October 18, 2012
As of the surprise resignation two days ago of the premier of Ontario, Canada’s largest and third largest provinces, Ontario and British Columbia, are now ruled by lame duck provincial governments in a polarized atmosphere with public sector unions and social and climate justice movements. Additionally, more than a whiff of scandal and of waste of public funds surrounds both governments.
The political situation in British Columbia would be laughable if it were not so troubling. Premier Christy Clark replaced the discredited and despised Gordon Campbell one and a half years ago. Not only does she have no electoral mandate to govern, she does not even bother to call the BC Legislature into session. She and her government have earned the reputation of political amateurs (cf the staged political conflict of Clark with Alberta Premier Allison Redford aimed at better selling the Northern Gateway tar sands pipeline), while the province strives to catch up to Alberta as the country’s biggest climate vandal. BC has recently opened its expanding coal mines to Chinese indentured labourers in regions where Native Indian people live in Third World conditions and are excluded from the wage economy by deepgoing and long-standing racism.
Clark’s lame Ontario counterpart coupled his resignation with the extraordinary step of suspending the operations of the Ontario Legislature. In both provinces, the electorate are captive spectators as elected legislatures are shoved to the side as a trifling inconvenience to the ruling elite, and life goes on. The Toronto Star reports on Oct. 18 that the union movement in the province is quietly accepting the prorogation in the hope that Dalton McGuinty’s future plans, whatever they may be, provide an opening to negotiate collective agreements for teachers and others in the public sector.
It’s all a testament to the degree in which the working class itself has been marginalized from capitalist politics. This is not a good thing.
To this picture we can add the political situation in Quebec, Canada’s second largest province. There, a new minority government recently received the smallest electoral mandate in the history of the province. Premier-elect Pauline Marois is telling audiences in France this week that she has no mandate to act on the central raison d’être of her party–to press for the independence of Quebec. (As an aside, she is telling audiences that her principle concern with the federal regime is its brazen abandonment of the mythical, Pearsonian, “peacekeeping,” middle power role of Canada in international affairs.)
The federal government is in power until 2014 and rules with a solid majority. But its rightist trajectory is deeply unpopular with the majority of the electorate, above all in Quebec. Twice in recent months it has borrowed from the U.S. example and introduced omnibus, “budget” laws for Parliamentary approval. Hundreds of pages of detail from soup to nuts (that is, sharp assaults on social and democratic rights) are submitted in one package in order to avoid the annoying exercise of submitting policy proposals to meaningful debate and democratic vote.
This is all a recipe for deepgoing political and social conflict as the aggressive agenda of the capitalist class collides with the aspirations of the working class and oppressed peoples and nations. The exact timing of that clash cannot be predicted, but the inevitability can.
Below are four articles examining the resignation two days ago of Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty,
Roger Annis
Desperate premier heads for hills
By Thomas Walkom, Columnist, Toronto Star, Oct 16, 2012
Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty is heading for the hills. And he’s shutting down the legislature to make sure no one catches up. That, in a nutshell, is the meaning of Monday evening’s surprise two-pronged announcement.
McGuinty is quitting as premier. More important, he’s proroguing the legislature indefinitely — a desperate action that suggests that there are still more scandals, as yet unrevealed, waiting to torpedo the minority Liberal government. On Monday, opposition leaders praised the premier. They are soon going to start asking what it is that he doesn’t want elected MPPs talking about.
But the real question — for both Ontarians and the country — is what happens to the McGuinty agenda. And yes, there is — or at least was — an agenda. It may have been misguided, in whole or part. But it was coherent. It involved fiscal restraint to soothe investors, more private-sector involvement in public business and bold efforts to build up a green energy manufacturing sector.
Regardless of what McGuinty and his ministers might say, all of that is now effectively on hold. It may be trashed by whoever replaces McGuinty as Liberal leader and premier.
Will the next premier want to balance the province’s books on the backs of teachers and other public-sector workers? No one knows. McGuinty insists he wants to suspend, or prorogue, the assembly for several months in order to concentrate on public-sector wage restraint. But if his successor has a different idea for rebooting the Ontario economy, any such efforts will be in vain.
Ditto the Liberal emphasis on so-called public-private partnerships. Under McGuinty, the Liberal government quietly privatized big chunks of Ontario’s electricity production. It created strange, quasi-government organizations to handle public business — with the big-spending air ambulance service known as ORNGE being the most notorious example.
It embraced the notion of going into business with private firms to build or refurbish hospitals and toyed with the idea of having private companies build — and possibly even run — portions of Toronto’s transit system. It even encouraged private business to set the rules and, in effect, regulate itself.
