Doug Ford says he can't be bought. But his behaviour suggests otherwise. Martin Regg Cohn writes:
Ahead of the last election, after a series of investigative columns in this newspaper exposing the Wild West of Ontario politics under the last Liberal government, all parties came together to support the cleanup (because all parties were part of the problem). Ontario’s legislature banned contributions from business and labour unions in 2016, so that vested interests wouldn’t trump voter interests.
To compensate for the millions of dollars that all major parties were forsaking, the province followed the old federal model of public funding based on per-vote allocations. Every vote would count, not just at the ballot box but in annual remittances to the parties based on their performance in the last election — initially set at $2.71 per ballot cast.
(Based on the results of the 2018 election, the victorious Tories were in line to receive $6.3 million annually while the NDP would get $5.2 million, the Liberals about $3 million, and the Greens around $700,000.)
But then Ford won the election — not only overthrowing the Liberals, but also overruling his own Progressive Conservatives to overturn the all-party consensus on public funding. Lashing out at the idea of “subsidies” to political parties, as if they are somehow unethical and antithetical to democracy, he ordered them phased out by the end of next year.
Forget Ford's rhetoric. Cohn believes politics is operating as it has for decades -- for the benefit of the wealthy:
Democracy is based on laws and level playing fields. Not trust in tilted gameboards behind closed doors.
By defending subsidies for the well off, and demonizing “per-vote” allocations for everyone else, Ford is playing favourites — and playing footsie with our democracy.
Ford’s old campaign sloganeering against “subsidies” was based on a flawed assumption wrapped in a glaring contradiction. Upon taking power, he set back campaign finance without thinking ahead.
Today, the premier gets that in a pandemic, it’s not politics as usual. Why then should it be business as usual — as before — for big donors, at the expense of the rest of us?
Plus ca change.
Image: democracywatch.ca
2 comments:
All that Ford had to do to make people forget how much they hated him was to act semi-sane in the face of the pandemic.
Now he makes sad eyes for the camera pretending that he feels the pain of everyone in the province. Meanwhile: Nothing for long-term care. Nothing for public education. Continued privatization of health care. And now the topic of this post: Providing corporate scumbags with the ability to openly bribe politicians again.
"Conservatism" is a cancer.
Today's conservatism is a long way from Edmund Burke's conservatism, thwap.
Post a Comment