Ontario

Thursday June 3, 1999

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday June 3, 1999

Hold Your Nose if You Must – But Go Vote

Why bother? It has been a campaign of soundbites. Weeks of doubletalk, namecalling, diversion and trivia. Instead of rising above the din of negative rhetoric, the party leaders more often seemed to be competing in a game of How Low Can You Go. Candidates of all stripes, locally and provincially, were scarcely better as they ducked all candidate meetings in favour of shallow photo opportunities. Thanks to bad organization, voters today can expect lineups and delays. We’ve been lied to, and treated like fools. Who can blame frustrated, weary voters for wondering: Why bother?

Of course, the answer is: We have to. It matters. Avoiding the polling station isn’t an option. Much as we feel assaulted and corrupted by opportunistic and cynical politicians, by too many glib pollsters, by media pitchmen and special interests, one unalterable truth remains: Voting is probably the most important thing we’ll do today.

Consider the words of John Kenneth Galbraith: “When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against themselves. It’s a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it.” The act of casting our ballot is the best way we have of taking back the democratic process; of seizing it from the spin doctors and power brokers more attuned to ideology and self-interest than to public service.

“Who will govern the governors?” Thomas Jefferson asked, then answered: “There is only one force in the nation that can be depended upon to keep the government pure and the governors honest, and that is the people themselves. They alone, if well informed, are capable of preventing the corruption of power, and of restoring the nation to its rightful course if it should go astray. They alone are the safest depository of the ultimate powers of government.” By voting today, we invoke a contract with the people we elect. We empower them to represent us fairly and constructively. By not voting, we defer and opt out of our collective responsibility. Some, thoroughly disenchanted and disenfranchised by the political process, will argue not voting is a form of political action unto itself. But it’s not. It is nothing. Declining the ballot, as proposed by an author on today’s Forum page, may be marginally better in that it requires concrete action and expresses, to a point, the “none of the above” philosophy many have adopted. But in our view, declining the ballot still amounts to opting out. The stakes are too high for that.

This is our chance to express ourselves on the record of the incumbents. We can endorse or renounce on any basis we choose. We can base our decision on the relative adequacy of a local MPP, or we can hold our nose and vote for the least objectionable alternative. If nothing else, we can consider our ballot the permit that justifies and validates future complaints and criticism of the party in government.

H.G. Wells describes the election as “Democracy’s ceremonial, its feast, its great function …” Diminished and reduced as this campaign has been, that characterization still holds true. And if all else fails, and you just can’t summon a positive reason for that trek to the polling station, a constructive negative will do. Consider the words of American critic and pundit George Jean Nathan, who years ago wrote: “Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.” Amen to that. (Source: Hamilton Spectator Editorial)

 

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Wednesday May 5, 1999

By Graeme MacKay, Editorial Cartoonist, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday May 5, 1999

Common Sense Prequel

OK, you’ve found all 21 action figures, including the four scarce Battle Droid variations: clean, dirty, slashed and blasted.You’ve purchased all the posters, including the Jedi vs Sith battle scene and the circus-style pitch for pod races.

Welcoming plot “spoilers, ” you’ve amassed a complete set of the trading cards and begun reading the novel.

But do you have the comic books for “Star Wars: Episode One — The Phantom Menace?”

The fact is, George Lucas’ space saga owes much to comics, which fanned the flames of fan interest through most of the lean years between 1983’s Return of the Jedi and the wave of enthusiasm sparked by new “Star Wars” toys in 1995 and the first trilogy’s “Special Edition” in 1997.

From the lulls through the current storm, comics by Marvel and Dark Horse have adapted the films and expanded on Lucas’ universe. Now they’re attacking the prequel years with a comics adaptation of “The Phantom Menace.”

It’s sold as a single graphic novel costing $12.95 and also as a four-part series of comics, costing $2.95 each.

The graphic novel and the first issue of the comics are now in comic book shops. The final three comics will arrive weekly for three more weeks.

The comics have two cover options: a photo from the film, and an illustrated montage of characters by Hugh Fleming.

They were written by Henry Gilroy, who works in the comics/animation industry. He got a copy of Lucas’ script a year ago.

Translating the film to the static medium of comics is difficult, Gilroy said. “Lucas makes the most of motion and sound in his films.”

He tried to pace the story “so that every time the reader turns the page, they get a cool ‘reveal, ‘ which is what you get in a “Star Wars” movie. Every scene has something new in it.” (Source: Houston Chronicle)

 

John Snobelen Meets With the Board of Trustees

Pen & Ink caricature by Graeme MacKay (Hamilton, Ontario, Canada). Illustrated in 1997.

Why Ontario teachers went on a province-wide strike in 1997

Back in October 1997, a strike kept teachers and students out of the classroom for two weeks.

The 1997 strike was not about wages. It was about the Mike Harris-led PC government’s proposed overhaul to education.

On Oct. 7 that year, a crowd of 20,000 teachers gathered inside and outside Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens for a rally opposing Bill 160, which introduced legislation for Progressive Conservative Premier Mike Harris’s changes to education.

