Ontario budget is austerity by any other name!

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MAY 22-23 at Woodsworth Residence, U of Toronto, 321 Bloor St. W., Room 20 • Friday, May 22, 7 p.m.: Europe Rising Against Austerity — Christina Palliou: Organization of Communist Internationalists of Greece (OKDE)/Spartacus; Gabriel Lafleur, railroad worker near Paris, Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, France; Tyler Mackinnon, young retail • Saturday, May 23, 10 a.m. Capitalism vs. the Environment — Jaime Gonzalez, leader of LUS (Socialist Unity League) Mexico; Prof. Patricia Perkins, York U., Environmental 1 p.m. From Ferguson to New York to Toronto – Disarm the Cops Jeff Mackler, 4 p.m. The Growing Inequality — Linda McQuaig, author and NDP candidate Toronto Centre; Prof. Louis-Philippe Rochon, Laurentian University; John Orrett, firefighter, member 7 p.m. Who are the Terrorists? — Gabriel Lafleur, railroad worker, NPA France; Manos Soufoglo, OKDE – Spartacus, Greece; Jeff Mackler, National Secretary, Socialist Action USA.

Co-sponsored by: Socialist Action / Ligue pour l’Action socialiste (Canadian state), Socialist Action (USA), Remove the Liberal smiley face and the Ontario budget delivered on April 23 is the companion piece to its regres­ sive Conservative federal cousin. Both are austerity plans, in the sense that a false panic to balance the books is used to accelerate the transfer of wealth from the working class to the capitalist class.

Ontario Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne and her finance minister, Charles Sousa, signalled that, over the next three years, spending on health care will suffer a real cut, once inflation is taken into account, and that education, training, justice and agriculture will be hit even harder.

Instead of taxing corporations and the wealthy, Queen’s Park aims to freeze public sector wages, slash workers’ benefits, along with services, and sell off profitable assets like Hydro One, the public electricity transmission util­ ity. Ontario Public Service Employees’

Union President Smokey Thomas said the government has declared war on sector worker, Socialist Action / LAS Canada.

Studies; Barry Weisleder, federal secretary, Socialist Action / LAS Canada.

National Secretary, Socialist Action USA; Ellie Carlson, representing the Network for the Elimination of Police Violence; Peter D’Gama, anti-racist activist, and SA member.

Socialist Action – Thornhill, Ontario.

and Liga Unidad Socialista (Mexico). its workers. The result is: nurses up in arms, teachers on strike at a number of schools boards, with a strike by 40,000 Ontario public service workers repre­ sented by OPSEU imminent.

“Premier Wynne’s budget sells more than just Ontario’s public assets, it sells false choices,” said Ontario Federation of Labour President Sid Ryan. “She is telling Ontarians to choose between public transit and public hydro; munici­ pal infrastructure versus hospital clo­ sures; good jobs or a balanced budget. It is a sort of budgetary ‘Hunger Games’ that pits public priorities against vital public services instead of addressing the most obvious choice: asking corpo­ rations and high-income earners to pay their fair share.”

The OFL pointed to the 370,000 On­ tario children who live in poverty; the one million workers who earn at or near the minimum wage; the one in five Ontarians who receive help from a food bank or charity; and the nearly half of all residents in the Greater Toronto Area and Hamilton who are working in precarious, part-time and insecure employment. All of this stands in stark contrast to Canada’s highest paid CEOs, who today make 171 times the average Canadian income at a time when the Ontario corporate tax rate is the lowest in North America.

Wynne’s earlier decision to fight cli­ mate change through a so-called capand-trade carbon-credits system is in­ effective, except for generating govern­ ment revenue by saddling the popula­ tion with another regressive tax, which will be felt first at the gas pump.

As for her promise, two years ago, to cut auto insurance rates by 15 percent, not even half that goal has been real­ ized.

Money earmarked for transit, high­ ways, bridges and waterworks is gross­ ly inadequate and agonizingly slowtracked. Extending beer sales to some big supermarkets could be labelled a pure distraction, were it not part of the overall privatization agenda, accompa­ nied by an added regressive tax on beer bottles. ... Freddie Gray Ontario New Democratic Party Leader Andrea Horwath warned that the Lib­ eral budget “weakens social services” because funding does not keep pace with inflation. “Ontarions didn’t vote for a platform of cuts and privatization,” said Horwath.

It “cuts education and closes schools, cuts health care and fires nurses.”

But this is the government Horwath propped up until the May 1, 2014 bud­ get when she pulled the plug on the then-minority Liberal regime. That trig­ gered the election in which Horwath presented a fiscally conservative plat­ form, which helped the Liberals win a majority of seats in the June 12, 2014 vote.

With a provincial election more than three years off, the only option now is for workers to demand that their orga­ nizations form an anti-austerity com­ mon front, like the one taking shape in Quebec.

Sorely needed is a general strike to break the bosses’ agenda, and pave the road to a Workers’ Government. n (continued from page 12: “Freddie Gray killing: Baltimore explodes”) over the extent to which police in Baltimore have adopted a highly milita­ rized approach to policing residents of our city,” Sonia Kumar, an ACLU staff attorney told The New York Times.

Baltimore, a city of over 620,000 people, is 63 percent Black. More than 23 percent of the population is below the poverty line, according to official statistics. Close to 17 percent of Baltimore’s housing stock is abandoned; in some neighborhoods entire blocks of row houses are burnt or falling down.

The official unemployment rate among Blacks is over 11 percent, not counting people who have “stopped looking,” young people who have never had a job, ex-prisoners who cannot find a job, etc. Recently, the city began shutting off water service to 25,000 residents who were behind on paying their water bills after a hike in rates.

Clearly, the murder of Freddie Gray, and the refusal of police and city au­ thorities to quickly bring the killer cops to justice, has lit a match under a powder keg. And people around the world are responding. n SOCIALIST ACTION MAY 2015 11

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