Harper's War On The Middle Class

Continues apace.

A shortage of skilled workers is the biggest challenge many Canadian businesses face today, Employment Minister Jason Kenney told a skills summit Wednesday, warning it could also jeopardize Canada's economic development in the future. 

The problem would continue to grow as the population ages, Kenney told the one-day conference, which brought together stakeholders to discuss the labour market, employee training and those under-represented in the labour force. 

Currently 30 per cent of the skilled trade workers in Canada are baby boomers, Kenney said, adding that they will soon retire. 

"They are going to take with them a lifetime of knowledge and skill," he said. 

It's necessary that an "informed national discussion" take place about the condition of Canada's labour market, in order to address future skills gaps, Kenney said. 

"We can acknowledge that we have inadequate labour market information and we need to do a fundamentally better job of getting granular information by region and industry," he said.

Coming from a minister of the government that has dismantled the ability of Statistics Canada to even perform an accurate, useful census of Canadians, that's almost funny - if it wasn't so tragic.

Of course, the Harper Conservatives don't like university educated people as a whole.  There's a reason for this:  people with a liberal arts based education don't typically vote conservative.  So, they've been quietly rejigging the funding for federal research grants (which are an important part of university funding) for several years.

Adjusted for inflation, granting council funding has been in serious decline since 2007-08. Funding for SSHRC has fallen by over 10 per cent in real dollars, while core support for NSERC and CIHR are down 6.4 per cent and 7.5 per cent respectively. Support for the indirect costs of research has declined by 7.9 per cent. Overall federal support for the granting councils is down 7.5 per cent in inflation-adjusted dollars since 2007-08. 

There's more.  Not only has the government been quietly reducing the amount of funding it makes available for basic research, they have been changing NSERC's focus to "applied research":

"Collaboration between government, applied researchers and the private sector is vital to building an innovative economy," said Minister Goodyear. "The College and Community Innovation Program supports research collaborations between companies and colleges. It illustrates the importance our government places on creating the conditions for innovation and entrepreneurship to thrive in this country."

What does this have to do with Harper's war on Canada's middle class?  A lot.

First of all, it has fundamentally undermined the core of the concept of University.  If you are taking a degree in disciplines like Engineering, Business or Law, it's great.  You're seeing money poured into your department hand over fist.  If you're interests are in other areas - the social sciences, the liberal arts, not so much.  In fact, the government has been actively discouraging research in these areas and enrolment in those fields of study.  Want to study something that is "politically sensitive" (like gender and sexuality issues for example)? Good luck getting funding.  It isn't going to happen.

The consequence?  First of all, when you hollow out the liberal arts programs, you effectively turn the university into a technical college.  It might be one with the right to confer degrees, but I can guarantee you that the people coming out of those programs are not the well rounded thinkers that should be coming out of universities.  

This suits Harper quite nicely.  He and his "base" have long been critical of "intellectual elites" (you know conservaspeak for people who think about things rather than simply accepting the sound bite du jour).  So turning universities into institutions which turn out highly focused specialists in various domains suits them just fine.  If you don't think too much about any one part of his government, he doesn't seem too bad.  Start to analyze his government in more detail, and the picture rapidly becomes quite horrifying.

Further, by limiting funding to universities, Harper has made the cost of attending so excessive that only the wealthy can really afford it.  So much the better, it reduces the number of people who are likely to be critical of his government (or his ideological successors' governments).

But this is only one facet of Harper's war on Canada's middle class.  Through a series of other actions - mostly by policy fiat - Harper has gone after Canadians even more blatantly.

Front and centre in this has been the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP).  This has been used as a tool to undermine the balance of the Canadian labour economy.  Especially since the government started allowing all and sundry to come in under this program.  Historically, the TFWP existed quite explicitly for importing people with skillsets that are unique, rare and virtually impossible to find locally.  Generally, that meant only a relative handful of specialists came into Canada in any given year, certainly not enough to impact the local labour market.  Then the government started to open it up to general labour.  

Run a restaurant?  Having difficulty "finding qualified help"?  Oh, well now you can solve this problem by bringing in a bunch of labour from another country.  The effect?  Employers could suddenly refuse to pay reasonable wages in areas where there is a labour shortage.  (after all, if you lived in the Phillipines for example, how are you going to know that Calgary's cost of living is high and labour market is tight?)  Further, a foreign worker won't know their rights as a worker in Canada, much less are they going to be willing to "rock the boat" when their employer effectively holds the keys to their continued residence in Canada (especially important if they are considering moving to Canada permanently).  

Although the government has recently announced changes to the program, the damage to Canada's labour market has been done.  Many traditional entry level jobs are no longer available to Canadian youth.  There are many stories out there of youth applying at the local Tim Horton's or other fast food restaurant and being told that they are "overqualified".  Another friend of mine who is a plumber's apprentice has been finding job postings for "entry level" positions demanding 3+ years of experience.  This is a posting which is obviously aimed at a TFW coming into Canada who is looking to get into the same trade in Canada that they were doing previously.  

