Maybe it was the high Swiss altitude, or perhaps the high of being amongst the world’s most successful capitalists, that caused Prime Minister Stephen Harper to give some uncharacteristically candid reflections on his agenda for 2012 in his address to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. After several minutes of trumpeting Canada’s relative economic success compared to other G20 countries, a comparison similar to being the thinnest person at fat camp, Harper got down to business.
The major slogan of the Harper Conservatives for 2012 is “economic growth, job creation, and prosperity.” While economic growth and prosperity are easily decrypted as being intended for business, not working people, it is worthwhile to spend some time on the myth of “job creation”. If capitalism has one fundamental principle, it is that of the profit motive. No corporation in the world is guided bythe principle of job creation; they do seek, however, profit maximization. In the last 50 years in Canada, we have seen countless corporations downsize their workforce. While many of these jobs are outsourced to countries with lower health, safety and labour standards, a significant portion of them disappear and the rest of the workforce must work harder in an effort to squeeze that much more surplus value from them. The entire platform of the Harper Conservatives for 2012 offers not a single thing to the Canadian working class except continued austerity and social service rollbacks.
Harper assured the business leaders in attendance the government will soon be acting on the advice of the recently published Jenkins Report which calls on the government to subsidize corporations in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries to the tune of $7-billion. Not only will the government be giving them access to university research facilities and allow them to direct research, but they will allow the corporations to maintain intellectual property rights to whatever is discovered. So in effect, our brightest minds will be focusing on commercially successful ventures, such as remedies for baldness, instead of public health needs. Furthermore, the Jenkins Report calls for the federal government to supply funds to corporations specifically for the purposes of high-risk speculation on prospective biotech and pharmaceutical ventures. This means that if the university research facilities do produce anything of social value, corporations can drive up the price of future medicines or technologies and reap even more profits. On the other hand, if the bets placed by corporations on the future worth of these technologies fail, it’s the public that fronts the bill exactly like we had to do in 2008. The game is indeed rigged.
Aside from paying more for medicine in the future, Canadian workers can look forward to working longer. During the speech Harper hinted at raising the age of retirement saying, “Our ageing population is a threat to our social programs.” The ageing population of Canada is a threat, but not to Canadian society as a whole, as it is commonly made out to be by the mainstream bourgeois press. Conversely, it is a threat to the capitalist system that relies on, and necessitates, a surplus of available labour to depress the wages of the majority of workers. In forcing Canadians to work longer, it weakens the general resolve to fight for better working conditions for fear that we will be replaced by anyone from the large pool of hungry and unemployed workers. Moreover, citing ageing populations as a threat to our social programs is just the most recent in a long list of pre-texts conservative governments everywhere have used to rollback the gains won by organized workers over the last century.
The last batch of promises Harper made during his speech in Davos concerned international trade. Harper promised to sign and ratify the current free trade deal with the E.U., thus increasing Canadian exposure to European economic instability. Additionally, Harper promised to continue exploring free trade agreements with India and China ones that would further contribute to job insecurity and unemployment domestically as well as continually exploit workers abroad. Harper also vowed to make the exportation of Tar Sands oil to Asia a national priority. This is an affront to the large numbers of Canadians who rose up and expressed their vehement opposition to the continued development and use of Tar Sands oil because of its known effects on local communities as well as the environment.
With millions in Canada struggling to get by in the wake of historic unemployment, massive debt, and the rising cost of living not a single thing is promised by the Harper Conservatives to alleviate our plight. The time is now for the working class to organize and put an end to the corporate agenda.
