Government and Democracy

This column originally appeared in the Toronto star.

There’s a reason why they’re called scabs.

“Just as a scab is a physical lesion, the strikebreaking scab disfigures the social body of labour,” writes Stephanie Ann Smith in Household Words.

I could not have said it better myself. Scabs tear apart communities, pull down workers and prolong disputes – something, we at Unifor, know all too well.

It seems Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives just can’t pass up any opportunity to feed the party’s right-wing base and do some fundraising.

The Conservatives are standing in front of microphones and e-mailing supporters spinning a myth that the CRTC is going to police the YouTube and Facebook video uploads of everyday citizens.

If Bill C-10 – legislation updating the long-standing Canadian content obligations of commercial broadcasters for the modern era of Internet streaming - gets caught in this political crossfire, O’Toole doesn’t mind.

We have a national childcare plan at long last, and we cannot afford to lose it to political games in Ottawa.

It’s just too important.

It has been more than 16 years since the previous Liberal government tried to bring in a national childcare program, only to see Stephen Harper’s Conservatives kill it after Jack Layton helped them defeat the Paul Martin government