Burn Your PC Membership Card: PCs Give Up Fighting for Tax Cuts

The Ottawa Citizen’s Lee Greenberg today reports that Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives won’t be fighting for tax cuts. Party leader John Tory lacking a seat in the legislature, acting Opposition leader Bob Runciman had this to say:

The reality of the situation is that most of the stakeholders seemed to have rolled over on this, even the ones who were complaining loudly prior to the budget — whether the Canadian Manufacturers (and Exporters), the (Ontario) Chamber of Commerce…

…What’s the point of continuing on this, especially when the people who are most impacted have sort of waved the white flag?

Subtext: the Progressive Conservative party follows the polls, not principles. And, even then, it really only polls interest groups, not individuals: if the Chamber of Commerce doesn’t want tax cuts, but you do, too bad.

Now, for those wondering what to do with their Progressive Conservative membership card, a helpful hint. For those with more flair, here’s another way. (And, please, if you do either, video it and put it on youtube).

P.S.: Freedom Party memberships are $10. Just sign an application and send it in with your $10 and, voila, you’re a member.

"Right Wing" Reality Check

For those who insist on deluding themselves by saying that Ontario’s “Progressive Conservative” party (you know, the one that introduced rent controls, a ban on private health insurance, the provincial income tax, etc.) is “right wing”, “centre right”, “right of the liberals” – or that it is the right party to support if you are pro-free-market/pro-capitalism – here’s more evidence to the contrary straight from the lips of party leader John Tory, as reported in today’s Cornwall Standard Freeholder:

Our party has been steadfast and unanimous in saying that (supply management) is a system that is working for the farmers, it’s working for Canada, and we should just leave it alone.

and

We should be more concerned with the fact that we’re importing Chinese apples, and who knows what kinds of pesticides have been used to grow them there, when we have perfectly safe gown apples here in Ontario.

The most that can honestly be said about the differences between the Liberals and the PCs is that the PCs use socialism as a justification for handing out grants, loans, market protection, and special status to certain alleged nobles in society…all of whose wealth and privilege depend upon regulation of – not freedom of – the market. The Liberals, in contrast, regard a socialist system as the ideal. In short: PCs view socialism as a means to a dishonest and corrupt end, whereas Liberals view socialism as a means to a dishonest and corrupt end.

"If you want freedom…" Q&A: The False Dichotomy: Rationality vs. Electability

First quoting my house metaphor, G writes:

This only makes the homeowner question why a group of roofers that are trying to be foundation workers, keep on roofing.Should the roofers give up roofing or should they just exist to repeatedly knock on the homeowners door to point out that there’s a leak here and a shingle missing there without ever getting the homeowner to hire them??

I take G to be implying that a politician will not get elected if he does not base his advocacy of freedom solely upon matters of political philosophy (e.g., “rights”, “freedoms”, capitalism, etc.), and if he does not refrain from advocating positions on metaphysics (i.e., the facts of reality), epistemology (i.e., the means of identifying facts and falsehoods) and ethics (i.e., right vs. wrong).

Debating the metaphor is fraught with possible mis-communications and the likelihood of arguments based on silly non-essentials but I introduced the metaphor, so I respond as follows:

The most popular home renovation shows feature people who, for example, are asked to come to a house to put in a walk-in closet, but who end up advising the owner that the foundation must be repaired before such a closet can be built or expected not to collapse. Nothing requires a renovator to limit himself to fixing rooves. It would be unconscionable to put in a closet that the renovator knows will collapse without first explaining that to the customer, and identifying what must be done to prevent the collapse.

