{"id":2157,"date":"2007-08-03T15:01:34","date_gmt":"2007-08-03T19:01:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacingtoronto.ca\/?p=2157"},"modified":"2013-01-21T13:37:58","modified_gmt":"2013-01-21T18:37:58","slug":"why-progressive-politicians-are-fulfilling-the-common-sense-revolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2007\/08\/03\/why-progressive-politicians-are-fulfilling-the-common-sense-revolution\/","title":{"rendered":"Why progressive politicians are fulfilling the Common Sense Revolution"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.mackaycartoons.net\/2001\/2001-01-09.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve had many discussions with friends over the last two or three years about the long-term ramifications of Mike Harris&#8217; Common Sense Revolution. A few years back it was starting to become clear that even though Toronto had elected a mostly progressive-minded city council, those folks were going to be responsible for enacting policies that ran counter to their stated political positions: privately-funded <a href=\"http:\/\/www.publicspace.ca\/sidewalksale.htm\">street furniture<\/a> and infrastructure; private-public partnerships for city-run facilities (like the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eyeweekly.com\/eye\/issue\/issue_05.25.06\/city\/news.php\">Nike-funded running track<\/a> at Mother Teresa Catholic Secondary School in Scarborough); constantly rising transit fares; and finally, the power for the city to tax residents.<\/p>\n<p>These acts are a direct result of the downloading of services that the PC Party hoisted upon Toronto in the mid 1990s. If the province was still paying its share of <strike>constitutionally<\/strike> legislatively mandated costs, it&#8217;s possible none of these policies would be on the table *and* we&#8217;d have a properly functioning city. Imagine.<\/p>\n<p>So it was with reluctant joy that I read Ed Keenan&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/eyeweekly.com\/eye\/issue\/issue_08.02.07\/city\/editorialdigest.php\">Editorial Digest in Eye Weekly<\/a> where he nicely lays out how the province does not need to fulfill the final stages of the Common Sense Revolution and that easing the costs of downloading should be a major election issue.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8230;This, as intellectual John Ralston Saul pointed out at the time, is a tactic straight out of the neo-liberal textbook: if what you want is smaller government but you don&#8217;t want to have an uncomfortable debate about, say, the merits of the welfare state, you shift responsibility for those things to the cities, claiming that they&#8217;ll be better administered \u00e2\u20ac\u0153closer to home.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d You then immediately cut taxes so that any successor who would like to undo those changes will need to swallow political hemlock by raising taxes to do so.<\/p>\n<p>But, of course, funding those programs from the local tax base is near impossible. And so there is, once again, a fiscal \u00e2\u20ac\u0153crisis,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d requiring \u00e2\u20ac\u0153difficult decisions.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Everyone would like to expand transit and policing and welfare, the argument then goes, but who has the money?<\/p>\n<p>And so in this way, neo-liberal governments accomplish the task of gutting the welfare state without any real debate. Following the Xs and Os in this small-government playbook, Harris downloaded provincial programs onto cities while cutting income taxes by 30 per cent.<\/p>\n<p>And look: five years after Harris left office &#8212; during, you&#8217;ll note, one of the longest sustained economic booms in Canadian history, a period of tremendous prosperity &#8212; our cities are neck-deep in a fiscal crisis, faced with the punishing choice of hiking taxes or shuttering services. Toronto faces a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153structural deficit\u00e2\u20ac\u009d of $1 billion per year, according to the Conference Board of Canada. Surprise! The Common Sense Revolution is alive and well at Toronto City Hall, and our local politicians implement Harris&#8217; plan every time they privatize a street furniture program or threaten to close a transit line.<\/p>\n<p>No one talks about this in these terms, of course, lest they be accused of fighting yesterday&#8217;s battles. But this should be a live issue in the provincial election campaign. Dalton McGuinty came into office selling himself as the antidote to Harris&#8217; revolution, not as the guardian of its legacy. He ought to be shamed into undoing the damage of Harris&#8217; years by accepting responsibility for those abandoned programs and, if necessary, inching income taxes back up to pay for them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><em>editorial cartoon from Jan. 2001, by <a href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/wp-admin\/www.mackaycartoons.net\">Graeme MacKay\/Hamilton Spectator<\/a> <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve had many discussions with friends over the last two or three years about the long-term ramifications of Mike Harris&#8217; Common Sense Revolution. A few years back it was starting to become clear that even though Toronto had elected a mostly progressive-minded city council, those folks were going to be responsible for enacting policies that<a href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2007\/08\/03\/why-progressive-politicians-are-fulfilling-the-common-sense-revolution\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"sr-only\">&#8220;Why progressive politicians are fulfilling the Common Sense Revolution&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1022,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[6371,6374,4581,3216,31,423,6372,1529,2054,6370,89,6373,19,648,391],"class_list":["post-2157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-catholic-secondary-school-in-scarborough","tag-common-sense","tag-conference-board-of-canada","tag-dalton-mcguinty","tag-election","tag-eye-weekly","tag-john-ralston-saul","tag-mike-harris","tag-nike","tag-pc-party","tag-scarborough","tag-teresa-catholic","tag-toronto","tag-toronto-city-hall","tag-usd"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Why progressive politicians are fulfilling the Common Sense Revolution - Spacing Toronto<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2007\/08\/03\/why-progressive-politicians-are-fulfilling-the-common-sense-revolution\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Why progressive politicians are fulfilling the Common Sense Revolution - Spacing Toronto\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I&#8217;ve had many discussions with friends over the last two or three years about the long-term ramifications of Mike Harris&#8217; Common Sense Revolution. 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