Cultivating Economic Imagination

There are more things in heaven and earth, Mr. Harper and Mr. Campbell, than are dreamt of in your neoliberal economic ideologies.

With the economy crashing all around us yet great uncertainty about how it will affect us all in the long run, we have seen our federal and provincial government spend most of the last 6 months denying reality and continuing to slash and burn our functioning collective government.

But suddenly the federal and provincial government have broken their rigid, ideological opposition to deficit budgets for authentic economic stimulus in deficit budgets.

But with so much denial and delays from our leaders and a corporate media that constantly echoes calls for blind tax and spending cuts, the public has not had a great deal of reflective debate about better ways to fix our economy so that it actually works for people.

In fact, we should evaluate the economy by seeing how well it serves people throughout the land, not just the rich.

This is why the Vancouver & District Labour Council and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives held a workshop on the last weekend of January in Vancouver to do just that.

Just days after a distinctly non-Conservative federal budget and 18 days before the new provincial deficit budget, the workshop allowed dozens of people to explore how the economy should serve us all and not the richest 10% of Canadians who earned over one-third of all taxable income of Canada in 2004, unlike the poorest 30% who earned just 7%.

During the workshop, SFU’s Marjorie Griffin Cohen explored problems with Harper’s stimulus program. So much of the plan rests on individuals’ choices. People put their tax savings in times of crisis like this into savings or debt repayment instead of spending on domestic goods and services that can provide a multiplier effect to help the economy.

More collective planning like infrastructure spending, child care, health and education would provide a much more reliable benefit for our economy.

Bob Simpson, NDP MLA for Cariboo North and Opposition Critic for Forests and Range, also spoke. With a background in history and forestry, he demonstrated some big picture insight into the ecology within which our economy exists. He described how the hyper-consumptive, corporatist American dream “will kill us all and give us no hope for future generations” as it irresponsibly wastes the resources our economy needs to work for all people.

Simpson discussed how GDP as a measure does not tell us how the economy is serving people. We need to use new tools that evaluate what really matters, like the Genuine Progress Indicator, which measures the improvement of people’s welfare.

We also need to stop privatizing our publicly held resources: our forests, rivers and agricultural land. And we must focus on community economic development that works with our ecology without shipping raw logs overseas and risking our aquatic habitat.

In her new book, Naomi Klein explores the neoliberal Shock Doctrine mentality of capitalizing on crises to privatize, deregulate, de-fund and marketize governments. At the workshop, Jim Sinclair from the BC Federation of Labour described that we can take advantage of the clarity of this economic crisis to show the public how bankrupt market capitalism is for providing people’s needs.

We need to rethink how we do politics and economics, enabling workers with expanded rights and focusing on increasing community control of our economics. He used the example of the Queensborough mill that closed because despite being profitable and a solid contributor to the community’s economy, it wasn’t profitable enough for its foreign owner.

Andrew Jackson from the Canadian Labour Congress spoke of the option of actually using the Bank of Canada to finance our own debt rather than privatizing it by borrowing from banks. The USA will likely end up doing this, and when they do we can explore it also to keep our exchange rate from fluctuating too much.

But as well as more typical fiscal areas of intervention in a struggling economy, we need to remember the human face of the effects of the economy.

The CCPA’s Seth Klein spoke about BC adopting a poverty reduction plan to actually set meaningful criteria and targets to focus on, with spending to ensure that improving the economy actually helps real people, particularly our most economically vulnerable. And when we address retraining, we absolutely have to develop green jobs to go along with reducing poverty.

Finally, Adrienne Montani from First Call spoke about BC’s Living Wage campaign that calculated what people need to earn to live in Vancouver and Victoria (over $16/hour). And while health policy researchers have clearly demonstrated how poverty undermines people’s health, Montani mentioned that now even right wing economists are now recognizing the social profitability of eradicating poverty because of increased health costs to society.

So on February 17 when the BC government introduces a deficit budget, we need to remember that there are far more options we can consider than what neoliberal Finance Ministers chooses to embrace.
The VDLC and CCPA have shown in their workshop that we can weather the economic crisis and improve the economy so it actually serves people rather than forcing people to sacrifice for the investment return rates of the hyper rich in Canada.