Broken Trust. Broken Future.

THE CITY OF LONDON, ONTARIO, and its inside unionized workers announced over the weekend that they had reached a tentative agreement, subject to the full approval of both groups. Predictably, opinion was deeply split on both sides throughout the community. The loss of trust across many fronts has made this recent labour conflict perhaps a harbinger of difficult days ahead, as more contracts come up for renewal and disillusionment festers.It’s become a kind of open season on public employees across North America. The rationale, most often produced through extreme ideological politics, is that it’s difficult to justify public sector salaries when money is scarce and job security fragile. Behind it all is the belief that only the private sector can create jobs and that governments only get in the way of free market development. Unions and public sector workers get caught in the crosshairs and, as in London itself, city managers and politicians who appear to favour the view that a city should be run as a business only simplify the tensions to a degree that continues to threaten social cohesion.The private sector has basically had the run of the field in the last two decades, with stimulus funding, lowering corporate tax rates, ongoing access to global markets, and an increasingly corporatized methodology moving into the public space. Yet despite such advantages the job market continues to shrivel, not because of government expenditures but corporate efficiencies and the move into the global marketplace. Put bluntly, the more corporatism is enhanced, the more the employment sector is in decline, this mostly through efficiencies. To place the blame for low employment opportunities on government itself is a misnomer and only muddies the waters.To claim that everything needs to be poured into the private sector as the only effective place where “productive” investments should be made is to forget than the context for a healthy economy is as vital as the players themselves. Canada is a vast nation and the need for timely investments on roads, airports, public transportation, electrical grids, waterways management, and a productive standardized food system fall under public purview and form the vast canvas on which the private sector can invest, grow productivity, and compete effectively. If the private sector had to fund this infrastructure, the cost of their products and services would mushroom. And that doesn’t include the public investments in healthcare, education, research and development, fire and police, public security both domestically and globally, and the vast diplomatic networks that empower international cooperation in everything from trade to immigration.The real power behind the ideology to cut the public sector is derived in its ability to turn citizens against one another. Few of those citizens makes a fortune, and the vast majority of Canadians have far more in common economically with their public sector counterparts than the wealthy elite. And yet we are increasingly told that paying the public sector means less money in the pockets of the average Canadian. This is a ruse, one that is manifesting itself across the globe, even in those developing nations that have recently begun investing in the public service in order to gain legitimacy and spread the wealth only to be informed that such measures should be cut through austerity.One thing is obvious: income for most Canadians hasn’t changed much in recent years, except for the wealthy, of course, whose income has doubled, and sometimes tripled, in that same time period.Canada remains a fabulously wealthy country; it’s just that an increasing amount of that wealth has gone to a relatively few in the nation’s financial order capable of adapting to the global restructuring. Rather than our bounty going to a strong public and private sector workforce in balance, it has been stripped out of both and gone elsewhere. In going after public sector workers, we are inevitably cutting the very services that we will eventually have to pay for, forcing us to stretch our dollars even further. To turn on one another just at the time we need to fight together for a fairer Canada is one of our greatest tragedies.Wealth is not the issue; there’s plenty of it for all in our vast country. It is the effective sharing of that wealth that we must strive for. We have been tricked, bamboozled, into turning on our own service providers and protectors out of our own anger at a diverted economy.Government (as opposed to merely politics) and the public service are the names we give to those things that we share and build together. It’s time to turn our focus to the equitable distribution of our shared wealth. In a land struggling for employment, we all have a collective job right now: pull together and achieve economic balance once more, to get our groove back. As cities like London are in danger of discovering, you can't break trust with historic partners and build an equitable nation at the same time.