Category Archives: Opinion

The Real Reason Behind Harper’s Annual Arctic Trip

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August 18, 2013

By Andrew Chernoff

According to reporter, Michael Den Tandt, Postmedia News, Prime Minister Harper and his Conservative government are planning on staying the course with no intent on turning back on the federal Conservative government agenda. Full steam ahead. Damn the torpedo’s!

In his article, “Stephen Harper uses first speech of northern tour to lambaste oppositions’s dangerous ideas and vacuous thinking’, Tandt writes:

“Prime Minister Stephen Harper used the occasion of his eighth annual Arctic summer tour to deliver a blistering, highly partisan and combative speech in which he defended his record across the board and hammered the opposition relentlessly.”

Was this a good news speech Harper was delivering to the people of the North and the city of Whitehorse? Oh…..wait….it was a speech to Conservative Party supporters at a barbeque for about 200 supporters.

Tandt noted that, “Harper sounded more like a campaigner than a mid-term prime minister on a relaxed visit to one of his favourite regions. “You have trusted us, and we have delivered, despite the Opposition,” he said. Indeed, Harper claimed, the government has delivered on 84 of “more than 100 specific pledges” made in the last election.”

Of course Harper was just a wee tiny bit biased to the Conservative faithful in touting his federal government record.

Are they really “accomplishments” as reporter Bryn Weese , of QMI Agency wrote in his article, “Stephen Harper harkens back to gold rush, slams opposition to kick off northern tour”?

Harper lauded his actions, you know….the negative consequences being felt by 99 per-cent of Canadians; of his policies and the Conservative governments unapologetic support of global threats to Canadian sovereignty and shameless submission to the powerful and filthy rich 1 per-cent.

Anti-union sentiment is rampant with Bills before Parliament that seek to continue eroding what is left of the middle class in this country; trade agreements like CETA and TPP threaten Canada’s autonomy from coast to coast to coast; federal government layoffs threaten access to government; changes to EI seek to add more anxiety and stress to an already high unemployed Canadian population especially amongst young people.

Harper has never known what it feels like to be on welfare. Harper has never known what it is like to go hungry and scrounge for food; Harper has never had to use a food bank; Harper has never known what it is like to live from pay cheque to pay cheque with no savings to speak of or cushion to fall back on if your budget gets hit with a surprise.

Harper has never had to rely on the social safety net like many Canadians have and do.

Harper never has to worry about his defined pension benefit unlike many Canadians who are facing attacks on theirs and being threatened with a defined pension contribution. Parliament has decided their own fate on that subject, whether Canadians like it or not.

The point is, Harper is completely, unapologetically, unequivocally out of touch with the majority of Canadians.

Harper has no empathy or understanding of the reality of the work of nurses, steelworkers, sawmill workers, fisherman, coalminers, janitors, bus drivers, policeman, fire fighters and the rest of Canadians on the front-line like retail and service sector workers. Many Canadians have more than one job, as they struggle to make ends meet with a minimum wage.

When is the last time Harper had to make ends meet with one or more minimum wage jobs? Never!

Harper does not care how his policies are impacting the reality of the majority of Canadians and their families, many of them working in jobs highlighted above.

Harper’s arrogance is too far gone.

He believes his speeches. The speeches are not words to him. The speeches are not spin or hype. To him, the speeches are the truth.

Harper’s personal philosophy and political beliefs are his Bible. To question his integrity and direction is to commit the most unpardonable sin and to take his name in vain, is blasphemous.

Harper spoke of the mining of the North, how it led to the finding of gold over a century ago. But he did not speak of the sweat and toil, the strife and hardship, the impact on the health and well-being of the miners that slaved to extract that gold in harsh, inhumane conditions.

“The North is Canada’s call to greatness. As Conservatives we believe this with a passion… And as Conservatives, we have pledged that northern development will mean northern prosperity,” Harper told his faithful.

Of course Harper is excited about the potential of the North; of course, he believes the North is his…oops….Canada’s,,,, call to greatness.

The North, the Arctic, will be the cherry on Harper’s political legacy: the tapping of the North and Arctic’s economic richness and development of its land and resources are his ultimate goal, in my opinion.

