The Common Sense Revolution has meant different things to different people, perhaps explaining why the crowd who selected Ernie Eves for Ontario premier last month contained more businessmen than single mothers.

For the Bay Street crowd at the Conservative leadership convention, the enthusiasm is understandable. It’s hard not to like a “revolution” that’s delivered more perks than a good stock option plan.

Since the Tories came to power in Ontario with their Common Sense Revolution, the top-earning 20 per cent of Ontarians have seen their real incomes rise by 16 per cent on average, according to the latest data from Statistics Canada

What’s not to like?

The fact that the story is the reverse at the bottom end of the income scale seems to strike many at the top as quibbling. It is certainly not deterring the new Gordon Campbell led British Columbian government from following in lock step.

Defenders of the Common Sense Revolution are quick to trot out numbers showing that Ontario’s welfare ranks have shrunk in the last few years, as if this proves that former welfare recipients have been persuaded to switch to more satisfying careers in the banking and insurance sector. (Another possibility is that they’re now living on the street.)

The poor in Ontario are clearly worse off than before the Common Sense Revolution. The lowest-income 20 per cent of Ontarians have seen their real incomes fall since Mike Harris took office, according to Statistics Canada data.

In 1995, this bottom group of hundreds of thousands of people had an average after-tax income of CDN$12,405. This extremely meager average income declined by almost 3 per cent to CDN$12,049 in 1999 (the latest year available.) Since then, the economy has deteriorated, but no income data are available.

Although the poor are worse off financially, it’s possible they have derived some compensating benefits from boot camp discipline and compulsory drug testing. More likely, however, these sorts of psychic benefits are enjoyed mostly by the rich, — comforted by the thought that the poor are learning how to make their own way in the world.

The fact that the real incomes of the rich have gone up while the real incomes of the poor have gone down raises some important questions that attracted little attention at the Conservative convention.

An obvious conclusion would be that the Common Sense Revolution — which Eves vows to continue — is about transferring power and money to the rich, about giving them an even more favoured spot at the trough. But Common Sense advocates insist that their revolution also helps the poor.

Apparently this is not true, as the Statistics Canada data show. Rather, it appears that cutting welfare benefits — as the Harris government did — just makes the poor poorer.

This isn’t surprising when you think about it. Cutting anyone’s income generally has the same effect: it leaves that person with less income. It turns out that the poor are no different than the rest of us.

Theories about the peculiar nature of the poor persist however. The rich and their advocates have long resorted to all sorts of convoluted arguments to justify taking the lion’s share for themselves.

Back in the 17th century, when the market economy was just getting going, the entrepreneurial class found great merit in the new private property laws, which it was instrumental in putting in place.

These new laws allowed wealthy interests to establish private control over land that had previously been available for common use.

This was a disaster for peasants, who had long enjoyed a legal right of access to the common land, where they could graze their cattle and forage for heather, bracken and other items essential to the typical 17th century peasant lifestyle.

All this had given the peasant a basic self-sufficiency a self-sufficiency dashed with the establishment of the market economy and private property rights.

Under the new system, peasants were forced to work for wages in factories, workshops and farms, where their labour was needed.

This wasn’t a matter of choice. Peasants who opted to become homeless vagabonds rather than work under brutal conditions for below-subsistence wages were subject to laws that allowed authorities to tie them to whipping posts and give them a more convincing lesson in the merits of the market economy.

The entrepreneurs of the day justified the privatization of the common land on the grounds that it would benefit all, by preventing the over-grazing of the land.

One can certainly imagine how much better it seemed to the 17th century entrepreneur not to have all that extra cattle cluttering up the land and eating the grass.

But the late British economic historian R.H. Tawney, argued that the common land had in fact been well managed in pre-market times, often by the local peasant population itself, which strictly enforced rules that prevented over-grazing.

Tawney maintained that the key question was not whether the land would be improved by new agricultural methods, but who would do the improving and who would reap the benefits.

Certainly, the benefits were not reaped by the peasants, who lost their right to the land and were forced to endure atrocious conditions or left bleeding at the whipping posts.

Of course, the whipping posts are gone. Vagabonds are free to walk about today in Ontario; at least they are for now, since Eves beat out leadership contender Jim Flaherty who had pledged to jail the homeless.

Otherwise, much remains the same. It seems that taking things away from the poor doesn’t help the poor any more today than it did in the 17th century.

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...