Nothing lays bare more clearly the contradictions of free-market globalization than the hysterical and often ugly reaction to the arrival of the Chinese migrant ships on BC's coast.
Perhaps the recent Chinese arrivals are genuine convention refugees (a definite possibility given China's human rights record), or perhaps they are mainly economic refugees. Only due process and a proper refugee board hearing will tell. In either case, the nasty "send-them-back" reaction is unwarranted and based on a troubling lack of understanding about global migration and the world economy.
Inequality and poverty
We used to hear a lot about the feminization of poverty. It hasn't been in the news much lately. Yet women remain among the poorest of the poor in Canada, and the percentage of women living in poverty is growing. Almost 19% of adult women are now poor - the highest rate of women's poverty in two decades.
Shortly after external protests and internal conflicts hit the Seattle WTO Ministerial and stalled a new negotiating round, The Economist magazine ran a picture of a poor child from India on it cover, with the caption: The real losers from Seattle.
The implication of this cover, and the accompanying story, was clear: well-intentioned but misguided protesters were essentially denying the benefits of free trade to countries like India, and were thus unwittingly torpedoing the interests of the poorest of the poor.
Statistics Canada's new Survey of Financial Security--the first comprehensive study of personal assets and debts since 1984--paints a shocking portrait of the skewed distribution of wealth in Canada, but it says almost nothing about the reasons for this sorry state of affairs.
For answers to that question, Canadians should start by looking to Ottawa and the ill-advised policies that successive federal governments have foisted upon us in recent years.
OTTAWA—Bien que Paul Martin souligne les bons résultats sur le plan de la croissance économique et des emplois en hausse alors qu’il était ministre des Finances, ses résultats économiques généraux sont imparfaits du point de vue des familles de travailleurs. Voilà les conclusions d’une étude publiée aujourd’hui par le Centre canadien de politiques alternatives.
The current decline in financial donations to the Greater Vancouver Food Bank is cause for grave concern. It has rightly been picked up by the media and the public is being asked to meet the shortfall in food and funds. The moral imperative of the community to support our hungry fellow citizens should go without saying.
At the same time, as a community, we need to understand that behind the food bank issue lies a profound crisis in social policy: the collapse of Canada's social contract, now further imperiled in BC by provincial government cutbacks.
Premier Gordon Campbell established himself as a friend of the rich with the lavish cuts in provincial income taxes announced in June, but all he has to offer the poor is more misery.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the cuts to welfare foreshadowed in the new "service plan" for the Ministry of Human Resources--a complete reversal of a clear pre-election promise not to cut welfare rates. For the 246,000 children, women and men who relied on welfare at last count, the new arrangements touted by the provincial government can only mean extreme hardship and despair.
The growing gap between the world's haves and have-nots is one of the most pressing issues of our time. Recently, Prime Minister Chretien acknowledged the perils of the global divide, to the dismay of right-wing commentators, who have responded by denying the problem. Two things in this debate need to be pointed out: global inequality is extremely high and has been rising; and this trend is intimately connected to the laissez faire economic policies so promoted by those commentators.
For several years now, many observers of the BC economy have noted a split between the highly diversified and populous Lower Mainland (plus Victoria) and the rest of the province, which continues to be resource-dependent and highly vulnerable to swings in international market conditions. The gap between the "two economies" has been growing. But instead of an economic strategy to shrink that gap, BC's tax and spending cuts are making it worse.
"The world holds enough to satisfy everyone's need," Mahatma Gandhi once observed, "but not everyone's greed." In these few words he identified the main cause of most of the world's social and economic problems--and also pointed to their obvious solution.
Poverty, hunger, homelessness, illiteracy, preventable disease, polluted air and water, and most of the other ills that beset humanity have the same root cause: the inequitable distribution of the planet's wealth and resources.
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