By David Crane
The Toronto Star
April 11, 1998
It was quite an evening. I had agreed to be a panelist for a town hall meeting on the proposed Multilateral Agreement on Investment, a 29-nation proposal to standardize foreign-investment rules, organized by MPs Carolyn Bennett and Bill Graham. There were many signs it would be a lively event. Everyone arriving was handed a variety of pamphlets and papers criticizing the agreement. And the turnout was much larger than expected. The meeting had to take place in the church itself at Yorkminster Park Baptist Church, instead of in a meeting room. Moreover, the audience wanted to take charge.
People were angry and frustrated about the way our political system works and the dominant voice they believed businesses, especially multinational corporations, have in determining public policy. This was the principal message of the evening: Ordinary Canadians are terribly frustrated by what they see as the erosion of democracy; while they vote in election campaigns, they feel they really have no voice, that once elected, governments listen only to corporate interests.
This was one reason for the fury with which the Multilateral Agreement was attacked that night. Ever since the proposed Meech Lake accord, many Canadians have come to feel that all too often they are presented with faits accomplis, either negotiated between federal and provincial governments or by Canada with foreign governments, with no chance for input from the people into the process. Indeed, Graham acknowledged a ``democratic deficit'' that has to be addressed.
As one person who attended said afterward, ``the fundamental glue which once attached those who govern to those who are governed, and vice versa, has almost all gone now.'' The proposed agreement is seen as just another example of the Canadian government giving more weight to the wishes of big businesses and their organizations, such as the Business Council on National Issues, than to ordinary Canadians who elected the government.
But the proposed pact is also a proxy for another major concern of Canadians: the seemingly ruthless consequences of globalization and the transfer of a wider and wider range of human activity to commercial transactions where the only goal is efficiency. In that sense, globalization is leaving many Canadians feeling insecure and helpless in the face of the relentless forces of laissez-faire capitalism.
Alan Greenspan, chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, put the choice bluntly in a recent speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. ``For good or ill, an unforgiving capitalist process is driving wealth creation,'' he said. ``It has become increasingly difficult for policy makers who wish to practise, as they put it, a more `caring' capitalism to realize the full potential of their economies.''
In a less competitive world, when trade barriers were higher, ``governments were able to construct social safety nets and engaged in policies intended to redistribute income.'' But today, as a result of falling trade barriers and new technologies, ``international competitive pressures are narrowing the choices for economies with broad safety nets: The choice of accepting shortfalls in standards of living, relative to the less-burdened economies, or loosening the social safety net and acquiescing in the greater concentrations of income that seem to be associated with our high-tech environment.''
In other words, Greenspan was saying if countries such as Canada try to sustain social cohesion through social programs of fairness, they will have less competitive economies than if they copy the more ruthless form of American capitalism and accept the enormous disparities of income and other forms of social inequality. If that is the choice, then you can't blame the average Canadian for being angry and frustrated. While wealthy Canadians may wish for U.S. tax rates and two-tier health care, the ordinary Canadian is much better served by Canadian-style social, health-care and education policies.
The real challenge, then, is for Canada and other nations to write global rules that are not designed solely to serve the interests of private capital, but also address the needs and concerns of ordinary citizens, and impose obligations as well as rights for private capital. It's hard to think of a more important issue on which Canada could strive to provide leadership than to design a global system with a human face.
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