McKernan, The Guardian 

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s grip on the country has been challenged by a resurgent opposition in local elections, with his ruling Justice and Development party (AKP) losing control of Ankara and on track to lose Istanbul, according to unofficial local election results.

31) Canada's probable next PM is courting the far right to win

Andrew Mitrovica, Al Jazeera 

It is said that you can take the measure of a man by the company he keeps.


By that objective calculus, the toxic company that Canada's Conservative leader, Andrew Scheer, stubbornly keeps ought to disabuse anyone of the silly notion that Canada is an antidote to the pestilence of white nationalism infecting other, Western "liberal" democracies.

32) Warning from 'Antarctica's last forests'

BBC News 

Scramble across exposed rocks in the middle of Antarctica and it's possible to find the mummified twigs of shrubs that grew on the continent some five million years ago.

33) SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARY WORKERS PARTY TO LOBBY FOR SARB TO BE NATIONALISED

Theto Mahlakoana, EWN

The Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party (SRWP) says that nationalising the South African Reserve Bank is one of the key policy objectives that it will lobby for.

34) 'People are fleeing the city': How 'renovictions' are forcing renters to the edge of bankruptcy

Michael Smee · CBC News

A Toronto credit counselling firm is warning of a surge in so-called renovictions — landlords ousting tenants so they can upgrade and re-rent their apartments at jacked-up prices.

35) Cash-strapped Yorkshire school forced to teach without electricity once a week

Peter Lazenby, The Morning Star 

The unnamed school took the extreme measure to introduce ‘dark days’ due to the funding crisis affecting educators nationwide.

36) Neo-fascist violence keeps Roma out of Rome neighbourhood

Lorenzo Tondo, The Guardian 

Hundreds of neo-fascists, far-right activists and local residents took to the streets of a Rome suburb on Tuesday in a violent protest against 70 Roma people, including 33 children and 22 women, who were to be temporarily transferred to a reception centre in the area.

37) Footage of Italian boy who stood up to fascists goes viral

Lorenzo Tondo, The Guardian 

A 15-year-old boy who stood up to far-right activists during violent protests in Rome has won plaudits across Italy.

38) Let’s build the kind of Left that demands Canada withdraw from NATO

Yves Engler

Though it would elicit howls of outrage from the militarists, withdrawing from NATO would not be particularly radical. European countries such as Sweden and Finland aren’t part of the alliance, nor are former British dominions Australia and New Zealand, not to mention Canada’s NAFTA and G7 partners Mexico and Japan. Still, withdrawing from NATO would dampen pressure to spend on the military and to commit acts of aggression in service of the US-led world order. It’s long past time to do so.

39) The Anti-Democratic Roots of NATO

The Real News Network 

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) must be understood from its roots, which is anti-democratic says Yves Engler, while discussing his four part print series on The Real News.

40) Worst deal ever? The 407 is worth $30B today – Ontario sold it for $3.1B in 1999

Alicja Siekierska, Yahoo Finance Canada 

At the time, it was the largest privatization of a public asset in Canadian history. But in hindsight, it may be considered one of Ontario’s biggest financial missteps, considering the SNC-Lavalin sale pegs the value of the highway at at least $30 billion.

41) SA sex worker activist speaks out at international conference

Duncan Guy, IOL

“Prostitution is neither sex, nor work, nor is it a free choice”

 42) Communist Party of India (Marxist) exhorts people to defeat BJP

The Sentinel 

Hamen Das, former MLA and State Secretariat Member, Communist Party of India (Marxist) who addressed a number of election meetings at Chabua, Sadiya and Doomdooma LAC said that people of Assam were never communal, nor they are communal now or will be so in future. So he exhorted people to defeat ‘communal’ BJP in view of their current activities to demolish the very fabric of the society by trying to divide people on communal line.

43) The Picture of Dorian Trudeau

John Clarke, Counterfire 

The neoliberal centre's cover boy cannot protect Canadians from hard edged austerity or the racist right.

44) Berlin activists march to demand city seize housing from landlords

Caroline Copley, Reuters 

Thousands of Berlin residents took to the streets on Saturday to vent anger over surging rents and demand the expropriation of more than 200,000 apartments sold off to big private landlords, which they blame for changing the character of the city.

