The Conservative caucus at Queen’s Park must have got to their Leader Tim Hudak. They made him promise to cool his jets on right-to-work laws. With a broad wink, he is promising not to mention the idea again until after Ontario’s expected spring election. After all there is more than one way to drive down the expectations of the middle class.
And it is the middle class that Tiny Tim seems to despise. The last of the middle class in Ontario are the union classes. They include the teachers, the nurses, the university professors, the plumbers, the firemen and the police. They are Timmy’s target.
Timmy trained as an economist. He knows there is more than one way to lower the expectations of the middle class. His new approach is all bundled up for him in the term “contracting out.” This is just another way to race for the bottom. It is the way that we can all be poor except for Timmy’s elite one per cent.
Contracting out was one of the methods that fellow economist Don Drummond recommended that Ontario use to save money. He actually suggested it just for information technology needs but to Timmy, there is no end of scope for the method of forcing people to work for less.
What neither Drummond nor Timmy would understand about information technology is that the last three per cent of the tasks never get done. The first 97 per cent is easy but the rule is that the job is never complete. Microsoft recognized this reality of information technology many years ago and solved it by letting unsuspecting customers solve the last three per cent of the problems.
But Timmy sees contracting out as the final solution. He thinks Toronto Mayor Rob Ford is a fool to stop at just contracting out some of the city’s garbage collection. There is a long list of work that can be contracted out. In the private sector, people have been known to build a virtual company that had every job contracted out. (It makes it easier to leave town when appropriate.)
But Timmy wants to be in for the long haul. He wants to show his mentor former Premier Michael Harris that he too can drive Ontario into the ground by doing his bidding. Just wait until those members of his caucus who argued against right-to-work want to be in his cabinet. They are in for a surprise.
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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry
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