Authoritarian Fordism in Ontario Trumps the Far Right Elsewhere
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 1669 ... September 18, 2018
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Authoritarian Fordism in Ontario Trumps the Far Right Elsewhere
Leo Panitch
On the day the Ford government’s ham-fisted attempt to alter the balance of political forces in Toronto came to a head in open confrontation with the judiciary, the international media’s attention was focused on a far right political party winning third place in the Swedish election with 17 per cent of the vote.
Any mention abroad of what was happening in Ontario -- with a population larger than Sweden’s, and where the party in government had recently secured over 40 per cent of the vote -- was notably thin on the ground.
Yet the rapidity, as well as the scope, of the new Ontario government’s intervention to change the basis of a... municipal election that was already in motion in one of the world’s leading cities arguably exceeds what any other far right government has yet done.
The disdain for conventional democratic political norms, alongside the very explicitness of the intent to thereby secure a considerable narrowing of the political space, has been especially breathtaking.
