Alien Invasion: How the Harris Tories Mismanaged Ontario

Ashley Thomson is a full librarian at Laurentian University and co-editor or co-author of nine books, most recently Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide, 1988-2005.

Alien Invasion consists of 34 short pieces, some written specially for
the book but the majority lifted from other sources (mostly Toronto
newspapers). One of the longer pieces is a transcript of the famous
“creating a useful crisis” speech that John Snobelen, the newly
minted Minister of Education and Training, delivered to senior
bureaucrats in his department.

The book is divided into three parts. Part 1, “The Background to the
Harris Revolution,” includes a piece written by the editor that
purports to analyze the ideology driving the Common Sense Revolution;
the extensive quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, Friedrich von
Hayek, and Milton Friedman are puzzling since everybody knows that
Harris, by his own admission, is not much of a reader and has probably
never encountered these authors. Part 2, “Re-Engineering Ontario,”
focuses on the personalities and policies of the Harris Tories, and
includes an informative article by Ulli Diemer’s titled
“Contamination: The Poisonous Legacy of Ontario’s Environmental
Cutbacks.” In “Monopoly Man: Beyond the Free-Marker Rhetoric, Is
Mike Harris Really a Central Planner?,” Guy Crittenden takes Harris to
task for failing to privatize as much as he had promised. (Harris, it
seems, can’t win whatever he does.) Part 3, “Essential Reading,”
tries to set Harris within a broader world context of neoliberal
regimes. Offsetting Susan George’s worthwhile “A Short History of
Neo-Liberalism” is a piece by a retired Bowmanville doctor who spells
out a loopy alternative to party politics.

Like most collections, Alien Invasion is uneven. Uniting its individual
parts is a single-minded dislike of the Harris Tories.