Now What?

Some things are obvious. First of all, we still have surpluses only because a bunch of stuff that needs doing isn't being done. So no more bloody tax cuts. Reverse some of the cuts that have been made lately. Institute (or rather re-institute, we used to have them) inheritance taxes for the rich. Restore funding to medicare and make sure it has strings. I’m not too worried about the specifics, just make sure it’s long term predictable funding and earmark some for dealing with bottlenecks. Move to a Romanow Report style approach to pharmacare. Consider public dental insurance. Get serious about publicly funded child care. Start building social housing. Put back at least some of the safety net. Cut back some of the expensive bureaucratic machinery for means-testing and fake job-search assistance and various other victim-blaming procedures. Fund a lot more drug rehab. I mean a *lot* more. Legalize pot and de-emphasize criminalization of drug use generally. Put funding back for all the little things the Cons have been hacking, like women's organizations, rape crisis centres, the arts and so on. Explain carefully to the customs people that their homophobia is an embarrassment and heads will roll if they don't start leaving Little Sisters bookstore the fuck alone. All that is just fixing damage—it's pretty much a no-brainer. Any Trudeau Liberal would favour that list.

Moving beyond that, as a non-free-market-fundamentalist, I think the government should be involved in the economy. OK, so the Canadian dollar is riding high, and against the US dollar at least I expect it to continue to do so. Given our foolishly one-dimensional trade, that means Canadian exports are going to suffer, Canadian jobs are going to suffer, and Canadian industry is going to suffer. We might still be exporting plenty of oil, but while oil brings in plenty of money that money tends to end up concentrated and unproductive—and it doesn't help that the oil is mostly in the province least likely to do anything useful with it, or even to keep significant amounts of the cash. Oil is not going to save the economy, not in terms of general prosperity. So, what do we do?

To have a healthy economy, I firmly believe that we have to make useful stuff. Sounds both obvious and naïve, I expect, but most economic commentators don’t seem to believe this, with all the talk about “post-industrial” economies and service economies and blithe handwaving at offshoring and whatnot. I think all that is bull. For people in general to live well, we have to be making stuff; for it to be sustainable, the stuff has to be useful (e.g. not military; military expenditures are for defense, not Keynesianism). If we’re making less stuff for export, we need to make more for domestic use. If we make less for both, the bill will come due eventually, as the US is finding out right now.

So how to keep on making things when the dollar is rising, squeezing our exports and making imports cheaper? That requires government intervention. It requires industrial policy, it requires creating those things that make a country competitive in spite of monetary and wage considerations (e.g. public health care, good education, strong infrastructure), and it may require protectionism. I think the government needs to get into building infrastructure, industrial policy and job creation. These things work together, of course. And incidentally, many problems *can* be solved by throwing money at them. Any industrial policy entered into right now needs to take the environment into account. Green industry is not yet really big in Canada—we're seriously lagging. We need Green power generation, we need conservation/energy efficiency projects, and more. So I would suggest a series of Green infrastructure projects combined in parallel, especially where the private sector doesn't have what it takes to step up and get them done, with starting a bunch of Green Crown corporations to do the work. There are lots of manufacturing workers losing their jobs these days, in the auto industry for instance. As things stand, those people are tending to get their next jobs in service industries—a waste of expertise. We could take advantage of those skills and build a new generation of owned-in-Canada industry.

I would advocate that these Crowns, and any others that a new government starts, should use an innovative structure. While claims of government inefficiency are generally overblown, certainly compared with private sector inefficiency, Crowns can have problems in terms of throwing good money after bad. And of course Crowns partake of many of the general flaws of the corporation, including specifically its heavily hierarchical nature and in turn the lack of incentive for line employees to make the place work—especially if it's seen as politically unable to fail. A better structure would be a quasi co-operative, with workers sharing profits and controlling day-to-day operations while government retained overall control and set the firm's general objectives (because the firm’s output is important to the public interest, not just to the people there). There are some examples of this approach in Venezuela, although they’re in early days yet. In such a setup, workers would have a stake in the firm's success and efficiency.

Related to the Green infrastructure projects, the country also needs to work on things like transportation, with an emphasis on rail, both urban commuter and long distance. Private rail companies have been a disaster lately, with derailings and deaths ever more common due to pinchpenny maintenance—it's time they were re-nationalized. And subsidized—we subsidize highways, we can subsidize rail lines. Rail transport is cheaper, more efficient, more environmentally friendly and creates less carbon dioxide than highway transport. The government should be making sure there's plenty of it, ideally advanced like, say, the French. We should also be putting money into such mundane but important things as water, sewage, and waste-handling infrastructure, taking sustainability and the environment into account.

We need to look very seriously at questions of food production, encouraging family farms over agribusiness, organic farming over pesticide use, well treated, free range animals over batteries and feedlots, natural breeds over GM strains, and local production over food transported vast distances. We also need to institute a serious cattle testing regime. We should reverse any tendencies to harmonize with American regulations. We should strengthen the Wheat Board, not kill it. We need to look more broadly at the prices farmers receive for foodstuffs and at way of ensuring that those prices have floors, whether it's by direct regulation, marketing boards, some sort of unionization for farmers or what. It's possible a sliding farmer subsidy on food sold close to the point of origin (the closer, the bigger) might kill a couple of birds with one stone, helping farmers and sustainability. I'm not, to be honest, very knowledgeable about farm policy—I know farmers are having big problems and agribusiness is taking over, to the detriment of our food supply, but I don't really know what needs to be done about it. Maybe someone with a stronger understanding of these matters will enlighten me.

Some of these policies may require, by their very nature or to stop outside forces from stripping them of value, laws which run counter to free trade notions, laws which may for instance violate NAFTA. My advice would be, pass 'em and walk out of NAFTA. If capital strikes threaten, I would advocate controls on capital flight. Chavez did it, seems to have worked out fine for him. If a run on the dollar were threatened, my response would be “No, please, don't throw me in that briar patch!”

Well, that's a grab bag of policies off the top of my head in some of the more crucial areas. I'm missing plenty. But I think there's enough here to make the general point that government has functions beyond coddling billionaires and moaning about the inevitability of Sacred Market Forces. I’m sure other people have their own ideas. Any suggestions?