Rob Ford's proposed cuts

I’d like to weigh in on the issue of budget cuts and library closures in the City of Toronto. The Ford brothers appear to have forgotten that they promised no service cuts but now act as though implementing service cuts, including closing libraries, was what they were elected on. It may was well be repeated yet again that in fact Rob Ford was elected to cut the gravy, not actual services and not to close libraries. I also believe it folly to claim like the Fords do that every single person objecting to cuts is affiliated with a union. Some people really don’t want their libraries closed. Some people really don’t want cuts to programs such as daycare. And they may not be in a union. It is not only labour unions that object to hard-right policies and the hard-right should admit that. But for them, unions are a type of scapegoat through which they can claim that all objection to hard-right polices come from unions and that regular folk just love those hard-right policies. This claim is not true. Polls consistently show that even most Conservative voters support some social spending. Ford was elected largely by Liberal and NDP voters. Conservative voters alone could not have put him over the top. I estimate Ford got around 25-30% of Liberal voters and about 20% of NDP voters. Now admittedly, some of those then-Liberal voters became Conservative voters in the federal election held a few months later. This appeared true in ridings the Conservatives won in Toronto federally where some then-Liberal voters who likely voted for Ford also moved to the federal Conservatives. But this was still a minority of Liberal voters who did the switching to the federal Conservatives. It just happened to be enough to pick up a large number of seats in the city, especially with increased votes splitting due to that “Orange Crush”. Notably in Etobicoke North, where Rob Ford got the highest percentage of the vote, a large number of Rob Ford voters voted Liberal and NDP which allowed the Liberals to retain the riding. As I also say, most Conservative voters in Toronto are not hard right-wingers anyway. Therefore when Torontonians strongly object to the type of cuts the Fords have been proposing, it should not come as a surprise. Voters do want low taxes, but this desire is tempered quite a lot when they see the type of services that would have to be cut to give them really low taxes.

Note: This is being posted in the midnight hours of September 7, right before the provincial election is officially called. In the coming days I will be giving commentary on the provincial election.

It seems odd the NDP keeps getting scandals recently

It does seem odd that the NDP in recent days has been beset by scandals. First there were union donations in Nova Scotia in the middle of an election campaign. The reason they are considered improper is because the umbrella union organization appeared to use its subdivisions to give more than the new legal donation limit. The NDP has done nothing wrong, however. They immediately returned the donations as soon as they realized there was a problem. The NDP's opponents have called for an RCMP investigation but I disagree. Not every little thing should warrant an RCMP investigation. The governing Manitoba NDP also saw an old scandal resurface over the use of union volunteers in the 1999 Manitoba election to do with election expense claims. Some former NDP worker has come out with the allegation that this mishap was done purposefully. The NDP's response has been that it what they did was thought to be a legal practice at the time and it was only later ruled illegal and the situation was dealt with at this time and there is nothing new here. I'll take the Manitoba NDP's word on this. Although this former NDP worker has called for a public inquiry, there can't be a public enquiry for every single scandal. That would be going too far. Sometimes inquiries and investgations are warranted, but there are times when we should just let things be. Another odd thing is that both these scandals are related to unions. Unions mostly support the NDP in Canada. This was also true at the federal level until union political party donations were completely banned. In most provinces that have an NDP local labour unions almost exclusively support the local NDP. An exception to this is in Ontario. In Ontario, lingering bitterness over the Bob Rae years makes unions in Ontario split their support between the provincial Liberals and the provincial NDP. This held true even during the 2007 Ontario election when Rae had already openly become a Liberal. Rae's effects on the Ontario NDP have long outlasted Rae's time as a member of the NDP. In my view it needs to be firmly established what it is and is not legal for unions to do when it comes to helping political parties so that we don't get scandals like the ones in Manitoba and Nova Scotia.