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Rolling up our sleeves

June 9, 2022   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

Doug Ford’s majority win represents a mere 18% of the popular vote. Is that how democracy works?

That he was returned to power, we have the Liberals and the NDP and ourselves to blame, for Doug did little to promote his own success. He never responded to any of the quite accurate accusations hurled at him about his 82% absence from his attendance to parliament sittings; his abuse of the environment; his false promises about pushing for electric cars, his plans to decimate wide swaths of the Green Belt, his handling of the pandemic. Doug Ford only ever talked about jobs during his campaign and how many had been created but there were no statistics to back his claims.

He lied about having invested in Health Care; he actually robbed our publicly funded system of huge funds – and the same about education.

Mainly, he stayed out of the way to let voters watch the cat fights between the Liberals and the NDP and what on earth were they thinking? They had no wisdom to sit down together and see to it that between them, they might have ousted the Conservatives. A coalition between them, backed by the Greens would have been a much safer government for Ontario than the one voters sent back to Queen’s Park.

During the campaign, voters would have been engaged in watching their joint attack on the Ford government to learn why Doug Ford should not be re-elected premier and more voters would have come out to see to it that it did not happen. Ontarians may very well have seen the virtue of a coalition government for this province.

All that did happen was their egotistical folly bored the electorate so badly only 43.5% of us bothered to vote.

Then they both resigned. That was right for the Liberals and after four elections, it is time for NDP Andrea Horwath to “pass the baton.” Here is hoping the new leader of the NDP will learn from her and Steven Del Duca’s major mistake of engaging in conflict instead of focusing their ire on Doug Ford.

Here’s hoping the two new leaders agree to work together in opposition to the Conservatives, that they meet with community organizations set to conserve the Greenbelt and all of Ontario’s fragile environment; to defend people with disabilities, in poverty, homeless; to defend students and health care workers; to stop the wholesale shift of public medicine to private for-profit, corporate medicine.

And so much more. 

Those of us in the communities who stand in defence of all of that, we must roll up our sleeves and whether we voted or not, we must push back against the sure destruction Doug Ford will reign on what we value in our environment, our health care and education, our concern for people with less or nothing, people addicted to killer drugs – all of it or we will see irreparable changes. He will build those highways and endless acres of houses with no forethought as to the damages incurred. 

He will embrace the damages as unavoidable sacrifices for “progress.”

Just as we have been doing for centuries and just exactly as we know all too well we have to stop.

This is the 21^st Century. When oh when do we progress in truth? All the evidence of how we must proceed is there for all to see: that we must be who we really are and shed our skin of cruelty and irresponsibility. It is time – and almost too late for us to grow up and stop being the influence that teaches our children to fight in the play yard and practice at being bullies so they can grow and continue the style of government that exists today. 

We must begin to truly care for each other and the place we call home. We talk about travelling into space; colonizing Mars but so what? Even if we do expand our dwelling places to other planets, we will only make the same mistakes everywhere we go if we don’t stop making them here. Here, on planet Earth is where we must achieve our humanity and our love; finally release our true selves that knows that to be well, for our children to be well, everything has to be well for we cannot live successfully in a soiled and ruined nest.

We study the histories about ancient civilizations – any of them – and they are all about gladiators and conquest one nation over another and it’s ancient history, thousands of years ago but we are still just the same. Hundreds, thousands of people hungry to see two combatants seriously hurt or kill each other; with no end to one nation warring to overrun another nation – with one industry wanting to take over other industries and none of them cares how careless they are about water, land nor the beings living on it – people or wildlife, there is no difference in the lack of caring.

When do we finally turn the page to a new history?

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