Category Archives: Opinion

Want, waste and wealth: The immorality and inefficiency of capitalist food distribution in Canada

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Michael Laxer's picture   By Michael Laxer August 13, 2013    From: http://rabble.ca

It has been both a disturbing and telling couple of weeks in terms of news developments related to food distribution in Canada.

First, at the end of July, a report by researchers at the University of Toronto showed that nearly four million Canadians face what they, as is now commonplace, somewhat euphemistically describe as “food insecurity”; an academic way of saying that these citizens either are not able to buy enough food for themselves or their families or that they are constantly struggling to do so. In the case of Nunavut, where the situation is at its worst, over 50% of households experienced food insecurity, while in both PEI and New Brunswick it was a quarter or more of households.

Jennifer Taylor, head of the PEI Food Security Network, reacted to the island province’s embarrassingly high numbers by stating:

It’s a social problem. It’s not a nutritional problem [but] it has nutritional outcomes…

This is an embarrassment. We have the home of Green Gables, we have beautiful beaches, we have friendly, generous people and we have the most kids — save Nunavut, that’s the only place higher — that are possibly going to bed hungry or going the whole day without food. This is a crisis and we need to deal with it.

The consequences of “food insecurity”, or put more bluntly, hunger, malnourishment and the stress of trying to get food on the table, is devastating for those families and individuals facing it.  The report’s project leader, Dr. Valerie Tarasuk, put it in stark terms:

The impact of this situation on children, families, communities, the health care system and our economy cannot be overstated…The problem is not under control and more effective responses are urgently needed. The cost of inaction is simply too high.

Shortly after the release of this report, came news from Statistics Canada about the rising price of food in Canada between 2007-2012. In the words of Mark Brown of their economic analysis division:

The report showed that prices have increased at a cumulative rate of 19% over the last five years. The report also showed that for Canada, the price of food rose at almost twice the rate of the Consumer Price Index, excluding food.

This is a staggering increase that directly effects the financial well-being of citizens, especially, obviously, lower income households and those on fixed (and always declining versus inflation) social assistance rates. It also clearly adds to the acute problem of “food insecurity” described above.

Finally, a third report released by the Conference Board of Canada on August 8, found, among other troubling environmental conclusions, that as much as 40% of all food in Canada is wasted. This waste is equivalent to as much as $27.7 billion annually.

Put in the context of widespread food insecurity and the rise of prices, this level of waste is truly appalling both socially and morally. It means that not only is food that could feed citizens who are going hungry being wasted on hard-to-believe and disgraceful levels, but such wastage inevitably will be a factor in keeping food prices high, in this case artificially.

The Conference Board, typically and disingenuously given its business bent, puts the onus for the waste on consumers, and calls for greater “education and awareness campaigns”. While it is, no doubt, true, that most food waste cumulatively will occur in households, the 40% figure is not an average, it is a total. Any given household, taken individually, will waste far less food than the vast majority of restaurants and supermarkets/food retailers taken individually.

What the numbers really indicate is that food waste is a systemic part of our food distribution system, that it is tied to the quantities in which food is packaged, marketed and sold as well as to standard commercial food practices, like restaurants and diners filling plates with more food, often by far, than a person is likely to finish. The food industry, as a whole, profits greatly from this waste, as it directly impacts supply and demand in ways obviously in its favour and drives up prices.

Further, though, the Conference Board’s calls for “education and awareness” are absurd in a society and economic system predicated on the principle of  perpetual over-consumption (in economic terms) socially, with the over-consumption the more pronounced the higher up the economic ladder one climbs, it being basically non-existent at the lower end. Placing the “blame” on households conveniently diverts attention from the profound immorality of what this waste represents. It is an intrinsic part of our capitalist system of “food distribution” and not an incidental one.

The waste embodies the very ethos and underlying driving forces of consumerist capitalism and highlights its moral and economic contradictions as well as how it is basically unsustainable.

Most Canadians are aware that we are living in a dangerous housing bubble which is at best now “cooling”, though it shows very real signs of collapsing. This is especially problematic as the housing bubble was essentially engineered by the Federal Government as a form of economic stimulus, and the government, and citizens, are on the hook for it should it collapse.