We have seen it with the Alberta tar sands, and his unrelenting pursuit of the development and selling of “dirty oil”. Why should the North and Arctic be any different?

It may provide some northern prosperity, however long, or, short lived it may be, as history has already shown. But the expanded raping and further imperialising of the North and Arctic will provide untold wealth and riches to the 1 per-cent, with only a few crumbs to appease Canadians but many negative consequences because of it.

That is the real reason behind Harper’s annual Arctic summer trips.

Austerity chokes the down-and-out, as Harper and Flaherty look the other way

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By Nick Fillmore  August 16, 2013  http://rabble.ca

Austerity chokes the down-and-out, as Harper and Flaherty look the other way

The exceedingly aggressive austerity cuts carried out by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty over the past seven years have come home to roost as millions of Canadians, depressed and without hope, are succumbing to its worst consequences.

Program cuts and tax reductions for corporations and the wealthy have had a huge, disproportionate impact on the poor, working poor, underemployed, and those with health problems including mental illness.

The massive austerity program translates into less income, decreased services, and reduced health care for many of Canada’s most vulnerable people. It appears that more than 3.5-million Canadians — mainly the poor, the unemployed/underemployed and the under-privileged — are struggling.

The attacks on the vulnerable began soon after the Conservatives came to power in 2006. They launched cuts that were a broadside attack on the government’s ability to finance many of its activities, including these much-needed employment and social support programs.

Ignoring the needs of Canadians living in desperate conditions, Harper and Flaherty initiated the extremely aggressive austerity program because of their determination to reduce the deficit and cut the size of the federal government. Their decisions were based on their own neo-liberal economic beliefs, not what Canadians needed or wanted.

There are numerous examples of needless, brutal cuts. Claiming it was concerned that some people don’t have enough incentive to work, Harper-Flaherty toughened up the Employment Insurance rules. They took millions of dollars away from mostly seasonal workers, leaving them vulnerable.

Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC), the government department that provides the most hands-on support for the poor, is being cut more than any other department. It will lose 5,700 positions — one-quarter of its workforce by 2016. The largest cut in absolute terms is to the Citizen-Centered Services Program, which helps Canadians access government services by phone and online.

Harper also cut funding to the National Aboriginal Health Organization (NAHO) and to a number of Aboriginal women’s health organizations — crucial programs on suicide prevention, women’s health, and diabetes. They also cut the Women’s Health Contribution Program, which funds six women’s health organizations across the country.

The austerity cutting is based on Harper and Flaherty’s near-fanatical determination to cut the deficit and reduce the size of government. The two unwaveringly believe in neo-liberal economics, which enriches corporations and the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us. We have two people running our country who don’t really believe in government!

Unfortunately, the problems of the less fortunate are not acknowledged in the PMO or Department of Finance. It is much more important that interest rates remain low for the benefit of corporations and the one per cent. A Google search for any Harper or Flaherty comments that express any concern or interest in the problems of the poor comes up empty.

Two moves early on by Harper and Flaherty eliminated the ability of the Conservatives to fund the kind of generous, liberal-minded government Canadians have been used to. First, a two-per-cent cut in the Goods and Service Tax income in Flaherty’s first two budgets cost the government a staggering $10-billion to $12-billion annually in revenues that had been used to help support government services.

In addition, Flaherty has cut $60-billion in corporate taxes since the Conservatives took power in 2006 – needlessly reducing the country’s corporate tax rate to the lowest among G8 countries.

The austerity program and other government cuts have had disastrous consequences for millions of Canadians. There are staggering disparities in life expectancy based on the amount of education a person receives and their amount of education. On average, people living in rich neighbourhoods live an average of 86.3 years, while those living in a poor neighborhood live only 65.5 years — a difference of 21 years.

There is more hunger across the country than ever before. In March, 2012, 882,188 people received food from a food bank in Canada — an increase of 2.4 per cent over 2011 and 31 per cent higher than in 2008, when austerity was being launched.

Children are not spared from the suffering. According to UNICEF’s most recent report, Canada is 21st out of 29 top countries for relative child poverty, and 27th for the percentage that were overweight.

