Angella MacEwen is a Broadbent Institute Policy Fellow. She is also a Senior Economist with CUPE National, and co-author of Share the Wealth! How we can tax Canada’s super-rich and create a better country for everyone available now from Lorimer Books.
In today’s apparently well-performing capitalist economy, working-class ordinary Canadians aren’t feeling like they live in a “Good Society” and acutely feel these economic pressures.
Since the 1980s, governments around the world have reduced taxes on corporate profits and personal wealth, weakened regulations and privatized public infrastructure. These decisions allow the powerful to hoard wealth at the expense of workers, consumers, the environment, and social cohesion.
Across Canada, paid sick days have largely been left to the responsibility of the employer and/or union collective agreements to provide.
Policy makers accustomed to making sure the design of a program only reaches their intended group need to adjust their thinking caps and cast a broader net.
The sooner affected workers can make the financial decision to stay home from work, the more effective public health measures will be in slowing the spread of COVID-19.
Without that information, how do we answer the central question – are we making the right choices that will help us live up to our vision of greater equality?
This is the kind of bold leadership needed in the rest of Canada to make headway on combatting inequality, poverty and to create the conditions for a growing economy that benefits everyone.
It could be national project, much like Medicare, that we can all be proud of contributing to and benefitting from. With the acknowledgement that building a program like that will take sustained dedication and time.