Let us leave the metaphor, and deal with a sample issue in government. When someone complains that he lacks freedom to manufacture, sell or purchase an incandescent bulb, you will not help him by saying: “Well, what you need is some rights”. Instead, as a politician, you need to point out that the ban on incandescents is the logical consequence of a belief in man-made global warming, and that the belief is not founded on the facts of reality but upon the popularity of the belief. You need to recommend a cure, not a band-aid: that government should not act on beliefs for which there is no rational foundation. Promising a “right to light-bulb choice”, or promising “free markets” is like promising to fix haemophilia with a band-aid. The right answer, from an honest politician, is: “The belief that humans are causing catastrophic global warming is false until we discover a rational foundation for that belief and, until we do, the government ought not to ban incandescent bulbs”.

Such statements do not move a politician out of the realm of politics and cast him solely as a philosopher: rather, such statements disclose that the politician is knowledgeable. People do not regard a politician as not-a-politician simply because he promises never to act on irrational beliefs (such as man-made catastrophic global warming).

If the essential problem is political, the politician should say so. If it is moral, he should say so. If it is epistemological, he should say so. If it is metaphysical, he should say so. And, having identified the problem and its nature, he is in a position to justify his position on whether and how the government should respond.

If the renovator does not get hired to build the closet that will collapse, and the homeowner hires a cheat who neglects to tell the homeowner about the inevitable collapse of the closet (or who lies), the homeowner will get exactly what he bargained for, and the renovator can come back to offer his services to rebuild the house, armed with an “I told you so”. Similarly, if the advocate of reason is not elected because he mentioned things that people would prefer not to know – e.g., that consensus is no means of discovering knowledge – he can come back to the unemployed, candle-bearing victims of enviro-irrationalism, armed with an “I told you so” and a promise never to make laws for which there is no rational justification.

Tory not tough enough either

National Post

Letters to the Editor

John Tory has indeed said that the rule of law must be restored, but talk is cheap. “Concerned about the optics” of looking like another Mike Harris, Tory has followed McGuinty’s lead by stating that elected officials lack authority to instruct the police to enforce the law at Caledonia. Tory’s only recommendation has been for the Premier to talk with those involved in the dispute about how the rule of law might be restored. This is not a “hard line” on the rule of law. To implicitly recommend “land for peace” is a cowardly cop-out and an appeasement of aggressors. It is not “leadership.”

Paul McKeever
Leader, Freedom Party of Ontario

Re: Tories get edge on Grits (June 14, 2006)

Letter to Editor

Toronto Sun

On the Sun Media-Leger poll data reported in your paper yesterday, Dalton McGuinty received a positive rating from 38% of the 860 people who knew him; John Tory received a positive rating from 48% of the 640 people who knew him. Therefore, when all 1000 people polled are taken into account, approximately 32.7% of them gave McGuinty a favourable rating, whereas 30.7% gave Tory a favourable rating. Yet your apparently PC-friendly paper led the report with a patently false byline that stated “Conservative Leader far more popular than premier”. There are lies, there are darned lies, and there are the things one can read in your paper, I suppose.

 

Paul McKeever

Leader, Freedom Party of Ontario

Reason, faith, and tax-funding for education

Reprint

 

The non-sectarian presumption

 

The London Fog

(thelondonfog.blogspot.com)

 

Thursday, February 23, 2006

Freedom Party of Ontario leader Paul McKeever sends along this letter in response to the Izvestia editorial on that mythical beast, “non-sectarian” education:

I agree that it is a mistake for the government to use taxes to subsidize “faith-based” schools. However, it is self-defeating to base that opposition on the idea that a society that funds multiculturalism should protect funding for a “melting pot role” of public education.

Intentionally or unintentionally, all schools – public and private – have a major influence on a child’s beliefs about the nature of reality, about how it can be understood, and about morality. When a government funds or subsidizes a school with taxes, it eliminates any pretence of a separation of church and state. The state becomes a god of sorts. The schools it funds become its temples. The taxpayer becomes the state’s followers, compelled to pay for the temples and to accept, on faith, that the state is the origin of moral truth. All schools a government funds are “faith-based” in that sense.