Much of this has gone unnoticed. Only when manufacturers overreached themselves by hitting consumers with stiff green taxes on common purchases like bleach did the public react in anger.
But the centrepiece of the McGuinty agenda was his controversial green energy policy. The idea here had three parts. First, electricity consumers would subsidize new forms of power generation, such as wind power, through their hydro bills. Coal would be phased out as a source of electricity generation and replaced by natural gas.
Second, these green power generators (all private, incidentally) would buy their equipment from Ontario manufacturers.
Third, to encourage foreign multinationals like South Korea’s Samsung to locate their windmill manufacturing plants in Ontario, the provincial government would offer generous subsidies.
For a premier who prided himself on caution, the green energy policy was a remarkably daring attempt to use the power of government to rebuild Ontario’s tattered manufacturing sector. But like the rest of the McGuinty agenda it soon ran into trouble — from rural residents worried that windmills were making them sick, from suburbanites who didn’t want new gas turbines built near their homes, from hydro users angered by their rising energy bills.
In the end, through a crazy-cat combination of Liberal deviousness and government incompetence, all of these contradictions came to a head. On Monday night, McGuinty said he realized that it was time for his party to try someone new. What he meant was that, politically, he had no choice.
So he announced his resignation. In doing so, he took his government’s entire agenda with him.
Premier planned his exit in shadow of rising scandal
By Karen Howlett, Globe and Mail, Oct 17, 2012
Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty spent much of last Saturday on the phone with five of his closest advisers, informing them that he had decided to resign after nine years in office, sources say. Chief of Staff David Livingston, along with two of his deputies and his predecessors, Chris Morley and Don Guy, each received a phone call from Mr. McGuinty. That fed a flurry of calls over the weekend among the advisers and Mr. McGuinty’s brother, Brendan, as they developed a plan for Canada’s longest-serving premier to make his exit, according to sources familiar with the talks.
Those conversations paved the way for Mr. McGuinty’s surprise announcement at an emergency caucus meeting on Monday evening that he was resigning after 16 years as Liberal Leader and just one year after winning a minority government. “The Premier was absolutely firm on the fact that his caucus and Ontarians hear about the news together,” one source said.
At the same time Mr. McGuinty was dealing with his future, he was grappling with growing controversy over his government’s decision to pull the plug on two power plants west of Toronto. The opposition has forced the government to release internal documents on the discussions around those cancellations but insist there is still more to come. They assert that full disclosure would reveal that the cancellations were motivated solely by a push to save Liberal seats in the election last October. Now, with Mr. McGuinty announcing that he was proroguing the legislature along with his resignation, that pressure is paused.
Liberal House Leader John Milloy said on Tuesday it was necessary to have all business grind to a halt because the government had reached an impasse with labour leaders and the opposition over its plans to freeze wages. “I think things have become poisonous in the chamber,” Mr. Milloy told reporters.
But opposition members said the government prorogued the legislature because of weeks of embarrassing headlines over the cancelled power plants, which will cost taxpayers at least $230million.
Progressive Conservative MPP John Yakabuski said the government has stopped a legislative committee from calling witnesses and pursuing allegations that Mr. McGuinty and two of his senior cabinet members misled the legislature. “This is their attempt, successfully I would say, to block the people of Ontario from getting at the truth,” Mr. Yakabuski said in an interview. “The public has no way of getting at the facts of what really happened and how much money [cancelling the plants] will actually cost.”
NDP Leader Andrea Horwath said the timing is “very curious” to prorogue the legislature. “We know what the big issue has been around here,” she told reporters.
The controversy surrounding the cancelled projects slated for Oakville and Mississauga deepened last Friday after the government released another 20,000 pages of documents that were not identified as part of the initial search. Energy Minister Chris Bentley and Mr. Milloy each apologized to the legislature on Monday for insisting that all documents had been tabled with the release of 36,000 pages on Sept. 24 when in fact they were both aware that bureaucrats were conducting a further search.
“At the time that I made the statements that all documents had been produced, there was no deliberate intention to provide incorrect information to this House,” Mr. Bentley said. “Any incorrect information provided to this House was provided inadvertently and unintentionally.”
Mr. Bentley was already facing a rare contempt of Parliament censure for not disclosing documents to a legislative committee last May. The revelations that he was aware of the existence of further documents stiffened the resolve of both the Tories and the NDP to pursue a second contempt motion, not just against him but also against Mr. McGuinty.