Businesses are running about wringing their hands about the changes to the TFWP.  Oh goodness, how will they keep their doors open?  Well, the short answer is by offering reasonable wages and working conditions that are somewhat better than slavery.  

Regardless, Harper is working his ass off to create an economic environment where the oligarchy has all the marbles.  (a $600bn "dead money" fund lying around - now tell me why these businesses cannot pay a reasonable wage?)  Make no mistake, there is an active war on Canada's middle class and Harper's government is spearheading it.

Corcoran Misses The Point On Income Disparity

On CBC's "The House" this weekend, I heard an interview with the Financial Post's Terrance Corcoran, in which he was basically poo-pooing the very real issue of the growing disparity between Canada's top earners and the rest of Canadians.  He made a comparison between a pensioner pulling in $20,000 a year and an executive making $190,000 and said "who cares?" - a statement which trivialized the entire discussion and leftA little digging this morning, and I find that he has more or less made the same points in one of his FP editorials.

If Canadians actually seriously look at the income data instead of following instant Occupy interpretation in much of the media they might end up feeling pretty good about income distribution in Canada.  The Canadians within the top 1% cover a wide cross-section of professions and occupations.  Almost 70% of the 1% have univeristy educations, as does 50% of the top 10% of income earners.

The lesson:  Getting the right higher education pays.

How generous of Mr. Corcoran to patronize us with the old saw about higher education.  Education is important, but it is far from the entirety of the story. I do note that he turns the knife with an extra twist by adding that it has to be "the right" higher education.  Presumably, like most of the far right in this country, Corcoran is among those who believe that the only degrees which matter are the so-called "useful" degrees:  Business, Engineering, and so on.  "Lesser degrees" like English, Philosophy and so on don't count.

That's not the Occupy idea, which is that inequality is a function of a corrupt 1% populated by system manipulating, fat-cat bankers, investment executives and Wall Street/Bay Street corporate gougers who are skimming massive bonuses out of semi-corrupt boards of directors ... 

Having sat close enough to the executive suite in my own career, watching a company grow from a modest size to being part of a frighteningly huge organization, I have seen first-hand the way that decisions get made.  A smaller organization's leadership is closer to the day to day business problems and is capable of responding to them appropriately - balancing both financial and human factors appropriately.  At a certain size, things become entirely abstract in the boardroom, and the business' leadership is dealing not with people and clients but all the executive sees are numbers.  People become numbers, salaries are numbers, and profits are numbers ... so are the bonuses.

When business starts looking at its people as "expenses", rather than as assets, things go seriously awry.  We are seeing this in the service industry today - companies like Wal-Mart, Loblaws, Sobey's are all cutting staff and wages to the point where getting service in their stores is next to impossible.  (The Sobey's near me has had seriously empty shelves in the produce area on Saturdays quite frequently, and their shelves are often half empty in the rest of the store)  There are explicit policies in companies like Wal-Mart which are designed to cap a worker's hours to limit the company's "wage expenses".

These are very real problems.  Worse, they are symptomatic of a malaise that reaches much further than the service industry jobs (which are often the entry level jobs for so many beginning their working careers).  In higher paying, professional companies, there are similar games going on which are designed at their core to tie the worker to the company and its fortunes.  I've written quite a lot on this subject on this blog under the label of Corporate Feudalism.  Make no mistake about it, the whole "outsourcing" game of sending jobs overseas where wages are cheaper and laws are more lax about how employees can be treated is another dimension of the same evil - and it's an approach to business that is similar, only it ends up affecting higher paid, professionals such as IT specialists.

What Mr. Corcoran, sitting comfortably in his high chair at the Financial Post is misconstruing about the "Occupy" movement and its offshoots (or unions come to that) is that they are really about the growing exploitation of the lower income earners by the top income earners.  It is about the sociopathy of large corporations and their boards which are so abstracted from the people that their decisions affect that they make increasingly abusive decisions.

Income disparity is a symptom of a problem, not the problem itself.

Class Warfare - Harper Style

Harper's government has never been a friend of Canada's middle classes.  Recent changes to EI have served to be another plank in Harper's war on Canada's middle class.  Lurking in the midst of the Conservative party's twisted view of things is the assumption that people who are taking advantage of EI are engaging in fraud.

Investigators with the Integrity Services Branch were provided with a 23-page manual, dated October 2012, outlining investigative techniques intended to be used in a pilot project starting in November and winding up at the end of March. 

The document makes it clear the Service Canada employees are to leave no stone unturned in their inquiries, even in the absence of evidence that selected EI recipients had done anything wrong. The document suggests investigators check addresses, bank accounts, medical documents and even the physical appearance of claimants. 

The pilot project involves controversial home visits in which agents knock on the door of an EI claimant's home and ask for an interview on the spot, or deliver a letter to schedule a mandatory face-to-face meeting.

The supposition that underlies this is that EI claimants are inherently engaging in fraud to justify their claims.  While I am sure that there is a certain degree of fraud involved in a system like EI - not all people are going to be scrupulously honest in their dealings with the government, the nature of the government's program here is such that it creates an investigative program that presupposes that EI recipients are engaging in fraud.