In a day when tax-cutters are blamed for murders, our politicians – to avoid offending any voter – fund public schools in which moral relativism wages war against objective codes of right and wrong. At a time when the criminalization of blasphemy is considered seriously in some quarters, Mr. Tory would have the state fund mysticism in a war against the idea that man can understand the universe and use reason alone to distinguish right from wrong. The religious and the moral relativists must be free to teach their children their beliefs and philosophies, but not at the expense of those whose philosophy they seek to destroy. Instead of funding public or private schools with taxes, we must let every parent pay tuition directly to the school that their child attends, and only to that school. A separation of education and taxation is reason’s only hope.

Paul McKeever
Leader, Freedom Party of Ontario

Column – Financial Post – "Fiscal Imbalance", Cities, Toronto

Consumption tax cure for revenue ‘gap’

PAUL MCKEEVER

Gap-osis has become an all too common and embarrassing syndrome. A government in one jurisdiction allows its expenditures to exceed its revenues, then blames its deficit on “under-funding” by a senior level of government. The asking government claims there is a “gap” between the total tax paid by people who live within its jurisdiction and the amount ultimately spent there. Asserting that it is the “engine that drives” the economy, the asking government demands its “fair share” of tax revenues.

Canada’s gap-osis poster boy has most certainly become Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty who — with the politically correct approval of the province’s Progressive Conservative and NDP parties — has been demanding a share of federal tax revenues to make up for a $23-billion “gap.”

However, gap-osis is also running amok at the municipal level in Toronto. City councillors, welfare advocates, the Toronto Board of Trade: None are able (i.e., willing) to escape a politically advantageous gap-osis affliction. In addition to more autonomy for Toronto council, they have all been demanding provincial cash to close a gap between the provincial taxes paid by “Torontonians” (by which they mean everyone living in or around the City of Toronto) and the provincial funds spent in Toronto (by which they mean only the city).

What is more, the city’s demands are actually more justifiable than the province’s when one considers the narrowness of the city’s tax base and the breadth of the province’s.

As a result, with the province too strapped to continue shelling out provincial revenues to municipalities that are spending more than they take in, McGuinty has been put in an embarrassing situation: He cannot very well argue that diverting provincial revenues to municipalities is wrong while arguing that diverting federal revenues to Ontario is right.

McGuinty’s problem has unmistakably influenced the province’s newly introduced Bill 53, which facilitates governance and financing reforms for the City of Toronto. The bill is purportedly the result of consultations and research, commenced in 2004, to ensure a fiscally sustainable and accountable governance of the province’s largest city. Yet it has long been obvious that the most effective way to make a government spend in a responsible, sustainable and accountable way is to ensure that it pays for those expenditures with its own revenues, and raises those revenues responsibly, sustainably and accountably.

Since the election of 2003, my party has proposed a set of municipal finance reforms that acknowledge the effectiveness of that approach. Specifically, we propose that municipal property taxes be eliminated and replaced, in each municipality, with a consumption tax. In particular, we propose that each municipality be permitted to impose, within its boundaries, a municipal premium collected as part of the Provincial Income Tax (PST). Municipal taxes, hence municipal spending, would be kept low by market forces. Each municipality would determine its own premium with knowledge that, if the premium is raised too high, customers and businesses will be encouraged to do their shopping and selling out of town.

Similar proposals have more recently found their way into recommendations by non-partisan entities, such as the Toronto Board of Trade. Yet, despite the broad appeal of these proposed reforms, the McGuinty government has decided to proceed with legislation that aims to resolve its own political dilemma by exposing taxpayers to the possibility of even more irresponsible, unsustainable and unaccountable taxing and spending by the government of Toronto.

By titling Bill 53 the Stronger City of Toronto for a Stronger Ontario Act, 2005, McGuinty has made a transparent attempt to bolster his bid for federal cash. He is suggesting that he walks his Ottawa talk about a “stronger province of Ontario for a stronger Canada.” However, the bill does little to improve the lot of taxpayers. It does not remedy municipal reliance on property taxes, which are both economically unsound and unjust. It does not impose any checks or balances on excessive municipal taxation or imprudent municipal spending.

