EDITORIAL

Tories swing budget axe

The media has dubbed it the “refried budget” and treated it as a non-story. One is reminded of the farce, The Naked Gun, where the cop standing in front of a spectacularly exploding fireworks factory tells the crowd “Move along. Nothing to see here.”

Oh wait, there is the elimination of the voting subsidy for political parties, a major blow to democracy and electoral reform.

But the biggest story here is that they will eliminate the deficit one year earlier. This gives them license to cut $11 billion from public services over four years.

To achieve that they will eliminate 80,000 jobs, or about one third of the core jobs in the public service. They pretend they can hit that target through retirement and attrition, and won’t damage services—such as health care, education and environmental protection—that Canadians want and need.

They lie on both counts.

These layoffs will disproportionately hit women workers. And government figures don’t take into account the ripple effect: 80,000 people no longer working means layoffs in private retail, services and manufacturing sectors. At a time when 1.4 million Canadians are already out of work, such policies are irresponsible.

What government spending remains will be directed more to the private sector. As Toby Sanger, economist at the Progressive Economics Forum, reminds us: “Harper clearly stated in the election he wants provinces to experiment more with ‘alternate service delivery’, code for privatized health care.”

Harper says they are cutting because the economic outlook isn’t good, and they want to improve Canada’s ability to weather the next downturn. But wait: didn’t Canada’s economy survive the last slump precisely because of public sector spending and job creation?

Tories claim their budget will create jobs and protect the economy. It will do neither. What it will do is allow them to hand over $6 billion per year in tax cuts to corporations. This will pump up profits in the short-term but result in long-term economic destruction.

We are about to see a major showdown designed to break public sector unions, the first battle being the current postal workers’ strike, in which workers are defending a public service we all rely on.

Although CUPW is facing off against a Crown Corporation, rather than directly against the governmentas other public sector workers do, if Canada Post is able to beat the Postal Workers, all workers—private and public—will be the losers. But there is a mood of resistance palpable across the country. If Brigette DePape is a spark, the 50,000 members of CUPW—striking in communities across this country—are the flame of resistance in the fight against austerity.