In Reflections of a Siamese Twin, John Ralston Saul argues, “Our future was debated and decided as if we had no past.” He goes on to describe contemporary Canada in this way: “[W]hile our elites increasingly give themselves over to their myths of globalization...the citizenry seems to be withdrawing into a state of sullen non-cooperation.” Why Because we are repeatedly told that the approaches used to build this country no longer function.
Since the 1980s, there has been a gravitational pull to the monetarist school of economics, with its near-total faith in the wisdom of the market. Under this model, the federal government is not characterized as an instrument of nation-building, but rather as an impediment to the natural needs of the market. As trade and commerce became increasingly transnational, the idea of a strong national government (and a mixed private-public economy) lost currency. Profit, not human prosperity, is now declared to be our primary national purpose, and efforts to mitigate the worst consequences of global trade and competition are muted or non-existent. Facilitated by computers and the Internet, through just-in-time delivery systems and other magic machines, business has gone global, the argument goes, and our society must adapt to the needs, values, and realities of the global marketplace. We are made to feel parochial for even thinking about national identity or protecting our institutions.
Values once fundamental to our working lives have corroded. If you want to join a company, rise in its ranks, and remain loyal to it, you are “old economy.” The concept of a company being loyal to its workforce is “old thinking”. Our children will not have jobs as we did. Their resumés will feature numerous contract jobs and work done for dozens of different enterprises. They will simply move from place to place.
It is not nostalgia for halcyon days and greener pastures that is causing me to be anxious about our present trajectory. Rather, it is that vast layoffs are now the rule at many corporations seeking labour in emerging nations where they are not financially burdened by unions, fair wages, or environmental regulations.
Of course global trade can provide important economic opportunities and has the potential to yield a global conscience that takes collective responsibility for environments both ecological and social. Our commercial and cultural goods now reach the world. In return, we are enriched by other cultures. This was meant to be the promise of the new global community, but instead of serving people by empowering them and their societies, the global economy is becoming a race to the bottom, a race that replaces diversity with homogenization.
There are many examples where the negative consequences of intense domestic and global competition coupled with decentralization have affected the things that matter most to us. We have abandoned, for instance, the democratic promise that higher education would be accessible to all. While undergraduate programs are starved of resources, business and law schools aggressively compete with each other and provide premium education at premium prices. Across the board, social services are atrophying and user fees are becoming the norm. While part of this trend was triggered by the economic adversity of the late 1980s and the fiscal realities of the new economy that followed, the reasons for this drift don’t lie there alone. In fact, most of the attrition in Canada’s social infrastructure took place during a period of sustained economic growth. What is the result
Despite prosperous times and encouraging employment figures from Statistics Canada, clawbacks in social services have contributed to a growing gap between rich and poor, and the number of low-wage, insecure jobs is growing. The richest 10 percent of Canadians now own and control 53 percent of the country’s wealth; more than one million children live below the pre-tax low-income cut-off, and there is more child poverty today than in 1989, when the House of Commons committed to ending it by the turn of the century.
And then there’s that one enduring shame that haunts our progress as a nation: unfulfilled treaty obligations. Aboriginal peoples in Canada are facing unacceptable living conditions, joblessness, and a disgraceful life-expectancy rate. Promises have been made—solemn each and every one—but the pledges remain largely unfulfilled. A vital part of our legacy is being rendered invisible, lost in isolated poverty, only to re-emerge in shocking spectacles like the November 2005 evacuation of over 1,000 Kashechewan residents after an outbreak of E. coli in the water at their James Bay reserve.
The question is, do we now accept that a legacy of shared destiny is not sustainable—that, in the end, people have to make their own way
As recent evidence suggests, government transparency has been replaced by closed-door negotiations, with the public excluded from debate and denied information on who is responsible for decisions that affect us all. Who decided that our children would drown in debt after they leave university (Half of our university graduates leave school with student debts of over $20,000.) Art, music, and physical education programs at many public schools are now funded through bake sales, or not at all. In 2005, almost one-third of Canadians reported that they, a family member, or a friend could not find a family doctor. How do these things happen The polling firm Ipsos Reid reports that 73 percent of us believe that Canadian content in the media and the arts is crucial for maintaining national and cultural identity, and yet fewer and fewer Canadian productions get the support they need to tell our stories. And who decides that gun control is the primary issue underpinning youth violence, rather than the forces of hopelessness
And what of new Canadians, many of them highly skilled and educated, who confront accrediting bodies that ignore their experience and credentials That so many immigrant children face a lack of critical second-language support is unpardonable. It’s no wonder that dropout rates for esl learners are more than double the high-school average.