(Related: Problems of the Construction of Social Housing, International Symposium on Social Housing Construction, World Federation of Trade Unions, Prague, 1975)

45) From Middle Power to Regime Change Specialist: Canada and the Venezuela Crisis

Donald Kingsbury, NACLA 

Canada’s image as a moderate force seeking multilateral dialogue on the situation in Venezuela is little more than rhetoric veiling Ottawa’s increasingly interventionist role in Latin America.

46) Hundreds march in Washington, DC to protest against NATO, US interference in Venezuela

RT News 

Hundreds of people have taken to the streets of Washington, DC to oppose the upcoming NATO ministerial meeting in the US capital. The demonstrators also decried the continued US involvement in the Venezuelan political crisis.

47) Venezuela: Why is Maduro Still in Power?

Federico Fuentes - Green Left Weekly

For many, it is impossible to understand how, despite presiding over the country’s worst economic crisis and facing such intense international and domestic opposition, Maduro remains in the presidential palace.

48) Washington Concerned Over Maduro's Stay in Power

Telesur 

Maduro's stay in power has Washington as well as various regional neighbor countries worried about the situation. It seems that Venezuela's neighbors followed a false promise to get rid off the Venezuelan President rather quickly. According to the report, allies of the U.S. are disappointed with the result and are now questioning their decision to recognize Juan Guaido as interim president.

49) Venezuelan Gov’t Authorizes Expansion of Red Cross Aid

Lucas Koerner, Venezuela Analysis 

Venezuela’s Maduro government has reached an agreement with the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) to scale up the humanitarian organization’s activities in the Caribbean country.

50) Venezuela: The US empire is on the march again

Rob Winkel, Counterfire 

It doesn’t matter how many ultimatums the US or European leaders put to Venezuela. Venezuelans don’t need their former imperial masters and others to tell them to hold elections. Who leads the country is determined only by the population. It doesn’t matter how many countries support the opposition - it doesn’t give them a mandate to rule.

51) Venezuela’s Constituent Assembly Removes Guaido's Immunity

Telesur 

The National Constituent Assembly (ANC) of Venezuela approved on Tuesday a decree to lift parliamentary immunity and the continuation of the prosecution of self-proclaimed opposition deputy, Juan Guaido.

(Related: Yet again the NDP shows its true colours as lapdogs of American Imperialism. Time for the Canadian Left to notice) 

52) Venezuelan Chavistas Stage Anti-Imperialist March in Cacaras

Telesur 

Venezuela's Bolivarian people took the streets Saturday to carry out the sixth consecutive anti-imperialist march, an event aimed at backing President Nicolas Maduro administration and rejecting the interventionist policies by the United States and its regional allies.

See also: Israeli Attacks, Venezuela Resists, Climate Change & more -- The Week in News, Opinion and Videos March 24 - 31

Student walkouts and mass protests coming this week in Ontario against Ford's education cuts

Image from a protest poster designed by Nathaniel Laxer

Student walkout strikes followed by a large weekend rally at Queen's Park are coming to Ontario this week in the wake of the announcement of what amount to massive funding cuts to public education by the Doug Ford government.

The Ford government is using increased class sizes and forcing students to take online courses as what Dave McKee in the People's Voice describes as a "Trojan Horse". McKee notes that:

The Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation (OSSTF) calculates that these changes will result in over $700 million in funding cuts to public education, and a loss of over 24% of current classes from the public school system. While the government has repeated that no currently employed teacher will lose their job, these funding cuts are expected to result in 10,000 fewer teaching positions across the province over four years.

In protest of this upwards of 100,000 high school students across the province will be walking out of classes at hundreds of schools on Thursday afternoon (April 4). The graphic above is from a poster designed for the walkout at one west end Toronto school.

This will be followed by a massive rally outside the legislature in Toronto on Saturday, April 6 at 12 noon. Thousands are expected to attend.

