Goar: Public sector ‘haves’ face a backlash - thestar.com

by Carol Goar - from the Toronto Star


Statistics Canada signalled a historic shift in the labour force this week. For the first time since it started counting (1918), a majority of Canadians with workplace pensions are on the public payroll.

Last week, two pay raises in the public sector made headlines: first, word leaked out of city hall that Toronto police had negotiated a four-year, 11.5 per cent pay raise, despite a projected budget deficit of $800 million in 2012; then news filtered out of Queen’s Park alleging that provincial civil servants had negotiated a 3 per cent wage hike next year, despite Premier Dalton McGuinty’s 2 per cent cap.

Nine days ago, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation issued a post-election bulletin reminding everyone that the 113 MPs who were defeated on May 2 or did not seek re-election would be getting golden handshakes worth as much as $2.8 million.

These are just the latest signs of a sharp divide between the 20 per cent of workers employed by the government and the 80 per cent who make their living in the private sector.

This issue has been simmering for a decade. The recession turned up the heat. It’s now close to a boil.

During the economic downturn, pay rates continued to climb in the public sector. Private-sector workers — those who hung onto their jobs — agreed to wage freezes and benefit rollbacks to keep their employers afloat.

Businesses left vacancies unfilled while public agencies continued to hire.

Doctors who had been lured to the United States by lucrative pay and benefit packages discovered how fragile these arrangements were in a privately funded health-care system and came back to Canada.

MBA graduates, who’d once aspired to become high-flying corporate executives and financiers, increasingly ranked careers in the public service as their top choice.

Teachers, bureaucrats and heads of public institutions became society’s “haves.”

None of these developments was discussed during last month’s election campaign. But governments will have to address them now, whether they like it or not.

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Goar: Public sector ‘haves’ face a backlash - thestar.com

Goar: Why the poor cast votes for Conservatives - thestar.com

By Carol Goar - from the Toronto Star

They aren’t ready to hear this yet, but the anti-poverty activists who work tirelessly to promote the interests of low-income Canadians need to ask why so many of them voted for Stephen Harper last week.

They won’t like the answers they get. They won’t understand how food bank users and social housing tenants could think the Prime Minister is on their side. They’ll be tempted to interrupt or object.

But their feelings are not the point. There is a serious gap in their knowledge.

Left unaddressed, it will trip them up in next fall’s provincial election campaign, the same way it did in this spring’s federal campaign and last autumn’s municipal race which propelled Rob Ford into the mayor’s chair.

It would be easy for the anti-poverty movement to argue that Harper’s victory was the result of vote-splitting, smear tactics and luck. He did benefit from the “orange wave” that began in Quebec and spilled over into Ontario, dividing the left-wing vote between the New Democrats and Liberals. The Conservatives did saturate the airwaves with attack ads, portraying Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff as an opportunistic outsider. And Harper was publicly endorsed by Toronto’s mayor, in a departure from tradition.

It would also be easy to stay the course, hoping the Conservatives will see the light. Despite the fact that Harper has announced his priorities — which don’t include poverty reduction — anti-poverty groups are busy writing articles and circulating studies that bolster their case.

But neither rationalization nor wilful blindness will get them far in the next electoral showdown. Tim Hudak, who leads the ascendant Ontario Conservatives, uses the same playbook as Harper and Ford.

After being sidelined twice in the past eight months, anti-poverty campaigners need to figure out how right-wing cost-cutters connect with voters — especially low-income voters.

My soundings are limited, but a few themes keep popping up:

• People in low-income neighbourhoods are the biggest victims of the drug dealers and violent young offenders Harper is promising to lock up. They want relief from the violence they can’t escape. They want to rid their communities of the gangs that lure their children into gun-and-gang culture. Crime crackdowns make sense to them.

• What Canadians struggling to make ends meet want most is a job; not government benefits, not abstract poverty-reduction plans, certainly not charity. Harper tapped into that yearning, promising to stabilize the economy and create employment. The New Democrats, aiming to beat him at his own game, said they would cut small business taxes.

• It angers low-income voters to see secure middle-class bureaucrats getting pay hikes. Those trapped in entry-level service jobs seethe when public employees who earn far more than they ever will are rewarded simply for showing up. Those living on public assistance — employment insurance, welfare, old age security — dislike being treated with contempt by government officials. In both cases, cutting the public payroll has a lot of appeal.
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Goar: Why the poor cast votes for Conservatives - thestar.com

Left and right can unite to end corporate welfare - thestar.com

By Mark Milke - from the Toronto Star


“While they publicly denounce increased government expenditure, particularly in the form of social welfare, these champions of free enterprise actively lobby the government for incentive grants, research grants and tax concessions, and all manner of assistance at the individual taxpayer’s expense.”
— Then federal NDP leader David Lewis, on corporations and corporate welfare, in his 1972 book, Louder Voices: The Corporate Welfare Bums


Over the last three years, federal Conservatives have run up $102 billion in new debt, with the forecast for the next four years at another $59 billion. In total, that’s $161 billion in new red ink over seven years.


Given the rancour likely to occur over various attempts to balance the books with a Tory majority government and an NDP opposition in Parliament, here’s a modest proposal they should jointly act on: end corporate welfare.



