Uncommon Wisdom From The 'Common' People

That is the best way to assess the fact that last night, despite all of his gerrymandering, Dalton NcGuinty was decisively thwarted in his ruthless drive for the majority government he had been denied in the last general provincial election.

Thanks to the people of Kitchener-Waterloo, both he and the leader of the Official Opposition, young Tim Hudak of the Conservatives, are looking decidedly vulnerable today. A good analysis of that vulnerability can be found in Martin Regg Cohn's column in this morning's Star.

And just before I leave the topic of politicians who forget who they are elected to serve, I am reproducing a letter I came across yesterday in The Spectator. The observations made by the writer, Mark Kikot of Burlington, are ones that our arrogant political 'masters' would be wise to bear in mind the next time they contemplate the bald pursuit of power at the expense of the electorate.

McGuinty scapegoats public-sector workers

Premier Dalton McGuinty is demonstrating through his current strategy for dealing with the deficit that behaving like a conservative government is easier than being a liberal government, and that behaving like a corporation is easier than being a government.

Those Ontarians who have accepted the corporate mindset as the controlling metaphor in their lives, and the corporate structure as an inescapable reality, would argue that any responsible government should function like a business. Costs that cannot be sustained must be offset by cuts in order to produce a supposedly more efficient, hopefully more effective, and clearly more profit-driven organization; in other words, the ideal model for governance is the lean mean machine.

While any sensible person should acknowledge that we cannot continue to live beyond our means, any sensible person should also recognize that the debt incurred by a government must be shared by all the sectors of the society that that government represents.

By targeting primarily the public sector, and the educational sector in particular, in its attempt to balance the books, the McGuinty government has made scapegoats of those public sector workers who provide social services that improve the quality of life for all Ontarians. In adopting this politically convenient strategy, McGuinty has created the impression that the deficit is entirely an in-house problem, instead of a problem for which the private sector is also responsible. It is unreasonable and unjust to expect the deficit to be reduced almost exclusively at the expense of public sector employees who make on average much less than $100,000 a year, while private sector employees who make between $100,000 and $500,000 a year pay taxes at pre-deficit rates, and corporations continue to be granted privileged tax status in the hope that they will create jobs.

The McGuinty government in its bull-headed idiocy is moving forward with legislation that ignores the collective bargaining process and imposes working conditions, not negotiated contracts, on teachers and other educational workers. There can be no social contract without contractual agreements.

Mark Kikot, Burlington