Fools’ Paradise: The Bankruptcy of the Canadian Utopia
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By Guy Paquette
Canada has earned a worldwide status as one of the great success stories of modern nationhood. The Canadian credo of social justice and racial tolerance has been a worthy model of stability and opportunity for the many diverse ethnic groups who have come here to join our somewhat successful experiment in cultural diversity. Canada is thus seen as a beacon of peace and prosperity in a world convulsed by mounting economic and political conflicts. Yet few people, inside or outside of Canada, know the actual truth behind our sterling reputation as a mecca of prosperity and justice.
Behind the facade of affluence and opportunity lies the hidden face of our masked national tragedy: that Canada's public debts are so staggering as to have brought us all to the brink of national bankruptcy. Our federal and provincial debts have by now surpassed $800 billion, making Canada the most impoverished 'wealthy' nation on earth; this amounts to $28,000 for every single Canadian, including the newest born. By comparison, the U.S.A.'s national debt stands at an inconceivable $2.8 trillion or $10,000 for every American. Our governments are so awash in debt as to be almost powerless to extricate us from the last 25 years' cycle of protracted debts to sustain our bloated and wasteful public spending.
Despite all their posturing and rhetoric, they are mainly fixated on placating the mega-banks, whose long hands reach into the very core decisions of our disempowered governments. Our political and economic sovereignty has in the process been insidiously stripped away from us.
How our once prosperous country has become a financial 'colony' of the mega-banks is the shameful and treacherous story of a fools' paradise: of deluded elitist leaders promising its misinformed countrymen an unattainable utopia and then leading them towards a vicious cycle of chronic borrowing to finance the great Canadian dream of the ideal welfare state.
The protagonists of Canada's ruinous exercise in national grandeur are its elected leaders – Prime Ministers Trudeau, Mulroney and Chretien, the avid lenders of the international mega-banks and, stranded on the desert island of national insolvency, the misled citizens of Canada.
Back in 1968, when Pierre Elliott Trudeau burst upon the national landscape by becoming Canada's youngest prime minister, our country was poised for greatness. The Montreal World Expo of 1967 showcased for the whole world Canada's rising star as a prosperous cultural mosaic of immense potential. With charismatic vigour, Trudeau set upon the task of sharing his idealistic vision of Canada as the “Just Society”: a prosperous welfare state of benevolent government that would harness Canada's rising economic potential of vast natural resources, coupled with a skilled well-educated workforce, to build an egalitarian utopia, a vibrant demonstration of humanism's best ideals of justice and prosperity.
Pierre Trudeau's vision for the Canadian Utopia was nurtured during his formative years at the London School of Economics, the mecca of socialist humanism. There he deeply imbibed the socialist dogmas of economic stewardship towards greater social justice. He also carried over into his own personal style of governance the underlying contradiction of socialism, which requires that an enlightened few will rise to excessively govern for the well-being of all. Too much government, even very benevolent, actually disempowers people from seeking their own betterment.
But Trudeau's vision of the Just Society through pervasive government became his personal crusade. His dogma, now the bedrock of all Liberal governments, was that the people's needs are better served by more government. Bolstered by the tide of Trudeaumania that swept the country, he expanded government benefits and programs by leaps and bounds.
Anyone and everyone could jump unto the Liberal gravy train, even for the most trivial or wasteful endeavours; Liberal coffers seemed to be inexhaustible. Admittedly, greater social justice and shared opportunity became the hallmark of the Trudeau era, with a steady rise in Canadian economic sovereignty. But these marked gains came at a heavy price of forfeiting our long-term economic viability. Trudeau's experiment in utopia was quickly becoming a fiscal nightmare; in this culture of unbridled public spending, chronic deficits and mounting debts were undermining our actual growth as a nation.
By the early 80s, Trudeau and his team were starting to understand this menace: that its gluttonous bureaucracy and plethora of unnecessary programs had to be drastically cut back for it to properly fulfill its core functions in health, education, security and economic stability.
However, despite heated debates over possible solutions to stop the fiscal haemorrhaging, any realistic remedies became mired in the quicksand of partisan fighting that the Canadian Parliament had regressed to. Proposed solutions were routinely stonewalled by the opposition who would resist any cuts with a babble of irrational critique, “to protect the citizens' interests”, but actually meant to score more political points in the process. The whole parliamentary system was breaking down, in betrayal of their real job of salvaging the country's worsening finances. Thus, by the end of the Trudeau years (1968-84), the nation's debts stood at a staggering $210 billion.
The Canadian electorate had contributed to this national crisis by also resisting any serious attempts to stem the rising tide of debt. A case in point was the election in 1979 of Joe Clark's conservatives, who had promised to clean up Trudeau's financial mess. He set about to do just that, but he was quickly defeated in the emergency elections provoked the vengeful Liberals' motion of non-confidence. His defeat was the swift retribution of the disgruntled electorate, appalled by Mr. Clark's tenacity in applying his promised “austerity methods” to actually cut back much of the government spending, so as to allow Canada to live only within its real means. The spoiled citizens of Canada could not abide by such a bitter dose of reality. The swift rejection of Joe Clark's realistic austerity was a tragic turning-point in Canadian politics. After his short-lived 'too honest' tenure, our political leaders regressed to the duplicious method of catering to our ingrained illusions of affluence by littering their constituents with largesse, all with more borrowed money.