Organized and endorsed by "AEFO, CUPE-Ontario, ETFO, OSBCU, OECTA, OSSTF and a growing list of parent and community groups, other labour unions and organizations" the event's Facebook page notes:

As parents, educators and concerned community members we are standing together to defend high-quality publicly funded education and the optimal learning conditions that all students need and deserve!
The Conservative government is proposing cuts that will be damaging to all students and will particularly hurt students with special needs. Our message is simple: Our education system needs investment not cuts.
The government has proposed to:
• Increase class size in grades 4-8 and in high school;
• Download its obligation to support children with autism onto public schools without adequate funding; and
• Reduce the number of teachers and support staff in schools across the province.  

The Left Chapter plans follow-up reports from events on both days. 

Further Readings / Links

FORD’S CLASS CHANGES TROJAN HORSE FOR SCHOOL CUTS

RALLY for Education

Horwath rises as Ford stumbles and other news -- The Left Chapter Ontario Provincial Election Roundup Week Two

While not the total fiasco out of the gate that was Tim Hudak's rapid derailment of the Conservative campaign in 2014, the scent of scandal and promises and pledges that simply don't add up seem to be putting a dent in what appeared to be an insurmountable Ford lead.


The anti-Ford vote, however, is not coalescing around the Liberals and Wynne but rather around Andrea Horwath and the New Democrats, exposing the bankruptcy of the government's re-election strategy.

As the NDP rises though so too do the attacks on them that are being made from predictable angles aimed at weaknesses of the NDP's own making.

In this, the second of our weekly The Left Chapter round-ups we look at this past week's themes, news and developments.

407 Scandal

There is a deep historical irony that it would be the 407 toll highway -- handed to the private sector for a relative song by Mike Harris in the 90s in one of the worst privatization deals in the history of the country -- that is causing the Conservatives to go off message and stumble just when they looked to be certain to form government again for the first time in 15 years.

Having based their campaign in no small part around the need to clean up alleged Liberal corruption, the dangers of doing so become apparent when scandal begins to hover over your own party and campaign as well.

In this case Ford and the Tories have come under scrutiny after a Brampton candidate was forced to resign due to the alleged inappropriate use of personal data gleaned from 407 users for political purposes. The question is how widespread this was and if other Conservative candidates used the data as well. Police and the province's privacy commissioner have launched investigations.

You can read more about it via these articles:

Police and privacy commission join investigation into Hwy. 407 customer data theft

PC Leader Doug Ford hammered over alleged data theft; police probe urged

Ford faces tough questions as NDP asks for probe into ex-PC candidate's alleged role in data breach

Ontario elections watchdog reviewing PC candidate campaigns

Doug Ford and other PC figures pictured with man at the centre of growing data-theft scandal

For Doug Ford math seems to be hard

When it comes to explaining how he plans to deal with the loss of billions of dollars in government revenues due to his proposed tax cuts of various kinds without slashing public sector jobs and social programs, Doug Ford simply does not have an answer.

Presumably Ford thought he could just coast along like his brother Rob did with pseudo-populist rhetorical nonsense about "gravy trains" and "efficiencies" but it seems Ontarians are paying a little more attention to reality than Torontonians did during the 2010 municipal election.

His so-called "middle class" tax cut -- which unsurprisingly appears to mostly benefit the wealthy -- will cost the province $2.6 billion.

His plans to cut gas taxes and scrap cap-and-trade will lead to the loss of at least $3.2 billion.

Then there is the corporate tax cut. That would see another $1.4 billion vanish. 

How is he going to make up for this lost revenue without a vicious austerity agenda? Who knows?

Ford, of course, has not been willing to seriously answer questions about this from day one. He began the campaign by acting like a defensive bully replying pathetically with “Very simple. You haven’t done it. I’ve done it. That’s the difference. Next question” to CBC reporter Robyn Bresnahan's totally legitimate question about how he could cut as much spending as he claims he can without cutting jobs.

He has been doing the smoke and mirrors deflection routine ever since.

It looks like it may have stopped working.

Related articles:

Doug Ford declines requests to explain his 'nonsense' $469 million estimate

For Ford fact and policy free is the way to go

NDP rises to new heights in polls

The NDP is quickly gaining on the Conservatives according to many recent polls. The CBC poll tracking data has them at 33.4% compared to the Tories at 38%. The Liberals remain mired in the doldrums at 23.1%.

One poll by Ipsos Reid and Global actually had the NDP one point ahead of the Conservatives with 37% support.

