Download Perspectives Journal No. 2 -Autumn 2024 (.pdf)
- Counting the Dead: The Urgent Need for Coroners’ Data on Trans Deaths in Canada – Dylana Thompson
- Spillover Effects: Making Minimum Wage Increases a Popular Policy Choice – David McGrane
- Possibilities of Power: A Retrospective of the Ontario New Democratic Government, 1990 to 1995 – Bruce McKenna
- Pharmacare and Access to Medicines in Canada: Is Bill C-64 a Step in the Right Direction? – Marc-André Gagnon
- 2024 Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture: Profits, Inflation and Survival in an Age of Emergencies – Isabella Weber
- Review: Escaping the Consulting Trap – Jack McClelland
Through this long, melancholic fall, the weight of the world’s events these past few months have cast long shadows over all of humanity. By the time this issue of Perspectives Journal goes to print, the escalated massacres of civilians throughout the Middle East, the massive climate disasters that have wreaked havoc across the United States, and the gaining momentum of far-right factions in elections across the West, including Canada, have become heavy on everyone, understandably burdening many of us with a pessimism for the future.
Fall is the season when many Canadians typically think about ghosts; seemingly invisible, weightless visions or apparitions that can indeed feel heavy. Ghosts can continue to haunt us, long after the things they represent have died and gone away. In this second edition of Perspectives: A Canadian Journal of Political Economy and Social Democracy, it may be the most appropriate time of the year to explicate some of the meaning behind our journal project.
To think of “perspective” is to imagine what someone else may think and to illustrate that different point of view in a way that could be understood by others who may also have different points of view – the way a ghost can be imagined. The word is also evocative of “spectres” – another word for ghostly spiritual entities that also bring about a haunting uneasiness. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels famously allude to a “spectre” in the very first sentence of The Communist Manifesto and another, relatively new journal publication entitled Spectre takes from this vision to publish fantastic left-wing analysis.
The ghosts that Perspectives Journal tries to exorcize, however, are the spirits of neoliberal capitalism that continue to haunt Canadian social democrats. This particular stage of capitalism, long after its heyday of the late 1980s and early 90s, still pervades our political economy and applies a heavy weight to today’s progressive movements that fight for justice and equality. Despite being disproven over countless experiments and real world outcomes across decades around the world, neoliberal economics and the “common sense revolution” are still powerful counter-narratives to the more broadly desired “good society” and “better world” that the progressive left strives for. As the catastrophes, costs, and lives mount towards the death of neoliberalism, a different vision emerges that this publication attempts to illuminate.
This haunting is also a part of the thematic design of Perspectives Journal. The ghostly shapes of forced perspective that stretch on in the logo evoke a retro 1980s aesthetic: the same prominent design features in mass consumer culture at the height of neoliberalism. The “vaporwave” genre of music that recycles mass-produced pop music from the apogee of the neoliberal era, slowed down to a speed that almost elicits discomfort, informs the theme music for our accompanying Perspectives Journal Podcast, as well as the new limited podcast series Activists Make History with Peggy Nash. The title of Nash’s collection of interviews with political outsiders is also taken from a line of socialist Chilean President Salvador Allende’s final speech in 1973, as the CIA-backed coup d’etat overthrew his government to install the “Chicago Boy” experiments of neoliberalism in his country: “History is ours, and people make history.”
Online, you will find many articles, videos, podcasts and book reviews that analyze capitalism and bring forward a left-wing, social democratic vision that shines light from out of neoliberal-ism’s shadow. The Progressive Political Economy video series brings forward Canada’s left-wing thought leaders such as Jim Stanford and Armine Yalnizyan to show what a different economics for an affordable, good life can look like. The Perspectives Journal Podcast also brings forward policy conversations with experts to dig into the details and nuance of implementing practical political choices, based on social democratic principles.
In this issue, Perspectives Journal No. 2 features Dylana Thompson’s analysis on the need for policy change in counting deaths among Trans community members across Canada, to appropriately assess the public health outcomes that arise due to right-wing reactionary policy changes. Garrett Evans also demonstrates why proposals to increase the minimum wage not only help workers across the income distribution, but how this policy can be used for electoral popularity. Bruce McKenna, following up on his previous contribution to Perspectives Journal online, looks back at the spectre of the Bob Rae-era of government in Ontario and what lessons are on offer from the failure of that regime. Professor Marc-André Gagnon calls into question the current formulary of Bill C-64, An Act Respecting Pharmacare and its ambiguous parameters that could leave the back door open for private sector profiteering.
This issue also further exorcizes the ghosts of neoliberalism with the printing of the 2024 Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture by Prize recipient Professor Isabella Weber. Her lecture, entitled Profits, Inflation and Survival in an Age of Emergencies, that was delivered at Toronto Metropolitan University last May, goes against the grain of orthodox economics to demonstrate how today’s affordability crisis has been induced by the social relations developed from prices as multiple crises give cover to inflationary profiteering.
Lastly, Broadbent Institute Digital Communications Assistant Jack McClelland reviews The Consulting Trap: How Professional Service Firms Hook Governments and Undermine Democracy released earlier this year from Fernwood Publishing. “Transnational Public Service Firms,” being largely a product of the neoliberal era have continued to parasitically attach themselves to public administrations in Canada and around the world, cutting services while taking billions in contracts. From the failed ArriveCan app to the Phoenix pay system fiasco, TPSF’s have been at the root of these problems. It has been up to citizens and public sector unions to push back against infection and retake democratic control from these corporations that continue to damage social democratic projects such as public health care.
You can also listen to our interview with the authors of The Consulting Trap on the Perspectives Journal Podcast, available on all major podcast platforms. Recent episodes of the podcast include inter-views with experts and labour leaders for progressive points of view on immigration, Canada’s carbon pricing system, and housing financialization.
Into the 2024 holiday season, we hope that these alternative visions for society presented here, that ward off the phantoms of the previous era, can instead renew our optimism for the possibilities of our collective future. Thank you once again for your support of Perspectives: A Canadian Journal of Political Economy and Social Democracy, published biannually by the Broadbent Institute.
