A common-sense resolution to revive our economy

There is a solution to bring our province and Canada out of this depression that started in 2007. It’s a common-sense resolution that would pay off big for most of us. Let’s take a look at it. It’s not really anything new.

It’s not as if there aren’t enough jobs out there. Nobody is filling them! We need everything from more elder-care workers, more social workers, more jail councillors, more rent-geared-to-income housing. We need more trash collectors who’ll go into the bush and clean it out. You get the picture. There’s plenty of vital work going undone but nobody who needs work is being hired.

Since before the days of Ontario’s worst-ever premier, Mike Harris, provincial leaders have let Ontario’s infrastructure go to hell. Harris and Rob Ford have a lot in common. Both were incompetent, mean-spirited toward the public, mired in pursuits of their own vices and forced out of office by their own misdeeds. In Harris’ case, it was by his seeming choice that he walked away from Queen’s Park in disgrace to his sundry corporate rewards.

Rob’s perceptibly more egregious vices became too public and thus he can only find appreciation from the majority yokel element of Toryism while mid-range Tories and the elites cringe to watch comedians and barflies claim the big boy as their own.

It’s the price of pandering to envy, greed and vindictiveness against society’s unlucky people.

That sadly destructive viewpoint does enable those who commit atrocities against people whom they view as unworthy to feel righteous as they slash and stomp what symbolizes the flesh of wrongful entitlement.

In our city and province, the beating is done to our very infrastructure.

Although it was Harris whose efforts to sell off your public property to private businesses that, for example, killed people in the Walkerton water-treatment disaster, he was supplanted by another bad man, Dalton McGuinty, who favoured developers. He, too, left in disgrace and his replacement, Kathleen Wynne, has perhaps lost touch with any chance of a solution to our malaise.

Our rotting, rusting, crumbling infrastructure afflicts us all. It’s both elected government and civil servants at fault. Bridges aren’t maintained nearly well enough, the water lines are ancient and leaking, potholes and torn-up streets are endemic, there aren’t enough places for people to live, and on and on.

Nearly everything that can be duct-taped back together instead of replaced gets the tape. the Gardiner has been left to crumble as much for anti-car propaganda reasons as for indolence and misplaced priorities. There are hundreds of examples everywhere.

In some cases you have to wonder whether much of this is planned. It might well be that city staff and politicians are plain inept and staggering under a massive workload of an area that should have never been placed under one level of government.

Think of that as the Common Simpleton’s Revolution. Thanks, Mike.

On top of that, Mike’s co-religionist, The Rightly Despised Brian Mulroney, stripped us of our factories and our jobs by a bad deal known as NAFTA. Now Steve in Ottawa has made a secret pact with the dysfunctional European Union, which has made basket cases out of Greece, Spain and many other members by requiring they pay the banks first, sell off their beaches, their mountains, their infrastructure to foreigners and impoverish their people.

It’s called austerity. Gotta pay down the debt. But do we really? Do we have to pay it before we pay ourselves?

There’s another way for Canada.

How about putting to work those who’ve lost their jobs to cheapo Mexico and the anti-union redneck U.S. south by fixing what needs fixing? There’s plenty of work needed from cleaning up the trash to revamping the once-grassy weed-filled public lawns we had under Toronto’s parks boss Tommy Thompson. That was pre-Harris.

Most of those who do that infrastructure work, ranging from skilled workers to day labourers, will spend nearly every cent they earn to buy stuff from the stores. The economy will bounce back. A fair tax regime will include sizeable contributions from high-income earners, large corporations here and abroad and impose tariffs on goods from low-wage competing nations.

Not taxing them enough pays absolutely no dividends to Canada. They take the money and spend it offshore.

Canada is an independent nation. We don’t have to be subservient to banks and brokerages. We make our own laws and don’t need to yield to foreigners who would drag us by our belts to suit their purposes.

Canada can print its own money. Not a central bank. Canada can. If we’re spending it here, it’s a closed circuit and money is what we say it is. If we’re spending it outside our borders those foreign vendors can either take it at face value for what it buys here, or take payment in chits that they can trade to others eager to purchase various of our mines and resources products.

We hear a lot about how blessed Chicago is because it has an enviable waterfront. It’s often cited as an example of what Toronto could have had—if we hadn’t permitted that wall of condos blocking the lakeshore. It’s also what we can still partially create through Waterfront Toronto.

Even Mayorette Rob Ford sings praises to Chicago’s waterfront as a fabulous public space. But he might not be so praiseful if he reads its history. The magnificent Chicago waterfront was part of a nationwide Depression-recovery program instituted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s.

Gawd! Smacks of socialism, don’t’cha think?

It was exactly the sort of undertaking that’s shunned by the London- and New York-based elites who run the “free world’s” money systems and the too-big-to-fail, too-big-to-jail banks that must be paid first and foremost.

Their recipe for pulling out of this great depression of 2007-2014 is crippling austerity. Pay them first, foremost and often.

The European Community [of Victims], with whom Stephen Harper signed a secret free-trade deal, has its cringing masses selling off their once-public utilities, highways, beaches, you-name-it to pay off lenders who are always first on the list and the last at the barber shop (for a “haircut”).

Let’s not adopt austerity for Canada. Paying the bills mustn’t be the top priority. Paying the people is.