Opposition leaders both called on the government to resume the legislature. “We do not need to bring the daily workings of the legislature to a halt in order to accommodate a Liberal leadership race,” Tory Leader Tim Hudak said in a letter on Tuesday to Mr. McGuinty.
Premier may still have tricks up his sleeve
By Martin Regg Cohen, Toronto Star, Oct 16, 2012
Dalton McGuinty’s dynasty is history. How long can his Liberal party — and legacy — live on without slipping onto life support?
The premier is leaving on his own terms and in his own time, with his polling numbers low but his head held high. The deficit is declining and the economy is steady, even as labour strife looms. But the baggage of bungling and misgovernment was getting heavier by the day — nearly 3,300 days after he won power in a landslide 2003 election. McGuinty’s personal integrity remains unsullied, but the whiff of scandal and incompetence has been closing in on his minority government.
The premier’s evening resignation speech stunned his most loyal MPPs. But the decision was a long time coming — going back a year, in fact, to the Oct. 6 election that reduced him to a minority government. After nine years in power, with speculation swirling over his future, it was just a matter of time before he quit.
True, a Liberal party convention in Ottawa reconfirmed him handily as leader last month. And McGuinty dutifully vowed to soldier on. Privately, though, he told his wife Terri that with his energy lagging, the time had come for the party’s renewal. This past weekend he alerted his inner circle to prepare for the resignation speech at an emergency caucus meeting.
Now, McGuinty has made himself a lame duck in hopes of reviving the last bastion of Liberal power in Canada. A winter leadership race will bring out the pretenders to the throne, but few make any pretense of retaining power. For the winning candidate, it will merely be a prelude to the inevitable demise of this Liberal minority government and a spring election that will turn Ontario upside down. And that is when McGuinty may be missed most.
As polarized as Queen’s Park is now — and destined to become with partisanship escalating and labour battles brewing — it’s easy to forget how much the premier becalmed the province. Critics derided him as a lying politician who broke an election promise by imposing health premiums; as a cynical politician who exploited religious divisions to beat the Tories over faith-based funding in 2007; as a careless politician who presided over the eHealth and ORNGE scandals; as a reckless politician who cancelled gas-fired power plants at great expense. Yet McGuinty can boast of bolstering education with smaller classroom sizes, bigger campuses and full-day kindergarten; lowering hospital wait times; shepherding an economic recovery with a risky auto bailout; and introducing the HST without the predictable political toll.
It’s also worth recalling how far McGuinty took the Liberals after they languished for years in the political wilderness. After losing his first campaign in 1999, he reinvented himself as a moderate who could bring labour peace after the tumult of the Tory years. By then, McGuinty had reincarnated himself as Bill Davis, the pipe smoking Red Tory who governed Ontario until 1985. Both were fundamentally cautious leaders who consulted widely and governed with an open mind. Both were capable of bold moves — Davis purchased Suncor and cancelled the Spadina Expressway; McGuinty brought in green energy and closed coal-fired power plants.
Neither incited passionate adoration, and both struggled with minority governments when they fell out of favour. Like Davis, though, McGuinty eventually won the grudging respect of most Ontarians — as much as one can in a polarized society — for his dedication, indefatigable optimism and relentless sense of humour. Like Davis in his day, the premier refused to rule out a federal leadership run. Nearly three decades ago, Davis toyed with reporters about having “no plans” to run federally; McGuinty used precisely the same language and mischievous tone to leave the door wide open — avoiding direct answers and saying he had “no plans” for now.
So is McGuinty’s provincial resignation merely a ruse to repurpose himself as a federal Liberal leadership candidate? More likely it is just a politician’s self-protective reflex in case Justin Trudeau flames out and the federal party comes calling for another bilingual saviour down the road.
As for the provincial race, it will unfold at breakneck speed. Until then, don’t count McGuinty out yet as premier. He has a few legislative miles to go before he slips away. The premier has prorogued the Legislature at a time of intense friction with public sector unions and poisonous partisanship with the opposition parties. His professed hope — in many ways a cover story but not entirely fanciful — is to use the legislative break as an opportunity to reach out to his opponents.
There may be little interest among the opposition parties in dealing with a lame duck. The NDP has unequivocally rejected McGuinty’s announced wage freeze for the public sector; the Tories want to reopen signed contracts (unlikely to withstand a court challenge), but they may yet find common ground.
Will organized labour see McGuinty’s imminent departure as an opportunity for a last-minute deal that carves out a master agreement for public sector workers across Ontario? If they do nothing, they could soon be presented with a Liberal-Tory compromise that imposes wage freezes, restricts strikes and tightens arbitration; or they could face a future Tory government that rides roughshod over their interests.
