The Communist Party of Canada (Ontario) condemns the ongoing assault on democratic norms underway in Ontario at the hands of Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives. These attacks on democratic rights enrich developers and corporations by cutting workers’ wages and benefits , while pushing back advances won by working people.
To carry out this pro-corporate program, Ford’s Tories are using two approaches as increasingly important parts of their strategy: legislative and ministerial blitzes, while undermining parliamentary procedure and regulatory protections; and direct attacks on working class rights in an attempt to snuff out dissent. Despite being temporarily overwhelming, the wide ranging nature of these attacks also serves as a firm foundation upon which labour and the people’s movements can build a broad basis of unity and fightback.
Following their govern-by-decree style of political rule, Ford used the long winter break in provincial parliament to put the pieces in place for a blitz of legislation and ministerial orders which were introduced in late March when the house resumed.
This blitz included changes to the rules governing freedom of information (FOI) requests, cuts to post-secondary funding and OSAP, weakening local councils and expanding the role of appointed regional chairs, attacking school board democracy through the imposition of trustee caps and corporate-style executive control, and the implementation of the first Special Economic Zone at Billy Bishop Airport in Toronto. These steps are being taken to shield his scandal-prone government from further scrutiny and accountability, accelerate the drive to privatization, and override local democratic input to enrich his developer friends.
These follow a slew of similar attacks on democratic norms Ford has levelled over the years, including changing council sizes and ward boundaries, implementing strong mayor powers, taking over democratically elected school boards, and backroom sell-offs and preferential rezoning of provincial land. It’s clear that while this blitz tactic has long been a part of Ford’s overall pro-corporate strategy, his most recent assault marks a qualitative escalation, in an attempt to insulate corporate profits from the growing capitalist crisis.
Ford’s school board takeover is the poster child for the profit seeking strategy behind these blitzes. Since 2018, Ford has cut education spending to the tune of billions, continuing to deepen a crisis in education caused by successive governments. Now, having manufactured that crisis, Ford has used the justifiable anger it has caused to take over public school boards across the province, overturning democratic input – and pushback – to his regressive agenda at the local level. Now, with the takeovers complete, Ford is taking steps to “solve” the crisis he created, by setting up his appointed Board supervisors to sell millions of dollars of Board owned public lands to his private developer friends.
The second important component of this strategy is Ford’s attack on democratic norms directly, which he carries out to eliminate channels for opposition. In addition to the attacks on local decision making, Ford has waged a war on labour, student, environmental, and Indigenous organizations to clear the path for profiteering.
Cutting city councils, use of the notwithstanding clause to attack CUPE education workers on strike in 2022, using Bill 33 to attack and weaken student organizations – these are all done in an attempt to weaken the fightback against his pro-corporate agenda. Ford even tried to pre-emptively block a Palestine Solidarity rally happening on Al-Quds day in Toronto, a major escalation, in an attempt to weaken and intimidate anti-war voices protesting the Canadian state’s complicity in and profiteering from the US war machine.
While it expresses itself differently, he’s continued to repeat this strategy time and again: overwhelming resistance by moving on multiple fronts at once, and attacking democratic channels for opposition. These blitzes are designed to scatter and marginalize the labour and people’s movements, but they nonetheless build the basis for broad unity between different struggles, and create opportunities for a mass movement working together toward a people’s agenda.
To fight back against these anti-democratic attacks, the labour and people’s movements must resist constantly being drawn into disparate, disorienting struggles which pull them into multiple directions at once. The fightback must be built now by linking these struggles together through coordinated, escalating action in workplaces and on the streets. There are recent broad mobilizations that can be built on by labour-community coalitions, including mass demonstrations against Ford’s attacks on OSAP, which must be built on by the labour movement and the OFL. This coordination is even more urgent in light of the looming education sector bargaining happening this fall, with all signs pointing to a strike.
While Ford’s approach is temporarily overwhelming, it is not insurmountable. In fact, when the resistance has been able to coordinate itself into a genuine mass movement, Ford has been forced to back down and the working class have been able to defend itself and even make gains. The Communist Party of Canada (Ontario) will continue to fight to defend democratic rights, and fight alongside labour and the people’s movements to expand democracy and build workers’ power in Ontario.
