Liberals and Tories: Why Canadians Shouldn’t Continue to Elect a Safety Net Demolition Crew

By Gary Morton, March.21.2008

... vote for the best of the NDP, the Greens, and the Bloc….

 * This article is a lengthy view of the erosion of our personal and national well being or Safety Net. It shows that continued electoral support for Liberal and Conservative political parties is the root of the problem. It covers some US politics as well.

      Recession, its hangover and dregs are sure to spill in with the rest of the financial fallout from the United States. Canada is currently structurally and politically unprepared for hard times and that means there will be no easy solutions. This problem is especially visible when we have Jim Flaherty in the finance portfolio. The earth is shaking, yet he is unaware and remains like an aging Rocky, boxing with Ontario Liberals rather than acting on the national stage.

     In Ontario, our industrial heartland, jobs have disappeared by the thousands … from 2001 to 2006, 77,000 manufacturing jobs vanished. The trend is continuing with no real action from government.

      Welfare rates in Ontario are now so low they don’t even cover rent. Most people don’t consider social assistance an option. It probably won’t be an alternative for long with cities like Toronto spending welfare reserves on other programs. Still struggling with the downloading of services from the late Harris provincial government and a federal government that vacuums billions out of the city, Toronto’s financial woes in the end become empty pockets for its poorest citizens. Most other Canadian cities and towns aren’t faring much better and are lobbying for more federal aid.

      We don’t have to look far to find the culprits in the erosion of welfare benefits. Paul Martin’s Liberal Government killed the Canada Assistance Plan, thus eliminating welfare standards. This ran almost parallel to the huge reduction of social assistance benefits that occurred during the life of the Harris provincial government. Cuts to social assistance also occurred in other provinces like BC. It is clear that the present enemies of the poorest Canadians are Liberal and Conservative political parties.

      Employment Insurance is in the same weakened position as the Martin government gutted it years back. Only about a quarter of workers can now get benefits, and of course these are reduced benefits. The gap between the rich and poor steadily grows, and the middle class declines while our federal government demonstrates a mean spirited political will. They simply don’t know how to care and won’t care unless dissent threatens to sink social stability. I mean unshakeable dissent; if growing millions of impoverished Canadians simply accept their lot, our political parties will accept it too.

      Tweedledee Harper and TweedleDion currently exist as blathering brothers, pretending to do battle and represent the people while at the same time forcing us to live with a daily diet of toxic legislation. They’ve left us locked in an endless and brutal foreign war that citizens reject. Canadians find themselves short of any progressive change or social advancement. From the energy crisis to education, housing and child care they have failed us … and with at least some knowledge of this Canadians continue to support these two failed political parties. This support to their detriment as these parties have frittered away the surpluses of good times and robbed the EI fund and cities while delivering little of substance.

       As a replacement for solid social programs they have used tax cuts as a vote-buying tool. A current study on the latest Harper tax cuts shows that for every dollar in tax relief to Canadians in the lowest tax bracket, those in higher brackets get 12 dollars of tax relief. This means that the Conservative/Liberal tax cut ideology is one of transferring national wealth to the rich while eroding the nation.

      The good times of budget surpluses may be over, and my definition of a terrorist is a Conservative or Liberal majority government that has no money left to spend. As the economy faces a downturn, we are already seeing the murky shape of things to come. Both the Liberals and the Conservatives vow to avoid deficit spending. They talk of targeted spending, but once elected that will quickly become more cuts to social and environmental programs.

      As two sides of the same coin, these political parties favour public private partnerships or reliance on private industry to build our infrastructure … yet with the credit crunch unwinding, the private sector will not be able to get the funding to build. Caught in a squeeze, Tories and Liberals will find themselves powerless yet unable to jettison their outdated ideology, leaving us all in the lurch of poverty and a crumbling nation.

      Simply put, we have two dominant political parties that have lost respect for social programs and public opinion, wasted our tax dollars, and want to cruise along with gusto on the same dead end road. Harper’s Conservatives are doing a demolition job on key federal powers and finances; their goal being to leave the federal level lacking both the legislative tools and hard cash to create or fund social programs. Meanwhile, job loss is simply not an option when there is no real social safety net and banks have talked citizens into taking on record debt levels. Home owners must perform financially or be foreclosed on, tenants face eviction, affordable housing is unavailable, child care lacking, homeless shelters unlivable, and food banks instruments of starvation.

