Many of us mourning the penny-pinching neglect of the Ontario Science Centre have never known a culture that celebrates rather than fears public spending. The Ontario of 1969, in which a Conservative government spent the modern equivalent of $242 million to create a “palace of science” intentionally free of commercial interest, feels more remote than the moon on which humans first set foot in the same year.
Fear of public spending says we don’t have the money for nice things, and borrowing more would be ruinous. But even if this were true, you only have to look at how light we’ve made the tax burden on the record-breaking profits of our large corporations to see that our helplessness is learned. Fear of public spending is just a disguise for the worship of private capital, and it normalized the neglect we lament today.