[R-G] Stephen Harper's Economics

[Anthony Fenton]

Marie-Antoinette on the Campaign Trail
Harper to Canadian Workers: "Let them eat economic fundamentals!"

October 10, 2008 By Nikolas Barry-Shaw

http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/19084

As the waves of the U.S. financial tsunami start to lap up against  
Canadian shores, voters are beginning to ask themselves who the  
candidates will sympathize with come crunch time: bankers or ordinary  
workers?  Stephen Harper would have you believe that he, like Bill  
Clinton, feels your pain.  While empathizing with working people  
generally lies outside the formal training of right-wing economists  
such as Harper, the Prime Minister assured a crowd in London, Ont.  
that he feels for people who have lost their jobs:

     We know that some Canadian workers are transitioning between  
jobs, that's never easy and I     don't want to minimize it, but we  
should never lose sight of how solid our fundamentals are and     more  
importantly how fortunate we are to live in this country.

While those fortunate enough to own stock in the banks and the oil  
companies have certainly enjoyed the fruits of "solid" economic  
fundamentals, ordinary Canadians have most certainly not, according to  
a recent study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.  It  
wasn't always so. "Between the Second World War and 1980, the economic  
pie was growing at all points in the distribution, even if income  
shares in Canada didn't change much" observes Lars Osberg, author of  
"A Quarter Century of Economic Inequality in Canada: 1981-2006".

With the exhaustion of the post-war boom, however, class warfare was  
reborn under the moniker of neoliberalism.  Employers' hardened stance  
and an open assault on trade union freedoms - pursued by Tory and  
Liberal governments alike - would usher in a "new norm" of lowered  
expectations and "stagnant or declining real wages, despite  
unprecedented improvements in education and skills," for Canadian  
workers. The "fear of falling" for workers was also enhanced, with the  
poor facing "a much nastier reality now than twenty years ago, since  
cuts to social assistance have substantially increased the poverty gap  
- even in Canada's richest provinces."

(Stephane Dion's claim to represent both social justice and the  
economic legacy of the Chretien/Martin years is unproblematic only to  
those with a serious case of historical amnesia.  It was precisely the  
deep cuts to social spending made by the Liberals during those years -  
after beating the Tories in 1993 on the promise of "Jobs, jobs, jobs"  
- that helped established this "new norm".)

While Harper sang the praises of Canada's economic fundamentals,  
ordinary Canadians were clear that the matter is not simply of  
"transitioning" from one job to another.  "All the well paid jobs are  
turning into low-paid jobs with no benefits," Roy Jollymore, a retired  
General Motors worker, told the Canadian Press. "The life we've built  
up is not going to be available for young people," he said as his wife  
Joan stood by him outside the London Convention Centre.

To Canadian workers suffering the brunt of economic restructuring,  
Harper's callous message must sound a lot like Marie-Antoinette's  
advice to the sans-culottes of the French Revolution.  Declaring "Let  
them eat economic fundamentals!" is cold comfort to those who are  
working harder and sinking deeper into debt just to stay in place, as  
so many Canadians are.

Yet for economists like Harper who fetishize economic figures like GDP  
growth, or for those who actually profit by them, the economy of the  
past quarter century has worked marvellously.  The incomes of the  
richest 1% of Canadians have been growing very strongly, especially  
since the 1990s - with even greater gains going to the richest 0.1%  
and 0.01%. "They are literally pulling away from the rest of  
Canadians," according to the CCPA.

Harper was not urging Canadians to feel fortunate with respect to  
their recent past, however.  As he continued his speech, Harper  
explained that what workers "should never lose sight of" is how  
fortunate they are not to be Haitians:

     He then talked about how he travelled to a desperately  
impoverished slum in Haiti and how the     people there looked  
hopeless, in stark contrast to Canada, which he described as "a land  
of     above all else, boundless hope."

The demagogy is breathtaking.  After all, it was Canada, in concert  
with the U.S. and France, who put Haitians in such a hopeless  
situation.  Canada helped plan and execute the overthrow Jean-Bertrand  
Aristide's democratically-elected reformist government, in whom  
Haiti's poor had invested so much hope.  After the coup d'État, Naomi  
Klein writes, there was "a wave of Falluja-like collective punishment  
inflicted on neighborhoods known for supporting Aristide," unleashed  
by the Canada-backed interim government and the UN "peacekeeping"  
mission.