Rather, the bill functions primarily to reduce the likelihood of further demands by Toronto for provincial revenue. Once Bill 53 is passed, any Toronto demands for provincial revenues can be met with a response from McGuinty that the city does not need provincial funds. He will argue that, unlike other municipalities, Toronto now wields some of the province’s taxing power, such that the city now has a broad enough tax base to satisfy its own budgetary needs.

Given that McGuinty wants federal cash even though the province’s taxation powers are already quite broad, it will be a hypocritical response. However, that response may function to quiet the city’s council. With Toronto quieted, McGuinty will be able to continue playing the gap card with Ottawa without Toronto calling him on his hypocrisy.

Paul McKeever is the leader of the
Freedom Party of Ontario.
www.freedomparty.on.ca

Letter to Editor – National Post – Re: On Child Care, Harper's Got it Right, Editorial, Dec. 6

“Big government” is defined by how much it takes from our pockets, not by how it spends the loot.

Mr. Martin’s plan puts daycare workers on the government payroll. Mr. Harper’s puts parents and daycare companies on the government payroll. To the taxpayer, this is a distinction without a meaningful difference. To “get it right”, instead of left, one would simply tax us all less.

Paul McKeever, Leader, Freedom Party
of Ontario, Oshawa, Ont.

Ontario schools and religious equality

National Post, Letters
November 2, 2005

Re: McGuinty must make good on ‘one law for all’, Igor Ellyn, November 1.

Mr. Ellyn makes a sound case for equal fiscal treatment for all schooling choices. However, the diversity of curricula and cultures at independent schools would come under attack, if those schools were to become tax-funded. True choice and equity in schooling can be achieved only in a system in which parents pay tuition directly to the public or private school that their child attends, instead of funding education with taxes.

Paul McKeever, Oshawa, Ont.

Testimony to Ontario's Select Committee on Electoral Reform

The committee met at 1032 in room 151.

FREEDOM PARTY OF ONTARIO

The Chair (Ms. Caroline Di Cocco): I’d like to call the meeting to order, if everyone would like to take their seats. Welcome back to the select committee on electoral reform.
I welcome Paul McKeever, the leader of the Freedom Party of Ontario. Mr. McKeever, you have the floor.

Mr. Paul McKeever: I’ll just begin by thanking you for honouring my request to have all registered political parties invited to give their two bits on this adventure you’re on.
The rhetoric surrounding the issue of electoral reform is often couched in terms like “democratic deficits” or “making things more democratic.” I would urge the committee to consider that electoral reform has little to do with democracy per se, and much more to do with how government makes decisions.

Let me begin by addressing the first part of that assertion. Elections and voting are not, per se, democracy. “Democracy” is a term derived from the Greek word “d?mos,” meaning “people,” and “kratos,” meaning “power,” not “rule.” History is filled with examples of democracies that differed wildly in terms of who was permitted to vote or how they voted, but all of those systems have something in common. Properly understood, democracy, or “people power,” is the belief that government gets its authority from the governed. The meaning of the term “democracy” is probably best understood by juxtaposing it with the term that describes democracy’s most common competitors on this globe: “theocracy,” meaning “god power,” and “autocracy,” meaning “self-power.” In a theocracy, the prevailing belief is that government gets its power from God, whereas in an autocracy, the prevailing belief is that government is the source of its own power.

Democracy tends to be most compatible with, and defensive of, individual freedom. The reason is simple: An individual in a democracy cannot give his ruler or government more authority than the individual himself has to give. Thus while, and only while, the people in a democratic society respect individual freedom, the ruler or government in that democratic society will lack the authority to violate life, liberty or property rights of the governed. In a democracy, so long as it is wrong for an individual to murder an individual, or to offensively restrain another’s liberty, or to take another person’s property against their will, it is also wrong for the government to do so.

