Thin Democracy

Some are surprised to learn that the planet Neptune wasn’t discovered; it was deduced. In 1846 the French astronomer Urbain le Verrier, who worked at the Paris observatory, undertook some remarkable calculations. His intuition told him that there must be an extra planet in the solar system. He had calculated gravitational pulls – those strange laws that kept the system together rotating around the sun – and in the end predicted precisely where Neptune would be situated. He understood that our solar system was a remarkably balanced construct of laws and that it held together because of something that nobody had yet seen. He sent his calculations off to an observatory in Germany and after some scrutiny astronomers discovered the planet exactly where he said it would be – a remarkable work of scientific calculation.There are thousands of dedicated Canadians who have given serious and researched thought to what would happen if we continued to cut into the marrow of social programs, including welfare, education, healthcare, seniors security, etc. This is a huge country, full of challenges in sectors ranging from weather patterns to expansive distances between populations. Early builders of the Canadian dream, including our first Prime Minister John A. MacDonald, did some calculations of their own and determined that the odds against the country surviving would be slim unless mitigating governmental, social and economic actions kept the great Canadian experiment from spinning out of control. Through successive generations ventures like healthcare, pensions, human rights standards, language protections, and shared government programs built a remarkably progressive society out of a vast expanse.It was no less remarkable than Verrier’s calculations regarding Neptune. Calculating that things would spin out of control, he concluded that something was there, as yet unseen, that kept the remarkable balance. The thousands of Canadians mentioned earlier, working in numerous care sectors across the country, are sensing the opposite of the French scientist: something is missing that was once there and we are dissembling.As governments continue to cut back on the historic promise of providing safety to citizens, things get a little bit uglier. When federal administrations put emphasis on protecting you with things like prisons, needless and overbearing crime legislation, and phenomenally expensive fighter jets, rather than investing in your kid's university, your parent’s future security, your grandchildren’s environmental sustainability, and your own health coverage, you know something is wrong. Such things still exist but they are in decline. The social contract is vanishing and hole left in our own system of fairness is risking a crashing of sectors in our country.The government advisory group the National Council of Welfare has informed the feds that $25 billion could be saved annually if it took the problem of poverty seriously. Furthermore, they concluded that a committed poverty reduction program would be the most effective means of lowering crime rates across the country. Two House of Commons committees spent 18 months crossing the country and concluded the same thing. The government response? Nothing.It’s likely true that most Canadians aren’t aware of how serious things have become as a result of the cuts and rationalizing of social programs. Each region can tell its own story but the results aren’t good. The list is long and increasingly imposing: pensions, welfare, job retraining, disability, mental health, homelessness, increasing costs of post-secondary education, growing gap between wealth and poverty, a shrinking middle class, loss of benefits, falling behind in social housing, the tenacious hold child poverty has on vast regions of the country.But of all these it is the stubborn rate of unemployment that constitute the most dangerous harbinger of all. Regardless of which you study we consider, we learn that capitalism is now in an advanced cycle of efficiencies – casting off the need for Canadian workers as globalization and technology make a good steady job with benefits increasingly a privilege of the past. Nowhere is this more true than with the country’s youth, who jobless numbers hover in the double-digit range. Their future looks so bleak that many have stopped searching for work or attending post-secondary institutions. It is this youthful angst that drove much of the energies of the Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street movement. A future without hoped-for affluence becomes a present with a pent-up anger.We hear it every day – escalating food bank numbers, jobless rates, homelessness, healthcare costs – and yet we content ourselves with letting the Occupy movement do the spade work of protest. Like the child in the picture above, only a very thin surface keeps us from the beastly appetites of power and capitalism. Our social programs are what keep us from the cold, hunger, joblessness, and alienation. We support their decline at our own peril.Solon, the great leader of Greece’s early democracy 200 years before Plato, cautioned his citizens to think beyond themselves and to the larger social responsibilities that required attention. As those citizens sought to pull tighter into their own personal existences, effectively neglecting their larger responsibilities, he reminded them that they couldn’t escape: “Public evil enters the house of each man, the gates of his courtyard and cannot keep it out; it leaps over the high wall; let him flee to a corner of his bedchamber, it will certainly find him out.”Our democracy – financially, socially, politically – is thinning with each passing year. Cut these programs any further and there will be no place to hide where poverty can’t reach all of us.