By Gerry Nicholls
Sunday, September 9, 2007
This has previously run in the Windsor Star
With a provincial election just weeks away, a union-funded organization is paying lots of money to air anti-Conservative TV ads.
This, unsurprisingly, has the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party fighting mad. But unfortunately, the Tories are fighting the wrong battle for the wrong reasons.
The PCs charge the group -- which calls itself the Working Families Coalition -- is nothing but a front for the Liberal Party.
In fact, the Tories are asking Elections Ontario to investigate this group's spending, arguing the Working Families Coalition expenditures should be listed as Liberal campaign expenses.
Campaign expenses for political parties are limited by law.
But is the Working Families' Coalition really a front for the Liberal party?
I used to work for the National Citizens Coalition, a pro-free market advocacy group that routinely ran political ads during both provincial and federal elections - often to oppose parties and candidates.
We too were often called a "front", a front for the Conservative Party, or the Reform Party, or the Liberal Party or the CIA.
But the fact is, the NCC's political campaigns were waged for our own reasons and to promote our own agenda.
And that might be the case for the Working Families Coalition.
Indeed, while their TV spots certainly do oppose the PCs, they do not explicitly endorse the Liberals or the NDP.
But what if they were endorsing the Liberals or NDP?
So what?
In a free and democratic society every individual or group should have the right to express a political opinion during an election -- and to spend money to express those opinions.
This is something the provincial Tories, as proponents of free markets, should understand and support.
Indeed, a party that truly supports democratic freedoms -- such as the right to free speech -- would never seek to stop organizations, even unfriendly organizations from speaking out.
After all, these things have a way of evening out.
No doubt, for instance, we can expect organizations like the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, to mount their own anti-Liberal campaign.
Besides, the Working Families Coalition campaign just might backfire. Back in the 1999 provincial election, for instance, big union bosses spent a ton of money on a campaign to defeat then-premier Mike Harris.
Not only did that campaign fail, it likely drove undecided middle class voters -- frightened with the big union boss socialist agenda -- into the Harris camp.
That's why the Tories should stop making noise about the Working Families Coalition expenditures. That kind of fuzzy thinking only leads to laws regulating free speech.
That's what happened at the federal level.
Worried about so-called "third party advertising," the federal Liberals enacted an election gag law seven years ago that essentially limits the right to free democratic expression.
Thanks to this gag law, only political parties and professional politicians have the right to freely and effectively engage in a meaningful debate during federal elections. Everybody else has to shut up.
That's hardly democratic. In fact, the existence of this gag law only means voters are denied the chance to hear different ideas and arguments.
In Ontario, thank goodness, elections are still relatively a free-market place of ideas. We should keep it that way.
That's not to say, however, that the Tories have no reason to gripe about what the Working Families' Coalition is doing.
Far from it.
But instead of complaining about what that group spends, the Tories should instead focus on who finances it.
A quick check of the Working Families' Coalition website shows the people behind this group are essentially big union bosses.
And big union bosses typically finance these kinds of political campaigns, with the dues unionized employees are forced to pay.
To be blunt, that's an undemocratic practice. Why should unionized employees, who may support the PC party, be forced, through their dues, to help subsidize an anti-Conservative ad campaign?
That's what the Tories should zero in on.
Rather than complaining to Elections Ontario, Conservative leader John Tory should instead promise to reform Ontario's labour laws, so that union bosses can no longer use forced dues to pay for their propaganda campaigns.
If they did that, the Conservatives would be fighting the right battle for the right reasons.
And that's good politics.
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