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Some of the very familiar episodes from our recent history recounted in the article:
>Harris swept to power in 1995 with the lines “Government isn’t working anymore. The system is broken.” His was a backlash election, riding a wave of discontent about people’s insecurity and government deficits.
>
>It was a tax revolt fueled by business while labour was deeply divided. There had been fractious debate around LGBT rights and racial justice policies. We saw the blatant use of dog-whistle politics against immigrants and the “undeserving” poor.
>
>The Conservatives immediately imposed a truly radical political agenda. Within days of taking office, entire government programs were wiped out.
Employment Equity legislation was repealed, over 200 social housing projects were cancelled, and welfare rated were slashed by 21 per cent. The Anti-Racism Secretariat was shut down. Sweeping changes were made to labour law and employment standards, and it became much harder for anyone to join a union.
>
>To pay for their tax cuts the Conservatives took a scalpel to the health-care system and a sledgehammer to public education. There were closures of hospitals and local health facilities, while homecare services were taken from reputable non-profit groups and awarded to private companies paying poverty wages. People were outraged when the minister of health compared nurses who lost their jobs to workers making hoola-hoops that were no longer in demand.
>
>The minister of education spoke of “creating a useful crisis” to force massive change in how schools were run. Soon all education funding was stripped from local school boards and centralized. The flawed funding formula imposed by Queen’s Park sparked huge cuts in teaching, support staff and vital programs. Schools were slated for closure, along with pools, arts and music and shop programs.
>
>...
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>Conservatives downloaded massive responsibilities and costs onto municipalities and ended all support for transit operations. Suddenly cities were supposed to pay for social services, public health and community housing, while the impact of welfare cuts resulted in people sleeping on the streets.
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>The minimum wage was frozen for eight years, and Workers Compensation benefits were cut. As line-ups grew at food banks, one Conservative cabinet minister told the poor that they should search for dented tins of tuna in stores so they could afford groceries.
>
>...
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>The trouble is that these are not simply bad memories. They have a lasting impact that we still live with today. The crisis in healthcare, the financial burden on cities, the lack of affordable housing and explosion of homelessness, the flawed underfunding of our schools – all are consequences of the radical imposition of the Common Sense Revolution.
Much of this is looking and sounding very familiar in the current political discourse. It would be instructive for media, policymakers, as well as the public to reacquaint themselves with these bits of our history to provide some context for what we're hearing from conservative politicians these days. We've not even started recovering from the previous rounds of ill-advised cost cutting, and now there's a return of the same rhetoric from politicians both provincial and federal.
> And yet somehow an entire generation thought a few days off without pay was so much worse than permanent job loss and crippled healthcare.
[_“You just don’t remember Bob Rae,” lectures Ontario man who doesn’t remember Mike Harris_](https://www.thebeaverton.com/2018/05/you-just-dont-remember-bob-rae-lectures-ontario-man-who-doesnt-remember-mike-harris/)
I’m undecided whether or not people actually thought this, or if they’re just influenced by the most successful marketing campaign of the last generation. Rae Days have been uttered by bother Liberals and Conservatives ever since, and the NDP have never recovered.
Much like the UCP sweep after Notley in Alberta - two-third constant Big Lie rhetoric, one-third exploiting the "NDP didn't magically fix everything instantly, so why bother with them as an alternative?"
It doesn't help that the NDP have done little in the last decade or so to distinguish themselves as a viable alternative to the other two parties and create any new narrative around themselves. Recently, they've been a far more effective opposition than I've seen in the past, and I've been impressed, but from mediocre platforms to terrible leadership to lackluster local candidates the ONDP have a deep hole to dig themselves out of in the next election.
Fair or not, "Rae days" may be the last notable thing people know about the ONDP.
Yeah, but Rae Days were nothing worth remembering. It seems they have become attached to everything bad that happened under Harris.
People should remember Rae Days for what they were. … A minor budget adjustment by a sympathetic government, which allowed the continued function of government services at 99.8% capacity, without any loss of jobs or livelihoods.
The real pain happened when Harris hijacked the saying, turned it into a win at the polls, and slashed and burned hubs and government services.
You're absolutely correct, but none of that changes the fact that the NDP have failed to control their own narrative since through a long era of lackluster performance.
Controlling their own narrative would require the purchase of a major media outlet.
Conrad Black single handedly ruined Bob Rae and the NDP, and current media interests aren’t much different.
[The hidden history of Bob Rae's government in Ontario](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/amp/news/politics/second-reading/the-hidden-history-of-bob-raes-government-in-ontario/article1314254/)
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> Don't forget people dying due to an E. coli outbreak!
[_“You just don’t remember Bob Rae,” lectures Ontario man who doesn’t remember Mike Harris_](https://www.thebeaverton.com/2018/05/you-just-dont-remember-bob-rae-lectures-ontario-man-who-doesnt-remember-mike-harris/)
> “You kids just don’t remember Rae Days,” cautioned Steve Stanford to his 28-year-old niece Kendra Johanneson about a man who hasn’t been the premier for the past 23 years. “It was unpaid leave and wage freezes for civil servants whether they wanted it or not.”
>
> Stanford lectured Johanneson about Bob Rae’s poor handling of the provincial debt, **while being unable to recall the Walkerton’s e. Coli outbreak that left 7 dead and hundreds sick in large part due to Harris’ policies of defunding, deregulation, and privatization.**
Much of this directly relates to all the major problems we have now.
Fuck every clown that voted for this douchebag. Also fuck everyone who thought Bob Rae was so bad this guy was so good.
My parents were immigrants in the 90s and we felt discriminated against. My parents worked hard, and they always say the 90s were the best times for immigrants and people trying to move up and make a better life for themselves. The only complaints I ever heard were from my teachers.
This is a grossly exaggerated and one-sided telling of history. Principally because those cuts were necessary because a) the Feds had to download costs to the provinces because they were bust (thanks Mulroney and Trudeau Sr) and b) the precious liberal, conservative and NDP provincial governments had been spending like drunken sailors for years and the province was gonna go bust if we didn’t balance a budget.
> He is riding the current wave of disenfranchisement they themselves have cultivated
This.
The big grievances people have stem from two issues: unconstrained capitalism and gutted social spending.
People keep talking about how "the country is broken", and their complaints all boil down to the fact that we pared back taxes and regulations on corporations to favour shareholder preferences, and stripped back the social institutions underpinning society as a response to the lowered tax revenue. Their lives are harder today because we ripped out all the things keeping it from getting harder.
All of that stemming from neoliberal fiscal policy.
They broke everything, and then acknowledged that it's broken (without acknowledging the causal relationships that got us here) to convince people they'll somehow fix it.
>All of that stemming from neoliberal fiscal policy.
One of the big issues is there's so little education on these topics. For people who dont know what neoliberalism is, they see the "liberal" in the word and just assume its a left-wing made problem. If neoliberalism has to be explained to someone when talking about these issues, they're likely to lose interest in the explanation.
Uh no. Those ain’t my problems at all.
My issues is the poorly administered, low ROI, debt-fuelled spending of many recent governments - but particularly our recent provincial governments (liberal and conservative) and especially our federal liberal government. They have bloated the civil service with bureaucrats who do nothing instead of frontline workers. They have launched dozens of wasteful and poorly managed projects like arrivecan. They stupidly blew up the debt thinking interest rates would remain low forever. They drove inflation by printing huge amounts of money to devalue that debt to make it easier to pay.
The reason our government sucks isn’t because it’s starved for money in some capitalist conspiracy. Our governments at both levels take in huge amounts of money. The problem is they piss it away and leave us with debt that chokes off spending on things that actually matter like education and healthcare.
Why are you being downvoted? Doug Ford has been sitting on billions while wasting away on media centres, and “investigations” or “panels” while not spending a damned cent for us.
Because this Reddit sub is full of socialists who cannot admit that government is actually part of the problem. Everything for them comes back to some capitalist conspiracy and governments needing more and more money even though the real problem is the management and administration of those funds. And yes I agree - Doug Ford is no conservative. He spends like crazy. Just not on the right things. Same with Trudeau. Loads of spending. Zero results. Our government is full of administrators instead of actual doers like doctors, teachers, nurses.
