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We have been doing something unusual in Canada in recent weeks. We've been having a substantive debate about the basic direction of our economy. That's what happens when there are real parties facing each other in Parliament, who have real disagreements about real issues.
In that sense, we can say that the Canadian political system is finally maturing, after a long post-colonial history of elite accommodation. Federal politics used to focus on symbolic issues, and on two legacy parties who alternated in office but shared the same approach to public affairs. Things are different now.
For the time being at least, conservatives have reconsolidated around the Reform Party, currently governing Canada with the former Progressive Conservatives as junior partners. Canada's progressive majority is reconsolidating around the team that Jack Layton led into Official Opposition last May.
If this holds, you'll be able to vote next election to maintain the status quo into a second decade. Or you'll be able to vote to actually change it. Who knew you could do that in a Canadian federal election?
So back to the national debate we've been having about our economy. Check out this interesting report issued by the United Nations in the wake of the collapse of the world economy -- a collapse that shows little sign of ending any time soon.
Paragraphs 7 to 41, starting on page 16, are a crisp, pointed and convincing explanation of how industrial economies got themselves into the trouble we're in. It's all there. The folly of financial deregulation, leading to the mortgage meltdown in the United States. The folly of misplaced faith in unregulated markets to solve overwhelming economic challenges. And, critically, the folly -- and disastrous fiscal, economic and social consequences -- of growing inequality.
"In most advanced industrial economies, median wages stagnated during the last quarter century," the UN report argues, "while income inequalities surged in favour of the upper quintiles of the income distribution. In effect, money was transferred from those who would have spent to meet basic needs to those who had far more than they could easily spend. This created a tendency toward reduced levels of aggregate effective demand."
So then, the report's authors argue, for a time "the negative impact of rising income inequality on aggregate demand was largely offset by increasing indebtedness of households, especially in the United States and some other developed countries such as the United Kingdom. But the high level of indebtedness was not sustainable. ... In advanced countries such as in the European Union social protection systems compensated for stagnating income in a context of high unemployment, but were accompanied by increasing public deficits and public debt."
Just so.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper claims that Canada stands aside from all of this. In truth, income inequality in Canada has returned to its 1920s levels. In consequence, household debt is higher in Canada than in the United States. Our economy is paying the same price other advanced economies are paying for the same folly. But we have developed our own special way of masking the issues, for as long as China is buying. We are selling the world ever more raw unprocessed natural resources -- our rocks, our trees, and our energy (carbon and hydro-electric).
Is this the road we want to stay on? Or do we want to set a different course, towards a greener, more diversified, value-added economy whose benefits are much more widely shared?
There is a debate fit for a national Parliament.
This article was first published in the Globe and Mail.
I have to tag on here, how ever this applies.
Canada's Young Population
“Just my Opinion!” Last week there was a media escalation in the great lie about Canada’s aging population. Odd as in January, I believe, there was a back door announcement from the Federal Government that the average age of a worker in Canada was down to 34.
Last weeks news flurry was in the face of the facts that there was another abet smaller baby boom in the 1980’s that continued into the 1990’s and extends even to today. Plus, the corporate influenced Fed’s have flooded the country with new immigration since the late 1960’s and had virtually double the national population by the end of the last millennium.
“Funny” …remember, right up and into the ‘90s they had everyone convinced there was “0” population growth, 1.5 kids per family? Yet by that time Calgary’s and Edmonton’s population had doubled (although denied officially) and B.C.’s Lower Mainland, Vancouver Island and the Okanogan valley had nearly tripled yet the rest of the country was still growing (I’m a 30 year commercial pilot right, I’ve seen our world evolve from the air – retiring in 2006).
35 Billion Dollars for a hand full of jet aircraft, 114 Billion in secret bailouts and waivers to the five major Canadian banks during the current recession yet they are telling us there is no money for Education, Healthcare and Pensions? And they just cut 30,000 federal employees and the associated services!
When I was in High School, College and S.A.I.T. here in the early 1970’s, Calgary’s population was 450K. Finally, just a year or so ago, the city ‘Finally’ fessed up, confessing that we now have over 1.2 million people - after years of perpetual un-truths.
Proof - proof of where I'm coming from? Look at the age of people around you (at shopping malls etc.). Look at local maps or aerial photographs of the above locations from around 1970 and then look at the same on Google Earth today. THEN, on top of that, factor in the trend to high density housing that also started in the late ‘60s; back to row housing – town houses and condo’s, and then apartment buildings and high rises, and reducing the single family housing lots from 50 feet to 25 (Huh! …isn’t that a fire hazard? And look at where all our trees are going!).
Aging Population or Population Explosion?
Corporations are manipulating our Government when corporate greed has already wreaked havoc on most of the western world. Corporate Government is trying to tear apart all of the social infrastructure we our parents and grand parents had built and contributed to. Here in Alberta our public utilities are already gone; they are already talking about tolling out roads and highways - electronically (the wonders of proposed privatization at public expense).
Things are going down right now, people. Rise up and be heard before it becomes illegal everywhere. Support the Students and the protesters of the Subjugation Bill in Quebec!
Henry Ford said it best: a society needs "a productive and working middle class that can afford to buy the products they make."
But then P. Trudeau said, " ...but you people don't understand, we have to get back to a two class system." - national news, out side parliament buildings circa 1982.