Next: Defeat Neo-Liberal Agenda!
Tories Ousted in Ontario
Eight years of right wing Conservative Party rule in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, came to a crashing halt on October 2, 2003. The Ontario Liberal Party, led by Dalton McGuinty, swept into government, capturing 72 of 103 Legislature seats.

Many saw the vote as a referendum on the unprecedented assault on public services and workers’ rights that marked the two consecutive terms of the Progressive Conservative Party, first under Mike Harris, then Ernie Eves. Health, education, welfare, labour rights and the environment suffered enormously, while taxes on corporations and the rich were slashed during the so-called “Common Sense Revolution”.

Distorted Results

But jubilation at the demise of the Tory regime was tempered by the distorted allocation of seats, the historically low electoral turnout, and most of all, by the knowledge that Liberal Party rule at the federal level meant cutbacks in the 1990s that dwarfed all the provincial Tory cuts.

The McGuinty-led Liberals form a majority government with only 46.5% of the votes cast for their candidates. The union-based New Democratic Party received nearly 15% of the votes, but won only seven seats. Indeed, the NDP share of the vote increased by nearly 3%, but the party lost two seats, and lost official party status (which includes $1 million in funding for research staff). The Green Party, running candidates in almost every riding, garnered 2.8%, and zero seats in the Legislature.

Only 57% of the eligible voters participated – the lowest turnout in generations. In 1999, 58.3% voted. In 1995, it was 62.3%. In the previous decades it was typically over 70%. Right wing pundits attribute the decline to ‘complacency’ and consumer satisfaction. But most observers see the causes as grassroots alienation, the lack of choice caused by the general shift to the right of the main parties, and the discounting of votes for non-winning candidates by the “first past the post” system.

Promises Galore McGuinty promised a review of the electoral system, along with a referendum on changing it, including the option of Proportional Representation. In fact, McGuinty made many promises. Most of them will be much harder to keep. He pledged to restore public services with “no increase in taxes” and “no deficit”.

Hoping to be re-elected, the Tories were planning to sell off more public assets to erase a $2 billion deficit. Liberal pledges to cancel tax concessions to parents who send their kids to private schools, and other relatively minor adjustments won’t be sufficient to fund the sorely needed major re-investment in schools and hospitals, much less to repair the disintegrating infrastructure of cities, transportation, water purification systems, and the aging hydro electricity grid.

Physique and charisma aside, Dalton McGuinty could be called the ‘Arnold Schwarzenegger of the north’. He promised many things to many people, all the while reassuring big business that its wealth will not be requisitioned to restore eroded standards and living conditions devastated by the Tories. Ontario residents will get a glimpse of Dalton’s magic act when the new government presents its agenda in late October, and tables its first budget early in 2004. In the meantime, expectations are high – which means those expectations will likely have a very hard landing.

Momentum Squandered

The resounding defeat of the Tories, who were reduced to 24 seats and 34.6% of the vote, was the culmination of eight years of sharp confrontations and mass political protests. Major unions, under the auspices of the Ontario Federation of Labour and local labour councils, held one day general strikes in twelve different cities in the period 1995-1997. The largest of those occurred in Toronto on October 25, 1996, when over one million workers stayed off the job. It was followed by a march on the Ontario Legislature of over 200,000 the next day. In November 1997 a two-week political protest by 120,000 teachers closed all the province’s public schools.

But the movement that these anti-cutbacks, anti-Tory actions embodied was prematurely terminated. Nervous labour leaders took their cue from the corporate media and defied a clear mandate for a province-wide general strike. Abandonment of the mass struggle by the big battalions left other sections of the population more vulnerable to escalating attacks. The resulting demoralization of labour and community forces gave the Tories a new lease on political life, including re-election in 1999.

Smaller and weaker social movements tried to fill the void. The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty led a march of 2,000 poor and homeless people, and their supporters, to the Legislature on June 15, 2000. Provincial and Toronto police brutally attacked the crowd, resulting in dozens of beatings, arrests, lengthy trials, onerous release conditions and jailings. OCAP organizer John Clarke is currently on trial for a second time, charged with conspiracy to lead a riot (the first trial ended in a hung jury, at a cost of nearly $1 million).

In retreating from the path of mass protest, a significant section of the labour leadership embraced the idea of “strategic voting” – the class collaborationist notion of urging workers to vote for the big business (lesser evil?) Liberals in order to defeat the big business Tories. This mis-named ‘tactic’ almost finished the NDP. The party lost two seats it previously held in industrial centres (Hamilton and Sault Ste. Marie) to the Liberals, and was held back in other former labour strongholds.