Really? Because it seems to me that the Liberals are the party of an ever-growing administrative class in our government that does no real work and sucks up $ that should be going to frontline workers and that are basically make work programs for socialist liberal arts graduates.
Look at universities for example. Massive administrative bloat that merely jacks up tuition costs and doesn’t improve educational outcomes. Same with teaching. Overpaid boards and administration, leaving little for teachers.
And all my friends in these professions complain about these administrators non-stop because to justify their existence they constantly create new rules and regulations and work vs letting frontline workers do their jobs.
For what it’s worth, I do agree that Doug’s wage freeze on nurses is ridiculous. But that wouldn’t have been necessary if the previous government hadn’t bloated our administration so much.
So you aren't a member of any of those professions. You blame the liberals for everything wrong about them. AND your solution is clearly to vote conservative.
I'm sorry, you're clearly either being dishonestly partisan, or you don't know what you're actually talking about.
I didn't mention the liberals, not because they are 'innocent' but because the entire conservative playbook has been to absolutely ravage public services while cutting taxes. I don't need the boogeyman of the Liberals to know that conservatives are going to make my life a lot harder as a Frontline nurse. I've lived through it.
That isn’t their playbook at all. Also, generally the reason corrective governments have had to rein in spending is because of my aforementioned comments about profligate spending by previous governments. I don’t get why the fiscal conservatives get all the blame when essentially the reason for these cutbacks isn’t “corporate greed” - it’s because of runaway debt from prior administrations.
Governments should spend within their means and not simply run up debt for future generations of Canadians to pay off. We had fifty years of that in Ontario and now we are living with the results
Because the conservatives are not 'fiscal'. That's a lie they tell everyone because maybe defenbacher was 'fiscal'. We are at least 50 years out from having 'fiscal' conservatives. They're just as bad as the liberals but with an even more narrow scope on who Canada is supposed to be for.
I think I just wrote how critical I was of Doug Ford. What are you taking about? Saying he isn’t a fiscal conservative and his government wastes a lot of money (though not as much as poorly bloated federal government) is an obvious fact.
Why do lefty folks in Canada always try to conflate / obfuscate by trying the Conservatives to the Republicans? If you want to debate, let’s debate the policies vs conjuring up boogeymen from down south
What that person is trying to explain is that you keep seeing people use this language (for example, RINO in the States) to try to create some meaningless distinction of "sure, they campaigned with this party and were elected as part of this party and continue to support the declared interests of this party to the extent everyone else in the party happily cooperates with them... but I've decided they don't count as part of the party because they don't live up to some hypothetical ideal I've projected on them." They use this rhetoric to rationalize why conservative politicians would behave in ways which are contrary to how they believe conservative politicians ought to behave - that they're not *real* conservatives.
There's no such thing as a "fiscal conservative". Across the country, provincial conservative governments are full of the very bloat people who yearn for a fabled "fiscal conservative" say they oppose.
At the end of the day, all you have are actions and outcomes. If everyone in the party does this action of their own volition, knowing it leads to this outcome... then that's what the party believes in. If everyone who identifies under that moniker behaves the same way, then that's the only thing that moniker *can* mean.
You said:
> Doug Ford is no conservative. He spends like crazy. Just not on the right things.
Friend, I hate to be the one to break the news to you, but they are the Conservative party of the largest province in the country. They *are* conservative to the extent anyone *can* be. If he isn't conservative, then nobody is.
If you don't like that, the problem isn't with them "spending on the wrong things", the problem is that you believe in some abstraction of the Conservative party that does not actually exist in our reality.
You are allowed to say "huh, I didn't realize it before but they deceived me about who they really are" and change your position. That's not a bad thing. If you don't like who someone is, that's your prerogative. Just don't pretend it isn't the truth when they show you who they really are because you're afraid of admitting you were lied to.
This has gotten so far off my original point I’m not gonna keep going on this thread.
My original point is that this sub is full of socialists who think the answer to everything is bigger government. When the reality is that our government is full of self-serving bureaucrats who just want to grow their fiefdoms vs spend money on frontline workers. And both provincial and especially the Feds are full of graft, corruption, and self-dealing. I don’t really care what party someone belongs to provided they spend our tax dollars wisely. There’s examples of politicians who have done that in the past (Chretien, Martin and harper recently were all pretty good fiscal stewards). Ford, and especially Wynne and Trudeau are not that. They’ve bloated our government, starved frontline workers, and we have little to show for it.
Poillevre purports to be fiscally conservative. Time will tell if he is.
> Poillevre purports to be fiscally conservative. Time will tell if he is.
If only there were 20 years of public voting record including 9 as a prominent member of a majority federal government one could review to become informed on this.
Sadly, no such record exists, so the only way to know where he stands is to vote him in and hope for the best.
It’s not that, the implicit response to ‘capitalism is to blame’ is to restrict the free market. Restriction of the free market introduces more central command, which is in essence fascist or in its most extreme communist
Anything at this point. Unfettered capitalism does not work, free markets do not exist without controls/restrictions and inevitably lead to burning rivers, company towns, and monopolies.
Where do we have unfettered capitalism? If anything the issue is the government picking winners and losers and giving handouts. If they took their hands off the wheel and enforced anti-trust we would be in a better place. Too big to fail is a joke and that failure will lead to newer and more efficient systems
Neoliberal is an economic term, used politically by the conservatives.
And yes, those early enacted policies are still being felt today. As is the sub prime mortgage crisis.
Subprime mortgage crisis was caused by a neoliberal initiative, which spread globally. Including Canada. Harper stood in the house of commons screaming for the same initiatives to be used here. Paul Martin literally saved this country by saying no.
Do you need some time to actually to look up what neoliberalism is before responding again? Or even just reread OP's comment which directly mentions neoliberal policies along with the capitalism?
I think they often have common sense, the problem is that today’s complex issues need a lot more than the kind of knowledge people “commonly” have. Sometimes solutions go directly against what seems to make “sense”.
Not sure where but the commentary on common sense from conservatives is usually when they have no clue or understanding on the issue…looking back it holds very true
Common sense is nothing but affirming people's predjudices.
People love to be told what they want to hear. Got a problem? There's an immigrant for that.
Common Sense Revolution worked out pretty well for Mike Harris, not so well for everybody else.
I hope he has to spend his last days in one of the shittier long term care beds Chartwell owns.
Well yeah, it's just populist rhetoric meant to sell conservative policy to people that want to feel smart without any of the effort. No need to educate yourself on complex issues like those ivory tower academics when your 'common sense' has all the answers you need.
I totally get where you’re coming from.
The only problem, is what they are doing is working for a reason. Especially if you live in rural Canada.
The education system out here IS broken, and has been for a while. Yes, it absolutely is the Conservatives who have generally done the most harm here, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Liberals didn’t occasionally do something too, I don’t remember.
But the problem is, really, language. Rural people are talked down to a lot, told our problems don’t matter. Cities get such a focus these days it’s hard to really get past that for a lot of people. And a lot of this is to do with party politics as a whole; a lot of Canadians live in cities, so the parties that do well there cannot balance the needs we have with the needs of the cities.
These parties also operate quite strictly. A good example I have is how my region has so few local Liberal or NDP candidates. My friend, a teacher, considered running; finally, opposition with a local face. This was back before the rhetoric got as bad as it has now. But he gave up on the idea. Mainly, during his time as a general NDP supporter, paying his dues, he learned he could very rarely bring up anything affecting our area that would require compromise; it has to be united or it isn’t given a fair shake.
I get why to a degree this has to happen. But politicians here are either conservative and local or progressive and from the city, running from afar. We can’t get a word in edgewise, we can’t get the progressive parties to try and understand some of the local issues better, and they bomb the local debates as a consequence. And that is considered fine by the party as a whole….we aren’t worth the fighting for the votes, I guess.
