Tory times are tough times. Tough times for Canadian families; hundreds of thousands of whom have lost their primary supporting jobs; jobs that came with benefits and pensions; jobs that allowed you to raise a family. Tough times for the hundreds of thousands of young people who have witnessed the exploding cost of higher education, a four-year degree now costs on average 460 per cent more than it did just 15 years ago, and tough times for our seniors trying to live on the rapidly devaluing Canada Pension Plan while struggling to pay exploding heating, medication and food costs.

Food banks, once a temporary stop gap solution to help struggling families survive through recession, are now institutionalized community fixtures. Families with three and four or more part time jobs now are forced to rely on their services because wages have been kept artificially low by successive Corporate Conservative Provincial and Federal governments. Homelessness was once unheard off, then it was a national shame, and now we have children living on our streets!

Open your eyes, look around Leeds Grenville, and ask yourself are you better off? What have tax cuts done for you? Has your community prospered? Have opportunities for our youth grown or disappeared? Are your neighbours doing well, getting by, or sinking into poverty? Do you even know your neighbours or is everyone so busy running from part time job, to dead end job that you haven’t had time to speak? Poverty has exploded in Leeds Grenville and our youth are fleeing looking for some opportunity for a meaningful future. Now ask yourself this question; why is it that our communities look more like George Bailey’s nightmare, and Banker Potter’s dream than was ever thought possible when It’s a Wonderful Life was filmed? It’s the result of Conservative and Liberal Corporate policy.

Politicians are elected to make choices on our behalf, and it’s their choices that have led us to where we are today. They have talked the talk at election time and then once elected, walked with Bay Street instead of our main streets. Federally NAFTA which we were assured would open the door to massive economic growth and shared prosperity has instead cost our communities thousands of good private sector jobs. Neither of our past Local MPs, Brown, or Jordan ran on a platform of slashing jobs, destroying services, enriching the already rich, or pricing education out of reach, yet that is exactly what they did once elected. Remember if the rich paid their taxes they would still be rich! Yet Conservatives especially, believe the rich can never be too rich or the poor too desperate.

Having failed to further slash corporate taxes by billions more to enrich the already enormously rich, having failed in their plan to spend billions more to build jails to house our homeless youth and our poor, and having failed to blow billions to purchase the world’s most expensive fighter jets to chase obsolete Russian propeller driven bombers, or semi literate tribesmen with $50 machine guns on burros. And then becoming the first government in the history of the commonwealth to be found in contempt of parliament, Conservatives will now be knocking on your door seeking your vote, by telling you they have found a couple of bucks for Canadian families. Nervy bunch! We know where their priorities lie, now where are yours? It’s time for a return to tax fairness.

This post first appeared on the website for OPSEU Region 4.