Unpublished Op-Ed submitted to the Toronto Star. Additions have been made.

Gullible, narrow-minded voters who so eagerly embraced the carny barker in Doug Ford are now seeing what the real show is. Mike Harris 2. He has trotted out the well-worn and much used mantra of white, male, neoconservatives: cutting corporate liability and taxes, cutting a broad swath of critically needed public services and supports under the auspices of reducing the deficit and getting there by attacking working Ontarians and their wages. Ontario is open for business. This means business in the 1880s when there were no restrictions on corporations or industrial activity much like the current climate in China and the Far East where environmental, labour and all kinds of other kinds of social protections are absent.  These were what made North America so great but globalization ended all that.

His supposed line by line examination of the books is nothing more than an ugly deception meant to cover the ideological nature of the cuts. The “efficiencies” are intended to imply that governments have been squandering taxpayers’ money and he is exposing their ineptness to bring Ontario back to fiscal responsibility.  This is a one-sided conversation that does not involve the private sector. We are all too greedy and are asking too much of our governments. It is in these new hardships in Ontario “for the people,” that the perverse  and twisted nature of conservative ideology is laid bare. They say that those who do not understand history are destined to repeat it and we are doing this repeatedly in modern society.

Neoliberals and neoconservatives are pure hardcore ideologues bound to destroy government first and enrich themselves second. Liberals are somewhat more sensible and pragmatic, orienting their ideology in a few facts and science. The biggest issue that they both have is that they are firm believers in capitalism and free markets. Even the NDP believes in capitalism. It is this fractured economic credo that mixes with their politics to create the obsession with taxes, deficits and protecting and enhancing profits. Neoconservatives believe in using government and working people to further their own ideological purposes.  Doug Ford like Jason Kenney and Donald Trump view society as a war between the rich against the poor. They believe they have the right to govern and as such all their decisions are made in an adversarial environment that pits the working public against the wealthy private sector. Thus, like Mike Harris before him we witness cuts to critical government programs and services across the board under the guise of financial responsibility. Liberals can only repair a small amount of the damage caused by conservatives so there is a constant erosion of democracy and government. Governments and those who work for them in any way are mocked and derided for their greed and their lack of a private sector work ethic. Private companies can always do things better than public ones. Government and its employees are viewed as living off the wealth that the private sector creates which they have no right to. There is no end to the affrontery of conservatives regarding this matter. Name calling and dismissiveness are the order of the day.

None of the cuts affects the wealthy or corporations, in fact they are intended to enhance their gains. Governments have always represented conservative elites in their tone but recently they have become more and more extreme. The deficits that the Ford and other conservative governments have the temerity to be constantly railing about are a direct result of their own misguided efforts to cut corporate taxes to the bone which began in the 1970s. Conservatives are addicted to this pursuit despite little evidence that it stimulates the economy.  It’s a good soundbite – that’s all and people buy it every time – hook line and sinker. Liberals Conservatives, and the NDP are all playing the same game and the citizens are paying the final price. Their own money is being used as a large slush fund to support the private sector. Deficit financing began when governments were convinced by the private sector to start cutting corporate taxes to stimulate the economy leading to a yearly spiral of accumulated debt as corporate taxes were cut again and again by more than 75% in a futile effort to stimulate the economic growth. From the first year it was clear that it didn/t work but they kept on doing its becauseit boosted corporate bottom lines. The only thing that happened was that corporate profits and individual wealth skyrocketed while family incomes remained stagnant or declined when inflation was factored in. Wages have remained constant despite inflation. Every cut in corporate taxes raised the cost of living for regular Canadians. The most apparent recent one was the imposition of the HST to facilitate corporate tax cuts. This ridiculous pattern of behaviour has been going on for fifty years and has resulted in a growing decimation of local and national economies and a widening gap between the rich and the poor that even billionaires like Warren Buffet are embarrassed by. It is at the level today as to compare with the situation in France just before the French Revolution in 1789 where 2% were aristocracy and 98% were effectively peasants. Wealth is held by 1% of people in the world today while the rest have very little relatively. The bottom 50% of the world’s population for example owns virtually nothing while the top 1% own just under 50% of the world’s assets according to the Credit Wuisse Global Wealth Reports. Capitalism and the unlimited greed that it promotes is the problem not politics. Politics feeds off economic theory which feeds off education, which feeds off religious belief, which feeds off patriarchal mythology.