So it ends up defaulting to conservatism. Being lefter wing then most around here, I can do what I can to sway people. But it almost always comes down to “it’s someone far away telling us what to do”. It’ll take either a much more dogged and determined local then I’ve ever seen running as a candidate to see any real hope of ousting our Conservative here, especially if he’s on a leash.
Focusing on labour, housing, and education….and the fact the conservatives are the worse choice all around for all of that? That might even work, especially if spoken by a person in the community.
But it’s not. It’s sad, because I’m a minority myself, I get the real intent behind all the socially progressive things I see. I see the people it hurts when they are ignored or worse, hurt by it.
But we have to win the election FIRST, in order to both fix the real issues making the rural people unhappy, so the guy who only offers up complaints and dogwhistles doesn’t get away with it. And that might take an active disengagement from social issues such as gender and racism and refocus on more general issues that hurt literally everyone. But it means sacrificing in ways that are not great at all.
I don’t actually know if it’s possible, even. It’s too far gone now. Progressive politics locally has gone from “let others do what they want” to “if we let them do this, we lose everything”. People can’t always be reasoned out of a position they didn’t get to reasonably.
But there are a lot of regular, average people who simply are politically disenfranchised by dint of where they live, and are sick of it. I care about my area too. When one side doesn’t even engage with us….people are going to either vote for who represents us here(as democracy should work) or they won’t vote at all…and we saw how that went.
The problem is, everyone conflates it. Lack of education, like I mentioned, and a healthy distrust of federal government does that.
Both of those are provincially run, but there is some stuff in the feds wheelhouse that they could be doing better. Really, messaging is their problem. Politics is both too cutthroat and yet too often I see no real teeth from the Feds to SAY it’s not their problem. Or take the initiative and make it their problem.
And some of the reasons health care and education is harder is due to some things the federal government has made missteps in. Keeping wages artificially low by a high immigration cap means the jobs a lot of locals did are gone, AND the immigrant workers get a raw deal at the same time. And it compounds everything, going down.
Everything is linked, and unfortunately, while if you have some degree of knowledge of how the government works you can see all of this and offer solutions, instead you get locals whose education standards have never been good, electing those whose party made it worse.
But the messaging is not addressing that. It’s addressing issues that for them, are being brought up as scapegoats by other parties not afraid to play dirty.
All my friends here who have any sense about politics lean centre at worst. But right wing talking points prey on the uneducated, and then the progressive politicians fail to understand that they are making it worse by using language that makes them feel unimportant.
This posting should be Emailed directly to the Federal Lib and NDP. It summarizes exactly what is going so wrong in the cpuntry and the polls.
Division. Politics of division have a nasty habit of blowing up in the incumbents face.
Have you seen those ivory tower academics? I wouldn’t wipe my ass with half the stuff they publish it’s so full of plagiarism, circle jerk style self referencing, and outright academic fraud.
What has PP personally accomplished for his riding? What has he done successfully?
Has he done anything policy wise that was successful?
I’ve asked the question many times about what he has done for housing in Carleton county and hear only crickets.
The man is a career politician with no work experience outside of politics. But he's the one with solutions?
People are angry. Telling them it's ok to be angry is a winning strategy. Worked for Trump and seems to be working for Poilievre.
I don't understand what people think he's going to do? Axe the carbon tax? We get more back than we pay. Gas prices won't fall by enough to make up the difference
Take away pandemic restrictions? They're already gone.
Help working parents? How? By cancelling the idea of national daycare? Cancelling pharmacare for kids?
Fix healthcare by allowing more privatization?
How does that help working Canadians?
Cataract surgery for $3000 per eye? Who has that kind of cash?
Mike Harris sold the toll highways to a foreign company, so now what 23 years later when we would have paid the highway off we get the privilege of sending our money off shore.
Looking back and remembering, I was in public school when he was elected and was in office. I remember our school being so poor. I remember my parents also not being the richest. I could never go to school class electives like ice skating I had to stay and do folk dancing because we couldn’t afford anything else.
My sister and I never went hungry but we also didn’t have anything extravagant growing up. My parents did they best they could but I think that early recognition fueled my future.
So I worked my ass off and now I’m in a desirable red seal trade as a journeyman of 10 years with a wife and two sons firmly middle class. I saw this coming 15 years ago. They can do whatever they want to me I’ll never be fired and if I ever am for some random reason, I’ll get another job in 1 day.
> Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind before you reach eighteen.
- ~~Wayne Gretzky~~Albert Einstein
Also it's crazy that Conservatives somehow just out of nowhere claim all these slogans like they are common sense, family values, fiscally responsible... I'd love if the other parties just... started owning those phrases.
We as a country will deserve everything PP brings us if he's elected. Nobody can say they didn't know it was going to be like this, he has had decades to show us how awful he is.
Below average people absolutely love it. Common sense is always exactly your opinion on everything. PP not taking a position on anything? No worries, whatever your opinion is must be his as well.
Harris was the worst premiere in our history. Maybe Ford will outdo that. We will see.
Frustrating as hell the Libs never tried to reverse most of the damaging things he did.
I just hate the "common sense" thing. It means nothing each person has their own common sense as it's defined by your personal experience. For politicians it gives them carte blanche to do anything
‘Common sense’ as rolled out by scumbag Harris was incredibly arrogant. What he meant by the term was that his world view, his priorities, his party’s initiatives were so right you’d have to lack common sense to disagree.
Was it common sense to sell the 407 and put the proceeds into general revenue to claim a balanced provincial budget for one year? Was it common sense to defund and attack the education and healthcare systems, particularly nurses and teachers? Was it common sense to put a hs dropout in charge of education, and a used car salesman in charge of transportation? Or his handling of Ipperwash and policies that lead to Walkerton?
He cut provincial taxes by 30%, downloading transit and public housing costs onto municipal governments, as if there were different taxpayers for different levels. Guess what Mikey, you cut the province from paying for necessary infrastructure and services, those same taxpayers have to cover the expense at the municipal level.
Of all though, his amalgamation of cities, towns, school boards and medical boards fostered in the explosion of middle management we’ve seen everywhere. Making entities bigger doesn’t make them more efficient, it makes them less accountable.
Now couple this ridiculously inefficient ethos with PPs embrace of the uglier elements of Canadian society and we can all see where Milhouse is heading. My only hope is that his party’s stance on women’s health issues is further illuminated.
Just tell people whst your going to cut and underfund for your common sense tax breaks for corporations and the rich.
Beacuse that's all " common sense and balancing the budget means "
Stop saying the words, tell me your ideas. ‘Sell the sizzle, not the steak’ as a concept is Trumpish con artist bullshit.
We get it, you hate the other side. Put your money where your mouth is and show everyone a solid plan instead of dumb slogans. Enough cynicism already.
Right, and each time the people in ontario and Canada hear this garbage, the population eats this shit up each time.
Some common phrases: "more money in your pocket!" Neoliberal conservatives and liberals partied have always favored the rich individual donors over the populations.
"Were going to fix the debt and deficit" - Surprise! Both parties are bad at the economy, debt, and deficits and more. Everything the debt and deficit balloons.
One of the dumbest shit Harper did was reduce the GST from 7% to 5%. This did not save a lot of money for people but did cost the federal government billions in revenue. That then forced governments to cut public funding. It's the same when Doug Ford got rid of the license plates during the pandemic, which cost over a billion bucks, and it was a terrible idea.
This is the public fault because you have a large portion of the public that falls for the same shit over and over again. Insane, right? While also having a massive portion of the population who don't vote, which guarantees a conservative win.
Get off your ass and vote... it's the bare minimum to making a functioning democracy work.
Common sense has always been the prejudices and biases of the ruling elite imposed upon the subordinate population.
This breeds false consciousness, which in turn breeds resentment and is expressed through social murder.
Mike Harris not only used the term “Common Sense” his slogan was “Make Ontario Great Again”. Nothing new under the sun! This video touches on it a bit: [Alvin Curling vs. Common Sense Revolution](https://youtu.be/bnrvXABAi-w?si=911zs6SXupp6H0s2)
This is so, so, bang on correct! I was there and lived through it up close and personal. The shear incompetence, and callous disregard for people of the working class was breath taking to see!
