As the Greenbelt is bulldozed, the province's recycling is privatized without a peep, and the healthcare system is being strangled to death and shaken down by corporations and right-wing doctors, I have been working my way through this book after stumbling upon it at Novel Idea, a great independent bookstore in Kingston.
Tom McDowell documents the rollback of democratic mechanisms within the Ontario legislature and the centralization of decision-making power in the hands of cabinet and premier. The argument McDowell makes is an obvious one: democratic decision-making and diffused power in parliament are rolled back due to a series of economic crises that hit the province in the 1970s and early 1980s, and then again in the first half of the 1990s.
On both these critical issues of taxation and the welfare state, all three of Ontario's major parties suffer through a long, messy and catastrophic realignments beginning in the 1970s. The crisis reached its peak between 1985 and 1995 with voters electing in and voting out majorities of all three major parties. The social forces and political coalitions that had provided the bedrock base of each major Ontario party for forty years was thrown into turmoil through civil war and deindustrialization (NDP), demographic and cultural revolution (Liberals) and an insurgent political revolution (PCs).
The "grand coalition" of Ontario's post-war Red Toryism is decisively defeated in the 1980s, leading to the collapse of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party by the end of the decade and its reconstruction and renovation by an insurgent neoconservative movement in the late 80s and early 90s. The NDP's bedrock labour base is reconstituted in the 1960s and 1970s after its McCarthyist immolation in the late 1940s and 1950s, but splits in two as the NDP government of Bob Rae turns on the public sector unions in 1993 to impose austerity. Meanwhile, the Ontario Liberals, are transformed in the 1980s from a fairly conservative, heavily rural and Catholic party into a modern urban/suburban party that begins workshopping a progressive neoliberalism in response to the corporate counter-offensive of the 1980s.
With each party holding a majority government in this intense period of crisis (1987 Liberal majority, 1990 NDP majority, 1995 PC majority), parliamentary mechanisms that facilitate oppositional delay and disruption are rolled back and power centralized in the cabinet. Government decisions once requiring legislation are replaced with government decisions made by "regulation", aka: changes to laws by cabinet ministers without legislative oversight. Perhaps most remarkable is that McDowell identifies significant new centralizations of power in cabinet when the NDP brought forward "emergency" austerity legislation. Furthermore, the NDP rolled back parliamentary delay and disruption tactics they themselves had used while in opposition to the Ontario Liberal majority. Most famously, Peter Kormos's 17-hour filibuster of a lousy Liberal auto insurance bill was rendered impossible by the subsequent NDP government's changes to parliamentary rules.
The Ontario Liberals and PCs are known quantities in terms of being right-wing profits-first neoliberal outfits. What the left in Ontario must confront is the fact that the NDP was, in so many essential ways, instrumental to the construction of the neoliberal counter-revolution and current right-wing order. How can the left ever rebuild if we cannot tell these truths openly and reckon with their profound implications? How can the left fight for a democratic self-governing society if we cannot confront the forces that have paved the path of this great capitalist counter-reformation?