These actions have also had the, to say the least, morally dubious effect of dramatically driving up housing prices making them less affordable to those with lower incomes, even despite the loosening of mortgage qualification rules until recently. In the long term they have also created conditions in which it is quite likely that many Canadians will be paying mortgages on properties worth significantly less than what they purchased them for.Finally, they have placed many Canadians in a position, though admittedly of their own nominal “free will” in which they have a remarkable net worth on paper, tied up in the value of a house they do not actually yet own, but who in reality are a paycheque or two away from losing everything.

Many are also aware that we have sustained much of Canada’s economic “recovery” since 2008 through the extension of credit and the facilitation of a culture of indebtedness that has led to Canadians being in far greater debt than at any other time in their history. This is a credit bubble which is also clearly driven by consumerist forces in the economy backed by the government’s and corporate sectors policies around credit. As with all bubbles, it would take a surprisingly small number of initial defaults on mortgages and credit card/line-of-credit debts to set a whole chain reaction of default and rapid economic downturn in motion.

Further, looser credit spurs over-consumption in that people buy things that they otherwise could not afford and may in fact not be able to afford. Cars, more expensive housing, appliances, etc. This is what makes it such a dangerous form of economic “stimulus”. The consumption is not based on higher incomes (as we all know incomes are largely stagnating versus inflation) or on direct government spending on infrastructure or social programs that actually puts real money in the pockets of citizens, but rather on making it easier to buy things without having the actual money to do so. This can only, for obvious reasons, go on for so long. It also leaves out entirely the poor and the lower income working class, as they often cannot get credit in any real sense and thus cannot “benefit” from it.

The loosening and over-extension of credit is the worst possible and most corporate friendly “solution” to the diminishing ability of the consumerist society to sustain consumption. It places the “risk” and obligation of the stimulus entirely on the back of the consumer and citizen.

The alarming reports in the food sector very much fit this broader social pattern. We see the growth of “food insecurity” at a time of rapidly rising food costs in a setting of a largely unregulated corporate food industry that has engineered, facilitates and that profits from tremendous social waste. 

In a society  that makes a virtual cult out of the disposable, the food sector has not been left behind. From club packs, to encouraging citizens to buy more to “save” (an inherently absurd concept), to the socially created expectation that a “good meal” out means being served more food than we can eat, to retailers stocking shelves with more product than they can sell, the system is designed to create waste on a massive scale.

And as with other sectors of our consumerist economy it is not sustainable environmentally, economically or morally. It needs to be radically reexamined as do its systems of ownership and distribution.     

Michael Laxer lives in Toronto where he runs a bookstore with his partner Natalie. Michael has a Degree in History from Glendon College of York University. He is a political activist, a two-time former candidate and former election organizer for the NDP, was a socialist candidate for Toronto City Council in 2010 and is on the executive of the newly formed Socialist Party of Ontario.

Labour force numbers worse than they look

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Jim StanfordBy Jim Stanford  August 12, 2013  http://rabble.ca

Last week’s Labour Force numbers provide more evidence that Canada’s labour market is still mired in a three-year funk. Following one year of decent recovery from mid-2009 (the trough of the recession) to mid-2010, driven mostly by extraordinary monetary and fiscal stimulus, further progress has been stalled ever since.

Most headlines focus on the unemployment rate, but that is a misleading indicator — especially during sluggish times (when many workers give up looking for non-existent jobs, and hence disappear from the official unemployment rolls). The Canadian unemployment rate rose to 7.2 per cent in July, and is now just a smidge below the U.S. rate (7.4 per cent). Conceivably those two lines could cross imminently, casting some additional symbolic doubt on the Harper government’s broken-record claim that Canada survived the recession much better than other industrial countries. As previously noted, adjusted for population, Canada’s labour market performance since 2008 has clearly been worse than most other industrial countries.

The employment rate is a better indicator of labour market performance (relative to population trends), and by that measure July’s performance was even worse than the headline unemployment number seems to suggest. Labour force participation declined one-fifth of a percentage point in July; its decline has continued despite the so-called “recovery.” Indeed, at 66.5 per cent of the working age population this month’s participation rate (tied with April) is now at the lowest level since early 2002. This exodus of workers from the formal labour market helps to artificially suppress the official unemployment rate.

The employment rate also declined a fifth of a point, to 61.7 per cent. That’s lower than June 2010, the level reached after just the first year of stimulus-fuelled recovery (and not much better than the miserable 61.3 per cent recorded at the trough of the recession). Summer of 2010 is when governments shifted from stimulus to austerity, and the recovery stalled. (Erin Weir’s post illuminates the strong link between austerity and the falling employment numbers.) Job-creation for the past 3 years has only just kept up with population growth. The decline in the unemployment rate over the past three years is thus purely due to Canadians abandoning the labour market in droves. That’s hardly an accomplishment; it implies isolation, inactivity and poverty.