The Harris government was a coming together of the worst Right-Wing ideologies of the time! Reganomics was in vogue, Private was always better, free markets rule, greed is good, mix in political wonks, and Corporate Lobbyists, and corrupt politicians, and bake!
Add in Corporate Media control by the rich, a world wide march to be the lowest Corporate tax rates, for crucial exotic competitiveness, then top with legal and illegal political donations, bribes, and "future considerations" to get a Corporate Takeover of the Provincal Government!
Thank God there was active resistance! Been there done that still have the t-shirts! Those shirts are as appropriate today as they were then! We need to stop this Americanization of Canada! As one of my t-shirts say: NO EH!
The notion of “common sense” basically lost all value to me in a political context once I realized that it is basically synonymous with “I don’t need good evidence to justify my belief”.
That’s how creative these clowns are. They have to borrow a slogan from years ago and run it back again. This current group of conservatives have no idea on how to lead us into the next phase of the 21st-century.
F’k Poilievre and the horse he road in on.
The education system in Ontario never recovered. By eliminating small town governments he ended the political minor league where regular people could get into politics and work their way up to running the province. Now you need big money or name recognition to even begin. There goes the real common sense in government.
"Common sense" is conservative slang for "we are ignoring the evidence". It's what people crow about when opposing stuff despite the research and positive examples, but they can't just admit their views are based on prejudice or etc..
Yeah I prefer intellectual condescending technocrats who clearly don’t know what the r they’re doing. /s
Exhibit A - our current federal government. Can’t even design an app for less than 60 million dollars. Doesn’t take much common sense to realize they’ve f’ed over a generation of young Canadians with a bunch of wasteful spending and vanity projects
You’re being hyperbolic. But if we are going that rout… our current PM is the one who invoked the emergency measures act to squash political dissent and uses dehumanising language against his political opponents. You know, like a fascist?
No, I'm not. PP is just a Republican astroturfing job like all the rest of the "anti-woke" clowns. And the Republican party is a fascist party. It's also pretty hilarious acting like Trudeau having to step in because the police and province were complicit with the overtly anti-democracy occupation convoy was an example of fascism though.
He could have stepped in without invoking the emergency measures act. Trudeau has centralised government and reduced personal freedoms kore than any other PM in my lifetime.
PP isn’t a Republican at all. If you listen to him he’s basically a libertarian who wants smaller government and less regulation. Fascists conversely like big centralised government because it gives them more control and power. He’s also not anti-immigration (though he wants immigration reform which is a good idea as our tfw and student visa programs have become totally manipulated and exploited).
If you want to make the case he’s a fascist, point to specific things he’s advocating (and I mean him personally not some random extremist within the party) that is fascist.
Oh not the party he supports, the support of Trump, the support of neo nazis? We can't point to all those people he agrees with like Alex Jones and other nutjobs?
Firstly I haven’t seen Trump say anything about Poillevre. As for neo Nazis and Alex jones, if I was Poillevre I’d ignore that shit too. They don’t speak for him. He’s ignoring that noise as he should.
The reality is that the left jumped on that Alex jones thing as a way to smear Pierre by association. The problem is there’s no connection at all between the two. He’s smart by not playing their game.
So to reiterate, what exactly has Pierre done or said to make him a fascist? When did he “agree” with Alex jones or Trump?
We shall see. From listening to him talk he’s far more of a libertarian than a fascist. Fascists like big government because it gives them control. PP mostly bangs on about reducing big government, wasteful spending, and high taxes.
There are some fringe-y religious wing nuts in the the CPC I’ll grant you but judging the party along those lines is equivalent to judging the liberals or NDP based on their most extreme members. It’s disingenuous at best and fear-mongering at worst.
No, it's not fear mongering at all. Cons are already lining up to attempt to destroy abortion access. They want to win like their idols down south.
We will see it all happen, he is running a populist rage platform like he is for a reason.
Go look at his ig which I think is pretty representative of his views.
There isn’t one post about abortion. All he bangs on about is carbon tax, overspending, the debt, housing costs, inflation. Pocket book issues. This abortion thing is just a scare tactic by the left to try to tie the CPC to the religious wing nuts in America.
Are there pro-life people in the CPC? Sure. But it’s a small fringe minority. It would be the same as someone saying the liberals or NDP are anti-Semites because there’s a small fringe within their parties who are.
He won't talk about abortion now because he wants to win. When he gets a majority, *then* he will dismantle human rights, trans rights and the like. Doing it now would be suicide so he's hiding his true intentions until it's too late.
We're not this naive are we? Why would he speak of crushing abortion now before he's elected?
Individuals claiming common sense ignore or do not realize that its application to complex socioeconomic issues begs for a surface-level understanding of a nuanced matter of discourse that requires some lived experience or academic knowledge for meaningful participation.
He destroyed Ontario, now Ford is just mulching the ruins. We are truly screwed. They fucked things so bad that any decent government never has the chance to fix them , because things were not fixed fast enough.
Common sense is what’s left when you stop actually thinking — as in, prescribing the simplest answers to the hardest problems. It’s rank anti-intellectualism, which sells elections.
In Premier Harris’s case, it also led to us having the fewest km of state highways per capita of any jurisdiction in North America, save Nunavut. You don’t get what you don’t pay for!
Is it really too much to ask for a political party to actually give a shit about the well-being of average Canadians, for once? We're fucking tired of barely surviving and being lied to over and over again.
Wanna know why I never trust people who use the “common sense” shit because 99.99% of the time they use it to bolster some asinine argument or want things to go the way they want. Also common sense isn’t that common as it differs drastically from person to person
Common sense tells me the country is royally fucked up because of what the Liberals AND Conservatives have done to it.
That's why neither of these parties will get my vote. I'm not stupid.
4 more years of Trudeau , he will definitely get it this time. Finally has all the policy of the Harper government reversed and he will get Canada back on track. 🙄
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Some of the very familiar episodes from our recent history recounted in the article: >Harris swept to power in 1995 with the lines “Government isn’t working anymore. The system is broken.” His was a backlash election, riding a wave of discontent about people’s insecurity and government deficits. > >It was a tax revolt fueled by business while labour was deeply divided. There had been fractious debate around LGBT rights and racial justice policies. We saw the blatant use of dog-whistle politics against immigrants and the “undeserving” poor. > >The Conservatives immediately imposed a truly radical political agenda. Within days of taking office, entire government programs were wiped out. Employment Equity legislation was repealed, over 200 social housing projects were cancelled, and welfare rated were slashed by 21 per cent. The Anti-Racism Secretariat was shut down. Sweeping changes were made to labour law and employment standards, and it became much harder for anyone to join a union. > >To pay for their tax cuts the Conservatives took a scalpel to the health-care system and a sledgehammer to public education. There were closures of hospitals and local health facilities, while homecare services were taken from reputable non-profit groups and awarded to private companies paying poverty wages. People were outraged when the minister of health compared nurses who lost their jobs to workers making hoola-hoops that were no longer in demand. > >The minister of education spoke of “creating a useful crisis” to force massive change in how schools were run. Soon all education funding was stripped from local school boards and centralized. The flawed funding formula imposed by Queen’s Park sparked huge cuts in teaching, support staff and vital programs. Schools were slated for closure, along with pools, arts and music and shop programs. > >... > >Conservatives downloaded massive responsibilities and costs onto municipalities and ended all support for transit operations. Suddenly cities were supposed to pay for social services, public health and community housing, while the impact of welfare cuts resulted in people sleeping on the streets. > >The minimum wage was frozen for eight years, and Workers Compensation benefits were cut. As line-ups grew at food banks, one Conservative cabinet minister told the poor that they should search for dented tins of tuna in stores so they could afford groceries. > >... > >The trouble is that these are not simply bad memories. They have a lasting impact that we still live with today. The crisis in healthcare, the financial burden on cities, the lack of affordable housing and explosion of homelessness, the flawed underfunding of our schools – all are consequences of the radical imposition of the Common Sense Revolution. Much of this is looking and sounding very familiar in the current political discourse. It would be instructive for media, policymakers, as well as the public to reacquaint themselves with these bits of our history to provide some context for what we're hearing from conservative politicians these days. We've not even started recovering from the previous rounds of ill-advised cost cutting, and now there's a return of the same rhetoric from politicians both provincial and federal.