In addition, over the last thirty years have been living in the age of globalization in which corporations were encouraged by the same right-wing conservative governments beginning with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and the private sector to take their work to the cheapest place they could find to have their products made – offshore – leading to an exodus of jobs from North America and the Rust Be;lt states that Donald Trump now rails away for. NAFTA is a current example where automakers moved their production to right-to-work states and Mexico where labour was a fraction of what it was in the U.S. and Canada.

This also globalized the workplace where workers in North America were competing with workers in China for the same jobs. Rather than being local or regional competition for jobs became global uprooting societies to meet the needs of the private sector. Corporations were also able to cut pension legacies, wages, labour protections, healthcare and everything else that remotely cost them money, boosting profits even further and impoverishing workers. Globalization has created a worldwide migratory workforce that is constantly in transition. Adversarialism as an operating relationship is very bad for the working class. Over the past fifty years the inflation rate quoted by the Bank of Canada was on average 3.95%. Costs have risen by just under 600% but Doug Ford wants everyone from teachers to doctors and service sector workers to hold the line on wages and benefits and governments to run as though they were frozen in 1950. For Conservatives growth in population doesn’t factor in. Their only job is to create profits for the private sector. Nor does the 30% Federal tariff built in to our low Canadian dollar that makes us look like a Third World country. All Canadians are unnecessarily paying 30% more for goods from other countries so that a few corporations can make better profits. The dollar should be at par or above the U.S. rather than begging favours from the likes of Donald Trump. These are only a few of the major steps that have broken our economy and created devastating poverty and crushing deficits around  he world. But still the ideologue Doug Ford cuts further. The problem is that he and other neoconservatives never raise corporate taxes or taxes on the rich to pay for the products and services that we all need. The carny show is just that – an illusion of money and fear that is intended to keep the public passive and contrite. Buck a beer and alcohol in corner stores are a cheap palliative for the pain that the cuts are causing and for which h they will never compensate. All that happens is that large brewing corporations profits grow even faster and an exemplary model of liquor distribution that brings in billions to the provincial treasury each year will be lost to the private sector.

There are clear ways to get out of this mess but none that the current parties would endorse. Gullible voters will continue to flip back and forth between the Conservatives and the Liberals finding each to be repeatedly dishonest but unwilling to try anything new. First governments must abandon free market principles and unlimited profit and substitute fair market principles and limited profits. Secondly, governments must get tough with the private sec by making mandatory most of the things that are currently voluntary. After all that is their job. Third, we must begin to reinstate sharply progressive corporate taxes, returning to the levels seen in the 1950s and 60s of around 80% and restoring the wealth balance in society.  We must stop this adversarial war between the haves and the have nots. Fourthly, we must initiate transparency in the private sector to ensure that “backroom deals” and hidden profits are a thing of the past. Everywhere we look today we see examples of massive, rampant corruption, graft and dishonestly encouraged and accepted by the greed of unlimited capitalism.  The money-laundering in B.C. and around the world, price fixing in generic pharma drugs, political bedfellows in the SNC Lavalin case and the shipbuilding contracts, the proliferation of casino gambling and on and on. Fifth and most importantly, we must institute profit caps to control profit and greed. Capping profits would eliminate the incentive to earn unlimited income. This would also make corruption much easier to spot. These are only a few of the methods that socially democratic governments would use to build a better society not the misguided authoritarian socialism of Russia or China or the deformed democracy of the U.S. and Canada. Money would begin to be used to meet the needs of the people not the needs of a few people. If we do these things deficits will quickly be a thing of the past, surpluses will be the order of the day and “the people” may finally find some real justice and meaning instead of empty slogans and catchphrases. The age of fleecing the public would be over. Gullible voters beware!