February 2003

COLUMN Alexa McDonough CHRONIQUE Fighting the Good Fight

he ideological blooming of the cent. To top it all off, we now have the the business agenda has been blunted. neo-conservative revolution wealthiest 10 percent of Canadian fam- Canadians are demanding progress in T occurred during the 1980s. Not ilies owning 53 percent of the net restoring health care, cleaning up our until the 1990s, however, did worth of the country. With numbers environment, and rebuilding our physi- Canadians feel the lash of the radical like those, it is not surprising that cal and human infrastructure. downsizing in the role and support of 50,000 people live on the streets in This renaissance in Canadian values government services in their daily today’s Canada, that each year 250,000 parallels the increasing momentum lives. Buoyed by the dominant politi- people find themselves temporarily behind the New Democratic Party. We cal currents of the day, the full imple- homeless, and another 2.2 million peo- are currently enjoying our highest level mentation of the neo-liberal agenda ple live in poor or substandard housing. of public support in more than a decade. washed up on Canada’s shores with In the earliest days of the federal Our recent by-election victories in break- Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin. slash and burn approach, it became ing a 40-year stronghold in Windsor Throughout the mean nineties, the clear that everything New Democrats West and gaining 20 percent of the pop- NDP found itself swimming against that had fought for and won at the provin- ular vote against the Alliance leader in stream. Though our voice was not cial level was going to be destroyed by a Calgary South West are signs that even silenced, our numbers were dramatically federal government in the clutches of in once hostile territory, our message of reduced. The direct challenge to the social Reform-Alliance ideology. Abandoning putting the interests of Canadian work- democratic legacy of public health care, the longer view of how to build a coun- ing families first is resonating. public pensions and accessible education, try and its people, budgets were being The new tide offers an opportuni- advanced by the NDP and the CCF, was judged solely on how fast taxes could be ty to reach new ground. Carrying the what propelled me into the federal arena. cut and the debt lowered. In the absence message forward into the fast-moving After 15 years as Leader of Nova Scotia’s of a national debate on people priorities, waters of Canadian politics will be a New Democrats, it had not been my Canadians were bullied with bogus new federal NDP leader. While Paul intention to move to the federal scene. budget numbers. For nine consecutive Martin desperately tries to reconstruct That was until 1995 when, in the absence years, Paul Martin overstated the deficit his image, we have every intention of of the NDP having official party status in and underestimated the surplus to the making sure that he is left high and the House of Commons, the Chrétien- tune of close to $80 billion. dry on the electoral beach. His experi- Martin tag team attacked the fundamen- The Romanow Commission on ment in budgetary priorities should be tals of the social democratic state that had the Future of Health Care is another left behind as so much flotsam from been half a century in the making. stark reminder of how much damage an experiment that benefited the few Even I would not have predicted has been done. Once the proudest at the expense of the many. that, by the time of the Chrétien- achievement not just of social democ- I intend to remain active in this Martin divorce, government spending, rats, but of Canadians generally, our fight for the soul of Canadian political as a percentage of GDP, would be at its not-for-profit public health-care system values, but in a supporting role to lowest level in 54 years. The results were has withered under the Liberal watch. whomever my Party chooses as its next felt across the board. According to Signs of hope are on the horizon. leader. If my constituents will allow Statistics Canada, child poverty rates The Canadian soul has been stirred. We me, I will repay them for their support rose from 11.8 percent in 1989 to 13.7 are debating once again how best to while I was dealing with national and percent in 1999. The use of food banks manage our relationship with our international issues, by serving them, has increased 12 percent since 1997. American neighbours. Our restored con- once again, as their MP for Halifax, but Between 1984 and 1999, the average fidence in ourselves is rekindling the this time, full-time without the added net wealth of the bottom 20 percent of belief that we can forge our own path, responsibilities of national leadership. families plummeted by more than 50 that there are uniquely Canadian percent. At the other end of the income approaches to national and internation- Alexa McDonough, who led the NDP in scale, families in the top 20 percent al challenges. The debate that focused the 1997 and 2000 elections, is the MP for increased their net wealth by 43 per- almost exclusively on debt, deficit and Halifax.

POLICY OPTIONS 75 FEBRUARY 2003