This should be a standard lesson in Politics 101. Have we all forgotten it? Why have we stopped making common cause with voters? Looking at the municipal, provincial and federal political scene lately, the only common cause we see is ‘Screw the voter!’
And common cause can exist. Look at the recent election in India—the largest democracy in the world and the voters made common cause with their new prime Minister-elect Narendra Modi. The voters in that country were tired of being taken for granted by the Congress Party.
But in Canada we have politicians such as Ontario Provincial Conservative Leader Tim Hudak who stand up and say, I’m going to fire ten per cent of the people working for the province. And then he says that he is going to create a million jobs—not good jobs necessarily, nor paying very well, probably with no benefits, no pension, no union, just a job that you might be happy to have.
Timmy and other Conservative ideologues think this is the way to treat Canadians. Look at that Employment Minister Jason Kenney. He is presently scurrying to fix the loopholes in the foreign workers program that the federal government thought would help lower expectations for Canadians. They were allowing companies to pay the foreign workers less than they pay Canadians and the companies thought this was a license to exploit foreign workers and not hire Canadians. (It certainly seemed that it was.)
Demagogues such as Hudak and Kenney think being elected gives them the right to mistreat people. Why are none of the politicians in other parties making common cause with Canadians against this type of treatment? It is as though these politicians are saying, ‘Shut up and do what you are told. We know best.’
It is the same in microcosm with Mayor Ford of Toronto. Rob Ford will be coming back from rehab soon, healthy (he will say) and ready to derail the fictional gravy train again. And the bad news is that there will be idiot voters who will support him. The really bad news is that Rob Ford can win if nobody can make common cause against Ford’s style of unruly municipal government.
And we have Ontario Provincial Conservative Leader Tim Hudak trying to make common cause against Ontario’s civil servants. He obviously thinks they are fat cats because they have jobs. He hardly cares how vital the job might be or whether the worker does a good job—just fire 100,000 of them. What kind of common cause is that? What makes him think the voters are mad at the civil servants? Or that they are jealous?
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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry
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