      Job loss persists under the many waves of a growing tide. Free trade deals that favour only investors and corporate profits, mergers, rising oil costs and an energy crisis, downsizing, automation, the high dollar, off shoring and the flood of imports … plus the fact that Canadian employers won’t train Canadians but want to bring in skilled immigrants to fill all jobs, increasing world poverty as they create a brain drain, robbing the poorer nations of their best.

      Blunt instrument government that is stuck in the free trade mantra of yesteryear will not be able to address sudden global economic catastrophe. Take the recent NAFTA-gate scandal as an example. When US presidential candidates Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton questioned NAFTA in Ohio, Canadian government and media were quick to respond. The reason being that they believe Free Trade and NAFTA are sacrosanct. Seriously discussing the issue was simply outside the parameters they put on debate. Presidential politicians addressing unemployed Ohioans could only be mad or lying.

      The right wing forces of Prime Minister Stephen Harper were quick on their heels in allying with corporate media to create a NAFTA-gate scandal that in the end damaged Barak Obama. The Liberals are no better, being free trade pushers of a deadly job killing drug. With the continuing dominance of these two political parties real change is not only impossible, it won’t be debated. Our iron-brained politicians have put positive change outside the boundaries of debate. Elite media insures that nearly all of us wear the blinders.

      Extreme hair-raising corruption passes without notice in most of the media. George Bush can turn Iraq and Afghanistan into hell on earth, through known lies. The visions of the uncountable victimized, maimed and dead are too horrible for any feeling human being to experience. Yet it’s all fine with the media, Congress and the law makers. In Canada we can occupy Afghanistan indefinitely, yet the media colours it pretty, as though we are the nice guys that came to town to rescue women’s rights with combat brigades. Our Prime Minister, Stephen Harper appears to have known about a bribe attempt engineered to aid the fall of the previous government. But that’s okay, no smoking gun. He can sue those who brought up such a testy little issue.

      Activists try their best but find they can accomplish little other than protest itself. Canada has a solid activist core but money and media access are simply not there. Most leave for other fields. NGOs are really NHOs – non-heard-of organizations. Alternative writers have no outlet and slip into poverty or other fields. Reading the few challenging voices we have seems like a miracle. A deeper look shows that their numbers are kept deliberately low. They seize the occasional counterpoint in the debate against the right leaning media majority. In the end we have a mechanism that serves to convince Canadians that the right is right and the will of the population. The safety net of a genuine political voice is gone.      

      Workers are now marginalized and abandoned. Real in-depth reports on labour, workers and their issues are not available. Genuine activist and protest reports are rare as big media favours ideological news and commentary spewed out by think tanks, pollsters and pundits. The panels of columnists and pundits we see on the tube openly scoff at the idea of workers and unions as a political force politicians should embrace.

      Freedom of speech is itself in danger as fear of the security state grows. Online activist reports might suddenly cause job loss. Maybe they’ll lead to investigation and arrest … or background files in intelligence agency archives.

      Alarm over the rising security state is genuine, though more so in the US. With Homeland Security placing cameras in every community, phones tapped, the borders under high surveillance, and email bugged … everything searched … the war is on and everyone is a suspect trying to find ways to bury information and clear their name. We all want to avoid ending up in some future and local Guantanamo-style prison … minus all previously guaranteed rights, which can be stripped in Canada via security certificates.

      We can’t freely speak for peace or the past when Canadians were peacekeepers. We can’t freely reveal the horrors and facts of Afghanistan. Bombed women and children may be in our breakfast cereal, but we’re better off not mentioning it. If we do we may be questioned and suspected or simply disliked. We won’t be called upon to speak in the forums of current political correctness. Those who exercise a voice outside the parameters of the fraudulent war on terror debate are not wanted. Lest the truth emerge, that the war on terror has really been a war on the sanctity of our own lives … a war on our safety net itself.

      Take the US primaries as an example. Barak Obama is being pummeled in the press and his poll numbers are lowering. Not because of anything he said, but because of politically incorrect sermons his reverend made. Guilt by association has been established in the eyes of the media. One of Obama’s friends dared to question the lies of American foreign policy and the accepted media spin in regards to the war on terror. Obama therefore may have hidden radical ideas and the media as thought police see it as their duty to uncover them.

