The Ontario Quandary: Worst or Next-to-Worst?
All things being equal, it is better to fight a less-ruthless opponent than a more-ruthless one. <a href=www.rabble.ca>Rabble Newsby Justin Podur June 17, 2003
What is a public to do in an election where the incumbents have spent years engaging in scandals, polarizing society, abandoning its most vulnerable members, tearing the health and education infrastructure to shreds, and destroying labour standards?
Vote them out, of course.
But here’s the problem: their nearest rival is doing its best to lose the election. The opposition leader has no personality. The government’s nearest rival spent the entire last term in opposition voting with, instead of against the incumbents, on issue after issue. And their nearest rival’s campaign platform fails to distinguish itself from the neo-liberal lunacy that has had such devastating consequences.
This is the situation in Ontario, but it is increasingly a problem for every jurisdiction where people have the right to vote. Indeed, U.S. readers can probably substitute “Republicans” for “Conservatives/Tories”, “Democrats” for “Liberals,” and “Greens” for “NDP,” and be stunned — or not —by the similarities. Voting ought to give the public some power to throw a gang of crooks out of office. The trouble comes when the other option is just another gang of crooks, barely distinguishable from the first crowd.
The Conservatives have held power in Ontario since 1995. In that time, they gutted the environmental inspection infrastructure, resulting in seven deaths from contaminated drinking water in Walkerton. They tried, and partially succeeded, in privatizing the electric utility. They built, and sold, a new highway to a private corporation. They rolled back hard-won labour rights. They cut welfare benefits by 21.6 per cent and attached far more punitive conditions to “welfare fraud”. It is widely believed that this led directly to the suicide of Kimberly Rogers, a young woman who was pregnant when she killed herself under house arrest for “welfare fraud”.
The government’s political style has been to single out groups for demonization — unions, the homeless, the indigenous, people with disabilities, welfare recipients — so as to make political points by attacking them, in the media and through legislation. They were returned to office in an election in 1999, an event that demoralized the public and heightened the arrogance of the Conservatives. Another election will occur, perhaps as early as the fall, and it is clearly time for them to go.
The Liberals, however, who could replace them, are a disgrace. A quick look at their website shows it. They attack the Conservatives not for having a despicable agenda, but for not fulfilling that agenda completely enough. Instead of attacking rate hikes for public transportation even as highways were built for private profit, their plan is to regulate the new highway “exactly in line with what the Harris-Eves Tories promised, but did not deliver.”
Instead of dealing with the diversion of funds from social investment into policing and prisons, they think it, “encouraging to see the [Conservative] government offer imitations of our plan for things such as public school choice, maximum waiting times for surgery and more police on the street”. Instead of understanding that the Conservatives created a funding crisis by their tax cuts in order to destroy public services, they attack the Tories for, “violating the Taxpayer Protection Act and delaying promised tax cuts with his 2002 budget.” Instead of decrying standardized testing as a diversion from real education and serious investment in the public system, the Liberals promise to “improve student achievement across the province by 50 per cent.”
With a platform like this, and a leader in Dalton McGuinty more dedicated to declaring how similar he is to the Tories than anything else, the Liberals are the Conservatives’ best hope for winning a third election.
As bad as the Liberals are, another election victory for the Conservatives is the worst-case scenario. It would increase their arrogance and demoralize the public even more. But why should anyone vote for the Liberals?
The third party in the province is the New Democratic Party (NDP), led by Howard Hampton. This is a social democratic party, with strong links to the unions and a progressive platform which, unlike the Liberal platform, does promise to roll back some of the devastation the Conservatives have unleashed on the province. The NDP doesn't have the resources of the Liberals, won't get the same amount of airtime or media coverage, and is far behind in the polls. The Liberals, instead of realizing the gains they could make by moving left, choose to try to frighten the electorate into not voting NDP lest this result in a Tory victory. But a strong NDP campaign could push the Liberals to more humane positions, as the Democrats were pushed by the Greens (though not nearly as much as they ought to have been pushed if they wanted to win) in the 2000 U.S. elections.
