Shit Eating Ontario
This Post is going to offend some people.
I have not been following domestic Canadian politics very closely for some time. It is so tiresome to see when there are much more constructive things being done elsewhere. It is not so much boring as just very inane and inedifying.
National politics is bad enough. The local politics of Toronto is fairly contemptible. But the way the Province of Ontario is governed is something else.
I do not believe there has been anything in Canada like the Doug Ford provincial government. Ontario has already disgraced itself with the Harris government almost a generation ago. We have seen people like Duplessis in Quebec and Aberhart in Alberta.
We have some bad governments in present day Canada, carrying out neoliberal agendas while selling off public assets for peanuts. We have governments who go beyond that to pandering to right wing extremism to the great detriment of society. Yet we have never had anything quite like Ford and the creeps around him.
What is really disturbing is the lack of reaction. That is what I focus on here.
This is not due to a lack of information about the Ford family and the Ford administrations. It is mysterious that so little effort is put into digging out the truth about them, because there is obviously so much more to bring out. However, enough has been written about these people to make clear their unfitness for public office.
Here are the essential points about the Fords. They are archetypal “white trash with money”, the lowest grade of the oligarchic class in Canada. They are most in fear of losing their limited wealth and so are the most aggressive about getting more.
Such people are usually the most viciously anti public among oligarchs. They will do nearly anything and believe they should get away with anything. They are not much good at anything except cheating people, bullying and manipulating them.
There is no clear reason for them to have developed so much influence in Toronto politics, and then in Ontario. The “Ford Nation” personality cult built up around such mediocre and contemptible people is hard to understand unless you understand how the globalist elite works.
They are expert at building mass perception management machines. They know how to draw out a section of the population to be followers of a carefully set up personality or idea. They can also quickly redirect that allegiance elsewhere.
So, they recruit flawed people who identify with elitism, who want power but could not gain it on their own, who can be covertly manipulated, and can be quickly brought down once they become a liability.
None of the Fords have any higher education. They are likely incapable of it. Yet they have been widely quoted as stating that they are ‘born to lead’.
The father, a member of provincial parliament under Mike Harris, was known as an utter mediocrity. The real founder of the dynasty seems to have been the mother. She was known to be very influential in hard right political networks in Toronto over a long period of time and for unclear reasons.
Many of the Fords have been involved in drug traffic in various ways and times. Brother Rob was a disaster and embarrassment as mayor of Toronto. He was seen and ridiculed as a crack addict, but for some reason could not be removed from office or even arrested for possession.
Doug Ford’s involvement with drug trafficking in his younger days has been well enough documented. Many people who lived in his neighbourhood at the time recall him openly running a cannabis ring. He strangely never seemed to have any problems with the police.
As executor of his brothers will, he stole from the estate and used the money to prop up his failing label business. He was sued by the widow but the matter has vanished from view.
Ford won the leadership of the conservative party after a coup of some sort against the more moderate leader at that time, Patrick Brown. A rushed convention was obviously rigged in his favour. He got considerably fewer votes, but somehow just enough ‘points’ to win against Christine Elliot, another relatively moderate conservative.
The consistent pattern in both elections Ford has contested is that the main opposition parties failed to campaign seriously. They seemed intimidated. Most establishment media pushed very hard for Ford.
Ford has adopted various vote rigging and voter suppression techniques, mostly borrowed from American politics. Parties can no longer receive public funding to campaign. Checks on large campaign donations have been removed. It is made harder for people in poor areas to vote, by such methods as reducing the number of polling stations.
Ford seems little interested in the normal business of government. He uses his office to enrich himself and settle scores with his enemies. He has become much more open and aggressive about this since winning reelection.
He has now finally started to come up against some real resistance. However, this seems usually to make him push even harder. He and the clique around him seem to back off only to regroup and try to achieve their goals by different routes.
Only very strong resistance seems to force him to really drop any of his nefarious plans. In a few instances he appears to have given up on offensive measures. For example, the threat of a general strike ended a serious attempt to destroy the teacher’s unions.
An example of this persistence is the plan for real estate development on the ‘green belt’, by speculators with connections to Ford. These people had carved out parcels of land before hand. This was exposed by some ‘investigative reporting’.
All this did was teach this cabal to cover their tracks better. There was a flare up of public indignation, and some theatrics from Ford about ‘investigating’ his own staff. Now the developments are quietly going ahead, including the expensive highway to service them. The indignation has died down, at least for now.
Ontario conservatives seem to particularly hate the ‘progressive’ tendencies within Toronto politics. Much of what Ford does seems calculated to break the spirit of these people. This includes destroying cherished symbols of the city, such as Ontario Place and the Science Center.
However, the two really frightening things about Ford have been his attacks on the health care system and on the court system. Due to some serious interference, he has not yet been able to break the system for keeping right wing operatives from once more being inserted as judges. But the support for the health care system has been confused and demoralized.
None of this should be overly surprising. There are many factors which have been leading to this situation for a long time.
