For a little while, Trump's mess made me über proud to be Canadian, and even a little bit okay with Ford. But that was short lived!
If anything, the US disaster has been a distraction for us as the provincial majority government pushed through several anti-democracy policies. They're using Trump's trade war to try to justify these policies, but we all know that's bullshit.
Bill 33: Supporting Children and Students Act, which passed second reading yesterday. It will give Ford more control over school boards and universities and colleges. It could mandate police presence in schools and mandate university admission policies. From OPSEU President JP Hornick:
"Stripping away access-focused admissions pathways threatens the socio-economic mobility of entire communities. They want to surveil and criinalize our kids from a young age and then make it even harder to access post-secondary education later on in their academic careers. Ontario's future depends on an inclusive education system, not one that intentionally keeps people out. ... It is clearly intended to defund these services in our colleges."
And a TVO article says,
"Queens' Park [is] giving up the pretense that school boards are democratically elected bodies in their own right -- able to make mistakes and scandals, yes, but also able to be disciplined by voters when that happens. Instead, Queen's Park is closing in on the end point of a decades long process of turning boards of education into mere subalterns for provincial education policy."
Bill 17: Protect Ontario by Building Faster and Smarter Act, which passed on Tuesday without much fanfare. It removes development charges for a list of construction project. They spin "no fees" as a good thing, but those charges to developers (companies) help to fund the cost to municipalities to provide all the infrastructure (roads, water, sewers). The bill is enabling developers to make more of a profit at the expense of our cities.
And then there's Bill 5: Protect Ontario by Unleashing the Economy Act, which passed on Wednesday. It allows Ford to bulldoze through construction projects and undermine consultation, environmental due process, the endangered species act, and treaty rights, through designated "special economic zones."
There's a great 2001 documentary, Life and Debt, that explains how the IMF (mainly the US) coerced Jamaica to set up "free zones" for the US to be able to, basically, legalize sweatshops that can ignore minimum wage laws. Check out how well those zones helped protect Jamaica!!
People. Are. Pissed.
From Wildlands League:
"People from all walks of life spoke up in the single largest pushback I've seen since the Greenbelt scandal: scientists, farmers, environmental experts, lawyers, seniors, engineers, civil liberties experts, community leaders, academics, Amnesty, archeologists, labour, nurses, the opposition, Toronto Zoo, municipal leaders, and Indigenous leaders, Elders and Indigenous grassroots members. Ford is irrationally whacking Ontario's vulnerable wildlife again pushing them to extinction. ... Clean fresh water and carbon-rich ancient peatlands that have cooled the planet are at stake, over two billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent in the area covered by mining claims in the Ring of Fire. These are irrecoverable carbon stores. Keeping them undisturbed is critical to meeting global climate goals."
Yesterday, Indigenous protesters set up tents at Queen's Park.
"Wassaykeesic, whose First Nation is located near the mineral-rich Ring of Fire, said he is concerned the new rules will be used to speed up mining projects which he said will predominantly benefit the companies -- not locals. He said the legislation is yet another example of 'economic genocide' of First Nations people."
NDP MPP Sol Mamakwa said,
"First Nations are ready to defend their treaty rights, they're ready to defend their Aboriginal title, they're ready to defend their land. ... I've been here seven years, and I think there's three or four times when I saw this governmetn walk back, rescind the bill because of the public reaction."
I really hope he's right. Ford doesn't seem as connected to election manipulators quite like Trump is (or was), so he still needs a few people to actually vote for him!
The 401 tunnel is proposed to be one of these special economic zones. Some people online are commenting that a tunnel won't work, and I suggested that maybe it doesn't matter if it works. We know there are much better ways to solve traffic issues. Just maybe he's taking a page from the disaster capital playbook and creating a project so he can hire contractors in a scheme not unlike what happened in Iraq under the U.S. where, according to Naomi Klein, billions of dollars disappeared in sub-contracting scams. The invasion of Iraq wasn't just about getting all the oil, it was about privatizing the shit out of the country so that, as Joe Allbaugh, ex-head of FEMA, said, "A Wal-Mart could take over the country." The three big rules of this playbook are privatize, deregulate, and cut back social services to get rid of anything standing in the way of accumulating corporate profits. How is Ford not doing this??
And, of course, Bill 34: MPP Pension and Compensation Act passed last week. MPPs will get a 33% pay increase. It moved from first reading to royal assent in a day!
Some say he's learning from Trump, but he was always running his own corrupt racket. Check out the Gravy Train podcast for his history. If he learned from anyone, it was Stephen Harper. We're capable of our own home-grown corruption! But they're both following a neoliberal capitalist grift.
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| Desmond Tutu in 1986 |
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