By corporate welfare, think of direct cash payments to business — not for goods or services, but simply because a government wishes to retain or attract a particular business or industry. Sometimes the money is a grant, or a “repayable” loan (often never repaid), but it’s the same strategy: Governments pick winners and losers in the marketplace. Grants and loans to the aerospace and automotive sector are prime examples.


There are plenty of reasons to stop the practice, starting with the cost to taxpayers. Between 1994 and 2007, Ottawa, the provinces and municipalities spent $203 billion on corporate welfare, or $15,216 over that 13-year period for every tax filer who paid tax. (At just the federal level alone, Ottawa doled out $67 billion during that time.)


Beyond the cost, consider other reasons. Corporate welfare creates an uneven playing field between businesses and industries that do not receive taxpayer support and those that do. The result is an artificial, politically created advantage. When Chrysler and GM received a bailout in 2009, it came at the expense of additional sales that would have gone to a more prudent and better-run Ford or Toyota. Money is thus taxed away from all of us and given to a specific company — and diverted from more productive uses.


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Left and right can unite to end corporate welfare - thestar.com

Siddiqui: How Harper won and Ignatieff lost - thestar.com

By Haroon Siddiqui - from the Toronto Star

In a parliamentary democracy, no election is unnecessary, really. Elections bring clarity, even those that don’t change party standings much — the government gets a new mandate, the opposition becomes more constructive. Sometimes, elections spring surprises. Stephen Harper, who derided this election as “unnecessary,” has ended up its biggest beneficiary.

Any prime minister who strategizes his way to a majority deserves credit — Harper more so, since he’s the first in seven years to have done so. This is all the more remarkable considering that he campaigned on what he had assiduously avoided in 2006 and 2008: asking for a majority. This time he read the public mood right, tapping into the broadly held sentiment that political shenanigans in Ottawa were trumping the nation’s business.

Those downplaying his majority say he won only because the NDP resurgence drained away votes from the Liberals, especially in the Toronto area. So what? Them’s the breaks in three-way races — just as the Liberals used to benefit from the splits between Progressive Conservatives and Reformers.

In fact, not all Tory wins can be explained by the splits — in many ridings, the Conservatives amassed a record number of votes. Read more...

Siddiqui: How Harper won and Ignatieff lost - thestar.com

Kelly McParland: Tory record on hiring lapdogs needs improvement | Full Comment | National Post

by Kelly McParland - from the National Post

The Toronto Star has a big exclusive scoop on how an agency created by the federal Conservatives to help crime victims was “just a $6 million public relations stunt to score political points.”

Who says? Steve Sullivan, the former ombudsman appointed by the Tories to head the office. The big scoop seems to centre around the fact the office hasn’t released its annual reports in a timely manner. Two of the reports, for 2008 and 2009, should have been released earlier this month, but weren’t. Jeez, no annual reports! That may not strike everyone as the scandal of the decade, but we’re talking the Star here. The paper that ran a death notice from a man whose dying wish was that people should vote Liberal.

While not much of a scoop, the story does point to one of the contradictions of Harper-hatred in Ottawa. While the HH camp keeps reminding us how Mr. Harper wants to stuff the courts, the bureaucracy and other official and semi-official bodies with obedient Conservative lackeys, his record on that front has been anything but stellar. He seems to have trouble recognizing True Blue Tory lapdogs willing to tow the party line (a mistake Brian Mulroney would never have made). Read more...

Kelly McParland: Tory record on hiring lapdogs needs improvement | Full Comment | National Post

Hébert: Why Gilles Duceppe has overstayed his welcome - thestar.com

By Chantal Hébert - from the Toronto Star

Danny Williams had it. So did Lucien Bouchard. It turns out that Gilles Duceppe did not.  When it comes to their exit from the political scene, few successful leaders have a reliable sense of timing.  Intoxicated by repeated victories, many end up staying past their prime and taking their party an election bridge too far.

On that score, the former premiers of Newfoundland and Labrador and Quebec are notable exceptions. Perhaps because they had more fire in the belly to begin with and little natural inclination to fade gently into the night, Williams and Bouchard had the instinct to bow out before they had exhausted their welcome.

Duceppe, on the other hand, has missed his cue. Over the past four weeks, he has been finding out the hard way that his deal with Quebecers was not open ended after all.  Even leaders who never have to wear the scratch of a single unpopular decision ultimately exhibit corrosion from the passage of time.

For the best part of the last year, the Bloc and its leader have been on a lengthy 20th anniversary celebration. In hindsight, that celebration was ill-advised. Read more...

Hébert: Why Gilles Duceppe has overstayed his welcome - thestar.com

Catholics, Protestants leaning toward Conservatives, poll finds - thestar.com

Les Whittington - From the Toronto Star

OTTAWA—As Canada heads into Easter Sunday and the final week of the federal election campaign, half of English-speaking Catholics outside Quebec are poised to vote for the Conservatives, a new poll says.

The Angus Reid survey for the Toronto Star says 50 per cent of self-described Catholics outside Quebec will vote Tory on May 2.

The Liberals can count on the support of about one in four Catholics, while 19 per cent said they would support the New Democrats and 4 per cent favour the Green party.

Protestants outside of Quebec expressed a similar preference, with 56 per cent poised to vote Conservative. Support for the Liberals among Protestants stands at 22 per cent, with 18 per cent in favour of the NDP and 4 per cent behind the Greens. Read more

Catholics, Protestants leaning toward Conservatives, poll finds - thestar.com