Between the years 2007 and 2011, Statistics Canada reported a 20 per cent rise in people who said their mental health was deteriorating. Mental illness is already the number one cause for disability claims in the workplace. According to the Mental Health Commission of Canada, awards for mental injury at work have dramatically increased in recent years because of pressure placed on workers to produce more during the austerity period.

It’s also likely been an increase in suicides in Canada due to the distress suffered by individuals as a result of the austerity program. Two international researchers, David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu, have documented substantial increases in suicide in several European countries and the United States as a result of austerity cuts. Suicides in Canada increased from 3,512 in 2005 to 3,890 in 2009, which takes in the early part of the austerity period. However, Statistics Canada is three years behind in posting its deaths statistics, so no information is available covering a large period of austerity. But, assuming that Canada is experiencing roughly the same fallout as are Europe and the U.S., it is safe to predict a sizeable increase in suicides here.

Throughout the Conservatives’ seven years in office, independent economists argued that the austerity program was not achieving its stated goal of preparing the country for an economic recovery, but Flaherty refused to budge.

Then in April, the world was shocked when the austerity experiment, which was had destroyed the lives of millions in Europe, was totally discredited. Thomas Herndon, a young University of Massachusetts Amherst graduate student in economics, discovered that an influential paper endorsing austerity practices as a way of rebuilding beleaguered economies was incorrect because of spreadsheet coding errors and selective data.

Amazingly, Flaherty continued with the austerity experiment. “What I worry about is those that suggest that austerity should be abandoned,” he noted. “I think that’s the road to ruin quite frankly.”

So more cuts that will affect the poor the most are on the way. Harper and Flaherty will chop another $11.8 billion from government spending by 2014-15; job losses in both the public and private sectors will be 90,000 by 2014-15; and there will be 1.4 million unemployed workers in the country in 2015.

If Harper and Flaherty really wanted to balance the budget and look after people at the margins, they could work harder to collect the $29 billion the government is owned by the rich and corporations in unpaid taxes.

They also could try harder to find the $3.1-billion that was given to the anti-terrorism program but now cannot be accounted for.

The Council of Canadians says if Harper and Flaherty really wanted to both gradually reduce the deficit and look after the needs of the poor, they could continue to stimulate job growth through needed infrastructure projects (water, transit, green energy, roads, etc.), and reverse corporate tax cuts. Not by suffocating those at the very bottom of the pyramid.

Nick Fillmore is a freelance journalist who worked in many areas with the CBC over nearly 30 years. He is a former member of THIS magazine’s editorial board and was publisher of The 4th Estate, an independent weekly in Nova Scotia, during the 1970s. Fillmore was also a founder of the Canadian Association of Journalists. To see other articles, visit his blog.

Whipped: The Secret World of Party Discipline

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http://www.cpac.ca

Winston Churchill once said ” Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”.

Governments, in democracies such as Canada, know that their hold on power is only as strong as their hold on the sitting members of their caucus. It is not unusual for MPs to find themselves in a position where they must decide between the wishes of their constituents and those of their party and it falls upon the party’s whip to ensure that the MPs’ choice is a simple one.

For example this past spring, in Ottawa, two MPs, Brent Rathgeber and Mark Warawa gained prominence when they took positions that were at odds to those of their party’s. While their deliberations were made public, more often than not, these discussions are often held behind closed doors and remain there, ensuring that the party’s image remains untarnished.

In Sean Holman’s documentary Whipped, the Mount Royal University journalism professor takes an in-depth look at how party discipline is enforced on the benches of the legislature in Victoria, B.C. Holman talks to former and current MLA’s and cabinet ministers about how they coped or were forced to cope to the demands of their party’s whip.

http://www.cpac.ca/eng/programs/cpac-special/episodes/whipped-secret-world-party-discipline

With B.C.’s job market stalled, it’s time for a jobs plan that actually works

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By Iglika Ivanova   August 14, 2013  http://rabble.ca

The latest B.C. job numbers reveal a picture of persistently high unemployment and stalled job creation. Since January, B.C.’s unemployment rate has been on a roller-coaster ride, down one month and up the next. All in all, there have been very few jobs created in 2013, far fewer than needed to employ our growing working-age population.

In fact, B.C. is a laggard in job creation this year, placing in the bottom three provinces in Canada. Only New Brunswick and Nova Scotia have created fewer jobs than us (they’ve actually seen job losses this year), while all other provinces have managed to achieve higher job growth.