      The politics of the war on terror are a form of paranoid sickness that began at the top as spores drifted in with the dust of 9/11. First our leaders saw enemies abroad and every Muslim as a terrorist. Then the sickness came closer to town, the media propagated it and it grew to fear of anyone not suffering security state delusions. Rights were abrogated and the truth hidden. In the end the paranoia masked the fact that the real enemy killing us is bad government and bigoted politicians.

      The federal government has gained special powers that are about more than intruding and collecting information on citizens. Critics of Canada’s security certificate laws see them as a threat to our rights and legal safety net. By critics I mean nearly the entire legal community. They summarize security certificate law as a process that creates indefinite detention without charge on secret suspicions. It has involved two-tier justice, racial profiling, and deportation to torture. A certificate can be upheld through the receipt into evidence of anything not normally admissible in a court of law. They mark the development of a parallel secret judicial system, completely outside the realm of public accountability. And of course the Liberal and Conservative political parties are the key supporters of this regressive development.

      The infection is spreading to Canada in real ways. War on terror or war on drugs, the rank perfume of privatized prisons is drifting over the border from the northern states of the American prison nation. We can only hope that the degrading industry of mass incarceration doesn’t spill into our communities.

      Today workers are almost universally disrespected. They are a necessary but unwanted lot in the march to profits. It is a cruel fact that is revealed in shabby on-the-job treatment. As a media item, workers aren’t sexy, and because of it mostly ignored. With high end jobs dying out more people now work in the service industry. In most industries nowadays, union members are a dying breed. The reason is that unions can’t organize small businesses. The cost to aid new members, gain contracts and fight hundreds of little union busting bosses are simply too great. Workers are stuck playing a pretend game, knowing if their knowledge of rights, labour laws or past activism becomes known on the job … it’s probably over.

       The lower down the ladder the worker, the more he/she faces the reality of employer abuse. There are employers that don’t pay at all. Others cheat on employment standards by denying holiday and overtime pay. They quickly fire those that complain. Generally employment standards are poorly enforced with violators facing only small fines. Even with full pay the minimum wage is too low. Supervisors are often abusive, overtime is forced and there are no benefits.

      Contract work that used to benefit the elite has been revised, with the lowest paid workers signing contracts that offer no benefits. Tax, employment insurance and pension payments aren’t deducted, fooling the worker with higher weekly pay that turns to mud when the real costs of the job catch up. Lower pension, no EI or health benefits … and hell, the taxman wants a humongous payment the worker simply doesn’t have.

      The wage gap between men and women in Canada is growing with women getting only 70 percent wages as compared to men. This shows us that employers and uncaring government are agents of mass inequality. Women are being used as a tool to lower wages, and this works to speed the growth of national poverty as more and more single mothers have less income.

      Two thirds of minimum wage workers are women, nearly all of them working in the service and retail sector. A quick move in any war on poverty and for women’s rights would be the establishment of a living wage. In spite of that our Conservative and Liberal elite prefer to talk endlessly about child poverty they never address.

      Poverty is studied repeatedly; results of the studies rarely implemented. Talk of workers’ rights is near non existent among Liberals and Conservatives. They certainly have no policies or plans to better our lot. The safety net they propose for us all is their declining status quo. And it has declined further under Stephen Harper as his government has wounded low income women even more by dumping national child care and pay equity. His cuts to the Status of Women group are an open attempt to silence women.

      Job loss becomes more devastating as we go up the job ladder. Skilled, trained and educated workers are harder to replace … benefits are paid and they get somewhat babied so they’ll stay on the job. Incentives, investment and pride in the company or institution cause them to work long hours. In the end devastation arrives … a merger, privatization, foreign competition, downsizing or cuts make a proud worker a sudden liability and abruptly terminated. Not having seen the reality of bosses, as low income workers do, these people can’t cope with job loss and the loss of self esteem. They usually remain out of the work force as they enter a period of spiritual recovery.