McGuinty started out as a friend of labour who profited from union support in his last three winning campaigns. Now, as he tries to wrestle the province’s finances into shape after accumulating unsustainable deficits, McGuinty finds himself estranged from his former allies. But as the premier showed Monday night, he is nothing if not unpredictable and enjoys being underestimated. If he could conjure up a deal with labour in his last days in power, it would be an unlikely but enduring legacy.
$21M cut may prompt spike in homeless
Minister says province forced to slash funding amid fiscal crisis
By Daniel Dale, Urban Affairs Reporter, Toronto Star, page one, Oct 18, 2012
A $21million provincial cut to homelessness prevention funding in Toronto will make it harder for thousands of poor residents to stay out of shelters, residents and community advocates say.
The biggest chunk of the cut, $12.8 million, is from the province-wide elimination of a benefit program that gave up to $1,500 every two years to families that were facing eviction, in danger of having their utilities cut off, fleeing domestic violence, moving from shelters or unsafe housing, or unable to replace bedbug-infested furniture or broken appliances.
In 2013, Toronto will offer a similar benefit itself — but with far less provincial money available, the city will give priority to the people considered “most vulnerable.” Others may get less or nothing at all.
“The bottom line is that one of the primary tools people have had to help stabilize their tenancies and prevent eviction is gone. So we imagine people will be losing their housing,” said Linsey MacPhee, manager of the Toronto Drop-in Network. The cut takes effect during a period of high local unemployment and high rents, and as “social assistance rates no longer reflect even the most basic costs of living,” the city says in a report. More than 160,000 people are on the waiting list for affordable housing.
About 70 people opposed to the cut gathered at the downtown St. Stephen’s Community House on Wednesday. Shineeca McLeod, 26, said she could not have left a shoddy basement apartment if the benefit had not covered moving costs and a rent deposit.
Dave Cherkewski, 40, said he would have been forced to stay in a group house he shared with a drug dealer. “Not unless I could find a place that didn’t require last month’s rent,” Cherkewski said. “Which landlord doesn’t require last month’s rent?”
The cut is part of a broader change to provincial homelessness funding that will give cities long-sought flexibility to spend the province’s money as they see fit. Community and Social Services Minister John Milloy said the province is taking a “whole new approach to dealing with housing” that frees municipalities from being “tied down to different rules.”
But he also said he refuses to “whitewash” the fact that the cut was prompted by the province’s “very serious fiscal crisis.” The Liberal minority government faces a deficit of $15 billion.
“Part of what was driving (the cut) — I’ve never hid that fact — was the fact that we simply have to find a way to balance things, particularly in a ministry like ours, where there’s huge pressure with a growing caseload. So it would have been nice not to have done this, but I think it can be explained very much in line with this broader vision,” Milloy said in an interview.
Housing expert and advocate Michael Shapcott, director of housing and innovation for the Wellesley Institute, said “any benefit that could be gained from flexibility is going to be lost because there’s less money.” Toronto officials estimate that up to 49,000 households can receive some benefits under the new Housing Stabilization Fund next year — just 500 fewer than it expects to receive benefits under the province’s Community Start-Up and Maintenance Benefit (CSUMB) this year.
Thousands of people will probably receive smaller payments than they would have under the current system. “We think that in 2013, the way in which we’ve configured it, we should be able to provide the fund to last through the year. But that’s not certain. I can’t say that with certainty. We’ll have to get experience with it,” said Toronto Employment and Social Services general manager Heather MacVicar.
The province’s benefit has been provided to anyone on welfare or disability payments and who could demonstrate a valid need. Next year, the city will be forced to ration the $25.7 million available, and the city will take into account applicants’ income levels and assets. It will also put a $400-per-family cap on the amount of money available for furnishings.
The disappearance of the provincial benefit will force about 10,000 disability recipients to compete against about 40,000 welfare recipients for money that both groups were previously guaranteed. MacVicar said the city will “take an equitable approach” so that disabled people are not disproportionately disadvantaged.
The benefit cut is accompanied by a $5.5 million provincial cut to four housing programs. The province will no longer provide additional shelter money to the city in the event of an emergency like the 2010 fire at 200 Wellesley St. E.
“Unanticipated needs may well arise, and then the city has to make one of two hard choices: pony up local property-tax dollars, which are of course already scarce and fully allocated elsewhere, or secondly, say to people, ‘Tough luck, can’t do anything, you’re on your own,’ ” Shapcott said.