“If he does not move off his legislative agenda, every school in this province will be shut down,” Eileen Lennon of the Ontario Teachers’ Federation told the rally. “We will not back down.” 

Reporter Steve Erwin outlined some details of the bill.

A Meeting of the School Trustees – By Robert Harris

It would give the province control over the levying of school taxes, the ability to dictate school funding, set class sizes and teacher prep time, and allow non-certified teachers to instruct.

Erwin said the government’s stated purpose was to “improve the performance of Ontario schoolchildren.”

But teachers saw it as a pretext to cut $1 billion from the system and lay off up to 10,000 teachers.

Education Minister John Snobelen, himself a high school dropout, dismissed the “union bluster,” according to the reporter.

“I wasn’t surprised by the turnout or the rhetoric from last night,” he said. “I think that was all pretty predictable.” 

Snobelen would be replaced as education minister in a cabinet shuffle two days later. (Continued: CBC News) 

 

Wednesday February 28, 1996 

Pen & Ink caricature by Graeme MacKay – The Toronto Star, Wednesday February 28, 1996 

Toronto Day of Action

(Story: Union and Harris repeat mistakes of the past, published: The Toronto Star, February 28, 1996) Can you believe or trust union leaders who have called a strike to save their members’ jobs right after having helped defeat a New Democrat premier who had tried to protect their members’ jobs by “Rae Days” that kept them all working by taking back a bit of their salaries?But can you either believe or trust a Premier who is making exactly the same blunder that his predecessor did when new in office?

Toronto Star – Feb 28, 1996

For about the first half of his term, Bob Rae governed almost entirely on behalf of those who had put him there, organized labor and the various special interest groups. Later, Rae changed radically, although far too late to save him politically. His “Rae Days” were part of an attempt to deal with a budget deficit for which all Ontarians were – and still are – paying a ruinous price.

What Rae once did, Mike Harris is now doing.

Any yielding to union demands would be “appeasement, ” says Harris. Triumphantly, almost boastfully, Harris has declared that the strike – more exactly, its eventual, inevitable, defeat – will send out a signal to potential investors that Ontario now offers “a better business climate.”

Beyond question, the condition of the province’s business climate matters a great deal. So equally, though, does the state of social cohesion among all its citizens. By ignoring this factor, by trying to depict public servants as enemies of Ontario’s collective interests, Harris is fracturing the province exactly as Rae did initially.

It’s neither here nor that Harris is repeating Rae’s original miscalculation from a different social-economic perspective – the neo-conservative one that whatever may be good for corporations has to be good for everyone.

Although he’s not much given to reading, you’d have though that by now Harris would have taken note of the speeches of Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan – his economic ones, not his cultural ones – and have wondered why Buchanan should be soaring in the primaries at the same time as he himself is tumbling in the polls.

Pen & Ink caricature by Graeme MacKay (Hamilton, Ontario, Canada). Illustrated in February 1996.

As for the union leaders, their calling of a strike on the basis of a modest 66 per cent vote and without having shown their members the government’s counter-offer to their own call for $1.5 billion in new payouts, confirms that they have learned nothing about contemporary reality.

That reality, for public workers as well as for all workers, is harsh and disagreeable. But it’s an unavoidable one, for at least the foreseeable future. All kinds of labels have been stuck on it, from Alvin Toffler’s “third wave” to “global post-capitalism.”

Perhaps the best comment about our present economic condition, most particularly so in the context of a strike by public workers to protect jobs that hundreds of thousands of others would dearly love to have, no matter with or without job security, is contained in American economic commentator Robert Samuelson’s recently published book, The Good Life And Its Discontents.

Samuelson’s theme is that we have entered the age of “the end of entitlements.”

It’s an excruciatingly painful change of life. Vast numbers of workers have had to accept downsizing and restructuring as the new norm. For many of the young, the new norm is unemployment (close to one in five), and after that an endless cycle of part-time jobs, short-term jobs, self-employment. For all, the new norm is shrinking social programs, longer queues for medical treatment, shrunken pensions.

Hamilton Spectator – Feb. 2, 1996

We are all angry and stressed out by these different forms of a loss of entitlements, that is of the abrupt loss of all that we all once took for granted.

Among all workers, only the publicly paid ones still are behaving as if the past was the present. The past, that is, not just of tenure but of barricaded tenure. To lay off Ontario Hydro employees required severance settlements averaging $100,000 – the highest in Canadian industrial history. To lay off all but the most junior of provincial civil servant takes, typically, two years.

Ontarians simply can no longer afford these kinds of entitlements by the few. As Management Board Chair Dave Johnson has observed, “The deficit does not go on strike. The debt does not go on strike.”

One half of the way this strike will unfold thus will be determined by how and when union leaders at last learn to cope with reality.

The other half will be determined by how, and when, Harris learns from Rae that to govern is to govern for all.

At a guess, it’s going to take each side a long time to learn what their job is.

Richard Gwyn’s column normally appears Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. (Source: Toronto Star)