Type A Blog

As a person of a certain age, I have started to worry, daily, about what my life will look like when I retire. I've read the books, done the math, listened to the rhetoric and become a believer: As a Boomer, whatever I have done to prepare, it isn't enough. I will be a drag on the people I love the most. I will be living on a shoestring with 18 roomates drinking wine that comes from a box.

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Where are the new jobs going to be? Maybe the best way to answer that question is to ask another question: Where are the jobs NOT going to be?

For example, as former TD Chief Economist Don Drummond recently warned the people of Ontario, the new jobs will not be found on the shop floors of the automotive industry, or the steel industry. There will still be jobs there, but not NEW jobs, because that industry will not grow enough to produce new employment.

The people in Atlantic Canada, whose ancestors worked in the fishery for 400 years, know that the jobs won't be there, either.  The centuries of over-fishing has destroyed the eco-system, and while there will still be fish on our tables, no young Nova Scotian or Newfoundlander looks to the fishery for the future.

Whether it is small family farms in Saskatchewan, automakers in Windsor, shipbuilders in Levis, Quebec, or loggers in environmentally-fragile woodlands in central British Columbia, the jobs that powered a century of growth in Canada are rapidly disappearing in our collective national rear-view mirror.

Farewell to all that. 
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When I think about getting a job that provides a living wage, personal and intellectual satisfaction, and hopefully, some quality of life, I think of my teenaged kids. I am where I'm going to be, but they sit on the precipice of the rest of their lives, picking universities and majors. Every day their compasses point in a different direction. So when those kids from Wolfville, Nova Scotia landed on my Calgary doorstep looking for some used furniture, thanks to Kijiji, I couldn't help but see the parallels. As everymom would do, I wanted to make sure they had warm blankets with the futon they took with them...and some cookies.

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When the Conference Board of Canada released its latest report, I was shocked. Having spent much time travelling recently through the US, I couldn't believe that we were nowhere close to being as productive as Americans. In fact, says the document, had our growth kept up with theirs, our real per capita GDP would have been $8500 higher, disposable income would have been $7500 higher, the Federal Government would have collected 31% more revenue and corporate profits would have been 40% higher.

That just didn't compute with anything I was observing: empty stores, abandoned buildings, headlines screaming record unemployment.

So what does the Conference Board's report mean?
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The concept of privatization is not complicated.
 
In the post-war expansion of the role of government in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and to a lesser degree in the 1980s, when a program or service was identified as desirable, the government was expected to step in and provide it.
 
During these decades of relative prosperity, when growing government revenues from an expanding North American economy allowed governments to continually expand their role, few questions asked.  There weren't a lot of water cooler discussions about whether governments should do everything for everybody.
 

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One news programming device producers use when trying to suss out the "mood of the people", is to grill taxi-drivers and people in coffee shops, (who just want to be left to their lattes in peace), about their "view from the street". It is in that spirit of qualitative data collection that I spent this last long weekend in Phoenix, shopping, eating, drinking and generally trying to make merry in a place where they have little to be optimistic about.

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Should we apply the business model to education? If you're going to dogmatically argue through the lens of a market-based ideology, the answer is yes. If you're going to look at all the evidence, and then make your decision on what's best for our kids based on actual proof... in my view the answer is a resounding NO. I don't see how a reasonable person can look at all the experimentation that's been done with education worldwide, and conclude that the pro-business model meets the burden of proof that it's actually effective. Rod doesn't agree - he's welcome to write a blog. : )

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The thing about being from Alberta, is that everyone in the rest of the country expects you to be right wing, and for the most part - at least within my extended circle - they are. But there's a difference between having a prediliction that says: "I think we, as a rule, ought to be responsible to economic principles", and being slavishly devoted to man-made constructs that sometimes, just don't make sense in the here and now. Personally, I put the notion of the corporation in this category. Amongst the religiously capitalist class, there seems to be a fervour to protecting the corporation as if it crawled from the slews of the Galapagos, and has an inherent right to life. Actually, we made it up. Read more »