This allows the NDP to attempt to position themselves as the strategic, safe progressive alternative to the Conservatives, a strategy that is not without its risks as I touched upon last week.

But Horwath certainly looks to be benefiting from a series of possibly fatal self-inflicted wounds by her opponents and is perhaps becoming the default option for many who find they have nowhere else to go.

Not a bad place to be at this stage.

The public may simply be too tired of the Liberals to consider them, and with another party promising to deliver essentially the same programs -- in some cases in a more robust way, in others differing either slightly or slightly for the worse -- without the same faces and the history, it could be their time is up.

While I do not share his overall ideological perspective Adam Radwanski in the Globe and Mail had a pretty good take on why Horwath may be able fend off the attacks on her by her opponents in his piece:  Why the usual questions about the Ontario NDP’s competence are being set aside

Horwath's 'fiscal responsibility' nonsense comes back to haunt

Speaking of self-inflicted wounds, one that Horwath has brought upon herself is the recent questioning of the NDP's math and budgetary plans due to what was a $1.4 billion annual error in the party's platform.

That being the platform that the NDP and Horwath repeatedly have sought to portray as fully costed and fiscally responsible, displaying a long-held and terribly self-defeating desire by mildly social democratic parties to appear as sound and reliable managers of the bourgeois state.

When you propose a fairly milquetoast, liberal platform that is so similar to the actual Liberal platform that you need a combination of a terrible Conservative leader and a titanically unpopular Premier to get your chance, it is easy to get tripped up by such minutiae. Especially given that it is the NDP themselves who have elevated it to importance with their fetishistic obsession with such neo-liberal policy detail that always proves to be fiction anyway.

Fortunately for them the public could be ready at this particular moment in time to get behind a liberal policy agenda without the Liberals as stated above. If a shift like that is occurring, these voters will likely not care about the error, especially given that Ford throws fictional numbers around daily as well as the long Liberal history of outlandish spending scandals and debacles.

Dave McKee's speech from the Communist Party launch

Ontario's Communist Party leader Dave McKee gave a terrific speech that touched on a number of important points when they launched their campaign in Toronto May 12. I reported on that launch already, but the speech has now been posted and it is definitely worth a listen.




Further news/article of interest about the campaign:

NDP Surges, Doug Ford Opposes Rent Control, Hydro One & more -- The Left Chapter Ontario Provincial Election Roundup Week One

Horwath’s NDP would ‘adjust’ Ontario cap and trade to fight climate-warming pollution

Ontario parties are ducking the issue of public auto insurance

Ontario NDP leader wouldn't introduce corner store sale of beer and wine

Ontario election campaign brings focus on nearly 2 million people living in poverty

NDP Surges, Doug Ford Opposes Rent Control, Hydro One & more -- The Left Chapter Ontario Provincial Election Roundup Week One

The provincial election campaign in Ontario is now a week old and with only three weeks to go until election day the desire to "change" who is arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic appears to be strong enough that the tired Liberal regime's fate may well be sealed.

Momentum has swung, at least for now, to Andrea Horwath's New Democrats as the primary alternative to the looming Doug Ford catastrophe, though not so much due to any great enthusiasm on the part of Ontario voters but rather due to the paucity of choices.

In this, the first of what will be weekly The Left Chapter round-ups we look at this past week's themes, news and developments.

Fully 74 per cent of voters wish they had a different choice

A poll taken as the writ dropped found profoundly deep voter dissatisfaction with the various mainstream "choices" on offer. Almost three-quarters of those questioned said they wished "there was another option other than Liberal Leader Kathleen Wynne, PC Leader Doug Ford and NDP Leader Andrea Horwath."

This same poll also found that while it was true that Horwath was the most "popular" leader (or perhaps least unpopular) this was not based on any great embrace of her leadership by the public:

Pollster Darrell Bricker said while Horwath has an advantage on the favourability front, it’s more “neutral” since the other two have fairly high negative favourability.
“Andrea Horwath comes up better because she’s less disagreeable, not because she’s so much more likeable,” Bricker explained.

I looked at what this poll meant and its broader implications in the piece: Deep ennui greets launch of an Ontario election that is Ford's to lose

The NDP surges 

The polls all seem to agree that the NDP is surging right out of the gate. With Kathleen Wynne remaining deeply unpopular -- out of all proportion to the actual popularity of the government's recent polices and budget going into the election -- Andrea Horwath and crew seem to be shaping up as the progressive alternative to Ford in the minds of voters.