The repression imposed a "peace of the graveyards" on these restive  
neighborhoods, so that Harper and other foreign dignitaries could  
visit like conquering heroes.  During his July 20, 2007, visit to Cité  
Soleil, one of the hardest hit neighborhoods of Haiti's capital,  
Harper stated that Canada's presence in Haiti was "giving [Haitians]  
some hope and some opportunity," and that "Canadians should be very  
proud that they are offering to help, that our help is making a  
difference in terms in safety of people's lives."  The sullen looks on  
the faces of the mothers present for Harper's awkward photo-op,  
however, told another story.

The savage violence of the occupation was necessary to impose a  
tremedously unpopular neoliberal economic plan on Haiti.  The  
opposition was so great that Haitians began referring to IMF and World  
Bank strictures as the "plan lanmo", literally "the death plan".   
Today the "death plan" continues its march under the name of the  
Interim Cooperation Framework.  Written largely by experts from the  
World Bank and the Canadian and American governments, the text of the  
ICF is explicit about the anti-democratic nature of the deal:

     The transition period and the Transitional Government provide a  
window of opportunity for     implementing economic governance reforms  
with the involvement of civil society stakeholders     that may be  
hard for a future government to undo.

As part of a Latin American tour, Harper's visit to Haiti was a  
bellwether of the changed economic times.  Canadian capital in the  
neoliberal age has aggressively expanded abroad, with foreign direct  
investment reaching $445 billion in 2004, representing nearly 40% of  
GDP (up from 5% of GDP in 1970).  Latin America has been a favourite  
destination for Canadian investors, whose assets total $96 billion,  
making Canada the region's second-largest investor.  This regional  
dominance isn't about to change either, with the growth rate of  
Canadian investments there far exceeding that of Asia or the EU.

Canada's corporate elites have urged a foreign policy centred on  
prying open markets and investment outlets, while forcibly integrating  
recalcitrant and "dysfunctional" or "failed" states like Haiti into  
the world economy.  As the tour began, Scotiabank President Rick Waugh  
called on Harper to "place a particular focus on trade and investment  
opportunities in the Americas because of our historic cultural and  
political ties, our existing corporate links, and the tremendous  
growth potential and proximity of these markets."

While the situation of Haitians and Canadians are in many ways worlds  
apart, there are more similarities than Harper's crass "hopelessness"  
vs. "boundless hope" comparison acknowledges.  Just days before food  
riots exploded across Haiti, the UN released a glowing report on  
Haiti's economy: "Macroeconomic indicators have continued to improve,  
and the country has experienced economic growth at a level that had  
not been possible for decades."  Once the crisis broke, however, UN  
officials were forced to admit that while "economic growth has  
returned to a 1991 level of 3.2% a year and inflation declined to 8%  
in 2007 from 30%-40% a few years earlier, . . . there has not been any  
improvement in difficult living conditions of the vast majority of  
Haitians."  Neoliberalism, in Haiti like in Canada, has created an  
economy whose economic fundamentals no longer correspond in any  
meaningful way to the well-being of ordinary people.

Economics are not the only area of convergence.  Stephen Baranyi uses  
these broad strokes to describe Haiti's social order: "Haitian  
politics have historically been controlled by elites who have used  
their power to enhance their and their allies' privileges. It rests on  
an awareness of the continued influence of those elites, and the  
contemporary twist to this cruel tale by which some of these elites  
are now junior partners in transnational organized criminal networks  
that link kingpins in Colombia to their counterparts in countries like  
Canada and the USA."

Yet are Canadian politics that different?  Or have they not also  
"historically been controlled by elites who have used their power to  
enhance their and their allies' privileges" with a similar  
"contemporary twist . . . by which some of these elites are now junior  
partners in transnational organized criminal networks" in Washington,  
in Paris, etc.?


Nikolas Barry-Shaw is a member of Haiti Action Montreal and Masse  
Critique, an anti-capitalist collective of Québec Solidaire.