Because one frequently finds lawmakers to be chosen by way of elections in alleged democracies, and because candidates win elections only by winning more votes than their competitors, elections and voting widely have been confused as being synonymous with democracy. However, in truth, elections themselves are not democracy; rather, they are a very effective tool for the defence of democracy. Specifically, by removing law-making authority from the lawmakers at regular intervals, and by requiring would-be lawmakers to obtain law-making authority from the people, elections continually and effectively remind everyone that the authority to make laws comes from the people. Put another way, elections remind the people that government answers neither to God nor to itself, but to the people it governs. Elections remind us that we believe in democracy.

To illustrate my point about the difference between democracy and elections, consider that a country need not be democratic in order to have elections. Democracy exists, first and foremost, in the minds of the people and not at polling stations. Before elections can defend democracy, the people have to hold the belief that they, not God, for example, are the source of their government’s power. If one were to use tanks and guns to bring elections to a country whose people believe that God is the source of a government’s authority, the result would not be democracy. Put another way, you can export elections to Iraq but you cannot export democracy to Iraq, at least not at the present time.

The relevance of this to electoral reform should be noted. Different electoral systems may differ in how effectively they “kick the bums out,” but it would be utterly false to suggest that one electoral system is itself more or less democratic than any other electoral system. Just as elections are not democracy, electoral systems do not differ in how democratic they are. As this committee drafts its final report, I would urge it to keep one thing in mind: Do not let your endorsement of one electoral system over another be based on the false notion that the electoral reform will lead to “greater democracy” or the elimination of a “democratic deficit.” Though it may lead to a better or worse defence of democracy, it will not lead to more or less democracy.
Having made that point, let me move on to my second one, that electoral reform has more to do with how a government arrives at its decisions. Specifically, I am referring to majority versus minority governments and to single-party government versus government by a coalition of parties. On this issue, the implications of electoral reform are truly immense.

As you know, the term proportional representation, or PR, is a reference to a situation in which the percentage of seats in the Legislature have been distributed among political parties roughly in proportion to the popular vote received by each party’s candidates. PR is a reference to an electoral outcome, not to any given electoral system. It is generally acknowledged that whereas the single transferable vote, the multi-member plurality, and list PR all lead to PR outcomes, our current single-member plurality system does not lead to PR outcomes.

Among the most common arguments made by proponents of PR — any of those versions: STV, AV, list PR — is that PR reduces the influence of political parties by making minority or coalition governments the norm, and majority governments the exception. Instead of a party doing what it believes is right for the province, the party is required to negotiate with other parties, so as to build sufficient numerical support for a given legislative change. This, the advocates of PR tell us, will make government more democratic and will cure a supposed democratic deficit. Their theory is that with PR, the decisions made by government are more reflective of the wants of the governed. However, the point has been put more forcefully and honestly by others who have said that PR is more likely to facilitate majority rule or majoritarianism, and they actively campaign on that basis sometimes.

This panel may well remember Canadian comedian Rick Mercer’s humorous Internet poll, in which he asked Canadian viewers to vote on whether to change Stockwell Day’s first name to Doris. Mr. Mercer’s point, made in the form of comedy, should not be overlooked. Specifically, he was making the point that a true majority rule is a system in which anything goes, and in which freedom can be trampled beneath the feet of the whims of the majority. I think, in fact, the vote was in favour of changing his name to Doris, by the way. The reason is simple enough. For the whims of the majority always to be obeyed by government, it is necessary that government’s authority be completely and utterly unbridled. It is for this reason that many advocates of PR are among the harshest critics, by the way, of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which they find to be a horrible obstacle to their wishes. In a true system of majority rule, there could be no right that would protect the individual from the whims of the majority. If you could force a man to change his name to Doris, you could, by the same logical and horrifying extension, force a woman to have an abortion or not to have an abortion.

