Current Situation
Jobs provide income and personal fulfillment. However, past governments have created so much red tape for employers and disincentives for employees that our economy is struggling to provide the ideal jobs for Canadians. Unions with government granted privileges further aggravate the situation, creating barriers to employment and removing choices from citizens.
Principle
Ontario Libertarians believe that the best way for our economy to create jobs is to allow employers and potential employees to negotiate wages and benefits, independent of regulation. Governments should refrain from any form of interference in the creation of jobs, labour regulations, or giving special legal privileges to unions or employers.
Our Plan
Short Term Focus: Extra Opportunity
Eliminate barriers to job-creation
- Wages & training requirements are determined by the employee & employer
Allow any qualified worker to compete for union jobs
- Benefits employers, employees and taxpayers
Correct legislation to reflect employer-employee contract rights
Long Term Focus: More Productivity
Improve regulatory environment
- Reduce interference : Eliminate licensing, funding support, insurance requirements which interfere with job creation and damage the economy.
Allow free market forces to solve labour challenges
Media Release
One of the most enduring myths that politicians and governments perpetuate is their ability to create jobs in the economy. Indeed, governments do create government jobs, and some of those jobs are essential for protecting the rights of citizens. But every additional job created by government places a burden on the treasury, on the taxpayer, or worse requires additional government borrowing. Every government public sector job thus created makes it less likely that a private sector job is created. If it were true that governments could create jobs as implied by politicians, then why not hire all the unemployed and be rid of that problem? The simple reason is that governments do not create wealth. That only happens in the private sector. Governments can only redistribute wealth and then only because of their monopoly on force.
What governments should do is simply create the legal and judicial framework which allows the private sector to produce the wealth and as many jobs as the market requires.
The reality is that current and past governments in Ontario have created so much red tape for prospective employers and disincentives for employees that our economy is struggling to provide the ideal jobs for Ontarians. Unions with government granted privileges further aggravate the situation, creating barriers to employment and removing choices from citizens.
Ontario Libertarians believe that the best way for our economy to create jobs is to allow employers and potential employees to negotiate wages and benefits, independent of regulation. Governments should refrain from any form of interference in the creation of jobs, labour regulations, or giving special legal privileges to either unions or employers.
To begin to unravel the red tape and the disincentives that constrain employment, Ontario Libertarians would eliminate all legislation that restricts the free market, including how wages are set and what training is required for a job.
Libertarians recognize that unionism has played an important role historically in improving working conditions for employees in Ontario. Today government regulations and the bureaucracy around jobs have largely usurped that role.
While unions are not inconsistent with free market economics, what is inconsistent, are the special privileges given to unions and union shops by governments. Governments have negotiated with unions and created public sector monopolies; governments have granted massive corporate bailouts designed to curry the favour of the unions and their crony corporate bosses, and governments have legislated the ability of unions to block non-union members in bidding for jobs. Libertarians believe that unions can operate in a free market, but they should have no right to control labour within that market.
Where employees were once powerless against their employers, today unions are more than a match for the crony corporations and the government agencies that employ them. There are many instances in today’s workplace where the power of unions, government agencies and crony corporatists work to the detriment of the economy and the people of Ontario. Libertarians will fight for the ordinary people of Ontario.
Over the longer term, Ontario Libertarians would eliminate licensing requirements and other impediments that interfere with job creation and that ultimately damage and distort the economy. Libertarians will strive to allow the free market to resolve the labour challenges of tomorrow.