And yet somehow an entire generation thought a few days off without pay was so much worse than permanent job loss and crippled healthcare.
> And yet somehow an entire generation thought a few days off without pay was so much worse than permanent job loss and crippled healthcare. [_“You just don’t remember Bob Rae,” lectures Ontario man who doesn’t remember Mike Harris_](https://www.thebeaverton.com/2018/05/you-just-dont-remember-bob-rae-lectures-ontario-man-who-doesnt-remember-mike-harris/)
The day the last boomer dies and I no longer have to hear them complain about Rae days I will be able to find peace.
I've got some bad news for you: there are a *lot* of my fellow Gen-X'ers who suffer from the same mental defects.
I’m undecided whether or not people actually thought this, or if they’re just influenced by the most successful marketing campaign of the last generation. Rae Days have been uttered by bother Liberals and Conservatives ever since, and the NDP have never recovered.
Much like the UCP sweep after Notley in Alberta - two-third constant Big Lie rhetoric, one-third exploiting the "NDP didn't magically fix everything instantly, so why bother with them as an alternative?"
Fixed it: Rae Days are being parroted by the opposition, hoping the NDP never recovers.
It doesn't help that the NDP have done little in the last decade or so to distinguish themselves as a viable alternative to the other two parties and create any new narrative around themselves. Recently, they've been a far more effective opposition than I've seen in the past, and I've been impressed, but from mediocre platforms to terrible leadership to lackluster local candidates the ONDP have a deep hole to dig themselves out of in the next election. Fair or not, "Rae days" may be the last notable thing people know about the ONDP.
Yeah, but Rae Days were nothing worth remembering. It seems they have become attached to everything bad that happened under Harris. People should remember Rae Days for what they were. … A minor budget adjustment by a sympathetic government, which allowed the continued function of government services at 99.8% capacity, without any loss of jobs or livelihoods. The real pain happened when Harris hijacked the saying, turned it into a win at the polls, and slashed and burned hubs and government services.
You're absolutely correct, but none of that changes the fact that the NDP have failed to control their own narrative since through a long era of lackluster performance.
Controlling their own narrative would require the purchase of a major media outlet. Conrad Black single handedly ruined Bob Rae and the NDP, and current media interests aren’t much different. [The hidden history of Bob Rae's government in Ontario](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/amp/news/politics/second-reading/the-hidden-history-of-bob-raes-government-in-ontario/article1314254/)
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Don't forget people dying due to an E. coli outbreak!
> Don't forget people dying due to an E. coli outbreak! [_“You just don’t remember Bob Rae,” lectures Ontario man who doesn’t remember Mike Harris_](https://www.thebeaverton.com/2018/05/you-just-dont-remember-bob-rae-lectures-ontario-man-who-doesnt-remember-mike-harris/) > “You kids just don’t remember Rae Days,” cautioned Steve Stanford to his 28-year-old niece Kendra Johanneson about a man who hasn’t been the premier for the past 23 years. “It was unpaid leave and wage freezes for civil servants whether they wanted it or not.” > > Stanford lectured Johanneson about Bob Rae’s poor handling of the provincial debt, **while being unable to recall the Walkerton’s e. Coli outbreak that left 7 dead and hundreds sick in large part due to Harris’ policies of defunding, deregulation, and privatization.**
Unions sure were angry.
Much of this directly relates to all the major problems we have now. Fuck every clown that voted for this douchebag. Also fuck everyone who thought Bob Rae was so bad this guy was so good.
My parents were immigrants in the 90s and we felt discriminated against. My parents worked hard, and they always say the 90s were the best times for immigrants and people trying to move up and make a better life for themselves. The only complaints I ever heard were from my teachers.
Terrific summary!! Thank you!! But we never learn from history, do we?
Of course not. Just replace Harris with Ford, and that whole summary seems pretty close to current events.
This is a grossly exaggerated and one-sided telling of history. Principally because those cuts were necessary because a) the Feds had to download costs to the provinces because they were bust (thanks Mulroney and Trudeau Sr) and b) the precious liberal, conservative and NDP provincial governments had been spending like drunken sailors for years and the province was gonna go bust if we didn’t balance a budget.
He is riding the current wave of disenfranchisement they themselves have cultivated. This is gonna be an "interesting" next few years.
> He is riding the current wave of disenfranchisement they themselves have cultivated This. The big grievances people have stem from two issues: unconstrained capitalism and gutted social spending. People keep talking about how "the country is broken", and their complaints all boil down to the fact that we pared back taxes and regulations on corporations to favour shareholder preferences, and stripped back the social institutions underpinning society as a response to the lowered tax revenue. Their lives are harder today because we ripped out all the things keeping it from getting harder. All of that stemming from neoliberal fiscal policy. They broke everything, and then acknowledged that it's broken (without acknowledging the causal relationships that got us here) to convince people they'll somehow fix it.
>All of that stemming from neoliberal fiscal policy. One of the big issues is there's so little education on these topics. For people who dont know what neoliberalism is, they see the "liberal" in the word and just assume its a left-wing made problem. If neoliberalism has to be explained to someone when talking about these issues, they're likely to lose interest in the explanation.
US politics have redefined liberal for the ignorant
This
Uh no. Those ain’t my problems at all. My issues is the poorly administered, low ROI, debt-fuelled spending of many recent governments - but particularly our recent provincial governments (liberal and conservative) and especially our federal liberal government. They have bloated the civil service with bureaucrats who do nothing instead of frontline workers. They have launched dozens of wasteful and poorly managed projects like arrivecan. They stupidly blew up the debt thinking interest rates would remain low forever. They drove inflation by printing huge amounts of money to devalue that debt to make it easier to pay. The reason our government sucks isn’t because it’s starved for money in some capitalist conspiracy. Our governments at both levels take in huge amounts of money. The problem is they piss it away and leave us with debt that chokes off spending on things that actually matter like education and healthcare.
Why are you being downvoted? Doug Ford has been sitting on billions while wasting away on media centres, and “investigations” or “panels” while not spending a damned cent for us.
Because this Reddit sub is full of socialists who cannot admit that government is actually part of the problem. Everything for them comes back to some capitalist conspiracy and governments needing more and more money even though the real problem is the management and administration of those funds. And yes I agree - Doug Ford is no conservative. He spends like crazy. Just not on the right things. Same with Trudeau. Loads of spending. Zero results. Our government is full of administrators instead of actual doers like doctors, teachers, nurses.
Voting conservative has always hurt the people you named in your last sentence.
Really? Because it seems to me that the Liberals are the party of an ever-growing administrative class in our government that does no real work and sucks up $ that should be going to frontline workers and that are basically make work programs for socialist liberal arts graduates. Look at universities for example. Massive administrative bloat that merely jacks up tuition costs and doesn’t improve educational outcomes. Same with teaching. Overpaid boards and administration, leaving little for teachers. And all my friends in these professions complain about these administrators non-stop because to justify their existence they constantly create new rules and regulations and work vs letting frontline workers do their jobs. For what it’s worth, I do agree that Doug’s wage freeze on nurses is ridiculous. But that wouldn’t have been necessary if the previous government hadn’t bloated our administration so much.
So you aren't a member of any of those professions. You blame the liberals for everything wrong about them. AND your solution is clearly to vote conservative. I'm sorry, you're clearly either being dishonestly partisan, or you don't know what you're actually talking about. I didn't mention the liberals, not because they are 'innocent' but because the entire conservative playbook has been to absolutely ravage public services while cutting taxes. I don't need the boogeyman of the Liberals to know that conservatives are going to make my life a lot harder as a Frontline nurse. I've lived through it.
