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.

Will Gen Y Separate Business From State?

This is a bit of a philosophical piece, considerably speculative in nature.

It has occurred to me in the last few weeks that we have a problem in the Western world that needs to be addressed - the notion of separating Business from the State.  

While history seldom repeats itself explicitly, it does repeat in varying degrees.  The process of separating church from state began with the Magna Carta's signing.  While the Magna Carta was about limiting the powers of the English monarchy, it inherently started the process of limiting the ability of the power structure in the ecclesiastic world from driving state policy.  At that point in time, senior clergy had very direct access to the monarch, and therefore, very direct influence on the direction of state.  It is, in fact, that reality which gave the Church such wonderful advantages as being property rich and tax exempt.  

Today, it seems to me that big business has achieved a place in the power structure of our governments that is similarly privileged to the Medieval Church.  As a case in point, we have the gutting of Canada's environmental laws and agencies, done by the Harper Government largely at the request of oil industry in a recent omnibus budget bill.  Further, the costs of government have been steadily downloaded from the largest income groups - the wealthy, large corporations, etc. - to the middle class.  

What has happened here is that over the course of the last half of the 20th Century, business has moved into very much the same place that used to be occupied by the clerics in the Middle Ages.  Instead of Bishops and the like sitting at the monarch's side, we have lobbyists paid by mega corporations to forward their legislative agendas; big money like the Koch brothers are well known to purchase influence through Political Action Committees (PACs), astroturfing organizations and other vehicles.  The net effect is that politicians no longer worry about whether they can gain the support of voters, but rather spend their time courting the support of the big money types that can afford to spend huge dollars buying votes with enormous advertising campaigns.   

The upshot?  Politicians no longer feel beholden to the voters, but rather spend the bulk of their attentions on the interests of the corporate big money interests that have their direct attention.

This is not necessarily new - the wealthy and powerful have always sought a place of privilege at the table of power.  In the past, this included the Christian Church.  Eventually, as the notion of secularism grew and the concept of religion as an individual freedom took hold, society moved collectively to separate government from the influence of specific religious movements.  (I will, for the moment, maintain the fiction that this is true in the US and Canada, although I do personally recognize the growing influence of religious extremism in the US on government)

What has changed is the alignment of interests.  As North America came out of the Great Depression, there was an alignment of objectives between the wealthy and the middle classes, reflected in FDR's "New Deal" economic program, and other parallel endeavours in other parts of the world.  Over the last thirty years or so, that alignment of interests and objectives has diverged significantly.  To the extent that government that is supposed to represent the interests of the people has ceased to do so on multiple levels.

In part, this is the consequence of the Baby Boom generation having gained power and lost sight of what power means; in part it is a reflection of the ever increasing concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a relatively small number of people who are becoming more and more wealthy, and have gained control over the levers of power with their wealth.  The political disengagement of the Gen X, Gen Y and Millenial generations comes as no big surprise - they are individually much smaller than the Boomers, and have been unable to influence the juggernaut that started with the rise of the neoCons in the early 1980s.

However, the combined size of these three generations, combined with the Baby Boom generation starting to retire (and ride off into the sunset) does change the available dynamics.  As these three generations become allies, it is my hope that collectively they will start the process of disconnecting the big money power brokers from the government, returning it to the people and their collective interests.