Ontario today
A few weeks ago, during the Chicago teachers’ strike, I had kind things to say about education reform in Ontario after the Liberals took power in 2002 (“How much do teacher strikes hurt kids?”). The piece drew on work by the OECD, part of an attempt to refute work by Washington Post boy blogger Dylan “Minipundit” Matthews.
After posting it, several emailers and commenters noted that things have changed in Ontario, as the Liberals have embraced U.S.-style austerity. Have they ever. The government has passed a monstrosity with a name that Rahm Emanuel couldn’t improve on: “the Putting Students First Act, that freezes teachers’ wages for two years and prevents them from striking.” Students are protesting the bill, as John Bonnar noted in Rabble.ca the other day (“Bramalea Secondary School students stage Queen’s Park protest against Bill 115”). And unions are suing. But clearly the Ontario Liberals have gone from a model school reform to one inspired by the colossus to the south.
LBO News from Doug Henwood 
The Ontario Liberals are liberal in name only. They are a party of big money and big business and as such are definitely anti-working class. They have never been a workers party ;always catering to the middle class at the expense of the workers. They are a pack of opportunists taking what they want from both the left and the right and claiming it as their own. Anyone who believes that the Liberal Party of Ontario or Canada has the interests common person in mind is out of their mind.
@john
They are also the backbone of the federation. Without their constant mafia-like network-building and superlatively corrupt financial practices, we’d have had a few secessions already.
Conservatives are merely good at emulating (and brown-nosing) US reactionaries. Liberals are the real stewards of this colonial state.
I agree completely with your comment. Canada and the Conservative Party has come a long way from Sir John A. and his “NO TRUCK NOT TRADE WITH THE YANKEES” Both the Grits and Tories suck up to the YANKEES and will sell out this great nation in a second. It is as if they are both afraid of an INDEPENDENT CANADA. If we can’t be a colony of the BRITS than they want us to be a handmaiden to the YANKEES.