After eight years in office, the Ontario Tories were finally thrown out onOctober 2, 2003. They were replaced by a Liberal majority government thatwon 72 seats to the Toriesâe(TM) 24. The NDP, after astrong campaign, won seven seats.

As part of the Tories’ so-called Common Sense Revolution, health care, utilities and education weredefunded, with new user fees introduced, to set them firmly on track toprivatization. Taxes were cut to create a revenue crisis that willjustify further cuts and privatizations in public services. Services weredownloaded from the provincial to the municipal level with the sameintention. Standardized testing was introduced pervasively through theeducation system and a year of high school removed, both of whichundermined the quality of education.

Anti-union legislation wasintroduced, environmental regulations relaxed, tenants’ rights undermined,social assistance cut. There was an escalation in repression and anew willingness to use police to attack and repress protest violently.

The Liberals have no intention of reversing any of this. At best, theywill continue on this path at a slower and less arrogant pace than theTories.

As is virtually always the case in NorthAmerica, the electoral outcome was a poor reflection of the popular vote,which would have given both the Tories and the NDP more seats. The Liberalstook 47 per cent of the popular vote, the Tories 33 per cent and the NDP 16 per cent.

The electoral system probably distorted the outcome in another way: theelectorate voted against the Tories more than for the Liberals. As aresult, there were probably many voters with social-democratic ideals wholet their fear of another Tory term outweigh their desire to vote NDP.The NDP’s share of the popular vote is an underestimate of the popularityof their policies, and would probably have been far higher in a fairelectoral system.

While the Tories themselves are down, they are far from finished as apolitical force. After a disgraceful campaign that advertised theirmean-spiritedness, arrogance and incompetence, they still won 33 per cent of thepopular vote. This hard core of support for regressive and hatefulpolicies is another legacy of the Tories’ revolution.

The real winner in this election, however, was abstention. The Star in Torontoreports that four million of Ontario’s 7.9 million voters cast a ballot.This means the Liberals took about 1.9 million, the Tories about 1.3million, and the NDP about 640,000 votes, while the winner — abstention —beat the Liberals soundly with about 3.9 million votes. In one way, thisis encouraging to radicals: no doubt voters stayed at home on electionnight for various reasons, but it is unlikely that they stayed at homebecause they felt that none of the candidates were far enough to thepolitical right to be worth voting for.

One explanation for voter apathy was given by the Ontario CoalitionAgainst Poverty in a post-election release. Those who didn’t vote, inOCAP’s words, “are poor and working people who make sacrifices and workhard to provide for their families. They are capable of acting veryvigorously when they see something as meaningful and important. The’electoral process’, however, leaves them cold. They see no reason tosupport a candidate because, as far as they are concerned, ‘none of theabove’ will deal with the injustices that beset their lives. Beneath thepassive indignation that underlies this rejection of elections is a hugesense of grievance and anger.”

Creating a widespread sense among poor and working people that votingwon’t change things has historically been a very deliberate and usefulstrategy deployed by élites and their political parties. Frances FoxPiven and Richard Cloward discuss this in their book, Why Americans Don’tVote. The U.S. political system is based on very high levels of voterabstention by, especially, poor and working people. The idea is to createa “democracy” devoid of genuine options, where the real decisions havebeen made long before voters cast their ballots. It is working: Ontario’sabstention rate is now approaching the rate in U.S. presidential elections.

Abstention is not the only feature of the U.S. political system that theTories have helped to establish in Ontario. If the intention of arevolution is to make irreversible changes, the Tories have indeed made arevolution here. As much as the Liberals present themselves as wanting torebuild the province, to reverse what the Tories have done would take anactivist regime with massive popular support. That is not what theLiberals are.

In recent decades, the only regimes that have managed to bring aboutgenuine social gains have been regimes that were unafraid of popularmobilization and organization, recognizing that it is these things alone that haveeven a chance of standing against the power of multinational corporationsand their mobile capital. The Workers’ Party governments in parts ofBrazil, the Left formations in West Bengal and Kerala in India, the Chavezregime in Venezuela, when they have succeeded (and they have not alwayssucceeded), succeeded because they were pushed, and protected, by strongpopular movements.

The NDP in Ontario, in power before the Tories, didnot fight in this way. The Liberals, with their endorsements from thetaxpayers’ federations and the business community, certainly will not.Instead, when people demand their rights, the Liberals are likely to callthem “divisive” and repress them using many of the tools prepared for themby the Tories.

So, while it is not out of place to feel some relief that the pace of thepounding Ontarians will be taking is about to slow down somewhat, it’scritical to understand, again in OCAP’s words, that “the only change thatwill occur in Ontario is that which we are prepared to fight for and it isthe new Liberal Government that we now must target.”

Justin Podur

Justin Podur is a writer and editor for ZNet (www.zmag.org), part of Z Communications, an alternative media organization dedicated to political analysis and support for movements for social change....