The CBC poll tracker shows the NDP up by around 3.5 points to 30.6% while the Liberals are down by 1.2% to 23.7%.

Upward trends very early in a campaign can be a double-edged sword as they leave plenty of time for opponents and the natural evolution of events to bring these numbers back down. There are countless examples of opposition parties going into elections much stronger than they finished them, the Tom Mulcair led federal NDP in 2014 being a case in point.

But there at least two reasons that NDP partisans can hope that the trend in this case may have staying power.

The first is the aforementioned general dislike for Wynne and the sense that her government should be sent packing. There comes a point -- as happened with the Rae government in 1995 -- where, as Globe and Mail analyst Adam Radwanski put it "If voters aren’t willing to buy what Wynne’s Liberals are selling, none of their advantages matter."  He further noted, when referring to Wynne's slick new ads "All the production values in the world can only go so far if voters just don’t want to hear from you any more."

How low could Wynne and the Liberals drop in the polls? Very low indeed. And a great deal more of their vote is likely to go to the NDP than the Conservatives.

Which brings us to the second reason for optimism among New Democrats, which is that it is rather easy to make the transition between them for centrists and mild progressives in this context as there so little that separates the two parties ideologically.

It is akin to dropping Coke in favour of Coke Zero.

While in most cases this would hurt the NDP -- and has time and again including in Ontario in the 2014 election -- here it allows them to transition to being a new and nonthreatening liberal party for voters scared of Ford but tired of Wynne's baggage.

As Thomas Walkom put it in the Star "Experts can parse the differences between the Liberal and NDP child care or pharmacare promises. But I suspect most voters see the two party platforms as near-identical."

Various NDP partisans may have deluded themselves otherwise, but I suspect Walkom is right.

Of course, the other side to that is that should Wynne somehow regain her footing or numbers start to trend back her way, the transition back to the Liberals from the NDP would be just as effortless.

Either way, with the Conservatives remaining steady at above 40% support the two parties are right now vying for who would be the official opposition to a massive Ford majority unless they can bring that support level down.

Doug Ford says he prefers the "market" to rent control

If you thought the housing market with soaring rents and low availability could not possibly get worse for tenants in Toronto, you would be wrong.

If Doug Ford gets elected they will get much worse.


Hydro board raises

Despite the fact that they only have their positions thanks to Wynne's short-sighted and deeply unpopular decision to privatize the bulk of Hydro One, the dim bulbs running the show there seem determined to tank her government.

How else to interpret the news that in the lead-up to an election where hydro rates are a central issue the part-time members of the utility's board of directors gave themselves a big raise?

Article: Hydro One's part-time board members gave themselves $25K raises

Of course, while Doug Ford pontificates about replacing these clueless rich people with his own group of clueless rich people, Andrea Horwath is correct in saying that the only long-term solution to hydro issues in the province is to bring Hydro One back into public hands.

That it will then be run in a fundamentally more democratic or egalitarian way under an NDP government, however, seems unlikely to say the least.

Green Party

The Green Party launched its campaign in Toronto running on a fairly progressive platform that you can read on their website. The prospects that there is room for a third mildly progressive party to gain traction in an election like this one would appear bleak.

What is clear though is that the media and the other parties are doing their best to make sure they remain that way with the Greens being shut out from the debates.

Party leader Mike Schreiner confidently predicted "We are going to make history and we are going to elect Ontario's first Green MPPs". Regardless of whether or not that would be a good thing, at this point it would not seem to be in the cards.

Two major parties run candidate slates that are over 50% women 

In an historic development two of the major parties running candidates province wide have slates that are comprised of over 50% women.  

The NDP lead the pack at 56% while the Greens followed closely at 52%.

Communist Party launch

While we are in an election where "change", as Ontario Communist Party leader Dave McKee put it,  really amounts to putting a new "jockey on the same old horse", the Communists launched their campaign on a platform that offers a genuine, unequivocally anti-capitalist vision.

