The first indication that the Mike Harris Conservatives were unfit to govern Ontario came early.

Only weeks into their first mandate, newly minted cabinet minister John Snobelen was captured on videotape saying, “we need to invent a crisis” in the province’s education system — a system he had just been placed in charge of.

That should have tipped us off that something was seriously wrong at the core of this government — a government now seeking a third mandate under the leadership of long-time stalwart Ernie Eves.

There was a brief flurry of media attention when the Snobelen videotape was leaked to the media. After all, it showed the minister telling his senior managers about the usefulness of creating a crisis in the education system — sort of like a police chief advocating a crime wave, or a hospital administrator extolling the virtues of smoking on the cancer ward.

What is striking — with the benefit of hindsight — is how Snobelen’s wish has come true. Our education system has been almost constantly in crisis these past eight years. It’s possible that’s merely a coincidence. (It’s also possible Mel Lastman could become an articulate, well-spoken ambassador for Canada abroad.)

The Snobelen incident highlights something important about this government — that one of its central goals over the years has been to destroy public confidence in public institutions and in government itself.

That may sound contradictory. Why would a government want to destroy the public’s trust in government?

But this apparent contradiction lies at the heart of the right-wing political movement that has dominated politics in the English-speaking world for the past two decades.

The movement boils down to an attempt by the financial elite to greatly reduce the role of government, particularly in providing the wide-ranging set of public programs — health care, education, social security, etc. — that became popular in the early decades after World War II.

One approach has been to say we can’t afford such programs, even though our society grows richer each year. (It’s easier to argue this when governments are running large deficits, but the argument is also made in times of government surpluses.)

Another approach has been to destroy the public’s confidence that governments are capable of delivering such programs.

One right-wing school of thought — known as “public choice” theory — holds that all human behaviour is based on narrow self-interest, so it’s naïve to think that people in government are capable of serving a broader “public interest.”

It follows then that, since governments don’t serve some broader public good, their powers and functions should be sharply curtailed. This is, of course, exactly what the financial elite wants — governments stripped of their power to regulate corporate behaviour and redistribute society’s resources through taxes and social programs.

But this anti-government agenda can also be sold to the public, once public confidence in government is destroyed. If citizens don’t trust government to spend their money wisely, they may see tax cuts as the sensible option, thereby supporting an agenda that drains government of its resources.

Destroying public confidence in the education system was therefore crucial to the massive rollback of education (and other) programs that the Ontario Conservatives had in mind. And the formula was easy — strip money out of the system and pick a fight with teachers, who predictably became antagonistic, thereby destroying harmony in the schools. It’s no accident that Eves keeps stirring this pot with his campaign pledge to outlaw teachers’ strikes, reinforcing the notion that teachers are public enemy Number 1, rather than being potentially enormously beneficial people in the life of your child.

The Tories have largely succeeded in creating the impression that our public education system is dysfunctional and that private schools are the solution. (By creating a special tax break for sending children to private schools, the Tories further undermined public education, transferring public funding from the badly strapped public system to private schools.)

So the crisis yearned for by Snobelen and Tory backroom strategists was easily accomplished. But the sneakiness and sheer malevolence of this assault should not be passed over lightly.

Public education lies at the heart of any meaningful democracy. It is the key to an educated citizenry, to equality of opportunity and to the learning of tolerance for other cultures. By playing fast and loose with public education for ideological ends, the Conservatives have come dangerously close to slitting the jugular vein of our democracy.

It’s too late to fire Snobelen (who quit politics to spend more time on his Oklahoma ranch). But it’s not too late to fire the rest of this political wrecking crew.

Linda McQuaig

Journalist and best-selling author Linda McQuaig has developed a reputation for challenging the establishment. As a reporter for The Globe and Mail, she won a National Newspaper Award in 1989...