(The following article is from the May 1-15,  2010 issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)

By Liz Rowley, CPC (Ontario) leader

     The Ontario budget delivers on the government's promise to open the province up to (foreign) business. It includes a $4.6 billion corporate tax cut, another $4.5 billion cut effective July 1 with the implementation of the Harmonized Sales Tax, elimination of the capital tax, and a small business tax reduction. Other items: a two-year public sector wage freeze, cuts to health and education, and a review of provincial assets for sale. For the poor, the budget eliminates the Special Diet Allowance, which allowed those with serious health problems a little extra for food on top of the pittance paid by welfare.

     The government tried to play down the horrible news by declaring that somewhere in the future its policies would generate new jobs and surpluses to fund social programs.

     In other words, pie in the sky when you die. Of course it's a lie, but most people don't know what to do about it. It's also a lie that "we're all in this together" as the Budget speech asserts.

     The news that corporate profits have recovered, and that CEOs and executives have had performance bonuses reinstated, has generated deep public anger.

     Some take comfort in the Liberals' decision to fund the 8,500 child spots that the federal government just abandoned, and in the funding of full day junior and senior kindergarten for 4 and 5 year olds. But the province won't cover the other $1 billion in federal spending on transit, housing, and health care that Harper has also abandoned.

     In fact, our self-styled education premier, Dalton McGuinty, continues to underfund school boards, universities and colleges, and allows tuition to keep rising. Accessibility? If students have money, they have access, says McGuinty. The budget anticipates plenty of money from international students, whom it plans to exploit generously. Apparently, that's the new funding formula for public education.

     Health care? The budget uses scare tactics, citing the rise in expenditures over the past 20 years, projected into the future. The idea is that Ontario can't sustain current levels of service. Figures don't lie, but liars do figure, as these numbers show. 

     Data prepared by the Ontario Health Coalition shows that hospital spending as a percentage of health care has declined from a high of 52% in 1981 to a low of 37% in 2008. In other words, hospitals can't provide services because they're underfunded. Ontario spends less per capita than any other province on hospital service.

     Another round of hospital closures is upon us. The last one was directed by the Harris Tories, this one by the Liberals, both under the premise of "efficiencies". Both have eroded health care and caused deaths in overloaded emergency rooms, hospitals and clinics.

     These are "made-in-Queen's Park" crises. Both the Liberals and Tories are geared up to sell the idea of a spending crisis, and the conclusion that spending must be reigned in. But this is a crisis of inadequate revenue, not over-spending. Instead of more than $9 billion in corporate tax breaks, and the HST - a regressive flat tax that will hit working people the hardest - the government should increase corporate taxes. It should keep the capital tax, and expand it to cover all industries and business including underground mining. It should eliminate the HST, and introduce a progressive tax system that would put the load on the corporations, not working people and the unemployed.

     Progressive tax reform would generate the funds needed for universal health care, for quality, public child care, and for public and post-secondary education. Progressive tax reform would enable the delivery of public transit and affordable housing, while cutting property taxes in half.

     Instead, McGuinty's tax reform "of a generation" is a Big Business tax grab, and it's going to hurt a lot of people, as OPSEU President Smokey Thomas pointed out.

     The Liberals intend to pay for the corporate tax cuts with a public sector wage cut of at least 4% - about the rate of inflation over the next two years. That's equivalent to a week's pay, says Thomas, and that's a wage cut, not a freeze.

     OPSEU will be organizing demonstrations at Liberal fund-raisers, and will vigorously oppose Bill 16. They should be joined by the whole labour movement. There are stirrings in Toronto to mount a fightback that will focus on defence of social programs and services. This is welcome news.

     But it's disturbing that some unions are `holding back', thinking they can clear the two-year wage freeze before the next set of negotiations, or because they think they can hold their noses and live with the Liberals, but not with the Hudak Tories as the 2011 provincial elections approach.

     After NDP leader Andrea Horwath told the media she refused to be boxed in on the wage freeze issue, a lot of workers wonder if they can live with any of the parties currently in the Legislature.

     The attack on wages, pensions, and benefits started last year in the private sector with the autoworkers, municipal workers, and miners. Now it encompasses all workers, public and private sector, across Canada and globally. The austerity programs in Ontario are paralleled in BC, Quebec, Europe and around the world. So are the corporate tax cuts, the sale of public assets, the elimination of social programs, and the attack on free collective bargaining and the right to strike, organize and picket.

     "Open for Business" is the second shoe after the 2008 economic crisis, and it's just beginning. The right-wing is very active in Ontario in a way we haven't seen before, attempting to turn worker against worker, private against public, employed against unemployed, Canadian born against migrants and new Canadians, young against old.

     That's why the fightback of 75,000 protesters in Montreal was never publicized in English-speaking Canada, and why the heroic ten-month strike of 3,300 miners and smelterworkers in Sudbury, Port Colborne and Voisey's Bay is virtually unknown outside those communities. Heroic struggles like these could be lost without the whole labour movement actively intervening. Organized labour cannot leave this matter to a Legislature that is indifferent or hostile to working people. Nor can labour wait it out.

     The CPC (Ontario) is calling for a mass extra-parliamentary struggle for policies that put people's needs ahead of corporate greed.

     The OFL must pick up the challenge, flex its muscles, and show its power. Organized labour must lead a province wide struggle to block the right, defeat this corporate budget, and campaign for policies and government to bring in a recovery for people in Ontario.