Today, it became public knowledge that the person who leaked those documents has been suspended:

Therrien leaked documents to the media anonymously in the spring showing investigators were ordered to find $485,000 in savings each year by denying claims. 

The federal government denied that any quotas were in place, but the opposition hammered the Conservatives on the issue. 

"Telling investigators that they each had to find half a million in fraud presumes that there is widespread fraud, that they're all a bunch of cheaters and criminals," said NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair in the House of Commons in February.

But, look at this through a different lens for a moment.  Harper is running around making a social safety net program that assumes Canadians who use it are thieves.  Meanwhile, his government is doing precious little to catch up with wealthy Canadians who have tried to hide their money offshore in so-called tax havens.

This can only be seen as one thing - a class war being launched against Canadians by this government. Harper has been consistent in taking positions where the average Canadian comes out disadvantaged, and the wealthy end up with more.

Whether we are talking about the ever expanding ... and unmonitored ... Temporary Foreign Worker program, Mandatory Minimum Sentences, the seemingly non-existent pursuit of tax-evaders who have buried millions of tax dollars in offshore havens or, for that matter, the surprisingly rapid processing of Conrad Black's application to reside in Canada.

On the other side of the coin, it appears some people have started to pick up on what is happening, and are starting to organize in response.  I don't think that unions are the complete answer here - too much has changed since the need for unions emerged in the industrial revolution.  But they are a legal construct, and one that will end up serving a key role in the process that is coming where people will once again assert control over their government, taking it back from the concentration of power and wealth in the oligarchy.

And The Screws Tighten Further

As the Conservatives continue on their hardline "tough on crime" nonsense agenda, the next step unrolled in an announcement from Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq revealed new rules for managing medical marijuana:

Under the new regime, the government will no longer produce or distribute medical pot and medical marijuana users will no longer be allowed to grow the product at home. Instead, the government will allow patients to buy prescribed amounts only from licensed growers under strict conditions.

In previous versions of the regulations, pharmacies were to distribute the product just like other medications, provoking the anger of pharmacists who feared being robbed.

But the final version removes the pharmacists from the loop, forcing patients to rely on mail order for their medical marijuana. 

Once again, we see the government stepping in and not just regulating something, but instead putting up obstacles which are detrimental to the good that these programs actually do.

"While the courts have said that there must be reasonable access to a legal source of marijuana for medical purposes, we believe that this must be done in a controlled fashion in order to protect public safety," Aglukkaq said in a news release.

"These changes will strengthen the safety of Canadian communities while making sure patients can access what they need to treat serious illnesses."

 Of course, they wrap it in the cloak of "community safety", when there isn't a shred of evidence to suggest that medical marijuana use has caused any community safety issues.  I will point out that any evidence the government may have is guaranteed to be purely anecdotal at this point, since they have ever so conveniently hamstrung the ability of Statistics Canada to gather reliable data.

There are two enormous questions that have not been addressed yet.  First is what are the criteria to become a "licensed marijuana grower"?  I'm going to put money on the rules being so strict that virtually nobody will be able to become one - not unlike what the government has done with the proposed rules around safe injection sites.

What the government has just done is push the use of marijuana to mitigate symptoms back underground.  The vast majority of users will not be willing to purchase the stuff via "mail order" models and will resort to the purchase of marijuana "off the street" simply because it is easier and more convenient - whatever the legal risks that may be associated with it.

There is nothing like a government which refuses to pay attention to available evidence and instead insists upon governing from ideology alone.

Air Canada Resurrects Indentured Servitude

Remember the notion of "indentured servitude"?  We haven't seen it used for a very long time.

But, that is the essence of what Air Canada has proposed as part of their training program for their "economy" airline rouge.

As part of an agreement, Rouge flight attendants are being asked to cover a portion of the training costs. They must commit to having $49 a month deducted from their gross wages for up to three years.

If they leave within 36 months of completing the training, they will required to pay back any remaining amount owed.

This smells a lot like an attempt on the part of Air Canada to create something that binds an employee to their job - indenture.

The fact it is being done through a payroll deduction program is even more offensive.  Instead of providing it as a loan which can be paid off at the employee's will, it exists as an obligation that is deducted from the employee's paycheque.  This creates a debtor relationship between the employee and their employer that is not appropriate.

On CBC this morning, I heard a business columnist arguing that this is Air Canada's attempt to make sure that employees have a commitment to their job and the associated training.  This sounds like the same kind of brain-damaged sophistry that justifies "open concept" office spaces by claiming that they promote collaboration.  The reality in both cases is far different - one is an excuse to be cheap, and the other is downloading the cost of employer-specific skills training to the employee while binding them to the job.

Whether this particular policy is strictly legal is not the point.  It is morally and ethically wrong in an era when we have long since left the bindings of servitude and slavery in the past.

I have suspected for quite some time that there is a corporate feudalism emerging, and Air Canada has executed another step in the process.  Unfortunately, Harper is unlikely to step in and do anything about this.