Yes we do, according to the Toronto Sun.
Hudak gonna set things right by firing 100,000 lazy-ass civil servants!
Chop down the corporate tax rate to next-to-nothing to boot, and by God, there's gonna be a jobs bonanza right here in the promised land!
A million new private sector jobs!
One shudders to imagine the nature of those million jobs. Yes, you could cut the corporate tax rate to zero, and yes, that would attract a few corporate bottom-feeders who would create a few minimum wage jobs. Is that really what Ontario needs?
Hudak's race-to-the-bottom strategy has failed everywhere it's been implemented. This is just the latest recycled version of the old Thatcher-Reagan trickle-down. You remember that; be nice to rich folks and eventually that niceness gonna trickle down on the regular folks...
Rich folks will of course love that strategy. It works for them. It frees up a little more cash to donate to the pols who are prepared to do their bidding.
Here's the trouble with trickle-down economics; the rich get richer and the rest of us just get soaked.
Ontario does not need Tim Hudak.
Showing posts with label Tim Hudak. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tim Hudak. Show all posts
Sunday, May 18, 2014
Thursday, January 24, 2013
The decline of unions in Canada
In an article that has appeared on both the anti-worker Bloomberg site and the generally pro-labour Counterpunch site, Kris Warner makes the case that the cause of organized labour's long drift into irrelevance in the US is due to a hostile climate.
His arguments are relevant as far as they go. There is no question that unions in America are up against a hostile environment, and that environment grows ever more hostile. However, his article is gravely misguided in using Canada as the benchmark for what unions could be.
While it's true that the overall climate in Canadian society is somewhat more conducive to and tolerant of union activity, the difference is one of degree, rather than of kind.
Warner is correct in claiming that there is yet no equivalent to "right to work" in Canada. Yet.
But listen to Ontario's wannabe Conservative Premier Tim Hudak. He's definitely a "right to work" kind of guy, and a Conservative victory in the next provincial election is not an outlandish prospect. The fact that traditionally union-friendly Michigan next door just went down that road doesn't help.
Even Ontario's supposedly labour-friendly Liberal government had no qualms about passing a bill that allowed it to "legally" quash the collective bargaining rights of Ontario's teachers, a bit of skulduggery that the most reactionary right-to-work governors must be admiring.
Warner's analysis misses the big picture, and the big picture is this; since the 1970's the rate of unionization in Canada's private sector has fallen by more than half.
True, it's fallen even more precipitously in the US, but Canada is hardly poster-boy material for a "make America union friendly" campaign.
His arguments are relevant as far as they go. There is no question that unions in America are up against a hostile environment, and that environment grows ever more hostile. However, his article is gravely misguided in using Canada as the benchmark for what unions could be.
While it's true that the overall climate in Canadian society is somewhat more conducive to and tolerant of union activity, the difference is one of degree, rather than of kind.
Warner is correct in claiming that there is yet no equivalent to "right to work" in Canada. Yet.
But listen to Ontario's wannabe Conservative Premier Tim Hudak. He's definitely a "right to work" kind of guy, and a Conservative victory in the next provincial election is not an outlandish prospect. The fact that traditionally union-friendly Michigan next door just went down that road doesn't help.
Even Ontario's supposedly labour-friendly Liberal government had no qualms about passing a bill that allowed it to "legally" quash the collective bargaining rights of Ontario's teachers, a bit of skulduggery that the most reactionary right-to-work governors must be admiring.
Warner's analysis misses the big picture, and the big picture is this; since the 1970's the rate of unionization in Canada's private sector has fallen by more than half.
True, it's fallen even more precipitously in the US, but Canada is hardly poster-boy material for a "make America union friendly" campaign.
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