In completing its report, I would recommend that the committee not fall into the trap of equating majority rule with democracy. Indeed, majority rule can be very anti-democratic. To revisit the light-hearted example, in our society no individual has the right to force Stockwell Day to change his name to Doris. Hence, if our society is truly democratic, we cannot give government the power to change Stockwell Day’s name to Doris. We don’t have that power to give to the government. If we move to an electoral system which, by design, subjects individual freedom to the pressure of unbridled majority rule — and make no mistake, that’s what a lot of people want you to recommend — we have done something that is not only anti-freedom, but potentially anti-democratic as well.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I’d like to address one other point relating to electoral reform and how government makes decisions under each system. I’d urge this committee to view the results of elections that use electoral systems other than the system we currently have, the single-member plurality system. Australia, for example, uses alternative vote, and the results there have consistently been, with the odd exception, that coalition governments are formed, not majority governments. The same can be found with the single transferable vote in Ireland. Of course, in those countries that use list PR, again, majority governments are the exception, not the rule. If Ontario moves from the current system to almost any other system, majority governments will become much more rare.

Therefore, in endorsing one electoral system over another, I would encourage the committee to give deep consideration to the implications of majority versus minority government. That, ultimately, is the most powerful effect that any electoral reform will have. In a majority government, the party in power has the opportunity to govern by doing what it believes is right, even when it’s unpopular for it to do so. In a minority or coalition government, the process is almost entirely different. The issue is not one of right and wrong, but of compromise and negotiation. On its face, that sounds very friendly and up-with-people. But in reality, the difference between majority government and minority or coalition government is dramatic. Specifically, when we replace majority governments with minority or coalition governments, we move from a system that accommodates ethical decision-making to a system based on the rejection of ethics and the substitution of whims and numbers — ballot-counting, or hand-counting, if you’re talking about the Legislature. We move from a government guided by reason to one guided by emotion; to one guided not by what’s right, but simply by what you want.

I’d urge the committee to consider the words of author-philosopher Ayn Rand, who wrote, in 1965,

“If some demagogue were to offer us, as a guiding creed, the following tenets: that statistics should be substituted for truth, vote-counting for principles, numbers for rights, and public polls for morality — that pragmatic, range-of-the-moment political expediency should be the criterion of a country’s interests, and that the number of its adherents should be the criterion of an idea’s truth or falsehood — that any desire of any nature whatsoever should be accepted as a valid claim, provided it is held by a sufficient number of people — that a majority may do anything it pleases to a minority — in short, gang rule and mob rule — if a demagogue were to offer it, he would not get very far. Yet all of it is contained in — and camouflaged by — the notion of `government by consensus.'”

Ms. Rand’s point applies with equal force to electoral reform. Only majority government is capable of facilitating government decision-making on the basis of ethical considerations, as opposed to numerical ones; a minority or coalition government simply cannot do so. All negotiations on matters of right and wrong are, by their very nature, clashes of implicit or explicit ethical codes. Therefore, to the extent that opposing negotiators have both compromised their stance on an important matter of government policy, they have both acted contrary to their own ethical codes. Therefore, to the extent that opposing negotiators have both compromised their stance on an important matter of government policy, they have both acted contrary to their own ethical codes.

In closing, I would urge the committee, in making its report, to be cognizant of the fact that it is not truly dealing with the issue of democracy. It is dealing with the issue of right versus might, with the issue of ethical rule versus majority rule, with the issue of individual freedom versus tyranny of majorities. If we are to protect democracy, we can do nothing more important than ensure that ethical limits be placed on government authority. Those limits, I submit, are facilitated only by an electoral system that makes majority governments the rule rather than the exception. Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. McKeever. You certainly provided to us 15 minutes of interesting discussion. Thank you very much for your input. Unfortunately, we don’t have time for questions and answers at this point in time, because the time has expired, but I thank you very much for your very valuable input, which we’ll certainly consider in our deliberations.

Mr. McKeever: Thank you very much.

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