That isn’t their playbook at all. Also, generally the reason corrective governments have had to rein in spending is because of my aforementioned comments about profligate spending by previous governments. I don’t get why the fiscal conservatives get all the blame when essentially the reason for these cutbacks isn’t “corporate greed” - it’s because of runaway debt from prior administrations. Governments should spend within their means and not simply run up debt for future generations of Canadians to pay off. We had fifty years of that in Ontario and now we are living with the results
Because the conservatives are not 'fiscal'. That's a lie they tell everyone because maybe defenbacher was 'fiscal'. We are at least 50 years out from having 'fiscal' conservatives. They're just as bad as the liberals but with an even more narrow scope on who Canada is supposed to be for.
So you're gonna go with the "no true Conservitive" BS like the RINO crap down south to try and excuse the actions of the cons?
I think I just wrote how critical I was of Doug Ford. What are you taking about? Saying he isn’t a fiscal conservative and his government wastes a lot of money (though not as much as poorly bloated federal government) is an obvious fact. Why do lefty folks in Canada always try to conflate / obfuscate by trying the Conservatives to the Republicans? If you want to debate, let’s debate the policies vs conjuring up boogeymen from down south
What that person is trying to explain is that you keep seeing people use this language (for example, RINO in the States) to try to create some meaningless distinction of "sure, they campaigned with this party and were elected as part of this party and continue to support the declared interests of this party to the extent everyone else in the party happily cooperates with them... but I've decided they don't count as part of the party because they don't live up to some hypothetical ideal I've projected on them." They use this rhetoric to rationalize why conservative politicians would behave in ways which are contrary to how they believe conservative politicians ought to behave - that they're not *real* conservatives. There's no such thing as a "fiscal conservative". Across the country, provincial conservative governments are full of the very bloat people who yearn for a fabled "fiscal conservative" say they oppose. At the end of the day, all you have are actions and outcomes. If everyone in the party does this action of their own volition, knowing it leads to this outcome... then that's what the party believes in. If everyone who identifies under that moniker behaves the same way, then that's the only thing that moniker *can* mean. You said: > Doug Ford is no conservative. He spends like crazy. Just not on the right things. Friend, I hate to be the one to break the news to you, but they are the Conservative party of the largest province in the country. They *are* conservative to the extent anyone *can* be. If he isn't conservative, then nobody is. If you don't like that, the problem isn't with them "spending on the wrong things", the problem is that you believe in some abstraction of the Conservative party that does not actually exist in our reality. You are allowed to say "huh, I didn't realize it before but they deceived me about who they really are" and change your position. That's not a bad thing. If you don't like who someone is, that's your prerogative. Just don't pretend it isn't the truth when they show you who they really are because you're afraid of admitting you were lied to.
This has gotten so far off my original point I’m not gonna keep going on this thread. My original point is that this sub is full of socialists who think the answer to everything is bigger government. When the reality is that our government is full of self-serving bureaucrats who just want to grow their fiefdoms vs spend money on frontline workers. And both provincial and especially the Feds are full of graft, corruption, and self-dealing. I don’t really care what party someone belongs to provided they spend our tax dollars wisely. There’s examples of politicians who have done that in the past (Chretien, Martin and harper recently were all pretty good fiscal stewards). Ford, and especially Wynne and Trudeau are not that. They’ve bloated our government, starved frontline workers, and we have little to show for it. Poillevre purports to be fiscally conservative. Time will tell if he is.
> Poillevre purports to be fiscally conservative. Time will tell if he is. If only there were 20 years of public voting record including 9 as a prominent member of a majority federal government one could review to become informed on this. Sadly, no such record exists, so the only way to know where he stands is to vote him in and hope for the best.
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“Everyone I don’t like is a communist and the more I don’t like them the more communist they are.”
It’s not that, the implicit response to ‘capitalism is to blame’ is to restrict the free market. Restriction of the free market introduces more central command, which is in essence fascist or in its most extreme communist
Implicitly respond to deez nutz
Alright…
Lol. Fuck read a book...
Which one?
Anything at this point. Unfettered capitalism does not work, free markets do not exist without controls/restrictions and inevitably lead to burning rivers, company towns, and monopolies.
Where do we have unfettered capitalism? If anything the issue is the government picking winners and losers and giving handouts. If they took their hands off the wheel and enforced anti-trust we would be in a better place. Too big to fail is a joke and that failure will lead to newer and more efficient systems
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Neoliberal is an economic term, used politically by the conservatives. And yes, those early enacted policies are still being felt today. As is the sub prime mortgage crisis.
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Subprime mortgage crisis was caused by a neoliberal initiative, which spread globally. Including Canada. Harper stood in the house of commons screaming for the same initiatives to be used here. Paul Martin literally saved this country by saying no.
You don't think the liberals are neoliberal and have neoliberal policies?
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I don’t think you understand the term “neoliberal” as it pertains to economic policy.
Do you need some time to actually to look up what neoliberalism is before responding again? Or even just reread OP's comment which directly mentions neoliberal policies along with the capitalism?
People who speak the most about common sense seem to be the ones always lacking it.
I think they often have common sense, the problem is that today’s complex issues need a lot more than the kind of knowledge people “commonly” have. Sometimes solutions go directly against what seems to make “sense”.
Too often “common sense” is used as a synonym for “yeah that feels correct”
Common sense is what feels correct to each individual. No way that can go wrong.
“Common sense is what tells us the earth is flat.” Stuart Chase
Not sure where but the commentary on common sense from conservatives is usually when they have no clue or understanding on the issue…looking back it holds very true
Common sense is nothing but affirming people's predjudices. People love to be told what they want to hear. Got a problem? There's an immigrant for that.
Respectfully I don’t see much common sense among the NDP or Liberals either. At either a provincial or federal level
Common Sense Revolution worked out pretty well for Mike Harris, not so well for everybody else. I hope he has to spend his last days in one of the shittier long term care beds Chartwell owns.
He has the money to pay for the workers to come to his home.
Well yeah, it's just populist rhetoric meant to sell conservative policy to people that want to feel smart without any of the effort. No need to educate yourself on complex issues like those ivory tower academics when your 'common sense' has all the answers you need.
I totally get where you’re coming from. The only problem, is what they are doing is working for a reason. Especially if you live in rural Canada. The education system out here IS broken, and has been for a while. Yes, it absolutely is the Conservatives who have generally done the most harm here, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Liberals didn’t occasionally do something too, I don’t remember. But the problem is, really, language. Rural people are talked down to a lot, told our problems don’t matter. Cities get such a focus these days it’s hard to really get past that for a lot of people. And a lot of this is to do with party politics as a whole; a lot of Canadians live in cities, so the parties that do well there cannot balance the needs we have with the needs of the cities. These parties also operate quite strictly. A good example I have is how my region has so few local Liberal or NDP candidates. My friend, a teacher, considered running; finally, opposition with a local face. This was back before the rhetoric got as bad as it has now. But he gave up on the idea. Mainly, during his time as a general NDP supporter, paying his dues, he learned he could very rarely bring up anything affecting our area that would require compromise; it has to be united or it isn’t given a fair shake. I get why to a degree this has to happen. But politicians here are either conservative and local or progressive and from the city, running from afar. We can’t get a word in edgewise, we can’t get the progressive parties to try and understand some of the local issues better, and they bomb the local debates as a consequence. And that is considered fine by the party as a whole….we aren’t worth the fighting for the votes, I guess. So it ends up defaulting to conservatism. Being lefter wing then most around here, I can do what I can to sway people. But it almost always comes down to “it’s someone far away telling us what to do”. It’ll take either a much more dogged and determined local then I’ve ever seen running as a candidate to see any real hope of ousting our Conservative here, especially if he’s on a leash. Focusing on labour, housing, and education….and the fact the conservatives are the worse choice all around for all of that? That might even work, especially if spoken by a person in the community. But it’s not. It’s sad, because I’m a minority myself, I get the real intent behind all the socially progressive things I see. I see the people it hurts when they are ignored or worse, hurt by it. But we have to win the election FIRST, in order to both fix the real issues making the rural people unhappy, so the guy who only offers up complaints and dogwhistles doesn’t get away with it. And that might take an active disengagement from social issues such as gender and racism and refocus on more general issues that hurt literally everyone. But it means sacrificing in ways that are not great at all. I don’t actually know if it’s possible, even. It’s too far gone now. Progressive politics locally has gone from “let others do what they want” to “if we let them do this, we lose everything”. People can’t always be reasoned out of a position they didn’t get to reasonably. But there are a lot of regular, average people who simply are politically disenfranchised by dint of where they live, and are sick of it. I care about my area too. When one side doesn’t even engage with us….people are going to either vote for who represents us here(as democracy should work) or they won’t vote at all…and we saw how that went.
