Spotlight On Bob Rae's Provincial Record
A response: to a poster's question about whether or not Bob Rae's provincial track record would hurt him in a general election? Did I forget about the Rae Days?
The short answer is NO, the long answer is...
In hind sight, the larger view of Rae's record in Ontario is that:
Of the variables within the controls of a provincial premier, Bob Rae did a very admirable job and did it with tremendous compassion, understanding, respect and equally important, through a lens of greater focal length that leaders that were to follow Rae.
During Rae's era, the whole country was in a deep recession (remember the Canada wide 22% interest rates on bank loans, the real-estate market crash in Alberta) and yet Rae managed to save thousands of public service jobs through his ingenuity i.e. the "Social Contract" and the Rae Days. While the public servants did take a small financial hit by way of a few days of lost pay, they were not shoved heartlessly aside to join the ranks of the permanently unemployed. That was Rae's choice, and he chose wisely and with deep compassion.
The ruthless reign of Harris that followed Rae compassionate leadership, eviscerated the Ontario public service leaving many of its dependents literally on the streets . During the Harris Cruel Days, we lost more than a few days of work:
Lives were taken:
Remember the Walkerton tragedy, after water inspection services were privatized, 9 people died of ecoli poisoning;
Or, remember Dudley George, the unarmed protester killed during the reckless handling of a brewing situation on a First Nations Reserve. On November 28, 2005, former Attorney General Charles Harnick testified before the Dudley George inquiry that Harris had shouted "I want the fucking Indians out of the park" at a meeting with Ontario Provincial Police officer Ron Fox, hours before the shooting occurred;
Safety nets destroyed:
During the Harris year, welfare rolls were reduced while the number of homeless and hungry rose steeply. Ever wonder why food banks burst seemed to pop up over night during that period of time?;
Our Medical System was gutted... nearly destroyed by Harris and his henchmen. Remember all the hospital closures and the severance packages to the nurses? Admittedly, Rae's Minister of Health made some missteps too, but by comparison, Harris government bears the lion's share of bad decision making. In fact, the current medical crisis, primarily a nursing and physician shortage, combined with acute shortage of hospital beds is a direct result of the Harris amputations. More than 6000 nurses were given a pink slip by Premier Harris. Those left behind were asked to carry the burden alone. He ridiculed the once noble nursing profession with tasteless and disrespectful remarks and deeds. Does it surprise anyone, that few young people wish to enter the profession today? It will take years, if not decades to recover what was lost during the Harris years.
I could go on ... but you get the drift.
When you consider the choices made, and the damage done by Premier Mike Harris, Bob Rae looks like the wise and compassionate angel that he was.
While I'm a Dion supporter, and I am also a Rae Supporter...kinda like the Quebecker who is also a Canadian or the Canadian who is also a Quebecker. Either one has my full support.
Neither is perfect, who is? We don't expect any leader to be perfect ...wisdom, compassion and ingenuity is all we ask for.
So ask me again: Do I remember the Rae Days? Yes, yes in a most fond way!
So go a head, put the lights on Bob -- but don't say I didn't warn you...he'll sparkle like a Rae of Sunshine!
2 comments:
What do you think of Andrew Coyne's take?
And it was an expensive education. Let no one pretend that the signature achievements of the NDP years -- a near quadrupling of the deficit in one year, doubling the debt in three -- were some sort of accident. They were deliberate creations of policy. Of the more than $5-billion in additional spending that first year, just $1-billion was recession-related. The rest was discretionary -- such as the hefty pay hike for the province’s civil servants.
And the recession wasn’t all that awful. The previous decade’s was sharper: a 3.1% drop in real output, from 1981 to 1982, versus 1.9% in 1990-91. What distinguished Ontario’s experience was what came next -- that is, after that first budget: while the rest of the country recovered, Ontario languished for another two years. The Rae government raised taxes, repeatedly, in a desperate attempt to restore order to its finances. Yet revenues, as a share of GDP, were higher under the tax-cutting Harris Tories than under the NDP.
The stock value of Andrew's credibilty and expertise in economics just dropped dramatically with his claim that
"the recession wasn't that awful".
$%%#@!@.. the recession was the worst since the Great Depression.
Marc Lee, a professional economist provides a good counter-analysis/defence in this post at Tyee.
I'm not an economist, thus I will defer to the experts on this one, in this case Marc Lee over Andrew.
Andrew Coyne should send his faulty abacus in for repairs, and tone down the rhetoric...it weakens his argument and clouds his judgment.
Although I do recognize that Andrew has substantial educational credits in Economics, his professional expertise is in writing. And, as we see from the example above, he can bend and stretch facts with ease. No wonder he and the Globe parted ways.
...You asked what I thought of Andrews take.
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