The Tory Toll: From Walkerton to the Streets of Toronto
June 14th, 2000By Naomi Klein Just after noon tomorrow, a few hundred protesters, many of them homeless, will arrive on the steps of Queen's Park with a very simple request. They want to speak to the Ontario Legislature about the effects its policies are having on the poor. If history has anything to teach us, Mike Harris will make a get-tough speech about how Ontario's voters have made their voices heard and he won't be bulliedright before he calls in the cops for a smashup. The question is: How will the rest of us react? I ask this because, since the E. coli outbreak in Walkerton, voters across Ontario have been searching their souls about the effects of Tory deregulation on real people and their daily lives. There has been widespread horror at the possibility that government cuts to the Ministry of the Environment, and downloading to municipalities, may have put the people of Walkerton at great risk. Public outrage this powerful is a transformative force, even in Mike Harris's seemingly impenetrable political enclave. This outrage has lead directly to the convening of four inquiries into the causes of the water crisis, to political commitments to fix the problems identified,...