NDP’s Poisoned Well

More damaging to the NDP is the legacy of the Bob Rae-led NDP Ontario government of 1990-1995. Rae’s “Social Contract” tore open union collective agreements and ripped $2 Billion from the wages of public sector employees. His government also paved the way for further privatization, de-regulation, contracting-out of work and undemocratic amalgamation of cities and school boards. Rae’s social expenditure cuts included the odious innovation of ‘welfare cops’.

On October 4, Toronto Star columnist Tom Walkom wrote: “Bob Rae’s (government)... was enough to sour many New Democrat voters who, when they looked for the accomplishments of their party in government, discovered only toll roads and casinos.”

In the latest election campaign, Ontario NDP Leader Howard Hampton said Rae’s abandonment of its commitment to public auto insurance was “a mistake”. The NDP campaign theme “Public Power”, which centres on defence of public Ontario Hydro, appeared to many as a left turn from its disastrous antecedents. But NDP leaders refrained from any self-criticism for their “Social Contract” or kindred misdeeds.

Thus, on October 2, the NDP suffered from a triple whammy – the poisonous Rae legacy, the residue of “strategic voting”, and the distortions of an electoral system which they failed to reform when they had the chance.

The question now is: what will the NDP do next?

Elbow Room on the Left

What the party can do was addressed by another Toronto Star pundit, Ian Urquhart, who put it this way: “With the Liberals in power, the left side of the political spectrum should be less crowded than it has been for the past eight years. For while the Liberals opposed from the centre-left, they usually govern from the centre-right. That will give the NDP more elbow room.”

In our view, for the NDP to survive it must turn sharply to the left. At the very least, it must strongly differentiate itself from the Liberals. That means, for the NDP, nothing less than campaigning for a radical break from the prevailing neo-liberal agenda. It entails embracing and fighting for a Workers’ Agenda, which includes the expansion of public ownership, the establishment of workers’ and community control, the requisitioning of the hoarded wealth and the super-profits of the ruling elite to restore public services and to provide jobs for all. It means making a clean break with the global corporate trade deals that obstruct democracy and popular sovereignty.

“Public Power” is, at best, a populist notion. It dissolves the reality of class into the morass of consumer-client ideology. PP implies top-down management by an elite of extravagantly paid ‘experts’. Workers’ and community control is the empowering alternative that aims to employ local democracy to uproot waste, corruption, and anti-worker bias.

Should Howard Hampton be replaced as Ontario NDP Leader? Notwithstanding his limitations as a public speaker, the problem is not reducible to Hampton. The whole NDP leadership should be replaced ... by socialists. For that to occur, a much bigger movement for radical change within the NDP and the labour movement must be built.

Such a movement is called a Class Struggle Left Wing. It is based on a concrete programme that speaks to the needs of working people, without fear of incurring the wrath of Capital. It puts people before profits. It puts democracy before big property.

The building of such a movement is the task facing every worker, and every progressive person. Radicals who refuse to engage in electoral politics, or who periodically support the NDP in electoral campaigns, but refuse to fight for socialist policies inside the NDP and the unions, do not contribute consistently or most effectively to building the Class Struggle Left Wing – which is desperately needed to change the current direction of the workers’ movement. Unity of the left is needed. It is needed particularly inside the only existing, labour-based, mass political party in North America, as well as in the unions across the Canadian state, many of which are affiliated to the NDP.

An Action Plan

What direction, what immediate demands and actions should activists demand that the NDP and the labour leadership initiate?

Speaking on behalf of the NDP Socialist Caucus at an SC post-election public forum held on October 9 in Toronto, I proposed that the following initiatives (in no particular order) be undertaken as mass, action-oriented campaigns:

1. Fight for electoral reform to win ‘pure’ Proportional Representation. Reject ‘mixed’ PR (which retains the distortions of ‘first past the post’ district voting, and its sexist bias). Reject ‘transferable preference’ voting (which encourages workers to vote for a capitalist party as a second or third option). Every vote should count. Every party that receives at least 1% of the votes should be represented in the Legislature. The October 2nd Ontario election result makes this a rather compelling and timely issue.

2. Demand official party status for the Ontario NDP now, in the context of the campaign for ‘pure’ PR. There should be no ‘minimum threshold’ of seats above one. Every party represented in the Legislature should have full funding and speaking rights as such.

3. Drop the charges against OCAP organizer John Clarke, and void the remaining release conditions and charges against OCAP activists arising from the June 15, 2000 police riot on the grounds of the Legislature at Toronto’s Queen’s Park.

4. Demand swift reversal of all the cuts in programmes and expenditures. Re-invest massively in public health care, education, transportation and environmental protection. Raise the minimum wage to $12 an hour now. Build social housing for all who need it. Tax the rich, the giant banks and corporations to fund social needs.

5. Demonstrate to End the U.S.-led Occupation of Iraq, and demand that Canadian military forces get out of Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf and the Balkans. If you agree with these ideas, you should join the folks who are trying to put them into practice, today.

The article above was written by Barry Weisleder.