      Lack of affordable housing and a rental housing shortage remain as another systematic problem engineered by Liberal and Conservative governments. As with other problems, the situation keeps getting worse instead of better. Stephen Harper’s 2008 budget doesn’t provide any money for new justly affordable homes. On top of that all three key national housing and homeless programs are due to expire this year. Right now about 4.2 million Canadians are in core housing need. These are people paying more than 30 per cent of their income for rent while living in substandard or over crowded housing.

      Education has become a dodgy deal. Canadian university students face costs that continue to rise. Currently they run up debt between 22,000 and 60,000 plus, depending on the program. Most of them operate on the myth that a high paying job will enable them to pay it back quickly. The reality is they’ll go deeper in debt even if working. With recessionary forces on the rise, they could face bankruptcy and cruel poverty. And don’t forget, we’re talking about an elite here. Most sons and daughters of lower income people can’t afford quality education anymore. The old days are gone. They quietly disappeared after Paul Martin’s drastic cuts to universities.

      Lack of funds has led to the rapid corporatization of universities. Yet we still have liberals like Bob Rae, who supported and still support the rises in education costs. The Tories are no better. They simply don’t care about students; their policies are regressive.

      Then we have to consider aging workers gone from the top to the bottom. Struggling in dead end no benefits McJobs as old age, health problems and retirement loom. At the bottom, if you take a day off you could be fired. If you don’t obey every command of a miserable boss you might be let go. You could be terminated for any reason … and it all adds up to crippling stress on an already weakened person.

      Leading us to mention disability, which also doesn’t pay a living package. Rates are very low; provincial promises to index disability and social assistance to inflation have been broken. The delisting of medical services and lack of a coherent national pharmacare program makes financial stability impossible. An even larger problem is that disability is hard to get and takes so long to get. The paperwork is beyond the capabilities of a person suddenly crippled by a disability. Studies have shown that many homeless people became that way because of sudden job loss through illness, and lack of the social benefits needed to keep them in their homes or apartments and off the streets.

      Now let’s look at the looming recession. The US Federal Reserve is working with an assortment of international banks, including the Bank of Canada. The Federal Reserve is spending billions on billions of tax dollars to bail out failing banks and funds. They are definitely not bailing out the poor or the sinking middle class. Interest rate cuts are set to aid banks that have profited from everything from war to worthless securities.

      We are at the edge of a precipice and when the fall happens, more financial institutions will fail. The majority of the rich and of the bankers will weather the storm on their yachts while the rest of us fight for jobs, for social assistance, for medical care and drugs, for homes or apartments, for the pieces of bread our children need … in a world of soaring prices … and in the end, to keep from freezing on the street.

     To date our wealthy media has successfully hid the globalization of poverty, and the long campaign to create national poverty embraced by Liberal and Conservative politicians. As the latest form of financial rot spreads like a tornado across the US and into Canada, they will pretend all is well or about to recover. This means we have to wonder what the calendar date will be when they finally start admitting we’re in the soup line.

      Perhaps at that time we’ll be faced with the larger Canadian political admission that nothing has changed, other than that poverty has become highly visible. It’s most likely the Liberals or Conservatives will be in power. Stephen Harper might even slime through on media coat tails to a majority government. Minority government is also possible, but it’s not a reason to vote Liberal or Conservative. Not when both parties will work together to insure that all our gains become losses.

      Tweedledee and Tweedledum; the Liberal/Conservative twins that squandered our cash in the good times, yet left our nation unprepared for the hard times. They’ll likely be at the helm, blind-eyed and visionless as always.

      The last vestiges of our safety net will be gone … off to never-never-land with our children and the future they lost. The environment and sustainability will be given over to the poverty of pollution, lower standards as far as the eye can see and global warming rising amid all over environmental and infrastructure demolition. Canada’s lack of respect for the environment and basic rights is now so great we are the only country in the world to have joined the US in voting against the United Nations' idea of a right to water. Since Stephen Harper has been in power the shame of seeing Environment Minister John Baird disgrace us on the international scene has been enough to make the average environmentalist or animal rights activist weep.

      Future historians … if any survive … will say that Canadians voted for their own end. Wouldn’t it be nice if they said that we woke up and voted for the alternatives. We wanted politicians that were brighter, caring and visionary so we voted for the best of the NDP, the Greens, and the Bloc….

 -----------------