![James Laxer](http://rabble.ca/sites/rabble/files/imagecache/thumbnail/category_pictures/picture-62_0.jpg "James Laxer is regularly asked to comment on current national and global issues by the Canadian media and frequently writes columns in major newspapers and periodicals.
In 1969, he was one of the founders of the Waffle Group, Canada’s largest New Left political movement. In 1971, at the age of 29, he ran second for the national leadership of the New Democratic Party. In the mid 1970s, James Laxer was a leading crusader against the power of multi national petroleum companies. His books, speeches and television appearances helped lead to the creation of a nationally owned oil company, Petro Canada, established to counter the power of companies like Exxon in Canada.
In 1981, Laxer was appointed research director of the federal New Democratic Party. At the end of his two year term, he wrote a controversial, book length critique of the party’s economic policies, charging that they were seriously dated. The report was front page news in Canada and was debated for months in the national media.
In 1984, the National Film Board of Canada hired Laxer to be host narrator, for a series of documentaries on the changing global economy and Canada’s place in it. In preparing the series, Laxer travelled extensively in Japan, Europe and the United States. The series, entitled Reckoning, was denied broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation because it was seen as too controversial.
Instead it was broadcast by a hook up of all the English language educational networks in the country. The series was also broadcast in the United States, as well, by a large number of PBS stations. The Reckoning series has won awards in both the United States and Canada. One of its films won the blue ribbon, first prize, at the prestigious American Film and Video Festival, for best political documentary. The same film won the Atlantic
Film Festival and national Gemini Awards in Canada for best writing in an information series, awards which went to Laxer and the film’s director as co-authors.
In 1986-87, Laxer spent a year in Europe writing Decline of the Superpowers. From 1978 to 1981, he hosted a public affairs television program on TV Ontario. He regularly went to Europe to conduct interviews with leading European political and intellectual figures. In 1993 his book False God: How the Globalization Myth Has Impoverished Canada, was published by Lester Publishing. In Search of a New Left: Canadian Politics
After the Neo-Conservative Assault was published by Viking in 1996. The Undeclared War: Class Conflict in the Age of Cyber Capitalism, was published by Viking in 1998, and by Penguin Canada in 1999, in a paperback edition. Dalton Camp wrote that the Undeclared War "is an informed and cogent book on the great and growing dilemma of our time: how to preserve a free society in the face of increasing disparity and the creation of a new class society---‘a dominant class and a dominated class.’ This is stuff we need to know." Laxer’s book, Stalking the Elephant: My Discovery of America was on national best seller lists for seven weeks in the autumn of 2000. In his review of the book for the Globe and Mail, David Shribman, Pulitzer prize winning columnist for the Boston Globe, commented: "This is a book by a Canadian that can change the United States." Stalking the Elephant is to be published by The New Press in New York in September 2001. In 2003, his book, The Border: Canada, the U.S. and Dispatches from the 49th Parallel, was published by Doubleday Canada. In 2004, Douglas and McIntyre published his book Red Diaper Baby: A Boyhood in the Age of McCarthyism. This memoir of James Laxer’s childhood was the winner of the Canadian Jewish Book Award for best biography/memoir in 2005.
James Laxer is a Professor of Political Science at York University in Toronto")
It's odd how the strike by 24,000 Toronto civic workers has turned the attitudes of the upper middle classes, business executives, small business lobbyists and conservative politicians upside down. These are the sorts of people who pay civic workers little heed when the garbage is being collected and the daycare centres are operating. They take garbage collection for granted, rarely wondering what sort of pay and benefits the workers take home. They're a lot more worried about whether the TSX is going to have a good third quarter. They resent every single cent in taxes that they pay and reward their accountants handsomely to keep their tax outlays to a minimum. The idea that the City of Toronto might have to increase taxes to meet the costs of the vast range of services it provides, including social services downloaded from the Ontario Government, leaves them foam-flecked and apoplectic.
Then, the Civic Workers go on strike because they don't want the burdens of the recession to be laid-off on them -- heaven knows the upper middle classes haven't stepped up to carry a heavier load -- and the well-to-do and their political spokespersons suddenly become frantic about garbage collection. Long before most Torontonians were due for their first garbage pick-up after the strike started, the well-heeled crowd was screaming about the imminent demise of civilization. In truth, a Hollywood film director working here would still be highly likely to want to dirty up the streets so Toronto could impersonate a U.S. city.
In Canada, the upper middle classes assume that the state at all levels is there to provide them with roads, airports, security, universities, hospitals and to shelter their incomes from tax and give them a hand with home renovation. But they hate to pay for any of this themselves and celebrate what right-wing think tanks call "tax freedom day," the day when in theory they've paid for their share of what the state provides for them. Living on the salary of a daycare worker (typically a little over $15 an hour in Toronto) is not something they have to contemplate.
The truth is that this country's Victorian age governmental arrangements -- despite the gloss put on them by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982 -- won't work in the 21st century. Toronto cannot survive on property taxes with periodic handouts from Queen's Park and slaps across the face from Ottawa. A look at the city's crumbling infrastructure and a ride across its potholes are evidence of that.
Canada's cities need to come out from under the shadow of the so-called senior levels of government. They require their own place in the constitution, which would endow them with the authority to raise taxes in all the ways the provinces do. In a time when the global economy is being transformed as the American Empire drowns in a sea of indebtedness, Canadians will have to display considerably more imagination about economic renewal than they are at present if they are to avoid being drowned along with their neighbours to the south.
A key to renewal will be to rebuild our cities to make them energy efficient, to equip them to replace the automobile with trams and other forms of rail and to increase urban population density to cope with the hangover of the receding age of cheap oil. The cities that make these changes effectively will be the centres of learning, culture, and come to think of it, of thriving businesses, in coming decades.
It's too bad our upper middle classes and businesspeople, the ones who would make the big money out of this, are too dumb to figure any of this out. Do I expect them to learn that the taxes they pay include crucial investment capital for the future and that they benefit hugely from the presence of well paid public employees? Not really.
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