Adam Riggio: How Ontarians’ Memory Can Wound Doug Ford

Teachers protest Mike Harris’ main vessel of attack on public education, Bill 160. (OSSTF/Google Images)

Written by: Adam Riggio

Mike Harris’ battles with Ontario’s teachers have become legendary in this province’s union movements and its politics more generally. No one who lived through the upheaval of Ontario’s education systems in the late 1990s could have forgotten the strife and stress of it all.

Even if you ultimately believe that the Harris government’s restructuring had turned out for the best, the turbulence itself of that time inflicted suffering. Bad memory, all around.

This is the cultural memory that confronts Doug Ford’s government as they draw deep, strong lines in the sand intensifying a new battle over the working conditions of secondary school teachers throughout Ontario. 

History of Resistance and Defeat

Ford’s government stonewalls the representatives of teachers and education staff who work every day to build our young people into respectable citizens of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and the world. They do this to stoke public anger at the teachers, education staff, and children who will suffer in their drastically underfunded education system. 

Indeed, the Ford cabinet’s assault on equal opportunity in Ontario has already begun with new fees for advanced education in the International Baccalaureate program. As of September 2020, that stream of especially high-quality education will cost each student $3000 over their last two years of high school. Access to this program was previously free, requiring only good grades and enthusiasm to join.

Stonewalling, public mockery, and the imposition of unequal fees to divide further the wealthy and the unlucky have become the standard tools of the Ford government to bully, intimidate, and defeat people advocating for a more equal society. They have been part of the elitist playbook for decades.

Yet such techniques are not working now. Recent public feedback has shown strong support for the teachers’ union over the hack-and-slash policies of the Ford government. Minister Lecce’s lies about educators’ goals and the attitude of the OSSTF are largely not believed. 

Such virtuous public skepticism is more surprising because government lies and hostility successfully enabled a similar hack and slash approach to governing Ontario’s education system under Mike Harris. The Harris program cut education funding by over $1-billion and took considerable planning authority from local board control. 

The Harris government made these massive cuts over considerable public opposition, and by the end of an educators’ strike that remains the largest single labour action in North American history, the general public was broadly against what Harris had done. The strike, with more than 126,000 people on pickets, had included massive public education outreach, explaining to the public what was at risk and what the union was fighting for. 

Problem was, the cuts and restructuring had gone through anyway. Harris won a tough re-election, but retired a few years later as the long-term effects of his policies caused further pain, suffering, and poverty throughout Ontario’s population. 

How Cultural Memory Can Overcome Resentment

The Harris government’s massive cuts to public education were ultimately successful. From the time they first planned the massive permanent austerity program, the public was broadly on their side, agreeing that these entitled educators needed to be taken down a level or two. 

Conservative Party organizing in economically depressed rural areas uses people’s neighbourly resentment to turn them against government. In poor communities, the few government employees like fire fighters, nurses, and teachers, are often more well-off, despite no one being truly wealthy as we understand it today. So poorer people employed in an anemic private sector can easily be convinced to support destructive policies if it means that the government employee who can afford a slightly better life will be reduced to their level.

At the time of the education cuts in 1997, Harris was able to establish the tone of the public debate at the outside, on his government’s terms. Harris expressed a worldview in which happiness comes from the suffering of others, and Ford follows this ideology. 

We have the opportunity to understand the ideology that drives Ontario’s Conservatives (and perhaps also their conservatives). The only role equality plays is a corrupt striving for equality, driven by resentment. A person suffers from poverty, poor health, trauma, addiction, or some other means of harm. That person regards those who don’t suffer with envy: my neighbour is no different from me, yet he is happy while I suffer. 

That Inequality Is Natural and Good

Social democrats have, for decades, been tarred as the envious, resentful ones, because their conservative opponents have tarred Such an attitude has spread among American popular culture especially, which began with the success of Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, abridged and serialized in Reader’s Digest in the late 1940s. 

Hayek painted all forms of welfare state, union organizing, or even mere neighbourhood associations as totalitarian communist, for two root reasons. For one, institutions are formed through people working together for common interests. For another, he argued that individual fortunes, no matter how huge, were the natural result of individual business acumen.

From this tradition of libertarian activism comes the meme “Taxation is theft.” An individual, having built a fortune, is entitled to that fortune without any obligation to build a more fair society. Such obligations would impose on him duties to give up some of what he’s worked toward, and are therefore a form of violence on him. Advocates for equality become advocates for violence. 

This is a powerful ideology in our culture today, one that lies under much of the modern right wing, and which lies under all the decisions and declarations of Ford cabinet members that Ontario’s educators are entitled, envious, and driven solely by greed.

That the educators and their allies during the Harris years were able to turn the public against the messaging driven by this ideology is to their credit. But that turn in people’s attitudes came too late to stop the worst destruction to this most fundamental public service.

Cultural Memory, Credulity and the Limits of Resentment Politics

Here is the problem facing Ford: That tide remains turned against Conservative Party austerity. People today aged about 30 to 40 remember experiencing Harris’ education cuts while they themselves were in school. People today aged 55 to 80 remember seeing their children’s schools thrown into chaos under Harris. It is not literally a shared memory, but it amounts to hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, people who have common memories of a shared experience. 

When the same words are repeated by a government who shares those earlier priorities, and often unintentionally evoke them, people understand those words as lies. They do because they had already experienced those words as lies more than 20 years ago. People are largely too intelligent to fall for the same lies twice. 

The political culture of Ontario in 2020 is different than it was in 1997. The waves of educators’ strikes and demonstrations in American states over the last two years have changed public consciousness in general. These teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Colorado raised popular awareness throughout North America of worsening conditions in public schools. 

But the life experiences of Ontarians themselves, entire identities forged in the crucible of their schools coming under attack again and again, has taught many to know lies when they hear them.