Political Inertia

Whenever our next election rolls around, I'll be ready - ready not to vote for the Conservatives. Ready not to vote for the Liberals. By default, I shall, in all likelihood, vote for the NDP. And it will hardly be an enthusiastic endorsement. 

Our political landscape, with few exceptions, has grown stale and complacent. Once it sets in, inertia is a hard force to break free from.  Journalist Justin Ling takes some lessons from the recent American presidential race.

In trying to paint Trump as a danger to democracy, the Democrats twisted themselves in knots to become guardians of the status quo. They avoided, even shut down, difficult conversations on pressing social issues because they are fearful of how bigots might weaponize those discussions.

Harris spent the campaign bombarding voters with tightly-messaged scripts about why they should vote against Trump. By election day, Americans had few good reasons to vote for the vice president. And yet it’s this strategy that Trudeau looks set to replicate.

Unfortunately, if the polls are to be believed,  Canada's electoral die has already been cast, and PP's simplistic, binary rhetoric is captivating many. Indeed, some of his barbs hit quite close to home, if one really examines them. Recently, for example, he gave a hard-hitting address to many of Canada's corporate elites, accusing them of "crony capitalism," saying they and Mr. Trudeau are too close and too dependent on lobbying and subsidies. If he wins, PP promises to change that, a promise that will undoubtedly resonate with many.

For example: longstanding Canadian law restricts foreign ownership in parts of the telecom, media, financial and transportation industries, which has resulted in a consolidation of power in a handful of companies such as BCE, Rogers Communications Inc., Air Canada and the major banks. Harper and Trudeau’s governments have tried at times to stoke more competition, but they’ve mostly stopped short of major reforms to liberalize protected sectors.

There is little doubt that the Trudeau Liberals have a too-close relationship with the powerful.

Poilievre’s “crony capitalism” charge rings true to people like [Jim] Balsillie, who has been critical of the close links between Trudeau’s government and some executives at big companies in highly regulated industries. He cites the example of Navdeep Bains, who was Trudeau’s industry minister, left politics in 2021, quickly landed at Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and now works as a senior executive at Rogers — a job announced just weeks after the government allowed Rogers to acquire a large rival cable company.

The government has been slow to move on open banking, a regulatory framework that makes it easier for consumers to move around their financial information and use the services of new financial technology startups.

“Why after nine years do we still not have open banking?” Balsillie said. “Who’s had total keys to the throne on fixing that for nine years? It’s clear that the Liberals have been captured by Bay Street.”

I suspect those who entertain ongoing outrage over the high costs of wireless and the predatory, protected practices of the banking industry would find little to disagree with here.

Justin Ling is pessimistic about the prospects for change within either the Liberal or NDP leadership.

Trudeau is neither innovating new policy nor reaching out to unlikely places. Their most significant accomplishments of late, national pharmacare and dentalcare plans, won’t cover most working people and come as medicare plunges further into crisis.

The Liberals’ lack of vision or ambition ought to leave an open lane for the NDP to offer a bold, uncompromising, and ambitious agenda for change. Yet they are the architects of the dental and pharmacare plans, and now seem bereft of other ideas. Despite their anti-billionaire rhetoric, Jagmeet Singh’s most ambitious policy is to implement price controls for groceries (also a riff on a Harris policy.) Voters are, understandably, disinterested.

Singh and Trudeau and stuck in their scripts, damned by the anxieties, purity, and dourness of their parties. The only tactic left at their disposal is to compare Poilievre to Trump, unconvincingly and to the frustration of the Conservatives’ new-found working-class base.

Institutional stasis is an almost always-certain eventuality, demonstrated amply in the above. And time on the bench seems to be the only fix to the inertia that currently plagues our politics.Without new vision and new leadership, I suspect the next election will, unfortunately prove current polling to be correct. 

 

 

A Vile Image

It is good that this pathetic, disturbing attempt by Alberta energy company X-Site to incite hatred and sexual violence against Greta Thunerg is being widely denounced within Alberta. Surely, there is no place in our country or anywhere else for this kind of violent, misogynistic backlash against someone corporate Canada feels threatened by.



Rocky Mountain House, Alta., Councillor Michelle Narang summed up the revulsion all right-thinking people should feel this way:

“This company represents everything that the oil and gas industry needs to fight against,” Narang said to Global News while reading what she had posted online.

“I am absolutely sickened that X-Site Energy Services would think that the hard-working men and women in the energy industry would condone this representation of a child clearly being raped.”

“We do not rape women and girls to teach them a lesson. This is not our oilpatch,” Narang said to Global News. “We can’t have this representation of the oil patch and the oil companies and of our industry be accepted as normal. People need to start speaking out about it.

“It’s not OK.”