Our complacency was thus bought with the bitter price of our national addiction to borrowed money; we could get our perks in exchange for our votes as our country gradually slid towards insolvency.
This absurd scenario became the modus operandi of Mulroney and his conservative minions(1984-93). They continued to blindly apply the doomed logic of national salvation through economic expansion. They were convinced that everything would turn out all right by focusing on a sustained economic boom that could eventually catch up with the debt and finally put us back on top. This could have been possible only if they had the sense and courage to make the hard choices needed to pull us out of the fiscal quagmire by drastically cutting back on overspending. Their plan was in reality a recipe for disaster. They chose instead to become distracted by vain attempts to solidify Canada's unity through a renewed constitution; akin to re-allocating the cabins while the ship is actually sinking. They further mined our financial waters by cajoling Canadians into NAFTA for short term boom. NAFTA soon proved to be a treacherous selling-out of our resources and manufacturing sectors to ravenous American and multi-national mega-capitalists. Canadians were being continuously lied to about NAFTA's promised benefits, while losing most of their long-term economic sovereignty by the relentless rise of foreign ownership that has come in the wake of NAFTA. Also the complex fiscal rules that have been legislated in increments have rigged our tax laws so as to allow these foreign owners to extract maximum profits and pay minimum taxes.
Such a recipe for economic slavery was the disastrous result of Mulroney's bungling tenure, either by naïve incompetence or outright treachery. And he was allowed to continue undermining our country with more borrowed money to maintain our affluent stupor, as our country's debts rose to a catastrophic $500+ billion by 1993. In the great Canadian utopia, such criminal treachery is even rewarded with the golden parachutes of life-long pensions and high-level business appointments. The fools' paradise lives on, whatever the price.
The Chretien government, even more crafty in public posturing and agile deceptions, has managed to rally our continued allegiance to their well-spinned 'deficit reduction' rhetoric, while maintaining NAFTA's back-room sell-out of our dwindling Canadian economic ownership. Few Canadians actually know the hard truth that over 70% of our economy is owned by foreign(mostly American) corporations. Through a sustained smoke- screen of much publicized cuts in spending (too often on the backs of the more needy), they continue to distract Canadians from the real issues of overwhelming foreign ownership and rising poverty. We are still burdened by excessive government, per capita the most costly bureaucracy in the world.
What more can we expect when the fox is left in charge of the hen house? As we stand at the dawn of this 21st century, we are left gaping into the abyss of a national debt of over $800 billion, with over $40 billion also needed annually just to service this gargantuan debt. It now seems clearer that such a mess was the planned tactic of the mega-greedy banks to disempower our governments and all of us in the process. By enslaving us into such debt, they could then pursue their planned take-over of our economy.
Our governments' policies and choices are by now mostly subservient to the will of the mega-banks who have for decades propped up our debt-burdonned governments to protect their sizeable investments in our country. These monolithic banks control the mythical world of international finance through their cherished creation, the International Monetary Fund. The IMF 'regulates'= controls the currencies of the world; through this tentacular artifice, they can manipulate the esoteric complexities of international finance to effectively influence all countries' economies and governments.
The IMF is the expedient instrument of control for the chess-masters of the mega-banks, who can thus maintain or replace any government to better serve their will. Their control is specially entrenched within the political and economic establishments of both the U.S.A. and Great Britain.
The World Trade Organization is their parallel mechanism of economic control to pursue their agenda of economic enslavement through globalization's false propaganda of shared opportunities through open markets. Anyone who seriously scrutinizes Canada's recent history of economic and fiscal policies can readily detect the steady emergence of the IMF and WTO's stated goals of homogenizing all regional economies towards globalization. This concerted molding of the world's economies into a more 'open market' actually benefits big money, not the peoples of the world ,who are reduced to impersonal units of production and consumption.
Big money's predatory capitalism has expanded exploitation and natural destruction on a scale unimaginable to our forefathers. The dons of this global oligarchy also dictate their choices to all Canadians through their minions, our so-called 'democratically-elected' leaders, who govern for their benefit more than ours. Thus our entire democratic process has become a shadow-game, subverted as it is by outside forces few of us understand. Dispossesed in our own land, we are left with only an illusion of national greatness.
The crumbling remnants of our utopian welfare state are an urgent wake-up call for all of us to start reclaiming our country's future hope. only when we admit to ourselves that we are being manipulated and lied to by the rising 'corporate' governments can we start to do this. Instead of leaving our children the bitter legacy of a crippled country, we can empower ourselves to reclaim our economic and political self-sufficiency through less government.
We also have to re-assess the prevalent lifestyle of pervasive consumerism as unfulfilling. Rather than continuing to satisfy too many artificial needs by dependency on the complex and costly technology of our wasteful urban culture, we could seek simpler models for more satisfying interaction in smaller grass-roots communities, modelled on the best experiences of earlier Canadians. Then we can better help each other pursue our real human potential: the sharing of our inate spiritual kinship, secure and satisfied in the awareness of God's benevolent arrangements for all living beings.
Then Canada could again achieve greatness as a beacon of hope and equality to promote self-sufficiency and self-governance as the formula for the future well-being of all humanity.
Guy Paquette, May 15/03
RELEVANT READING: 1- Money to Burn – Trudeau, Mulroney and the bankruptcy of Canada (Darcy JENISH, Stoddart/Toronto 1996) 2-Friends in High Places – politics & patronage in the Mulroney gvt. (Claire HOY KeyPorter1987)
@ October 24, 2003