April 2001
by Barry Stagg
What about this command economy stuff. This is the sort of authoritarian control associated with people like Joe Stalin and Fidel Castro. Surely, Canada is a healthy market economy, like its elephantine neighbour to the south. It comes down to who is in the market and who else is under the command of our lovely commissars comfortably ensconced in Ottawa.
Those who turn down paying jobs in Newfoundland to stay on Employment Insurance benefits are part of the command economy. The market is assaulting them with that most peculiar weapon: the job. The 10-42 way of existence is a pure product of a government income plan gone off into the economic equivalent of one of Timothy Leary's LSD excursions. Ottawa is controlling and indeed choking the job market with the use of the federal chequebook.
Federal welfare payments are not limited to Newfoundlanders of questionable ambition. The Indian poverty industry is based on exactly the same standards of perpetual need and government generated income. This makes for a good living for the people who run the programs. Giving out money on these terms is Ottawa's contemporary version of the discredited command economy that so enthralled the politburo boys of Moscow. It seems as if Ottawa has created various fiscal ghettos that are to Canadian federalism what collective farms were to the followers of Lenin and company.
There must be more commonality to Canada than that of the hospital waiting room and the welfare office. That is a statist profanity simulating a national vision : welfare patriotism. It becomes citizenship defined by the controlling classes in terms of the devices that make them dominant. This is a classic form of authoritarian practice. Stalinists used it well.
Whether the method of command is the transfer payment, the employment insurance cheque, the Indian tax exemption or an autocratic fisheries licensing regime, it comes down to the federal state, the ubiquitous government, controlling life through the thin pocketbooks of its regional citizens.
The additional imposition of mascot politics whereby some groups and special interests are more equal than others gives further colour to the command ethic percolating through the guts of regional economies. The Trudeau era marked the advent of mascot politics with the Quebec separatist template serving as a pattern for a future, now our present, where favoured groups based on god-knows-what specious reasoning are deemed to be more needy than others. The hardy souls eking out a living on the fishing boats and farm tractors of this country seem to take a permanent back seat to any and all of these groups.
Quebec's need for cheap expropriated Newfoundland electricity was more equal than Newfoundland's right to own and sell its own. Orwell's Animal Farm contemplated just such vicious practices when it hit the presses a good three years before Canada merged with its tenth province. Unfortunately, the ability of Canadian governments to successfully mimic such classic satire is without financial reward. Otherwise, the royalties from such a performance might be worth a pretty penny. Perhaps Brian Tobin as Napoleon has its possibilities whichever version of the character you prefer: porcine or person.
It does seem that the market economy- nasty capitalism to any of you delicate do-gooders- has hit on a particularly subversive form of guerrilla warfare to fight the creep of the welfare state of mind. Job terrorism is an old weapon, once summed up as the thought that the best social program is a job. To be completely modern , why not give it a 21st century name: Job terrorists of the world, unite.