Back in the 1980s, Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney said it was all about “jobs, jobs, jobs”. If we just provide the right kind of “climate” for business, they’d crank out so many good jobs that Canadian workers will be able to pick their job and name their price.
So first we got the free trade deal with the U.S., then NAFTA, then tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy — and after a few decades of making the rich richer and corporations more powerful, did we get the payoff?
Well, it worked for rich people. Their incomes have grown dramatically. The share of total national income going to the richest 1% of Canadians has almost doubled since the late 1970s, while the rest of us have had to run harder to break even.
And a succession of tax cuts benefiting mainly corporations (mainly the banks and oil companies) and the wealthy means that the rest of us are paying a greater share and getting less.
Our manufacturing sector, and its good unionized jobs, already shrank dramatically before the 2008 financial meltdown. As for all of those great jobs that good business climate was going to bring, we have seen our job market shift increasingly to shaky, low-paid, contingent and part-time work, particularly for young workers.
Two years into our “economic recovery”, there are still close to a million and a half Canadians officially unemployed and hundreds of thousands more who have given up looking for work or are working fewer hours than they want and need. The official unemployment rate for young workers is close to 15%.
No wonder most Canadians don’t think that the recession is over – except for the banks and the oil companies.
What is really shocking is that the billionaires and the media they control have succeeded in getting a lot of working people mad at other working people – union members, people working in public sector jobs – who, like them, are just trying to scrape by. Somehow, it is not fair for teachers or nurses to have a decent income and pension, but it’s all right for bank presidents to take home $10 million + a year after having nearly destroyed the world economy.
Of course, their answer is that none of it was their fault, and what we need to do is cut their taxes some more, while the rest of us pay more and tighten our belts – and sign more “trade” deals that make corporations more powerful. That’s their idea of fairness.