Canada historically has been a very corrupt country. There is an old saw that the biggest problem with Canada is that there was a government here before there were any people. By this they refer specifically to Ontario, which is the core from which the country grew out from.
But the problem was also with the first people who showed up in upper Canada, later Ontario, who established the tone for public discourse.
Many of the old loyalists were not people who had fought for the King in the American revolution. They were kicked out of the new American republic because they were Quakers, or of similar sects. They did not believe in fighting for anything, or having any loyalty or affiliation for anything outside their own closed communities.
Even the ones who had fought the revolution resented the way they were treated by the British military colonial administrators but were in a bind about doing anything about it. There was no where else for them to go. The British military were always very hostile To any kind of democratic tendency. Subjects were supposed to accept whatever was handed out to them.
To these people, the only legitimate form of government was a landed gentry ruling over compliant peasants. So wherever the British military went, they tried to set up a local aristocracy. In Upper Canada this was usually called the “Family Compact”. More importantly, the British administrators always set up the Scottish rite masons as their intelligence system among the population.
A fairly long essay could be written about the cultural dynamic that developed from this start. There was some serious resistance to this nonsense in early days; the MacKenzie rebellion, the Fenians, the Markham gang, and so on.
The local elite which developed in Ontario grew cunning enough to avoid provoking the population and to make a show of responding to their needs. They had been forced to accept some limited rights for the population. However, they were determined to keep people under tight control.
People are taught to think they live in a democracy, but have no idea what an actual democracy is. Instead, subservient attitudes, and ideas contrary to democracy, are carefully cultivated in the population. We have had the “respect authority” nonsense, as well as the “speak truth to power” ideas from the Quakers.
There was no concept of real democracy, where power resides with the public. The public does not speak truth to itself. Government has no authority but that granted to it by the public.
This cognitive dissonance is smoothed over by entrenching a naturalist fallacy and an attitude of “liberalism”. The former means the idea that the way things are is the best way, or only way, things can be. It is freakish to listen to some older generation middle class Ontarians insist that we have developed an ideal system of government and everything would be fine if we just elected better people.
Liberalism an obsession with ‘normality’, a hostility to anything which is seen as outside of normal. Liberals cling top naturalist fallacy and thus think they have the truth about everything. They believe they can bring society around to their ideas by their ‘superior arguments’ and are constantly surprised when they cannot.
The worst thing in middle muddle Canada, especially in Ontario, is to appear ‘unreasonable’. This is how people are lead into conceding where they should not, on matters of right. When ‘reason ‘ does not work, they blame them selves and think they must be doing something wrong.
The elite in Canada, and especially Ontario, developed some sense of limits. Canada has always been a corrupt, “businessman’s” country. But there was an understanding that the corruption must not become apparent to the public, and that the critical systems necessary to the functioning of the society and economy were off limits to profiteering.
We developed health care and welfare systems, and labor rights, but they were always the bare minimum needed to buy off serious dissent. We always got a more limited system than was available elsewhere, a generation after most other western countries. The Canadian middle class liberal mentality often talks as though we invented these things here.
We still have a weak governance structure, designed for running a colony. There is no mechanism for reforming or modernizing it. All attempts at this have been dismal failures, including that of 1982.
Thus we have always had very poor government, especially in Ontario. Toronto’s problems with inadequate transit, traffic gridlock, flood control, and even housing result from generations of bad planning and bad city building. People currently talk as though all these problems sprang up suddenly.
Despite the inadequate government and cultural backwardness, and due to a fairly prosperous economy, this system remained reasonably stable and provident for a long time.
But since the nineteen eighties, the malign force of neoliberalism has spread among the Anglosphere countries, including Canada. All over the western world, there is an aggressive and persistent effort to break down all public institutions with the aim of creating business dictatorships.
Most of the ruling elites in Ontario, as elsewhere, either align with it or are indifferent to it. Most of the public want these institutions and services preserved, but they have no idea of how to protect them. “Civility”, “reasonableness”, and “speaking truth to power” work even less in dealing with this new kind of power complex.
The progress of neoliberalism in Ontario has been steady. We now have the smallest expenditure on public health, education, and welfare in the country. It is rated as the most corrupt province in Canada.
Ironically, the biggest breakwater against neoliberalism in Ontario has been the federal government and the rest of Canada. The federal government must respond to the whole country. In much of the country, the public is somewhat more sophisticated and better able to influence power, than more backward provinces like Ontario.
Neoliberalism really started in Canada with the free trade agreement of 1988, breaking the country open for aggressive financial capitalism. The Bob Rae New Democrat government started neoliberalism in Ontario. It actually began the attacks on the health system and social welfare as a cowardly, appeasing response to oligarchic opposition and intimidation.
The breakdown of public services really got going with the Harris government. That a government like that lasted more than a year is a shame on the public which allowed it. The pattern was established, of a public unable to respond effectively to attacks on public services and the public interest.
There were some elements who had an idea what needed to be done, but they were attacked, not by the Harris government and supporters, but by the rigidly entrenched forces of ‘normalcy’ and ‘reasonableness’. Things like tax strikes, a general strike, and serious direct actions were aggressively undermined. These were ‘unCanadian’ and instead we should ‘engage’ the Harris government and talk them down from it; speak truth to power, superior argumentation, and so on.