This is a problem that requires governments — both federally and provincially — to take a more active position. Simply standing out of the way and waiting for foreign investors to create jobs is not going to do it; it’ll only mean that we’ll be stuck with persistently high unemployment for a long time, depriving young people of career opportunities, resulting in needless suffering of those who can’t find work, and slowing down our economy for years. We can’t afford to remain complacent.

The BC Jobs Plan isn’t going to do it. That’s because (as we’ve previously argued here), it doesn’t address the key underlying cause of our sluggish job creation — the lack of demand.

The reason why business isn’t investing and hiring more people is that the expectations for sales and profits are low. And that’s because B.C. consumers are spending less, weighed down by record high debt-levels, relatively high unemployment, family incomes that have stagnated for the last four years nationally and in B.C. have actually dropped since 2009, and a weak housing market that’s either heading for a prolonged slowdown or a crash in urban hot spots like Vancouver. None of these factors bode well for household’s new worth and future spending plans. It’s easy to see this creates a vicious circle — customers not spending means businesses don’t expand hiring, family incomes remain low, so customers spend even less.

Exporters are also having a hard time as China is slowing down, Europe is still fighting an economic slump that its own austerity policies brought on, and the U.S. is yet to recover.

To make matters worse, the B.C. government’s own policies, narrowly focused on reducing the deficit, have been working against the job market. Cost-cutting governments don’t buy things and reduce jobs (July marked the third consecutive month of job declines in the public sector for B.C.), so the slowdown continues.

The bottom line is, the economy works better when the money is circulating around, and that happens when more people have jobs and livable incomes. When consumers aren’t spending and businesses aren’t investing, the government must step in. What’s needed is a boost in family incomes that will inject money in the economy.

While provincial government policy can’t fully compensate for the global economic slowdown, and the federal government is better positioned to engage in stimulus spending, provincial governments can certainly cushion the blows. Public investments can directly create jobs and boost incomes, but they can also attract and drive private investments in infrastructure and other areas that will meet community needs.

In fact, the smartest way out of the jobs crisis is to put some of our collective resources to work on serious social and environmental problems like climate change, poverty and the affordability crisis facing many families. This way, we will create jobs in the short term while improving quality of life and setting our province up with the basis for a robust and sustainable economy in the future.

I’m talking about investments in high quality, universal and affordable early child care and education, hiring more teachers to relieve crowded classrooms in our schools and provide the needed supports for students with special needs, and boosting funding to make post-secondary education and skills training accessible to all who need it.

Other ideas for boosting job creation and our economy include: investments in making our homes, schools and hospitals more energy-efficient (which will create jobs in construction, reduce energy consumption and help us meet our climate goals), and a large-scale reforestation program post the pine-beetle devastation to breathe life into many rural communities. Youth-focused initiatives should also be on the table, to deal with the massive underemployment plaguing that cohort.

There’s no shortage of ideas. The stumbling block is that an effective job creation strategy will cost money, and this goes against the B.C. government’s current narrow focus on immediate deficit reduction.

The way to move forward is to acknowledge that without more revenues, our government can’t effectively provide the kind of leadership that’s needed at a time of persistent joblessness. And since our current fiscal challenges are the result of years of tax cuts, we can begin to address them with modest tax increases on those who, to quote Finance Minister de Jong, “have a little more” (see here and here).

While slightly higher deficits may be needed in the short term, B.C.’s in a solid position to run deficits for a few more years. The key is taking some of the idle money, the money that businesses aren’t currently investing and consumers aren’t spending, and putting them to work for the B.C. economy.

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If you’re interested in looking at the numbers yourself, B.C. stats provides a good summary here and a detailed Excel spreadsheet here. For a detailed explanation of why our joblessness problem is worse than what the official unemployment rate would have you believe, see Jim Stanford’s excellent articles here and here.

In economics we should do what works, and austerity doesn’t.

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August 6, 2013 · by Elliot Brice   From: http://donotgogentleblog.com

Economics is often said to be more of an art than a science. This is because, unlike in the sciences, it is very hard to draw solid conclusions from empirical data. This might be the case; nonetheless you’d be stupid not to try and draw some conclusions from the experiences of others. And when we look at the experiences of various national economies right now there are definitely some lessons to be drawn.

