Author: Mark Winfield, Professor, Environmental and Urban Change, York University, Canada
Ontario Premier Doug Ford has justified his early election call on the need to respond to United States President Donald Trump’s threat to impose 25 per cent tariffs on Canadian imports.
While the threat of tariffs on all Canadian imports has been paused — although Trump has since slapped levies on all steel and aluminum imports into the U.S. — Ontario voters need to reflect more than ever on the province’s circumstances and the performance of its government as they prepare to head to the polls next week.
The Ford government’s approach to the environment and climate change, as well as its policies on a range of other issues like housing, health care and education, is best understood in the context of its overall “market populist” approach to governance.
Several defining features of this model have emerged over the past six and a half years under Ford’s rule.
I told my partner last week, “I predict the lowest ever voter turnout, and a larger PC majority.” It’s like the worse things get, the less people fight it.
Because people are driven to believe, by the real results, that voting isn’t nearly as impactful as advertised.
Whether or not what you are saying is literally true about the value of voting, you are certainly expressing the very feelings that our disenfranchised and disengaged electorate feel. But it’s self-fulfilling. PC voters don’t feel that way. They never feel that way, even when they are certain to lose. I think that says something about why things go to shit so badly, so quickly.
Voting is literally the least you can do to have political influence in a democracy. In a lot of ways, it exists to alienate people from power by subtly discouraging them from seeking more direct and meaningful forms of political action. But it’s also vital.
That last bit is why I think we’re likely to see further disengagement over time. Wide representative democracy might not simply have resulted from the suffering and organizing of labor. It might still be dependent on it. That is, maybe people have to organize as labor in order to get the representative democracy to really represent them with the right leaders and the right policies. Maybe the diminished labor action is the reason why it doesn’t represent us as much as it used to. Which then leads to disengagement. And so on.
Well, let’s look at a case. The Ontario Teachers Union is a major political force. But somehow, it doesn’t go to improving affairs for Ontario teachers and certainly not for Ontario students. Rather, I think the bulk of their political influence comes in the form of their ungodly massive investment in BCE, which perverts their interests and essentially makes their interests the same as the incumbent ruling class. All our power somehow seems to get turned against us.
Edit: Excuse me, I misremembered. It’s the pension plan that invests in BCE. Not sure if my point stands.