I attended their campaign launch in Toronto and you can read about it at: Communist Party launches Ontario provincial election campaign in Toronto -- "Ignite the movement for Socialism"

Further news/articles of interest about the campaign:

Another debate, another Doug Ford comment about Kathleen Wynne's smile

Avalanche of detail overwhelms Kathleen Wynne's message

No longer polling third, Horwath and the NDP are fending off attacks from both sides

NDP's Horwath has 'no interest' in coalition with Liberals

See also: Doug Ford wants you to subsidize the poverty wages of corporations

Communist Party launches Ontario provincial election campaign in Toronto -- "Ignite the movement for Socialism"

The Communist Party launched their Ontario provincial election campaign Saturday in Toronto. All of their Toronto candidates were in attendance and spoke, including the party's provincial leader Dave McKee.

The party is running on a comprehensive -- and genuinely radical -- anti-capitalist platform that stands in complete distinction to the campaigns we are seeing from the three mainstream, bourgeois capitalist parties.

The launch, held in a hall on the Danforth, began with a speech from Toronto Danforth candidate Ivan Byard who talked about the need for a new deal for cities in Ontario among other things.

Ivan Byard, Toronto Danforth

Parkdale-High Park candidate Jay Watts followed emphasizing the efforts the Communists have made organizing with tenants in Parkdale as well as touching on housing issues more broadly. He also noted that he would be participating in an all-candidates debate with the NDP, Liberals and Greens at the Parkdale Public Library on Monday, May 14 at 7 pm. The Conservative candidate is not expected to attend.

Dave McKee, who is running in Davenport, ended with a rousing, fiery speech that spoke of the central pillars of the party's platform including the economy, housing and other essential services, and real progressive tax reform.

Jay Watts, Parkdale-High Park

McKee began by noting that there is a genuine desire for change among the people of the province, but that this notion of "change" has become depoliticized. If it is simply change for its own sake it is nothing more than changing "the jockey on the same old horse" and will likely benefit the Tories and Ford. In contrast to this McKee said it was necessary to re-politicize the idea of change and to build a working class movement around it.

McKee then went on talk about all of the three main parties making it clear that the Conservatives under Doug Ford constitute a very serious threat and that his election would result in an "immediate attack" on workers, women, racialized and marginalized communities in Ontario. He emphasized this by pointing to

Dave McKee, Party Leader

Ford's socially conservative positions around abortion rights and the sex-ed curriculum, his positions on the environment, the minimum wage, tax cuts for corporations, slashing social spending and a number of other points.

Yet, McKee pointed out that the two alternatives to Ford that could possibly be elected on June 7, the Liberals or the NDP, are running on platforms that are "weak, insufficient and timid".

McKee reviewed the dismal record of the Liberals and Kathleen Wynne including such points as the 15 years of starving health care funding -- Ontario has the lowest per capita hospital funding in the country -- and the privatization of Hydro One despite the opposition of around 75% of Ontarians and the mass mobilization against it.

Meanwhile the NDP, to McKee, lie "just incrementally to the left" of the Liberals. The NDP pharmacare plan he sees as "totally insufficient" noting its very limited nature. "Why would we accept a plan that is half-baked?" he asked to loud applause.

He then pointed to the NDP's dental care plank which is not universal but rather two-tiered.To McKee this two-tiered aspect undermines the essential principle of universality in health care and social programs. The same is true of the NDP's childcare plan which is means-tested.

"Is that universal? No. Is that progressive? No." McKee said.

The Communist Party, however, wants to mobilize around a "strong list of working class demands".

These include a shorter work week with no loss in pay as part of a broader full employment strategy. McKee touched again on housing noting the Communist Party is the only party with a serious plan aimed at "confronting and resolving the housing crisis."

The party is also in favour of a $20 an hour living wage as opposed to the bare subsistence level that even the $15 an hour minimum wage represents. "Why are we talking about minimums? Why are we not talking about what's needed?" McKee asked.

McKee brought up the party's staunchly anti-capitalist vision to prevent plant closures and corporations trying to move factories to low-wage jurisdictions. "If you leave we are going to take over your business and we are going to run it."

To McKee one of the essential issues confronting Ontario is the need for radically progressive tax reform. Far from paying their fair share, McKee says that "corporations are stealing public money."