I guess X-Site just didn't get the memo, eh?

Yet Another Failure of The Corporate Community

We hear everyday about the grim prospects that our young people face - protracted periods of unemployment, underemployment and contract work have become the norm, rather than the exception, even for those with extensive education. Even going back to school to pursue graduate studies or certificate programs offers no guarantee of gainful employment. Indeed, my own family has personal experience with this problem. My son, with a Master's Degree, had to move to Alberta for meaningful employment, and my daughter, also the holder of a Master's as well as a post-grad certificate, is still struggling to find her place.

We are told that the culprit is a weak economy, with businesses reluctant to hire and invest during times of uncertainty.

And yet we are also told that Canada has a shortage of skilled workers, so much so that the federal government is fast tracking applications from foreign workers to take jobs in our oil, our shipbuilding, our mining, and our construction industries, to name but four.

Clearly, something is very amiss.

An article in The Globe and Mail helps to illuminate the problem. Entitled Why training workers in Canada beats importing them from abroad, it argues that training a domestic workforce is the much preferable alternative to importing temporary workers, for some pretty obvious reasons. However, it asserts that there are several obstacles to the pursuit of such a sane strategy.

One of those obstacles is the Harper regime's attitude toward temporary workers. It recently announced "that it intends to bring in an extra 3,000 skilled tradespeople next year," a decision which may elicit great delight amongst employers but one that betrays the national interest if it is being used as a cover to import workers whose only asset is a willingness to work for a lot less than Canadians.

A recent example of the above is HD Mining International, a Chinese-owned coal mine in Tumbler Ridge, B.C. that has won approval "to bring in as many as 200 Chinese workers over the next few years, even though it is paying them substantially less than the going rate, with no benefits."

This corporate interest in exploiting cheap labour, abetted by a government that seems, at best, indifferent to workers' rights, is exacerbated by companies' refusal to train workers through apprenticeship programs:

Apprenticeship – the time-honoured tradition of experienced journeymen training the next generation – remains a foreign concept for the vast majority of employers. In spite of generous government incentives, more than 80 per cent of employers who use skilled workers don’t offer any, according to the Canadian Apprenticeship Forum.

A little research confirms that the government incentives described above are indeed generous and include the following:

Ontario Businesses looking to hire and train a new apprentice in a specialized skilled trade, may be interested in filing for one of the following government grants and tax credit programs:

Ontario Apprenticeship Training Tax Credit (OATTC) – A provincial refundable tax credit equal to 35% – 45% of the salaries and wages for a qualifying apprentice or $10K per year to a max of $40K over the first 4 years of applicable apprenticeships.

Federal Apprenticeship Job Creation Tax Credit (AJCTC) – A federal non-refundable tax credit equal to 10% of the salaries and wages for a qualifying apprentice to a max of $2K per year for each eligible apprentice.

Apprenticeship Employer Signing Bonus – A program providing $2K in non-repayable government grants for registering a new apprentice in a sectors with high demand for skilled trade workers.

Employer Bonus Program – A program providing $1K in non-repayable government grants for employers whose apprentices complete an apprenticeship program in any trade or occupation.

Despite these incentives, corporate Canada seems, as it always does, to look only at the very short-term, with no thought to any responsibility it has to the wider community. Even a company the size of Irving shipping, "which has a $25-billion deal to build 21 combat ships for the federal government", recently announced that it will spend the paltry sum of "$250,000 a year to train and recruit local students." It also promises to offer some apprenticeships, but given the fact that it will need to attract "1,500 [skilled] workers ... over the next decade," it seems like an anemic effort at best.

I will close by giving the final word to the Globe article's penultimate paragraph:

Training workers is a long-term investment. It requires patience. Research by the Canadian Apprenticeship Forum, which lost its federal financing this year, shows that companies get back $1.47 for every $1 they spend on apprentices. Over the life of a four-year apprenticeship, the gain can reach as high as $250,000 for a single heavy equipment mechanic as the apprentice becomes more productive and generates revenue.

If They Won't Spend It, Perhaps We Should Tax It Back?

That is the question I am left with after reading this article in today's Star on the over $500 billion (the article erroneously describes it as $526 million) corporate Canada is sitting on, in part thanks to generous tax cuts, rather than investing some of it and creating jobs.

Harper's Lack of Vision and Corporate Timidity

Canada is cursed with a Prime Minister who pretends to be an economist, one apparently intent on returning us to an era when the country was primarily a hewer of wood and drawer of water thanks to his enthusiastic endorsement of a shortsighted prosperity achieved through oil and gas exports.

Is it really surprising then that Corporate Canada is sitting on $526 billion that it refuses to invest in worthwhile and necessary pursuits like research and development, plant expansion, new equipment, etc. etc.?