Except how "Left Leaning" is it when it actually *saves* money when overall costs at looked at?
Quite a number of 'rightist' European nations with a higher standard of living than we have, and higher average income, let alone greater GDP per Capita, believe investment in 'the common good' pays off handsomely over the longer term. How 'conservative' is that? Child care, dental care, subsidized transit systems, drugs, you name it. Nations like Austria, Germany and others have provided such for generations. And when their politics move even further to the 'right', those social programs are left intact, albeit with economies affected to make delivery more efficient.
As you have stated many times yourself, GO Transit saves the costs of building more highways. Is that a 'move to the Left'? Or just "common sense", the phrase being applied in a non-jingoistic manner?
Well, we are kind of on the same wavelength. Maybe I’m not saying it well.
I don’t see Ontario as being right-leaning at all. While we bristle at too direct an accusation of privilege or discrimination, we realise that our society is not ‘equal’ by any means and all parties are addressing that in some way at some pace or another. Ford’s populism buys into that implicitly, which differentiates him from a true ‘righty’. The nations you cite aren’t rightist at all, they just have built productive economies that generate lots of wealth, and they agree government will redistribute that wealth.
‘Right’ implies acceptance of current inequalities as just differences based on merit or hard work or correct working of a system that government refrains from intervening in. ‘Left’ implies government intervening to adjust a system that isn’t able to work justly on its own., or to accelerate social change faster than the sysrem is able to.
Why anyone is promising benefits to seniors without adding rigourous means testing is what I don’t get. There are some seniors living in poverty, yes - but it’s not a universal, in fact it’s stepping around the huge number who are able to pay.
My theory is that right now the (well disguised) agenda is addressing intergenerational economic disparity. The biggest benefits in the current platform address millenial-boomer disparity. They arguably help gender and racial inequality also, but generational benefit swamps that. We are doing this without drawing attention to the issue - it’s politics, after all. In Canada we don’t point fingers at privilege, ever when it exists...we are too polite for that. Unlike the US where it’s clear that older white guys have the most, and are determined to hang onto it, and say so.
None of our platforms are being positioned as ‘better use of money’. I really doubt that public-funded daycare will be more effective than what exists today. It will simply remove a hardship to young parents (I do think the hardship exists, btw). Similarly, cheaper fares does not improve transit effectiveness. It is being positioned as removing a hardship from the less affluent who are already using transit. I agree it may grow ridership, but we still ought to be declaring who we are taking the money from to fund the subsidy.
In those other countries, that social contract is more explicit. We need to fess up.
- Paul
