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The Shape of Things to Come in Ontario

From today’s Toronto Star:  Tory leader chides city unions — Toronto strike galls taxpayers, Tim Hudak says in his first day on the job”

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. If you liked living in Toronto with the political climate of the mid-1990’s, you’ll love what’s coming in a couple of years. Ontario’s political pendulum is swinging right again. People are getting frustrated at the Liberals’ half-assed attempts to undo the damage from the last time the Tories were in power. (See my earlier remarks regarding the Toronto strike.) As a result, they are champing at the bit for the Tories to come back and “fix” things again. It’ll be all the more fun to watch this time, though, since most of my friends who were on the shit end of the stick last time are now property-owning consumers more likely to care about lower taxes than a healthy social safety net.

In my most private, most cynical moments, I wonder how many people I know who proudly sported their “progressiveness” yesterday at Pride will be voting with their wallets in 2011 and make Hudak the next Premier of Ontario. In those moments, I am all-the-more glad I’m soon to leave this province for America, where the pendulum (for the moment, at least) is going the other way. If nothing else, the Americans make less pretense at social justice than folks around here, which makes the injustice a little less galling.