The biggest lesson is: ‘don’t be Europe’. Europe is bad and going backwards. Don’t do what they did. The failure of European economic policies have clear implications for economic theory and the economic policies of Australia and the rest of the world.

So what is the nature of the mess Europe finds itself in? Even answering that question is controversial; everyone agrees Europe is in a mess, but it’s not even clear what exactly the mess is. Is the mess a debt crisis fueled by dangerously high sovereign debt? Or is it an employment crisis fueled by low and negative growth? The governments of the Euro zone have clearly identified the crisis as a debt crisis because their solution has been austerity – slash government spending to cut back their respective deficits. However a good 3 years of austerity has failed to solve the crisis.

In the UK, government debt as a percentage of GDP only continues to rise and is now above 90 percent. French debt to GDP is also up around the dreaded 90 percent mark and rising. Spain lives in the mid 80s and is on an upwards trajectory, as is the debt to GDP ratio of Portugal, Ireland and most other European countries. Greek debt to GDP has fallen slightly but years of austerity have barely made a dent; their ratio still lies above 150 percent. See here and here.

So what’s going on here, why has government spending failed to stop the crisis? Perhaps because the crisis is not really a debt crisis. Sure debt is part of the problem, but the debt crisis and the growth crisis are two sides of the same coin. And by ignoring the other side of the coin, European governments have offered misdirected solutions that have only made the crisis worse. They have sacked public servants, slashed government welfare, increased the cost of things like university education, and put an end to many government services and programs that people depended upon in the process destroying countless lives and creating a lost generation who will never enjoy the opportunities their parents had.

They must be doing something wrong. We might get a clue at what they are doing wrong by having another think about that ratio that austerity nuts are obsessed with – debt to GDP. One way to reduce it is obviously by reducing debt; but that only works if GDP stays the same. The problem with that is that slashing billions of dollars of services, firing people and generally withdrawing cash from the economy almost inevitably results in a reduction in GDP. This explains why the debt to GDP of most European countries is not going down, despite harsh austerity. They are cutting spending, but that is resulting in lower growth. In fact it is resulting in negative growth. And that negative growth is sending companies out of business and driving people out of work.

Greece, Italy, Spain, Belgium, France and the Euro-zone as a whole remain in recession. The UK has experienced some slight economic growth in recent times but they are not exactly a success story having very nearly gone through three recessions over the period of time since the global financial crisis hit.

So I contend that trying to address debt to GDP through austerity is not a great idea.

If you are really concerned about debt to GDP then have a look at the other side of the ratio. You can reduce debt to GDP by increasing GDP. Even if you spend more and increase debt, the ratio of debt to GDP will still go down as long as GDP goes up by an even greater amount. And that is fairly likely to happen given the multiplier effect of spending: if the government spends 50,000 dollars employing someone, then that individual might spend 20,000 of that on a new car. Then the owner of the car shop might spend her new 20,000 dollars on a holiday to another city in the same country. Then the tourism operators in that city will spend their new 20,000 dollars on food, clothes etc. And the food and clothes sellers in the area will collectively have 20,000 new dollars to spend on something. This will go on and on; clearly the 50,000 the government has spent has resulted in more than 50,000 dollars worth of economic stimulus.

The above example has already resulted in over 80,000 dollars worth of stuff being bought. You might respond that in an economic downturn the government employee is likely to save their income rather than buy a new car. It is true that well off people will save in a downturn but less well off people tend to spend their money; which is why it is much more efficient to stimulate the economy through welfare for the poor rather than tax cuts for the rich. Furthermore, obviously (if the government has established a decent tax collecting structure – something Greece and Italy never did) then all of this new economic spending will result in more tax revenues, which will – guess what! – reduce the debt.

Slash and burn austerity hawks commonly used a 2010 study by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff to justify their policies. It argued that if a country has 90 percent debt to GDP or above, then economic growth will slow significantly. Of course a second study by Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin claimed to discredit the 2010 study, saying it was based on faulty calculations. Yet I would argue that even if the math wasn’t wrong, there is more explaining to do. After all, correlation doesn’t equal causation. And just because on average countries with 90 percent debt to GDP levels had much lower economic growth rates, that doesn’t mean high debt to GDP causes low economic growth. In fact based on what I was arguing above, it would seem to me that, if anything, low economic growth causes high debt to GDP. So what is more important than cutting debt? Stimulating growth!

