Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Friday, February 03, 2012

Goodbye Charlie Brown: the sequel

It doesn’t happen often, but what a beautiful sight to see when it does. Every once in a while the Canadian public flexes its muscles and tells a prime minister: “Oh no you don’t, buddy!”

That is what’s happening on pensions. We are witnessing Stephen Harper’s “Goodbye Charlie Brown” moment.

For reasons known only to Mr. Harper, last week he chose to muse about Canada’s aging population and the impact on the future of public pensions at a gathering of the world’s elite at a luxury Swiss resort. He did not make a statement in our House of Commons, where it would have signaled a respect for the Canadian people. No, instead it was delivered to that august crowd in Davos, Switzerland. If anyone wonders where the “1 percent” hangs out, just go to Davos in January.

Our Tim Horton’s Prime Minister flew by taxpayer-funded luxury private jet to the five star luxury resort in the heart of the Swiss Alps where royals take ski holidays. This is an annual gathering of central bankers, investment bankers, hedge fund managers, private equity titans, consultants and think-tank types. So, why did we pay for our prime minister and his sizable entourage to speak to this international audience of billionaires?

To talk to them about the “unsustainability” of Canada’s pension system, of course!

Mr. Harper and his finance minister have taken to giving sermons to the world on the wonderful work they have done to stabilize and grow Canada’s economy. They talk incessantly about how wonderful our banks are, how healthy our balance sheet is, and how, by implication, just plain bloody smart and talented Stephen Harper and his ministers are.

Try as politicians might to ignore them, but facts do matter in life. The banking system is healthy because the Liberal governments of Chretien and Martin put in place a stringent regulatory regime and enforced it vigorously. Banks are in good shape because Liberal governments resisted fierce pressure from the banking and business lobby and the Harper Reform-Alliance-Conservative parties to allow them to merge. That would have created mega banks with less competition and less consumer choice. The other reason that banks are so profitable is because they gouge the consumer and refuse to lend money to those that need it, including entrepreneurs. But that’s a whole other issue.

Harper inherited a healthy balance sheet. Since taking power, he threw us into deficit, presided over a ballooning debt, and exponentially grew the size of government. How did this so-called “competent” fiscal conservative manage this feat? Through a toxic combination of reckless tax cuts where they were not needed (GST and further corporate taxes decreases), tax increases where they hurt (payroll tax), and massively wasteful government spending.

With an ease that must be terribly disconcerting to his honest and principled supporters, Mr. Harper portrays himself as an economic wunderkind. To the rest of us, he is either amusing or infuriating.

The fact is that Canada’s economic performance is a direct consequence of selling our commodities at record prices to a Chinese market with an insatiable hunger for them. Energy, potash, metals, minerals, coal and trees are being shipped in unprecedented volumes to China. As you would expect, Mr. Harper takes credit for that, too.

Meanwhile, our overall competitiveness continues to erode and Canada’s national productivity – the real measure of our standard of living – continues its precipitous decline. Our schools go underfunded, high school graduates cannot find places in our universities, our environment is being neglected, our justice system is underfunded and in profound stress, and our health care system is fragmenting.

Canada’s economic and social union has never been in a more precarious state. Let there be no mistake: the federation itself is being weakened.

The unity that took almost 150 painstaking years to construct is under assault by Stephen Harper’s profoundly numbing and small-minded gradual incrementalist philosophy. That is the brilliance – and real danger – of Stephen Harper. By numbing stealth, he has been consistently chipping away at our national spinal cord.

During the election campaign that gave him a majority government, we heard nothing – zero – from Stephen Harper on public pensions. But we sure heard a lot about the need to spend tens of billions on fighter jets and new prisons, not to mention hockey rink roofs and outdoor toilets, not to mention the signs and advertising that went with them. He scared people who are mostly seniors with a flagrant and unconscionable lie that crime is running rampant on our streets. The facts and evidence say otherwise.

Nevermind.

In 2008, Harper was forced by opposition parties to deal aggressively with the economic meltdown that everyone saw coming but him. The opposition demanded that the government create a stimulus program to put money in the hands of people and deal with pressing critical infrastructure needs. What we were treated to was a spending boondoggle on a scale never before seen in Canada. What did we get? Nature trails, botanical gardens, recreation center roofs, gazebos, to name a few. The so-called Canada Action Plan was the longest running taxpayer funded political advertising and target riding re-election campaign in the history of Canada. Harper bought and paid for his re-election with our money, aided and abetted by the hapless Liberals, NDP, and Bloc Quebecois.

Play around with people on fixed incomes, however, and you are entering into a wholly different realm. In 1985, the Progressive Conservative government proposed de-indexing old age pensions, and Brian Mulroney had an unfortunate run-in with an irate senior citizen, the irrepressible Solange Denis. If Mr. Harper has forgotten that lesson, the arrogance of power that one typically sees later in a majority mandate has arrived early.

One of the people Mr. Harper has managed to scare is my 85 year-old father. My Dad retired when he was sixty-five and had worried about money all of his life. When he retired, he was a truck driver. Dad never worked for a company long enough to build a pension anywhere. Like many, he moved from job to job and went where the work was. There were stretches of unemployment, and I remember so vividly how grateful my parents were for the Unemployment Insurance safety net. It saved our family. Dad didn’t retire with very much in the bank. Since my mother passed away six years ago, my father’s monthly income has been a grand total of $950.

Well before Mr. Harper’s smug and self-satisfied speech to the world’s rich and famous, seniors were fighting for better public pensions to live in dignity. What we provide them is less than peanuts. For years, they have been sick with worry. Because of how they are forced to live, so many live a daily despair that is unseen, for the most part. They are living a humiliating existence, are often completely on their own, and are literally without life-support. We have turned so many of those that have built this country into the forgotten ones. They are too proud to ever beg. For people like my father, the fight to support their families and survive from paycheck to paycheck has been a lifelong journey. They have earned the right to live out their retirement years with respect and in the grace and dignity they deserve.

Stephen Harper has raised the anxiety and fear level of Canadian seniors. As far as I am concerned, that is as indecent as you can get.

This isn’t politics. This is life. Publicly funded pensions are the only means many of our fellow citizens have to for the basics: rent, food, transportation. We should be talking about how to increase pensions and improve the quality of life and sense of security of our seniors, not scare the living daylights out of them.

If we have to pay more taxes today to ensure our income security in the future, that is what we should do. We should at least have the conversation. Our pension system requires greater fed-prov coordination, more competent government spending priorities, and a growing economy. Perhaps Mr. Harper should focus on those, instead of looking where he can axe retired Canadians.

And let us not be suckered into a false debate on “affordability” and “sustainability”. A society defines its priorities and what is important to it and then it figures out how to pay for it. I sincerely hope that income security for seniors is one of those bedrock values that Canadians are prepared to fight for.

The Harper Conservatives have squandered our money on hundreds of billions worth of stuff we don’t need. This big spending government has done absolutely nothing to build the economy of the future, to improve national productivity, to make the federation more efficient and more united. It has done nothing to facilitate genuine long-term economic growth. And now, Mr. Harper is preparing to take his accountant’s scalpel to our most vulnerable.

He is a trader and a cutter, not a builder. That’s why he is so comfortable among the Masters of the Universe in Davos, and that is why they applaud his calls to cut our pensions.

If Solange were here, she’d say: “Goodbye Charlie Brown”.

Original Article
Source: iPolitics 
Author: Daniel Veniez 

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