Questioning the so-called “Canadian Dream”
This well-known story of declining real earnings of younger workers is seemingly inconsistent with a story of increasing family incomes of children relative to their parents.
This well-known story of declining real earnings of younger workers is seemingly inconsistent with a story of increasing family incomes of children relative to their parents.
Given the huge imbalance, this would likely require more managed trade plus more proactive Canadian industrial policies. As a planned economy, China might be open to sectoral managed trade arrangements.
In this new age of corporate concentration, we certainly need a much broader response than competition policy alone.
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?
A necessary prerequisite for restoring Western democratic capitalism, and even more so social democracy or democratic socialism, is to force the genie of finance back into its bottle.
These data point to stark and growing disparity between incomes and housing prices since 2005, far outstretching a related but less pronounced trend in the rest of the country.
Our trade situation was a serious problem long before the election of Donald Trump and new realities will demand a serious re-thinking of the liberal trade and industrial policies of the “free trade” era and not just more of the same.
At this moment of deep political convulsion throughout the West, the fight against privatization is part of a broader struggle against the economic logic that has led to corrosive inequality and underpinned the bankrupt neoliberal economic paradigm.
Acquisitions by foreign corporations of Canadian companies may be in the interests of shareholders and corporate executives, but harmful from the perspective of workers and local communities.