The European economic crisis is not a debt crisis at all, it is a growth crisis and an unemployment crisis. Debt is the symptom but not the cause. And even if it was the cause, austerity is not the solution.

Karl Marx argued that capitalism lurches from crisis to crisis. You don’t have to be a communist to realise that this is a powerful insight. We have booms (that are often bubble’s waiting to burst) and we have busts; no one can deny it. Marx argued that it lurches from crisis to crisis because when there is an economic boom and demand for labour is high, workers will, according to the law of supply and demand, only work for high wages. This will result in high inflation (which is bad for business) and obviously will also directly dent the profits of businesses. As a result businesses will need to downsize and an economic crisis will ensue. This is the problem that the Hawke/Keating government’s Accord sought to address by asking unions to temper their demands for high wage growth.

On the flip side (which is the relevant side at the moment), when there is excess supply of labour (high unemployment), businesses can get away with paying low wages (as the law of supply and demand shows). This might seem like it would be good for business (and right wingers often argue that low wages would lead to full employment) but if wages are low for most people then savings will be low; once workers have spent their money on the essentials they won’t have much left over to buy any non-essential products. And so the businesses selling non-essential items, like TVs and antique furniture and tickets to rock concerts, will be in trouble. Businesses will start to close and an economic crisis ensues. So, Marx argues, we can’t win either way; capitalism is doomed to fail.

Businesses might try to get around this latter scenario by searching for new markets, especially in developing countries, finding new people to buy their stuff. This worked for a while; even though workers in Detroit couldn’t afford to buy the cars they were making, Chrysler found some rich people in China and Africa to buy their stuff. Eventually though the crisis came; once the banks stopped lending to people, and credit cards were maxed out, incomes weren’t high enough to keep buying things -and the great recession hit. I don’t think the solution to this problem is to do away with the system, because there is no credible alternative. Yet what we do need to do is to smooth the business cycle – it is in no one’s interest to lurch from crisis to crisis, bubbles and busts.

What I get from Marxian economics (as opposed to Marxist economics) is that the extremes of capitalism – bubbles and busts – cause severe crises; and an extreme response to an economic crisis will only create another crisis. A crisis results from either a bubble – excessive growth – or a bust.

Austerity is an example of an extreme response; it takes money away from those that need it, causes higher unemployment, lower wages and hence sends us hurtling towards another crisis. And that is how Europe finds itself now, lurching from serious crisis to serious crisis.

Marx also reminds us that extreme inequality, which austerity fosters, is bad for economic growth. Extreme inequality leads to the situation above, where most wealth is concentrated in the hands of the few while most workers have little money to spend on luxury goods, leading to a slump in business activity and an economic crisis.

The solution to Europe’s crisis then must involve a path forward that reduces wealth inequality, does not lead to significantly lower wages or higher unemployment; nor should it involve unsustainable wage growth built upon a bubble. The solution is to have prudent economic management that aims for sustainable wage growth, sensible government intervention in the economy to boost spending when necessary, a progressive taxation system that reduces inequality and a strong safety net that helps people get back on their feet and prevents an excess supply of labour. This Keynesian approach might not eliminate all booms and busts – they may indeed be an inevitable feature of capitalism as Marx said. Yet it can reduce the extreme volatility of capitalism and make crises less likely. This is the approach Australian Labor governments have largely followed. It is also the approach Obama has tried to follow (though he has had to negotiate with ideologically blinded austerity obsessed Congress). And the results in Australia and even the US are far more promising than Europe.

Any attempt by a potential future Abbott government in Australia to change from this path more towards an austerity path should be a cause for concern. It would be a triumph of small government ideology over doing what works. Europe has shown that the game is up for austerity hawks. Economic theory now needs to shift to the left, in line with what works.

Elliot Brice has studied economics at the University of Melbourne and is currently studying to be a high school teacher at the same institution. He also has an Honours degree in philosophy.