TORONTO/Southam Newspapers

Jim Coyle

Perhaps the greatest act of genius of the Harris government was to have sold the Common Sense Revolution as if it were a manifesto arising from demands of the people rather than the work of a cabal of acutely ideological souls bent on serving the greater imperative of global capital.

As one analyst wrote of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, her government could not have implemented its neo-conservative agenda without first translating it into a populist idiom; without hard economics being converted into the language of compulsive moralism.

What followed, there and here, is what has been called an authoritarian populism. Much of the premier’s success has been in masking the first part of that term while peddling the second. It has been masterful sleight of hand.

In recent weeks, for instance, the government has pounded the populist message as Conservative MPPs on a legislative committee proposed that referenda be held on new or increased taxes. Finally, the tabloids hallelujahed. Here, at last, was a government devoted to seeking (and heeding) a greater voice for citizens in the conduct of public affairs.

That so much of what the Harris government has done has been precisely the opposite, and that a court ruling last week made that point very clearly, is ignored.

It has often been noted that one of the seminal acts of the government was the surprise introduction and hasty passage of omnibus legislation that, far from enhancing the public voice, centralized power to an unprecedented degree. Resistance to this was futile.

But it is precisely because citizens and their organizations feel these days that they don't get a say through conventional democratic forms that lawsuits are stacked up in the courts like planes over Pearson International Airport to challenge the government. On Monday, the Ontario Public School Boards Association was in court. Several Toronto hospitals are headed there. There has been an action by a Pembroke hospital. And last week, a judge ruled on a challenge to the government's amalgamation of six Metropolitan Toronto municipalities into a single jurisdiction.

Ontario Court Justice Stephen Borins dismissed the claim, brought by the municipalities, that the so-called megacity legislation was unconstitutional. But his judgement carried a powerful message. For while dismissing the case, he was sympathetic to the complaint. There was no Charter case to be made, he said, because the Charter does not guarantee individuals the right to live free of government chutzpah or imperiousness.

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