What the NDP has not done, however, is explicitly join the social movements. When the NDP held power before 1995, they were constrained in all the ways that progressive governments always are: demonized in the media, threatened with capital flight, and hit with institutional barriers to reform. What a left government can do in such circumstances is fight back, empowering the people and trusting them to defend social progress. The struggle in Venezuela, under far harsher conditions and with higher stakes, is an example of this. Many in the NDP’s social movement base believe the government capitulated instead of fighting. Since elites don't often support social democratic parties, the NDP ended up losing many of its (popular) friends and retaining all of its (elite) enemies. The confusion and divisions on the left helped bring the Tories to power.
The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (www.ocap.ca) is planning a series of public actions to embarrass the Tories and contribute to their electoral defeat. They are clear that, “There is only one demand that can be put to a regime like that of Ernie Eves — GET OUT!” For whatever government follows the current Tories, OCAP has other demands: housing, living wages, and immigrant rights, for starters.
But what are voters to do? The results of the 1999 election show that Tory power is concentrated in the 905 telephone area code of suburbs around Toronto, while the city itself and the North — two communities which have suffered worst at the hands of the Tories — are against. How much of this suburban vote have the Tories alienated with their privatization schemes (suburbanites have to pay electricity bills too), their education cuts (suburban kids go to school), their health care attacks (suburbanites get sick), and their threats against immigrants (lots of immigrants live in the suburbs)? How many will stay home, disgusted with the non-alternative presented by the Liberals and convinced by the logic of the system that a vote for the NDP is a vote for the Tories (which, unfortunately, could be true in many ridings)?
The truth is that for social movements the very spinelessness of the Liberals makes them more desirable as opponents than are the ideologues, fanatics, and crooks who make up the Conservatives. All things being equal, it is better to fight a less ruthless opponent than a more ruthless one. An Israeli commentator, talking about the continuity between the Labour party and the Likud party of Ariel Sharon in that country, said he would vote Labour because he would rather live under a hypocrite than a fascist.
If an election brings the Liberals to power, it will be easy to remind the Liberals that it wasn't that they won, but that the Tories lost — and that the Liberals can be defeated in turn.
What does this mean in terms of “tactical voting”? There are plenty of people (including this author) who believe that the whole electoral system, from its basis in political parties to the system of campaign finance to its winner-take-all nature, is stacked to favour the rich and powerful. The economic system, indigenous sovereignty or autonomy, so many matters that go to the heart of what society is about are not up for decision in elections. This means that any vote at all is a tactical vote. Any vote at all is a choice of the lesser among evils. If the best case scenario for the election — an NDP victory — is unlikely, the question becomes: how much more evil is the absolute worst-case scenario (a Tory victory) from the next-to-worst (a Liberal victory)?
Advocates of the NDP point to the pitfalls of tactical voting in the 1999 election. They contend that the tactical voting approach in ridings where the NDP was strong and could have won divided the anti-Tory vote, letting the Tories win. In other ridings, where Liberals were stronger but not quite strong enough, non-tactical voting probably yielded the same result. Such a situation could be avoided by an NDP-Liberal coalition against the Tories. But this won't happen because the Liberals are unprincipled and the NDP insist (understandably) that the Liberals and Conservatives are indistinguishable. So, voters are thrown back to the question: how much worse is the worst-case from the next-to-worst? Appreciably worse, in my view.
Until the election, OCAP's position is the principled one: the campaign is anti-Tory. The message: the Tories have to be defeated. On election night, voters who feel that the electoral system has deprived them of any meaningful choice will have to decide just how to do this. The real politics happen between elections, anyhow.
Justin Podur is a freelance writer who contributes to ZNet (www.zmag.org), among other publications. With others, he has compiled some anti-Tory resources at www.en-camino.org/tory and can be reached at encamino@tools4change.org