At the pre-recession participation rate (67.8 per cent), July’s unemployment rate would have been over 9 per cent. Add in involuntary part-time workers and other pools of hidden unemployed (e.g. those waiting for a job to start), and Canada’s true unemployment rate is over 12 per cent — or over 2.3 million people.

The painful reality is this: Labour is not scarce; jobs are scarce. And Canada’s labour market is not healthy; it’s been stalled in recession-like conditions for years. So much for the myth of Canadian exceptionalism.

Jim Stanford is an economist with CAW.

Canada needs a jobs and training strategy: Georgetti comments on disappointing July job numbers

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Friday, 9 August 2013

 

OTTAWA ― The President of the Canadian Labour Congress says that the job numbers for July are a big disappointment and he is calling on the federal government and employers to invest in both job creation and training.  

“Our economy lost 39,400 jobs in July and the unemployment rate is up. This is a wakeup call and we want governments and private sector employers to invest in job creation and training. 

Georgetti was commenting on the release by Statistics Canada of its Labour Force Survey for July 2013. There were 1,380,300 unemployed Canadians in July and the overall unemployment rate was 7.2%. In the 15-to-24 age group, unemployment stood at 13.9%, and 47.9% of young workers are employed only part-time.

Georgetti says that the federal government should assist in creating good jobs by participating in a long-term program to replace and extend Canada’s ageing physical and social infrastructure in roads, rapid transit and child care. “We have cement chunks falling off of bridges and tractors falling into city sinkholes. There is a lot to be done and the government should get at it.”

He adds that Ottawa has provided billions in corporate tax giveaways in the expectation that companies would invest in job creation and training. “Our research has shown that those companies are generally sitting on the cash instead of investing it in job creation and training. It’s high time for them to put that money to  work in the economy.” 

Quick Analysis from CLC Chief Economist Sylvain Schetagne

Government austerity measures and job cuts hurt employment growth in Canada in July 2013. The number of people working decreased significantly by 39,400 in July 2013, and another 14,200 simply quit looking for work and left the labour market. As a result, the unemployment rate rose 0.1% to 7.2% and the percentage of the population working decreased (from 61.9% to 61.7%). Jobs were lost mainly in the public sector, with 74,000 fewer jobs in this sector as a result of declines in health care and social assistance (-47,000) and public administration (-22,900). Growth did occur in the private sector but the number of jobs in manufacturing remains lower than a year ago in July (-59,500). Young workers were hard hit in July. Compared to the previous month, there was decrease of 45,600 jobs among workers aged 15-24, while another 48,800 left the labour market. As a result, their unemployment rate is 13.9%, up from 0.1% from last month.

The Canadian Labour Congress, the national voice of the labour movement, represents 3.3 million Canadian workers. The CLC brings together Canada’s national and international unions along with the provincial and territorial federations of labour and 130 district labour councils.

Web site: www.canadianlabour.ca
Follow us on Twitter @CanadianLabour

Contacts:  Sylvain Schetagne, CLC Chief Economist, 613-526-7445.
Dennis Gruending, CLC Communications: Tel. 613-526-7431.
Cell-text: 613-878-6040. Email: dgruending@clc-ctc.ca

The middle class: The battleground of all politicians

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Monia MazighBy Monia Mazigh August 9, 2013 http://rabble.ca

Photo: Peter Klein/flickr

In the U.S., the “M” word has been on the lips of politicians from the left to the right of the political spectrum, albeit for different reasons. President Obama is not an exception. Indeed, he made the mention of the middle-class part of his electoral rhetoric immediately after the 2008 financial crisis and after hundreds of thousands of Americans lost their houses, their American dream.

Last February, in his State of the Union address, Obama declared it was “our generation’s task” to “reignite the true engine of America’s economic growth — a rising, thriving middle class.” A few days ago, on August 5, he spoke in a gathering and he again pondered the same message, to “secure a better bargain for the middle class.” Whether we agree with Obama’s plan to revive the middle class or not, one must admit that he has been quite explicit about it. It includes measures affecting child care, dependent care, college expenses and retirement savings.

