(The following article is from the November 1-15, 2008, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $25/year, or $12 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $25 US per year; other overseas readers - $25 US or $35 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 133 Herkimer St., Unit 502, Hamilton, ON, L8P 2H3.)

PV Ontario Bureau

Faced with massive job losses in manufacturing, and bare cupboards after years of corporate tax cuts, the McGuinty Liberals will cut services to deal with declining corporate revenues, and run a $500 million deficit.

     Provincial Treasurer Dwight Duncan, presenting his Fall Economic Statement Oct. 22, noted early and often that the government will not raise corporate taxes to deal with the deepening recession. Instead the Liberals will cut transfer payments to municipalities, universities and colleges, school boards and hospitals, and shelve commitments to hire 9,000 nurses - a promise that helped them win the 2007 provincial election.

     Trying to allay public fears that this is actually the Tory agenda for Ontario, Premier McGuinty opined that it is neither "the tax and service cuts of Mike Harris", nor the "free-spending of (NDP Premier) Bob Rae".

     But in fact, with the exception of the small deficit the government will run, it is the Tory agenda. It will translate into further privatization in municipalities, health care and hospitals, and into a major confrontation in the education system as school boards continue negotiations with ETFO (elementary teachers).

     The Harris Tories passed balanced budget legislation in the 1990s forcing public institutions to institute deep cuts to services, as provincial transfer payments were simultaneously slashed. The resulting crises in service delivery led to public-private-partnerships, the main instrument for privatization of Ontario hospitals today.

     Because of the massive public outcry, elected hospital boards have been increasingly critical of provincial funding cuts and restructuring. Now the Liberals are eliminating the boards and replacing them with LHINs (Local Health Integration Networks) appointed and solely accountable to the provincial government.

      These new cuts will see hospitals reduce services to the point where some will likely be reduced to regional clinics, opening the door to private, for-profit hospitals to open and operate in everything but name.

     The annual meeting of the Ontario Health Coalition, on the heels of the economic update, has made privatization of hospitals a major focus of public campaigning in the year ahead.

     For universities and colleges, the cuts will mean sky-rocketing tuition increases and reduced accessibility for working class students. Other impacts will include more attacks on wages, working conditions and staffing (and more strikes like the historic Windsor University Faculty Association strike in September), and more corporate intrusions into Canadian campuses.

     For municipalities, the cuts will mean reduced services, increased property taxes and user fees, the shelving of transportation and infrastructure renewal, and more pressure to liquidate public assets, including very profitable municipal hydro utilities.

     School Boards are also being pressured to liquidate valuable properties in downtown locations across the province, as enrolments drop in some areas (a cyclical issue as enrolments continually rise and fall from one year to another). Long delayed capital projects including new school construction in areas like Peel (one of the most rapidly expanding regions in the country), and structural repairs in aging school buildings across the province, have again been shelved.

     While the government says it will deliver Junior and Senior Kindergarten programs promised in 2007, it won't be at least until 2010 or 2011. Childcare and public transportation investments are also on the back burner.

     As to the crisis in affordable housing, expanding and deepening poverty, and the massive job losses in manufacturing, the government has nothing to offer.

     The OFL, CUPE and other trade unions in Ontario have attacked the government for the absence of any action to protect working people from the recession and the US credit crisis, which threatens pensions, mortgages and savings as well as jobs and wages.   

     Communist Party (Ontario) leader Liz Rowley called on the government to reverse the service cuts and expand investment in health care, hospitals, public and post-secondary education, municipalities, and to move now to establish a system of universally accessible, affordable and quality public child care in Ontario.

     "Massive public investment in social programs and in job creation - including a massive social housing construction program across the province and infrastructure renewal - is what's needed now", said Rowley. "This should be paid for by corporate Ontario through reversing tax cuts, restoring corporate taxes reduced or eliminated by the Harris Tories and the McGuinty Liberals, and by introducing wealth taxes. Canada is a very wealthy country, and Ontario is one of its most wealthy and productive provinces. And anyone who says different is lying."

     Rowley urged other policies, such as plant closure legislation, abrogating NAFTA, pulling out of the SPP negotiations, and investing in value-added manufacturing and secondary industry. "That's the way to go to mitigate the worst effects of the recession which could turn into a full-fledged depression if the government doesn't reverse course," she said.

     She called for a new policy in the auto industry: "Ontario should invest in a publicly-owned Canadian car that's small, fuel-efficient, and environmentally sustainable".

     The Communist Party is also calling for immediate action to raise the minimum wage to $15, to increase ODSP and social assistance above the poverty level, and to raise pensions substantially. It says the federal government should be pushed to expand EI to cover all the unemployed for the duration of unemployment, and to increase payouts to 90% of previous earnings.

     "These demands aren't socialism," Rowley said, "though surely the depth of the global capitalist economic and political crisis raises the question of a new economic and political system socialism - in a sharp and immediate way.

     "But even these demands, all projected to protect working people from the worst effects of this capitalist crisis, will require a massive and united fight to win them. We need emergency action by the labour and democratic movements to defend the interests of working people who are being told by the Liberals, the Tories and the transnational corporations that they have to pay for the crisis by giving up their jobs, wages, pensions, savings, social programs, and living standards.  

     "The answer must be a decisive NO! People's needs, not corporate greed... that's what must shape a united opposition now!"