By Dave McKee
No sooner had Mark Carney announced his directive that all government departments – well, all except the military, the RCMP and Border Services – have to reduce their budgets by 15 percent over the next three years, then the corporate media began its campaign to soften people into accepting that such cuts were not only inevitable, but positive.
Sure, there have been plenty of articles about the ill effects of said reductions. These include interviews with public service workers and unions who (justifiably) fear massive job loss, pundits musing whether tax increases (for working people) could be used to reduce some of the cuts, and even the rare piece that connects (truthfully) the cuts to Carney’s military spending hikes.
But despite this content, the overwhelming message pushed by the media is that these spending cuts are necessary, that we really have no option. Whether they invoke the bogeyman of Putin, Xi or Trump as the trigger, virtually all corporate outlets want us to believe that the real pertinent discussion isn’t whether or not to cut, but how and where to cut.
Repeatedly, they remind us of how successful the Chrétien Liberals were in cutting spending and balancing the books back in the 1990s. They would have us believe that the Little Guy from Shawinigan not only did us all a kindness with his sweeping restructuring, but that it was even soothing!
Except, of course, that it’s all hogwash.
True, the Chrétien government did balance the books. But it did it through rapid-fire savage cuts to social programs. In large part, this was done through Ottawa’s unilateral reorganization of health and social transfers to provinces, which political scientist Michael J. Prince said “delivered … sudden and deep absolute cuts in transfer payments to the provinces, [where] 1993 levels of federal spending on healthcare were achieved again only in 2004.” Overall, the shortfall in cash transfers from Ottawa to the provinces during Chrétien’s time is estimated to be over $26 billion.
And let’s not forget the Liberal’s sacking of Employment Insurance. Previously called Unemployment Insurance, the program was renamed EI and substantially changed in 1996. Notably, qualification requirements were severely tightened up and benefits were chopped, but workers still paid into the plan.
It was a brilliant ruse, really. Within just a few years, largely because of restrictive qualification requirements, EI built up a surplus of $57 billion – equal to about 40 percent of Canada’s total health spending at the time – which Ottawa then used to balance budgets and offer whopping tax cuts to corporations and the very wealthy.
Far from successful or progressive, let alone “kind,” Chrétien’s spending cuts left a legacy of a widening income gap, growing poverty and underfunded, crumbling services. The damage was so profound that the Liberal health cuts from the 1990s have been pinpointed as the events which left Canada unprepared to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. The cumulative effects of the EI reforms are shockingly and sweepingly harmful for workers’ rights, poverty, gender and racial equity, physical and mental health, and union strength.
So, when the corporate media tells us that Carney’s cuts can be implemented without too much pain, because that’s what Chrétien did, they’re simply lying.
The problem is, a whole generation of working people has grown up without any memory of those days of austerity, let alone the level of program funding that preceded them. This means millions of working people don’t have a frame of reference for assessing, rejecting and confronting the lies of the corporate media today – they have to be taught this history.
And that is the role of this publication. Against the corporate media’s efforts to ideologically massage people into accepting Carney’s spending cuts and his maniacal military spending hikes, People’s Voice stands as a source of information that working people can trust and rely upon. By exposing the real dynamics behind government policies like these, and by agitating for and helping to organize resistance to them, we are a crucial part of the working-class struggle to defeat corporate power, to advance and win progressive reforms, and to build the movement for socialism.
We’re ready for the fight – let’s lean into it together.
[Photo: Mark Carney X]
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