Here in Canada, Justin Trudeau is on the footsteps of Mr. Obama and his talk is all about the middle class. The only difference is that we don’t have any idea how Justin Trudeau is going to tackle the middle-class issue. Is he going to continue to give free rides to corporations as both Liberal and Conservative governments did in the past, or will he be offering a real program with fiscal and economic measures specifically targeted to the fading middle class? (Even though a lot of words are being said about the new Liberal star candidate in Toronto Centre and how her book might make up the next platform for the Liberal Party campaign). Or is he only interested in the votes of this class and then will turn his back and continue to help the big corporations instead?

But in reality, do we still have a “real” middle class? Where does the political opportunism start and where does the economic reality end?

In the last two decades, generations of politicians watched the erosion and the crushing of the middle class. Some denounced the situation and stood by their principles but many nodded and acquiesced to all the economic and social measures making the poor poorer and the rich richer, effectively shrinking the middle class.

According to a report prepared by Canadian bureaucrats and presented to Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, and recently released by Postmedia, Canada’s middle class improved its average income only by seven per cent between 1976 and 2010. This is equivalent to 0.2 per cent per year. The median income of this class did not do better. From 2007 to 2011, it grew from $66,700 to $68,000, a mere 0.5 per cent per year.

This assessment is confirmed by another report that was prepared by TD Bank. The report documents the fact that low-wage and middle-wage jobs in Canada have been shrinking as a share of the economy as job growth focuses more and more on high-skilled, high-end jobs. Meanwhile, the spending by the middle class didn’t decrease. To the contrary, it continued to increase and the funding comes from the larger amount of debt Canadian families are contracting from the banks and other financial institutions, making the Canadian household one of the most indebted in the OECD countries with a debt-ratio of around 161 per cent for the first quarter of 2013. 

Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of Canada, never missed an opportunity to speak against the high amount of debt that is contracted by Canadians. The government never raised an eyebrow (until they changed the rules for mortgages). They barely reacted to the horrifying numbers of children who now live in poverty. Canada’s child poverty rate increased between the mid-1990s and the late 2000s. These are not only children born to single parents of low-income families but also to working parents who can’t make enough annual earnings to afford all the basic necessities for their families. The Conference Board of Canada reported that Canada scores a “C” grade and ranks 15th out of 17 peer countries. Moreover, more than one in seven Canadian children live in poverty.

Last July, the city of Detroit in the U.S., where the middle class was first formed by the autoworkers and later by public employers running city services, went bankrupt. The fall of the auto industry, the cuts to public funds, the fiscal structure of the American government and many other socio-economic factors took Detroit to the cliff; it was forced close shop. It is interesting nowadays to watch the Conservative government trying so hard to dismantle the unions in Canada and to slash thousands of jobs in the public sector. Yes, it would be both stretched out and simplistic to draw similarities between Detroit and the path Canada is following. Nevertheless, it is crucial to study the effects of recent public sector cuts and their impacts on the Canadian middle class, and the state of our economy in general.

The middle class today is like a beautiful woman, desired and solicited by everyone but insidiously feared and despised by all. The politicians are no exception.

Monia Mazigh was born and raised in Tunisia and immigrated to Canada in 1991. Mazigh was catapulted onto the public stage in 2002 when her husband, Maher Arar, was deported to Syria where he was tortured and held without charge for over a year. She campaigned tirelessly for his release. Mazigh holds a PhD in finance from McGill University. In 2008, she published a memoir, Hope and Despair, about her pursuit of justice, and in 2011, a novel in French, Miroirs et mirages.

Photo: Peter Klein/flickr

Show Canadian Parties Who’s Boss

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Voters, think yourselves employers, and would-be politicos your job seekers. Give ’em hell.

By Crawford Kilian, August 9, 2013, TheTyee.ca

Ever since the failure of the B.C. New Democratic Party to win the May election, dissidents within the party have blamed everyone from Adrian Dix to campaign manager Brian Topp and party president Moe Sihota. Plenty of outsiders have offered their own analyses and recommendations, not always well meant.

No doubt the usual suspects deserve the criticism, but I suspect the real problem is voters’ failure to remember that a democracy is an enterprise where the voters — not the parties — are the boss.

Politicians pay lip service to that idea, but they’re happier with promoting themselves as “leaders” we should happily follow. The media take the cue from the politicians, running endless stories about what the prime minister, premier, or some cabinet minister is doing. Then they profess to be scandalized to report how politicians are exploiting their perks and charging $16 orange juice to the voters’ tab.

