Linda McQuaig wrote about the Ontario Place debacle:
"Ford plans to "spend $400 million building a parking garage for the convenience of well-to-do spa users, while scrimping on the most basic educational materials in Ontario's schools. That scrimping--education funding has dropped by $1,200 per student under Ford--explains why classroom shelves are empty after teachers remove the learning materials they've provided. . . .
The government is actually swimming in money--even as it hollows out key public programs, underfunding schools, shutting down hospital emergency wards and doing nothing for the homeless. . . .
The notion that we can't afford a strong public sector has always been a scamBut it's particularly a scam these days. The Ford government's own numbers show a sea of surpluses--not deficits--over the next four years. . . . Ontario is on track to collect $22 billion more than it plans to spend on its public programs. . . .
We've become increasingly numb to what we're losing, caught up in a capitalist narrative that celebrates individuals making it on their own, rather than celebrating what we can achieve collectively.
This capitalist narrative is based on the concept of 'survival of the fittest' . . . But this narrative is something of a distortion of Darwin's overall view of what led to the successful evolution of the human species. . . . Darwin stressed humans as social animals and singled out the most important characteristics in our evolution, starting with our capacity for love, sympathy and caring for others. . . . key to our successful evolution . . . our ability to co-operate, to help one another, to take care of the well-being of others--which strong public programs enable us to do."
Absolutely.
We need to find the Tommy Douglases of our times, maybe McQuaig, Naomi Klein, Avi Lewis, Maude Barlow... to lead us under a different narrative. I have no idea what it will take to change the story we tell ourselves, the way we understand ourselves, enough for a turning point of people believe it, enough to shut down the radical cons who are destroying our country. And all those names have been working on it forever, I know, and this is a good addition to their collection. We have to keep it going.
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