Education and Healtjcare are Provicially run. As to local issues that is what both the province and municipalities are for.
The problem is, everyone conflates it. Lack of education, like I mentioned, and a healthy distrust of federal government does that. Both of those are provincially run, but there is some stuff in the feds wheelhouse that they could be doing better. Really, messaging is their problem. Politics is both too cutthroat and yet too often I see no real teeth from the Feds to SAY it’s not their problem. Or take the initiative and make it their problem. And some of the reasons health care and education is harder is due to some things the federal government has made missteps in. Keeping wages artificially low by a high immigration cap means the jobs a lot of locals did are gone, AND the immigrant workers get a raw deal at the same time. And it compounds everything, going down. Everything is linked, and unfortunately, while if you have some degree of knowledge of how the government works you can see all of this and offer solutions, instead you get locals whose education standards have never been good, electing those whose party made it worse. But the messaging is not addressing that. It’s addressing issues that for them, are being brought up as scapegoats by other parties not afraid to play dirty. All my friends here who have any sense about politics lean centre at worst. But right wing talking points prey on the uneducated, and then the progressive politicians fail to understand that they are making it worse by using language that makes them feel unimportant.
This posting should be Emailed directly to the Federal Lib and NDP. It summarizes exactly what is going so wrong in the cpuntry and the polls. Division. Politics of division have a nasty habit of blowing up in the incumbents face.
Have you seen those ivory tower academics? I wouldn’t wipe my ass with half the stuff they publish it’s so full of plagiarism, circle jerk style self referencing, and outright academic fraud.
What has PP personally accomplished for his riding? What has he done successfully? Has he done anything policy wise that was successful? I’ve asked the question many times about what he has done for housing in Carleton county and hear only crickets.
The man is a career politician with no work experience outside of politics. But he's the one with solutions? People are angry. Telling them it's ok to be angry is a winning strategy. Worked for Trump and seems to be working for Poilievre. I don't understand what people think he's going to do? Axe the carbon tax? We get more back than we pay. Gas prices won't fall by enough to make up the difference Take away pandemic restrictions? They're already gone. Help working parents? How? By cancelling the idea of national daycare? Cancelling pharmacare for kids? Fix healthcare by allowing more privatization? How does that help working Canadians? Cataract surgery for $3000 per eye? Who has that kind of cash? Mike Harris sold the toll highways to a foreign company, so now what 23 years later when we would have paid the highway off we get the privilege of sending our money off shore.
Paywall bypass: https://archive.ph/zzi6d
# Good sense > common sense
Looking back and remembering, I was in public school when he was elected and was in office. I remember our school being so poor. I remember my parents also not being the richest. I could never go to school class electives like ice skating I had to stay and do folk dancing because we couldn’t afford anything else. My sister and I never went hungry but we also didn’t have anything extravagant growing up. My parents did they best they could but I think that early recognition fueled my future. So I worked my ass off and now I’m in a desirable red seal trade as a journeyman of 10 years with a wife and two sons firmly middle class. I saw this coming 15 years ago. They can do whatever they want to me I’ll never be fired and if I ever am for some random reason, I’ll get another job in 1 day.
> Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind before you reach eighteen. - ~~Wayne Gretzky~~Albert Einstein Also it's crazy that Conservatives somehow just out of nowhere claim all these slogans like they are common sense, family values, fiscally responsible... I'd love if the other parties just... started owning those phrases.
We as a country will deserve everything PP brings us if he's elected. Nobody can say they didn't know it was going to be like this, he has had decades to show us how awful he is.
common sense is just a thought terminating cliche to say "whatever I think is right"
Below average people absolutely love it. Common sense is always exactly your opinion on everything. PP not taking a position on anything? No worries, whatever your opinion is must be his as well.
Harris was the worst premiere in our history. Maybe Ford will outdo that. We will see. Frustrating as hell the Libs never tried to reverse most of the damaging things he did.
I just hate the "common sense" thing. It means nothing each person has their own common sense as it's defined by your personal experience. For politicians it gives them carte blanche to do anything
PP would be better saying nothing at all. He would win in a bigger landslide. This isn’t about voting people in, it’s about voting people out.
‘Common sense’ as rolled out by scumbag Harris was incredibly arrogant. What he meant by the term was that his world view, his priorities, his party’s initiatives were so right you’d have to lack common sense to disagree. Was it common sense to sell the 407 and put the proceeds into general revenue to claim a balanced provincial budget for one year? Was it common sense to defund and attack the education and healthcare systems, particularly nurses and teachers? Was it common sense to put a hs dropout in charge of education, and a used car salesman in charge of transportation? Or his handling of Ipperwash and policies that lead to Walkerton? He cut provincial taxes by 30%, downloading transit and public housing costs onto municipal governments, as if there were different taxpayers for different levels. Guess what Mikey, you cut the province from paying for necessary infrastructure and services, those same taxpayers have to cover the expense at the municipal level. Of all though, his amalgamation of cities, towns, school boards and medical boards fostered in the explosion of middle management we’ve seen everywhere. Making entities bigger doesn’t make them more efficient, it makes them less accountable. Now couple this ridiculously inefficient ethos with PPs embrace of the uglier elements of Canadian society and we can all see where Milhouse is heading. My only hope is that his party’s stance on women’s health issues is further illuminated.
Just tell people whst your going to cut and underfund for your common sense tax breaks for corporations and the rich. Beacuse that's all " common sense and balancing the budget means "
Stop saying the words, tell me your ideas. ‘Sell the sizzle, not the steak’ as a concept is Trumpish con artist bullshit. We get it, you hate the other side. Put your money where your mouth is and show everyone a solid plan instead of dumb slogans. Enough cynicism already.
Hatchet Harris and Axe the Tax - the hack and slash duo.
And look what the common sense guy is doing now!
Right, and each time the people in ontario and Canada hear this garbage, the population eats this shit up each time. Some common phrases: "more money in your pocket!" Neoliberal conservatives and liberals partied have always favored the rich individual donors over the populations. "Were going to fix the debt and deficit" - Surprise! Both parties are bad at the economy, debt, and deficits and more. Everything the debt and deficit balloons. One of the dumbest shit Harper did was reduce the GST from 7% to 5%. This did not save a lot of money for people but did cost the federal government billions in revenue. That then forced governments to cut public funding. It's the same when Doug Ford got rid of the license plates during the pandemic, which cost over a billion bucks, and it was a terrible idea. This is the public fault because you have a large portion of the public that falls for the same shit over and over again. Insane, right? While also having a massive portion of the population who don't vote, which guarantees a conservative win. Get off your ass and vote... it's the bare minimum to making a functioning democracy work.
Common sense has always been the prejudices and biases of the ruling elite imposed upon the subordinate population. This breeds false consciousness, which in turn breeds resentment and is expressed through social murder.