It seems to have been airbrushed out of history that the Harris government really collapsed, and Harris quit, when direct action methods began to be effectively employed. A mind set seems to have become established that nothing can be done when “ignorant people” come into office, except to wait for them to go away. Nothing was ever done to reverse the damage done by the Harris regime.
A big advantage of mass immigration into Canada, and into Ontario, is that we have some elements of the population who have not had this ‘respect authority’ nonsense drilled into them for generations. They came from countries where they do not need it explained to them what “authority”, in that sense of the term, is about. Their children, established in the country, and often well educated, do not want Canada to degenerate into that kind of country.
These are the people who usually organize serious resistance to authoritarians and authoritarianism. They have driven most of the social progress in this country in modern times. They are behind most of the resistance to neoliberalism. However, their effect had always been partly nullified by the prevalent mentality of old stock Canadians.
The economic conditions created by neoliberalism is now having a severe effect on the public’s capacity to mobilize to assert its interests. The larger proportion of the more recent immigrants in the country is having a hard time establishing itself and is in no position to cause trouble. But older populations are also losing the means to organize themselves, even where they have retained the knowledge and inclination.
Economic conditions are making the political engagement style of ‘activism’ harder. But this is becoming less effective anyway. It is shown by many examples that economic hardship beyond a critical point makes direct action, including violent forms of resistance, easier.
We do not want conditions to get to a point where serious violence is necessary to achieve necessary change. We still have conditions in Canada, and in Ontario, where a mostly non violent political transformation is possible.
However, the approach people in Ontario are taking to dealing with the kind of government we now have, is not going to work. A much more aggressive approach is needed. There is some debate about what type of strategy is needed, but not enough yet.
This post is not about the exact type of approach to be used. That can be a subject for subsequent posts. However, I try to avoid being overly prescriptive about most things.
If we look at the international situation, we can see plenty of examples in recent years of how the people of many countries have thrown out oligarchies and created governments serving to their own needs. They have pursued a variety of ways of achieving this. None of them succeeded by being deferential to authority and speaking truth to power.
What their experiences should tell us about how to deal with governments such as that of Doug the Thug, is that you do not talk with them at all. You force them out of office. You adjust the basic laws of the polity to insure an adequate screening process and an impeachment process.
Ford should never have been allowed to run for office. The conservative party should have been told to choose a new leader and to correct their system for choosing one. As soon as he started acting corruptly and against constitutionality, he should have been brought before some form of review process and removed.
That would be much better than having to go in with clubs to get him out.
A challenge is facing Ontarians. It seems very likely that Ford will call an early election. It is very likely he will win it because there is no effective opposition party.
If one of the opposition parties won election in spite of itself, it is clearly not going to be able to govern. As with the governments after the Harris fiasco, they will be unable to reverse what the Ford government has done. They are utterly incompetent and cowardly, and some are also pretty corrupt.
Further, they accept all the basic premises behind neoliberalism. They are unable to consider socialist or progressivist concepts. Obviously, if people are going to continue to accept electoralism, a new political party is needed as a vehicle for these concepts.
It is also obvious that mere electoralism will not be enough. A transforming political party will have to be connected to a transforming popular movement. It is basic that the public will have to grow the capacity to fight it out in the streets.
Yet Ontario is a subnational government. Running Ford out of office through the side door will have limited benefit while we also have a neoliberal government in Ottawa. Yet it would have positive benefits for the whole country by providing an example to the people of other provinces, and a warning to Canadian oligarchy.
However, it really does not look like Ontarians are up to the challenge. These kind of developments will likely happen in other Atlanticist countries first. Then, likely in some other province in Canada.
Conditions will continue to deteriorate in Ontario. It will get much worse before people start to seriously rise up. Ontarians have had it pretty good for a long time, but are going to live through difficult times.
During the depression of the 1930s in Alberta, there was a right wing politician, Aberhart, who told the public; “if you have not suffered enough yet, you are free to suffer some more.” He then proceeded to make most people there suffer some more.
Ontarians are going to suffer more until they grow the brain and backbone to deal with what is making them suffer. This will require overcoming eight to ten generations of authoritarian conditioning, and the ‘shit eater’ attitudes engendered by it. It also includes learning to work together to create resilient organizations.
It also requires imagining a better way of living, a better way of organizing society. A big problem is people who think we can simply go back to an ideal world that never existed, before the neoliberal age and the reactionary conservative governments of the past thirty years. A thorough reconstruction of government has become necessary and it will not happen through the present structure.
This will require a mobilized public forcing the changes it needs. For those people for whom this is still a particularly radical idea, Ford and friends have plenty of shit yet to serve up to you. You are free to go on eating it.
Or, perhaps Ontario can lead the way for Canada. We can use the crisis of neoliberalism as an opening to finally get out of the military colony authoritarian mindset and begin to progress culturally.
Very interesting and enlightening article, although depressing.