The Harris Hall of Hypocrisy!
Graeme Bacque (gbacque@idirect.com)
Sun, 25 Oct 1998 06:27:09 -0500
October 25, 1998
Harris shrugs off responsibility
STEP RIGHT UP, ladies and gents! Don't miss the most hair-raising house
of horrors on the midway - the Harris Hall of Hypocrisy!
Our dazzling display of humbuggery begins with that master mountebank
himself, Mike Harris. Listen with bated breath as the Premier of Ontario
says:
``We are not government!''
Well, right. If you're going to be a populist outsider (this is known as
The Reagan Ploy), a David pitched bravely against the Goliath of Special
Interest Groups, what are you going to say once you've concentrated
enough power in your own hands, behind closed cabinet doors, to satisfy
a veritable Stalin?
What are you going to tell your provincial Tory convention? You're going
to shrug off responsibility for the mess, as Harris did last week.
You're going to say it's not your fault. Honestly. He actually said it:
``We are not government. We're the people who came to fix government.''
Coulda fooled me. Harris swept into power with all the certainty and
bravado of a schoolyard bully, so sure he knew how to do everything,
even though he'd never been anywhere but the golf course and never read
anything more than Mr. Silly. He wiped out the labour laws, slashed pay
equity to deprive 100,000 of the poorest-paid women the millions owing
them, and threw the entire school system into costly, disruptive chaos.
He drove half a million Ontario children into ever-worsening poverty and
hunger by cutting welfare a draconian 21.6 per cent. He was the sworn
enemy of women, dismantling the province's family support plan, cutting
shelter funds, cancelling non-profit housing in a single blow, tossing
out rent control and taking the scalpel to hospitals so recklessly that
5,000 nurses lost their jobs.
A populist, as Harris pretends to be, supposedly reflects the public
will, but time and again, he has bulldozed ahead with his
anti-democratic agenda in the face of huge public dissent. He destroyed
the well-functioning city government of Toronto because, according to an
``insider'' book by journalist John Ibbitson, he was furious with the
city's anti-smoking laws and he was in a snit with mayor Barbara Hall's
support for the Days of Action. Our entire civic structure is still
reeling from his forced amalgamation.
What makes all this nuttiness worthy of a carnival sideshow is the
Tories' unblushing fakery. The Premier - the very one who loves to
intone solemnly about ``responsibility'' and ``accountability'' - is now
pretending that he is not the government and furthermore nothing is his
fault.
Huge tax increases threaten to crush small businesses because of Harris'
clumsy messing about with the tax structure? Harris postures and poses
as the scourge of municipal governments and the defender of small
businesses. (``Asinine,'' comments a regional councillor).
After unleashing the unaccountable Hospital Restructuring Commission to
wreak havoc with forced hospital closings and costly mergers, without
ever supplying the promised millions for home care, the Premier was
shocked - shocked! - to notice the emergency-care crisis last week.
Ambulances were hopelessly circling Toronto with their freight of the
sick and dying, with 18 of the 19 emergency rooms closed. Somehow (gosh
darn it, how do these things happen?) the $225 million that the Tories
had loudly pledged to hospitals six months ago had never arrived.
``I'm embarrassed, I'm disappointed, I am frustrated,'' exclaimed
Harris, who is not the government. He started showing up at hospitals
for photo-ops, handing over cheques - a deed that was suddenly in his
power.
Another thing that might embarrass Harris, if he were the government, is
the Tory compulsion to micromanage and control every detail of
everything, whether they know how to do it or not. (They've got sex
snoops looking under the beds of welfare mums and, though not one of
them can utter a grammatical sentence, they've seized control of the
curriculum.)
Now they'll give money to hospitals only if the medical staff agrees to
the Tories dictating every detail of care, from cleaning procedures to
medical treatment time lines.
Quality education? Six hundred schools, rural and urban may be forced to
close under their simplistic formula. A cap on class sizes? From Wawa to
Welland, class sizes are swelling as teachers get fired. Math teachers
have been writing to tell me the Tories can't do 'Rithmetic - that
expensive TV commercial about ``all we're asking the teachers for is
another 25 minutes a day'' is either the worst case of screwed-up math
since I did Grade 10 geometry or the biggest lie since ``I did not have
sex with that woman.'' High school teachers are taking on whole extra
classes, not just extra minutes, so the Tories can lay off more
teachers.
Well, somebody is noticing that the Emperor has no clothes. A Tory poll
in Greater Toronto this month showed that 57 per cent of women think the
Tories are doing a bad job and should be replaced.
If women stay smart, stay focused and vote, they could make Mikey's
little fantasy come true. And then he really won't be the government.
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Michele Landsberg's column usually appears in The Star Saturday and
Sunday. E-mail address is mlandsb@thestar.ca
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