Ontario Fights Back: Recalling the Harris years
Canada, and its industrial heartland and largest province of Ontario, is far from immune from the right-wing populist forces gaining electoral ground and organizational force around the world. The June 7th election of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario (PC), led by the politician, businessman and blowhard Doug Ford, to a majority government is an all-too-clear example.
Canada has gone through a number of more or less reactionary and austerity-driven Conservative governments, most recently that of Stephen Harper from 2006–2015, but also at the provincial level in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. In the past, Ontario was ruled by moderate PC governments for forty years before they lost power to Liberal and then NDP governments, both experimenting in the centre-left ‘progressive competitiveness’ strategy of high-skills, value-added protection that quickly mutated into the neoliberal Third Way across the 1990s. This effort was defeated by hard-line, Thatcherite neoliberal PC governments that ruled from 1995–2003, under the leadership of Mike Harris (and for a brief period Ernie Eves). That regime pursued draconian cuts to the public sector in Ontario, as well as re-shaping collective bargaining, and the whole host of state practices. They called this project the ‘Common Sense Revolution’, and their right-wing populism finds an echo in the Doug Ford electoral platform, ‘For the People: A Plan for Ontario’. And, of course, the ‘buck-a-beer’ sloganeering.
(“Ontario Fights Back: Recalling the Harris years” தொடர்ந்து வாசிக்க…)
