Right to Community - Not As We Had Hoped

Canadian communities are presently struggling through a process never endured before. We have already recounted in these posts how governments, especially federally, have lost the will and ingenuity to acknowledge the importance of our cities and to put some imagination towards a more productive future with them. Though always the distant cousins of Confederation, there perhaps hasn’t been a time when our communities feel so isolated, even abandoned.Cities like mine are attempting to negotiate difficult transitions exactly at the time when the most advanced democracies on the planet are undergoing a crisis of credibility never seen before. Citizens have lost faith in corporatism, to be sure, but when they lose confidence in government’s ability to actually act in relevant fashion, then where do they turn except to one another.Across the board in all these countries the middle-class is in decline. Living standards are sagging - have been for years - and yet political representatives fail to address this reality directly. The list of those challenges left unattended grows each year. Inaction on climate change is about set to put a serious dent in our ways of living and perhaps even our survivability. There is no new work, merely old jobs kept on life support by the last remnants of stimulus funds. Capital flows unfettered around a precariously insecure globe. You know governments have become ineffective when they substitute partisanship for progress and divisive democracy for sincere democratic debate. They’re the emperors with no clothes. They know it, and in their frantic rush to escape responsibility look more like historic courtiers with their wigs, powders and snuff boxes. In behaving in such a fashion they only invite the derision of those who once elected them.So what do cities do when not only their own governments but democracy worldwide stumbles into decline? This is important to consider because all too many of us feel that if we could just replace the governments in Canada things would improve. Don’t bet on it – at least not yet.Globalization has effectively stripped away many of tools we would require to rebuild the places in which we live and our cities will remain vulnerable even if governments change.  When such things combine to erode our confidence in our local abilities to overcome any problem, that’s never a good thing.It weren’t supposed to be this way. Globalization and free trade were designed to give the stronger economic countries like Canada a global advantage. Western nations had proven to be the dominant players in how to move money around the world to instantly take advantage of key opportunities. And for a decade or two it appeared to work just as planned. Smart as we were, we didn’t foresee three things, however. First, such open arrangements permitted countries like China to flood our marketplaces with cheap products. Western citizens went on a spending spree that lasted almost two decades and saw us accumulate larger homes, more cars, and all the electronics you could imagine. Easy money meant easy credit and we all went a little bit crazy, until the sub-prime mortgage debacle steamrolled over our credit bubble and placed us all in jeopardy.Secondly, government and economic leaders didn’t fully foresee that successful companies in the West would actually abandon their historic partnerships and move to those parts of the world offering cheap labour. Third, our very openness as advanced societies in the end served as something of a disadvantage. Other growing and significant economies like India, Brazil or China, run in large measure on state-controlled capitalism. In other words, they had more policy levers at their disposal to regulate their own domestic economies. They had state-controlled oil reserves, energy, trade barriers, tariffs, employment regulations, and lower environmental standards – all of which meant they could more easily control the effects of globalization on their own populations. Canadian and American economies instead were wide open and liberalized economic policies meant that we really didn’t own a lot that we could control.Failing to recognize the pattern, the Canadian government has been rushing into the Canada-Europe Free Trade Agreement in which even the rights of our municipalities can be waived as Europeans select the workers and contracts they want. We get access to their markets, but in return we give away so much of our natural resources, including the right to use our own human capital, that we will be even more vulnerable than before the Great Recession began.In the end, globalization wasn’t as we had planned. It’s becoming clear that we have lost much in the bargain. While the middle-class in Brazil, India or China increase significantly, in North America we are headed in the opposite direction. Our standard of living has remained stagnant, with no sign of increase. The brilliant architects of globalization failed to spot what would happen when billions of low-wage workers would enter the international workforce. Sure, it drove prices down, but at the same time as it drove our labour opportunities overseas.You can see where this is heading – our communities are abandoned by their political leaders but also bounced around by economic rules that favour the newer countries coming into the system. We have a lot with which to contend, but it’s important to know what we are struggling against.When we reach the point where my right to community means that some other country can choose where they will get the labour to work in my own town, then I have few rights at all. It's not as we had hoped.