The Warpfish Chronicles

"27 years on the planet, and I still haven't figured out what's going on."

Mike Harris -- April 28th, 2001

Why? It's because everything he does, whether I agree with it or not (and I tend to disagree a hell of a lot more than agree) he does with an arrogance that distrubs me. He reminds me of Ralph Klein or Pierre Trudeau. (And, yes, they bother me too, even the great Trudeau. He may have been a great politician, but I don't have to like him for it.)

What is it with us idolizing bullies? Do we want our sons and daughters to grow up like these people? Why do we make heroes out of these people? A hero is a single mother with two kids trying to raise her family after the husband ran off with the 'Bimbo du Jour.' But, the baby boomers, now that they've grown up, have decided they had a heck of a lot more in common with their parents then they thought -- and ran the pendulum all the way right, trying to claim what they think is rightfully theirs.

The last straw for me was two decisions this week, concerning privatization of health care and education.

What's wrong with private health care? Private health care has to turn a profit -- otherwise, nobody's going to do it. In the era of inflated returns (because of the stock market), people want huge rates of return on their investment, on the order of 50% or more.

Which means, the focus will be on the bottom line and only the bottom line. With the rare exception, things such as quality of service, available services, and good ol' decent humanity will be lost to the bottom line. When it's a government service, you could concentrate on brining the best service to everybody. When it's private, you have to concentrate on making the most money. That's the way private enterprise works.

I don't know about you, but I'd rather have a doctor who's worried about me, rather than how much money he's going to have to make off of me to keep his investors in line.

Education -- more and more reports are coming out about the distrust between the teachers and support workers, versus the school board and the Ontario government. It's turning into a 'poisoned' atmosphere, according to one report. And the children are suffering.

So what the hell does the Ontario Government do? They order the workers back to work, ignoring a school board/union agreement in the processes. They've supplanted the local process (which is why the school boards were there in the first place!), and, furthermore, cut off an avenue of process that was letting steam out. How does this help the poisoned atmosphere? How does it feel if you did a noble job that was trashed, you were treated with disrespected, and then you were ordered to do things?

You'd get mad, and then you'd leave the job if you could. Is it any wonder that educational workers act the same way?

There's been a backlast against unions recently, as they tried to wield their power in clumsy and in ways that go against the spirit of the union. (Thank the unions for the fact that the 35 hour work week is standard.) But, in this case, it's time for all labour to re-assert itself. The greed of the 80s and 90s has turned us away from social justice issues, as we all tried to get rich. So we have sweatshops, we have education problems, we have dissatisfaction from the unemployed (many of whom just want to get back into the work force, regardless of the propaganda), and, when the Baby Boomers start retiring, and start looking for their social programs and other things that they 'rightfully' deserve, they're going to find nothing there because Mike Harris dismantled them all at their insistence, twenty years ago.

If nothing else, politicians should have vision. We haven't had a lot of that lately, and Mike Harris is worse than most.

That's why I don't like Mike Harris.

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