The Conservatives, of course, are calling for tax cuts cuts. McKee says the Liberals are not even talking about the issue. Meanwhile the NDP advocates for a tiny 1.5% increase in corporate taxes and talks about how this would remain "competitive" with Trump's new rates. For McKee this is the NDP putting "fiscal responsibility and capitalist competition ahead of the needs of the working class."

Tax cuts since the Harris era, the Communist Party relates in its leaflet, have cost the government of Ontario $18 billion in annual revenue. The party proposes to reverse this by "doubling the corporate tax rate and reversing tax cuts to the very wealthy." McKee emphasized the importance of this by saying that "we have to resolve the revenue crisis" in Ontario.

As for any attempt by corporations to refuse to pay, McKee says that "If the corporations don't pay we will take them under public ownership."

McKee talked as well about other aspects of the party platform including their commitment to fare free transit, ending public funding of Catholic schools, justice for Indigenous Peoples, a socialist approach to environmental justice, and fighting for the equality rights of women and people from racialized and LGBTQI2S communities.

While he said this in reference to health care, I think he summed up many aspects of the Communist platform more broadly very well when saying "It's just about treating people with dignity."

He also touched on the need to build a mass movement and alliance to fight against Ford and the deep cuts and attacks that we can anticipate should he become Premier. He noted that the Communist electoral campaign and the issues it is raising is a part of that saying "We are campaigning for June 8, June 9, and on" 

The speech ended with an inspiring call to "ignite the movement for socialism", one of the party's election slogans.

The Communist Party is running 12 candidates province wide all listed below:

The full Communist Party leaflet is reproduced here:

To find out more about their campaign visit their website or Facebook group.

See also: Deep ennui greets launch of an Ontario election that is Ford's to lose

August: Margaret Thatcher, Morgan Wheeldon, Tom Mulcair, Tommy Douglas & more -- The month on The Left Chapter in review

August on The Left Chapter saw 25 posts of various types.

Without any further ado, the top five posts in terms of hits for the month were:

1) Mulcair doubles-down on the NDP's right shift by defending Thatcherism

This week is the week where I think it can officially be said that the NDP leadership "jumped the shark" from any pretense at ties with its roots as a social democratic labour party to a straight-up and very open embrace of Blairite centrism and neo-liberal "progressiveism".

Read more! 

2) Morgan Wheeldon, Israel and the triumph of neo-conservative dogma

It would seem that, as with climate change, any serious discussion or criticism of Israel is now essentially forbidden in mainstream politics in Canada -- including within the NDP.

Read more! 

3) The NDP and budget deficits: Not the Tommy Douglas vision

By Fraser Needham

The 2015 Canadian federal election took another strange turn this week.

NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair committed that his first budget as prime minister would be a balanced one. This seems somewhat strange as Canada appears to be headed into a recession and if the current Conservative government has struggled to maintain services in recent years without running deficits, in what have been stronger economic times, the only way a new government could balance the budget in a weaker economy would be through substantial cuts. The minor revenues gained by an NDP government canceling income splitting for high-income earners and a modest corporate tax increase would not be enough to maintain current spending levels in an economic downturn, let alone meet other campaign commitments such as a national childcare plan.

Read more!

4) Deficit spending and the very odd week in Canadian social democracy

This has been an interesting week in the history of Canadian social democracy.

After Mulcair decided to double-down on comments he made praising Margaret Thatcher last week, we began this week with NDP advisers musing to Lawrence Martin in Canada's business tribune, the Globe and Mail, about trying to outflank the Harper Tories from the militarist side on defense spending by stating that they may yet be going to propose a whole lot more of it! As Martin relates it:

Read more!

5) Defeating the Harper Conservatives -- The peace movement and the federal election

by Dave McKee, Canadian Peace Congress President

The 2015 federal election is a critical opportunity for the people of Canada to defeat the Harper Conservative government and its reactionary, pro-war agenda. It is important that the peace movements in Canada begin work now to play a strong role in shaping the public policy debate.

Read more!

The number one food post for the month was Slow Cooker Beef & Mushroom Chili.