Running in parties is a convenience for politicians, who get a better chance of election in exchange for accepting party “discipline.” The parties are less convenient for voters because party promises rarely match performance. This leads to cynicism among politicians and voters alike, and that leads to apathy and still more political abuse. A democracy can’t prosper with absentee owners; someone’s got to mind the store.

While voters have ignored their responsibilities, all parties have ignored the demographic, environmental and economic changes transforming Canada along with the rest of the world. Older Canadians may still be voters, but they notably failed to bring up their kids to take voting seriously. Robins are showing up in the Arctic while swallows vanish from the Lower Mainland. Technology has made countless industries obsolete.

Reframing the parties

We won’t solve our political problems with a reformed or abolished Senate, or a more civilized Question Period, or less whipping of backbenchers. We can’t get rid of parties, but we should reframe them, so they always remember that they’re just so many job applicants. We are their employers, elections are hiring interviews, and once hired they had damned well better deliver on what they promise.

Here’s what every federal and provincial political party, regardless of ideology, should offer Canadians:

1. Its own concept of a social contract, explaining its view of taxes and what we can reasonably expect from our investment: a country where we collectively look after basic support systems so we can individually get on with our lives. The difference between parties would be in the definition of “basic support.”

2. Redefinition of the role of MP/MLA, not so much as “people’s representative” but as “people’s agent,” like the agents of movie stars and athletes: MPs would look after the details to ensure their constituents have both immediate work and meaningful long-term careers. Like agents’ income, MPs’ income would depend on that of the voters. Government MPs and MLAs would take pay cuts based on double their home riding’s unemployment rate: a five per cent unemployment rate this quarter means 10 per cent less on the MP’s next-quarter take-home pay and eventual pension. That might make backbenchers less whippable.

3. A detailed business plan for the province or country. This wouldn’t be just to go on doing what we’ve always done, but also to argue what we should plan to do when the resources run out or a natural disaster hits. The Finnish government is currently working “to make Finland the most competent country in the world by 2020.” Canada could and should give the Finns some competition on that score.

The business plan would include how to fund full healthcare, with demographic sustainability over next 50 years, minimum; provide free education to all as an investment to ensure sustainability; strong support for young families; and active recruitment of immigrants who can also maintain cultural and trade links with their home countries.

The plan would also include heavy support for scientific and technological research and development: R&D will drive change in all countries, so we need to keep pace. The next tech revolution could come in computers or synthetic biology, or something completely unforeseen. So the party wouldn’t bet on training particular kinds of workers (which would subsidize industries that may already be finished), but on the general education of highly literate citizens who could well invent a scientific revolution we can’t even imagine yet.

A party without such a business plan should be shown the door.

4. A vision of the poor not as a problem to be solved but an opportunity to be seized, through better education and the provision of more meaningful work. With so few young workers and so many retirees to support, we can’t afford to waste the productivity of any worker. We may quarrel about levels of support, but not about support itself.

Listening like smart employers

When elections come, we should consider ourselves employers listening to very anxious job seekers who want control over very large sums of our money. They should be able to tell us what they’d do with that money, and what kind of return they’d get on it.

Smart employers know bullshit when they hear it, especially when it’s obviously what the applicant thinks they want to hear: “Gee, I’m a team player, I’ve got ideas that will save you money, I’ve got a passion for this field, you won’t be disappointed if you hire me.”

Better to hear an applicant who looks you in the eye and says: “You’ve got big problems. This is what I think they are, this is what they’re costing you, and this is how you might start to fix them. If you don’t agree, thanks for your time and good luck.”

We’re too big a country for populist micro-management. But on the day the government calls a new election, it should be legally obliged to submit a balance sheet on what it’s spent, what it’s borrowed, and how many of its promises it’s actually kept. The balance sheet would be drawn up by the Parliamentary Budget Officer, not by anyone answering to the government itself, and the Opposition would be free to present its own critique.

Reframing our parties along these lines wouldn’t solve all our problems. As the great American journalist H. L. Mencken observed, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

But we’re all the common people, and we sometimes learn from experience whether we like it or not. We don’t always fall for warmongers, racketeers, or pretty faces. If experience teaches us that the present party system (which has never been in any of our Constitution Acts) is treating us poorly, we can still remember who’s supposed to be the boss, and who are just the well-dressed flunkies we’ve hired to work for us. [Tyee]