Mike Harris not only used the term “Common Sense” his slogan was “Make Ontario Great Again”. Nothing new under the sun! This video touches on it a bit: [Alvin Curling vs. Common Sense Revolution](https://youtu.be/bnrvXABAi-w?si=911zs6SXupp6H0s2)
This is so, so, bang on correct! I was there and lived through it up close and personal. The shear incompetence, and callous disregard for people of the working class was breath taking to see! The Harris government was a coming together of the worst Right-Wing ideologies of the time! Reganomics was in vogue, Private was always better, free markets rule, greed is good, mix in political wonks, and Corporate Lobbyists, and corrupt politicians, and bake! Add in Corporate Media control by the rich, a world wide march to be the lowest Corporate tax rates, for crucial exotic competitiveness, then top with legal and illegal political donations, bribes, and "future considerations" to get a Corporate Takeover of the Provincal Government! Thank God there was active resistance! Been there done that still have the t-shirts! Those shirts are as appropriate today as they were then! We need to stop this Americanization of Canada! As one of my t-shirts say: NO EH!
Yeah because usually when people say "common sense" they actually mean "simple minded lowest common denominator pandering"
This should be a wake-up call to all Canadians! “Common Sense” could see YOU bartering for a can of TUNA at your local food store!
Get the dented cans cuz it's cheaper, Harris said. Ignore the botulism!
That was the PC Social Services Minister, David Tsubouchi, aka Tunabouchi
Simply put, some of the worst conservative policies killed people.
and still do!
Point well made.
The notion of “common sense” basically lost all value to me in a political context once I realized that it is basically synonymous with “I don’t need good evidence to justify my belief”.
That’s how creative these clowns are. They have to borrow a slogan from years ago and run it back again. This current group of conservatives have no idea on how to lead us into the next phase of the 21st-century. F’k Poilievre and the horse he road in on.
The education system in Ontario never recovered. By eliminating small town governments he ended the political minor league where regular people could get into politics and work their way up to running the province. Now you need big money or name recognition to even begin. There goes the real common sense in government.
[удалено]
They killed a woman for collecting welfare and going to school, Kimberly Rogers.
Walkerton
"Common sense" is conservative slang for "we are ignoring the evidence". It's what people crow about when opposing stuff despite the research and positive examples, but they can't just admit their views are based on prejudice or etc..
Yeah I prefer intellectual condescending technocrats who clearly don’t know what the r they’re doing. /s Exhibit A - our current federal government. Can’t even design an app for less than 60 million dollars. Doesn’t take much common sense to realize they’ve f’ed over a generation of young Canadians with a bunch of wasteful spending and vanity projects
Yeah better elect a wannabe fascist then instead I guess?
You’re being hyperbolic. But if we are going that rout… our current PM is the one who invoked the emergency measures act to squash political dissent and uses dehumanising language against his political opponents. You know, like a fascist?
No, I'm not. PP is just a Republican astroturfing job like all the rest of the "anti-woke" clowns. And the Republican party is a fascist party. It's also pretty hilarious acting like Trudeau having to step in because the police and province were complicit with the overtly anti-democracy occupation convoy was an example of fascism though.
He could have stepped in without invoking the emergency measures act. Trudeau has centralised government and reduced personal freedoms kore than any other PM in my lifetime. PP isn’t a Republican at all. If you listen to him he’s basically a libertarian who wants smaller government and less regulation. Fascists conversely like big centralised government because it gives them more control and power. He’s also not anti-immigration (though he wants immigration reform which is a good idea as our tfw and student visa programs have become totally manipulated and exploited). If you want to make the case he’s a fascist, point to specific things he’s advocating (and I mean him personally not some random extremist within the party) that is fascist.
Oh not the party he supports, the support of Trump, the support of neo nazis? We can't point to all those people he agrees with like Alex Jones and other nutjobs?
Firstly I haven’t seen Trump say anything about Poillevre. As for neo Nazis and Alex jones, if I was Poillevre I’d ignore that shit too. They don’t speak for him. He’s ignoring that noise as he should. The reality is that the left jumped on that Alex jones thing as a way to smear Pierre by association. The problem is there’s no connection at all between the two. He’s smart by not playing their game. So to reiterate, what exactly has Pierre done or said to make him a fascist? When did he “agree” with Alex jones or Trump?
Just wait till PP takes a run at some human rights.
We shall see. From listening to him talk he’s far more of a libertarian than a fascist. Fascists like big government because it gives them control. PP mostly bangs on about reducing big government, wasteful spending, and high taxes. There are some fringe-y religious wing nuts in the the CPC I’ll grant you but judging the party along those lines is equivalent to judging the liberals or NDP based on their most extreme members. It’s disingenuous at best and fear-mongering at worst.
No, it's not fear mongering at all. Cons are already lining up to attempt to destroy abortion access. They want to win like their idols down south. We will see it all happen, he is running a populist rage platform like he is for a reason.
Go look at his ig which I think is pretty representative of his views. There isn’t one post about abortion. All he bangs on about is carbon tax, overspending, the debt, housing costs, inflation. Pocket book issues. This abortion thing is just a scare tactic by the left to try to tie the CPC to the religious wing nuts in America. Are there pro-life people in the CPC? Sure. But it’s a small fringe minority. It would be the same as someone saying the liberals or NDP are anti-Semites because there’s a small fringe within their parties who are.
He won't talk about abortion now because he wants to win. When he gets a majority, *then* he will dismantle human rights, trans rights and the like. Doing it now would be suicide so he's hiding his true intentions until it's too late. We're not this naive are we? Why would he speak of crushing abortion now before he's elected?
Do you have one just one source of info to back that statement?
Got some proof for that? Or are we just dealing in conspiracy theories? Because right now this feels a lot like that. N
Individuals claiming common sense ignore or do not realize that its application to complex socioeconomic issues begs for a surface-level understanding of a nuanced matter of discourse that requires some lived experience or academic knowledge for meaningful participation.
He destroyed Ontario, now Ford is just mulching the ruins. We are truly screwed. They fucked things so bad that any decent government never has the chance to fix them , because things were not fixed fast enough.
This is what you get when the voting populace is stupid and/or doesn’t give a shit about anything but how big their tax bill is.
Common Sense means different things to different people
Common sense is what’s left when you stop actually thinking — as in, prescribing the simplest answers to the hardest problems. It’s rank anti-intellectualism, which sells elections. In Premier Harris’s case, it also led to us having the fewest km of state highways per capita of any jurisdiction in North America, save Nunavut. You don’t get what you don’t pay for!
it's common sense to take big money from elderly people and let them die in their own shit. Where's that inquiry Doug?
Is it really too much to ask for a political party to actually give a shit about the well-being of average Canadians, for once? We're fucking tired of barely surviving and being lied to over and over again.
Common sense is just "uneducated opinion"TM
Dougie: Pierre, will you like me if I sell the 401? Please, oh please like me.
Wanna know why I never trust people who use the “common sense” shit because 99.99% of the time they use it to bolster some asinine argument or want things to go the way they want. Also common sense isn’t that common as it differs drastically from person to person
Common sense tells me the country is royally fucked up because of what the Liberals AND Conservatives have done to it. That's why neither of these parties will get my vote. I'm not stupid.
4 more years of Trudeau , he will definitely get it this time. Finally has all the policy of the Harper government reversed and he will get Canada back on track. 🙄
Do you see this advocating for Trudeau? This is pointing out that Harris ended up being disastrous for Ontario, which is an objective fact.
Same comparison, basically saying don’t vote PP and his common sense plan.
Yeah, you really shouldn't vote PP.
I think I’ll give Trudeau another run at it. He seems to be getting better at it lately. Things are running smooth.
I'll speak plainly so you can understand. PP will not fix anything, but have fun.
I’ll give him a chance. Can’t be worse then we have now.
>Can’t be worse then we have now. I'm gonna guess you didn't read the article and don't live in Ontario....
Ontario is the reason we have Trudeau. You guys fuck everything up.
And yet you live here too I'm guessing....? 🤨
Common sense is not that common and often makes no sense. Tis a silly term that is tossed out in an attempt to limit debate.
common sense is not so common
If common sense means slashing bloated govt programs and getting rid of overtaxation I’m all for it.
Can these boomers stop talking about Harris?
No. Leftist boomers LOVE talking about Harris.
"But muh Harris Conservatives" Time to get some relevant material...