The Ontario Liberals and Long-Term Care
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- Published on Thursday, 18 February 2016 05:15
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1222 .... February 18, 2016
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The Ontario Liberals and Long-Term Care:
The Struggle Against Privatization
Justin Panos
Governments across Canada have been caught in a fiscal bind over the entire period of neoliberalism. On the one hand, they have pursued austerity and restraint almost without interruption since the 1990s; and, on the other, they remain under pressure to deliver some minimal social security for welfare, healthcare, pensions and so forth. Since the eruption of the financial crisis in 2008 this contradiction, a core tension of meeting social needs in capitalist societies, has gotten worse. The combination of a long depression in economic growth and permanent austerity in government budgeting has further cramped government fiscal capacities. This has led to all kinds of efforts, following the new public management organization of... the state, to privatize, contract-out, marketize and so on, government functions and services.
In Canada, the government of Ontario loves to trumpet its record of having the lowest per capita programme spending in the country. Since the Mike Harris Common Sense Revolution of the 1990s, it has done as much -- or more -- to gut the capacity of the public sector as any government in Canada. The Liberals under Premiers Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne have done nothing to overturn this policy regime. Indeed, the much referenced 2012 Drummond Commission on the Reform of Ontario's Public Services, prepared for the Liberal government, took the neoliberal public management administrative reforms a step further and gave particular emphasis to the privatization and P3ing of the public sector. An especially prominent example of the public sector crisis in Ontario is the long-term care (LTC) sector. It illustrates well how the policies of neoliberal austerity attempt to bolster capital accumulation while displacing the costs of the crisis onto workers, the elderly and the poor.