In the News May 13

Ontario Election 2022

What Can Be Done to Control Rising Prices

On the issue of price inflation, a step forward would be the immediate removal of all provincial individual consumer taxes on goods and services and for the province to intervene forcefully to stabilize and control the prices of necessities such as food, housing and gasoline. Big enterprises in key sectors should be forced publicly to justify their prices of production and market prices, which include the rate of profit. The gross income of enterprises should determine corporate taxation. Net corporate income is too easily manipulated and has become a joke, with profitable companies not paying any or little taxes for years on end.

Price inflation is both knowable and solvable. Economic problems arise from the interaction with nature in the production of what humans require to live and their relations with one another within the productive forces. In the modern age the forces of production have become largely socialized and relations should follow suit.

Problems such as inflation are not being solved because a small section of the people, the rich who presently hold decision-making power find inflation, unemployment and even war suitable for their narrow private interests. This must stop!

How to solve the problem of inflation is an important election issue because it goes to the heart of the matter of who governments serve. Speak out against their mantra that there is no alternative but to wait it out. Speak out against the pay-the-rich agenda of the parties of the rich who claim to uphold high ideals of meeting their responsibilities to the people. Solutions without the people in them are no good. They are impoverishing the people, leading to untenable stress and taking Canada to war hitched to the U.S. war chariot. All workers fighting for wage increases and the working conditions they demand must be supported. This resistance is key to lifting the burden of the crisis the workers are made to carry.

Ontario Political Forum, posted May 13, 2022.