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 July!: July: Xenophobes, Olivia Chow, Eve Adams, Naheed Nenshi & more -- The month on The Left Chapter in review

Defeating the Harper Conservatives -- The peace movement and the federal election

by Dave McKee, Canadian Peace Congress President

The 2015 federal election is a critical opportunity for the people of Canada to defeat the Harper Conservative government and its reactionary, pro-war agenda. It is important that the peace movements in Canada begin work now to play a strong role in shaping the public policy debate.

Foreign policy matters do not normally play a defining role in Canadian federal elections, and it appears that this election may be one of the rare cases in which issues of peace, security, militarism and international policy are an important part of the public debate.

The Harper government itself has tried to maintain a high public profile for certain aspects of its foreign policy, under the recurring pretext of fighting terrorism at home (through Bill C-51) and abroad (through the expanding war in Iraq and Syria.) This is partly an effort to shore up the Conservatives’ political base. It is also an attempt to draw public attention away from the ongoing and deepening economic crisis, which has attracted increasing public anger to the Harper Tories, and toward foreign policy issues, where the Conservatives can differentiate themselves from opposition parties whose positions generally present weak alternatives.

Of course, the two issues of economic crisis and war are closely related and should not be counter-posed to one another. The Canadian Peace Congress put it this way at our 2011 Convention:

As the global, systemic economic crisis continues and deepens, competition for resources, markets, influence and profits has grown much more fierce and desperate. Capitalist governments have moved quickly to attack social and labour rights and impose severe austerity measures that will impoverish and marginalize masses of working people, at the same time that they are prosecuting wars and increasing military budgets.

The role of the peace movement is to draw attention to this relationship, to highlight the disastrous foreign policy record of the Harper Tories, and to identify the danger of continuing those policies. In the process, we must project the importance of a new, independent foreign policy of peace, international cooperation and solidarity. And we must insist that such a new foreign policy will work hand-in-hand with progressive, democratic domestic policies that serve the needs of the majority of the people in Canada.

Among peace and progressive groups, there are different proposals for how to approach the federal election. Some argue that the singular focus should be on defeating the Harper government. Others argue the broad foreign and military policies of the main parties are so similar that the tasks before the peace movement lie far beyond the scope of a single election.

The Canadian Peace Congress takes a different approach, one that includes both the immediate goals and the necessity of fundamental policy change. Our two-part proposal is that the Harper Conservatives must be defeated, and also that we need to build a mass movement that demands of all governments a foreign policy of peace.

It is very true that the main arena for peace and anti-war activism is “extra-parliamentary” – in workplaces, communities, schools and the streets. This is where we encounter interested, engaged people whose commitment and energy provides the backbone for the kind of mass movement we need to build. A strong and united movement, in action, can project a peace program for Canada that no government can afford to ignore or distort.

At the same time, however, Stephen Harper’s Conservative government has pursued the most aggressive and dangerous foreign and military policies in memory. Under the Harper Conservative government:

• Canadian military spending has soared, so that Canada is now the sixth largest military spender among NATO’s 28 members, and the 16th largest military spender globally.
• Canada has deeply embedded its foreign policies into those of the United States and NATO, to the extent that key economic policy is dictated by the military priorities of NATO and the US.
• Canada has promoted foreign intervention and participated in wars of aggression against sovereign states, including Libya, Syria, North Korea, Yemen, Brazil, Honduras, Venezuela and Ukraine.

Will defeating the Conservatives bring about a fundamental change in foreign policy? No, it won’t.

But it will remove the biggest immediate barrier to that change. Defeating Harper is key.

The Canadian Peace Congress Executive is developing the strategy for its federal election campaign, which will be launched soon.

Elements of the campaign will likely include:

• Window signs with messages that highlight the Harper government’s record on war and militarism and call on people to “vote for peace”
• A series of fact sheets and videos about foreign policy, militarism and war, and the importance of these issues in this election
• A speaking and organizing tour, to local groups across Canada, to draw together activists and identify ways cooperate in an effort to get foreign policy into the election discussion

We invite all members, supporters and friends to help with this campaign. If you want to get involved, or have ideas to share, please let us know.


‪#‎timeforpeace‬

This piece originally appeared in the Canadian Peace Bulletin, vol 2 no 1. It is reprinted here with permission.

Dave McKee is the Canadian Peace Congress President

You can find out more about the Canadian Peace Congress at www.canadianpeacecongress.ca 

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