Budgets

Both the federal government and the government of Ontario brought down budgets in the last week. The federal government has adopted the tried and tested Liberal Party of Canada approach to the budget. Sprinkle a tiny little bit of money to just about everybody, and try to use that to hide honking big corporate tax cuts. Excellent, just what we need. At a time when corporate profits are going off the scale, what they need is another tax cut. All this while money could be used to fight poverty, reduce the debt burden on post-secondary students, fight global climate change, encourage primary health-care, ensure that aboriginals have a decent standard of living or so much more. Jack Layton put it quite well when he said that the federal budget "put crumbs on the kitchen table and a buffet on the board-room table." I'm not surprised, but I had been hoping for more. With the amount of money being thrown around, Jim Flahrety has reduced the expected surplus next year to just $300 million dollars. Remember that number. You're going to hear it again.

The provincial situation is a little bit more positive. The Ontario Liberals have been feeling the pressure from the NDP on the left to do something, anything, for working-class and poor Ontarians. As a result, there is going to be an Ontario Child Benefit for families earning less than $20 000/year phased in over the next couple years. In conjunction with this, the provincial government will stop clawing back the National Child Benefit from families on welfare (though not for three or four years, which is far too long). Thirdly, the government will raise the minimum wage $0.75/hr each March for three years, starting next year. This will bring minimum wage to $10.25/hr by 2010. This is a decent start, but the minimum wage needs to be at least $10/hr now, and it needs to get there now, not in three years. After all, Dalton McGuinty and the other MPs didn't have to wait three years for their fat raises, so why should the lowest income people in this country have to wait for their (rather slim) raises? Also, this provincial budget was balanced, with an estimated surplus of $300 million next year.

Remember that number? That means that at the federal level, Flahrety has reduced the federal government's fiscal situation to the same as a province that has just introduced its first balanced budget in at least 4 years. That means that the slightest downturn in the economy, which will come (it's called the business cycle, folks), we are back to deficits. Good job Harpokons. I hope you're happy.

Cheers

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 671

Alberta Takes Another Step Towards Two-Tier Healthcare

The government of Ed Stelmach in Alberta has just decided that people will be able to opt-out of the public healthcare system for three years at a time. The government claims that this is simply a housekeeping measure, to reduce the amount of paperwork people have to do, but it is clearly more than that. To allow people to opt out of a universal healthcare system at all is a bad idea. To let them opt out for three years at a time is even worse.

The point of a universal healthcare system is that everyone pays into the system, and we can all draw on it when we are in need. The education system works exactly the same way. I don't have any kids, but my taxes still go to pay for the education system and I am perfectly happy with that. I haven't been to a hospital for care in close to 10 years, but I still have no problem with my taxes going to support a public, universal, healthcare system. To allow people to opt out of the system is to allow the system to be deprived of resources. And who do you think will opt out? Why the rich. Those that put the most money into the system in the first place through the progressive taxation system. What the government of Ed Stelmach is up to is a covert attempt to let healthcare privatization in through the back door. He should be ashamed of himself, and ashamed of the lies that he is telling to his people and to the rest of the country. If other provinces start doing this type of thing, we are going to be boarding the handbasket to hell in an awful hurry, and we are going to be without a public healthcare system. And we are back to the bad old days, when only those who could afford to pay would get medical care. For shame, Mr. Stelmach. For shame.

Cheers

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 681

A $10 Minimum Wage

There is a campaign underway in Ontario to raise the minimum wage to $10/hr. I think this is an excellent idea, because it simply is not possible for people to live on $8/hr (the current general minimum wage in Ontario) in many parts of the province. If anyone is interested in my living expenses calculations for Toronto related to the minimum wage, leave a comment and I will post more details of my reasoning. Suffice it to say, rents are so high in many cities in Toronto that even working 40 hours per week (and very few minimum or just-above-minimum wage jobs give 40 hrs/wk) will not allow people to live, even if heavy use is made of food banks. Obviously, $10/hr will not allow people to live comfortably, but it is a dramatic improvement on what has gone before and will help people have some degree of stability in their lives.

The Ontario NDP, the Federal NDP, many unions and a vast plethora of community and citizen groups are pushing this effort forward. A good measure of a society is how it treats the most abject of it's citizens. And right now we are treating the poor of our society like crap, to be frank. Raising the minimum wage to $10/hr won't make that better, but it would be a good first step.

Now, the right wing will whinge about how raising the minimum wage like this will cause the sky to fall and cause every small business in Ontario to go out of business. Well guess what; doctor's said that socialized healthcare would cause the end of the medical system and that didn't happen. And business has been claiming that every increase to the minimum wage since the invention of such a thing will have catastrophic effects on business, and the economy has continued much as it ever has, cyclical as always. Frankly, a lot of the business sector is full of shit and not to be trusted on these issues.

Another objection that the right-wing will raise is that most people who earn minimum wage are teenagers living at home who don't need a raise. Nice try. That may be strictly speaking true, but a raise in the minimum wage from $8 to $10 would also help every person making between $8.01 and $9.99 per hour. And that is a lot of people in Ontario alone.

This is a good idea, and the reason the right fights it so strenuously is because they need a demoralized and abjected working class to produce wealth for them. As Ambrose Bierce said:

Corporation, noun: An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit, without individual responsibility.

He was on to something there. Capitalists don't care about people, they care about profit. This is to put the cart before the horse in a dramatic manner. People should come before profit.

Cheers

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 688

Opposition Defeats Terrorism Act Provisions

For once, I have something nice to say about the Liberals. They voted the right way on the government motion to extend the arrest-without-charge and compulsory testimony provisions of the Anti-Terrorism Act. These sections of the Act posed a serious threat to the freedoms of Canadians and should never have been enacted in the first place. What is hilarious is to see the Liberals posturing as the defenders of civil liberties. To hear them tell it, you would never think that they wrote the law in the first place. One Liberal voted in favour of the government motion, notorious right-winger and arch-bigot Tom Wappell. It remains to be seen what, if any, punishment he will face for breaking ranks with the rest of his party.

The Conservatives now think that the Liberals have handed them a club for the next election. Expect to hear an endless repetition of "soft on terrorism" for the next couple of months. What is true is that by finally doing the right thing, the Liberals have proven that once again they are hopeless flip-floppers, following the political winds of the day. The NDP opposed these provisions from the beginning. The NDP was the only one to be concerned that the government was using the threat of terrorism as a means to induce Canadians to accept a diminution of their civil liberties.

The Conservatives also seem to have decided that they will bring in a new act to reinstate the measures that were allowed to expire on Wednesday. Expect it to be a matter of confidence, so that the Conservatives can say after they are defeated that the Liberals (plus the NDP and the Bloc) brought down the government because they support terrorism. It would be about par for the Republican course, and would fit right in with the playbook used by the American right in the last several elections.

All of this should make for more interesting politics in the weeks to come.

Cheers

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 696