The discussion in any election campaign inevitably turns to “The ballot question” or voters Top-of-Mind Issues. Unfortunately, these are usually whatever the media and pollsters decide they will be, rather than what the public is actually concerned about. And that is where contact with voters through door knocking, community events, or the internet (particularly for a small, growing party such as the Greens) is vitally important.
Regardless, it is abundantly clear that the economy is a top of mind concern, particularly for voters in Ontario and even more particularly for any communities dependent on the manufacturing sector, auto jobs, pulp and paper, etc. Whether it is the number 1 issue or number 2 or number 3 is hardly important. It is number 1 for anyone affected by the economic slowdown by losing their source of income.
As you talk to people and move through the spectrum of “I’m already unemployed”, “I’m afraid for my job”, “My job is fairly secure” to “I’m not worried” (though the last group is getting smaller by the day), you find the focus moves from short term to long term economic policy.
In other words, when you are out of work, you are focussed on whatever short term policy is going to change that situation, and rightfully so. Long term can wait till after you know where your mortgage payment is coming from.
I can understand this completely. While my job is not (yet?) in jeopardy, given the unpaid leave time that I took to run in this campaign, Mollie and I had some long discussion about the implications of the financial hit.
But the danger in focusing on short term fixes is that they can result in the worst long term policy, or potentially hide that these policies are, in fact, achieving nothing at all.
My example comes from this story in today’s Globe and Mail.
The U.S. government is preparing to escalate its emergency market bailout and “address systemic risks” with the creation of an agency to take bad assets off the balance sheets of the nation’s foundering banks.
While on the surface this may appear to be a good thing, and certainly the US government had to do something in an attempt to halt the failure of the financial sector, it should be noted that this does not actually remove the debt, it just transfers ownership of that debt from shareholders to someone else, namely the US taxpayer.
My point of all this is that, while short term measures are certainly necessary to protect an industry or large groups of citizens, unless these are followed up by proper long term economic planning, the entire exercise is rather pointless. Without a long term vision in everything we do, we are dooming ourselves to a repitition of the same mistake.
Thus I come to the Green Party economic policy.
One of the things that I have been saying about the difference between the Green and Liberal tax shift plans, besides the obvious details and watering down when the Liberals adopted this plank from our platform, is to ask yourself, if not for the Climate Crisis and needing to differentiate from the Conservatives, would the Liberals be doing this at all? If they were still in power, would they be proposing this policy? I think the answer is absolutely not.
But the Green Party would, for the simple reason that we believe fundamentally that, regardless of how you feel about how large the tax burden should be in Canada, and regardless of your spending priorities for that money, the best allocation of the tax burden should be on those things that we want to minimize in society. Pollution. Waste. Resource use. Energy use. And greenhouse gases happen to fall into the category of pollution. We also believe that we should not be placing the tax burden on things that society wants more of, like jobs, income and profits.
This tax shift concept, along with any policy to address climate change, is a significant departure from the economic policies of the past which have focused merely on economic growth. It would therefore cause some reconfiguration of the economy as Canadians and companies adjusted to the new reality of paying lower income taxes, payroll taxes and corporate taxes, while at the same time facing higher costs for energy, waste, and resources extracted from the environment.
Eventually a green economy means hiring more people, not less. But there are people who will find themselves working in a different job than their one in the past.
That’s why we’ve developed policies to help people through this transition, and those same policies would be the short term solutions needed for today’s economic uncertainty. But they make the best sense in the context of a long term vision.
You can read more in Vision Green, Part 1.
