This is an amazing oped:
The pandemic was a brutal example of Canada’s chronic inability to plan for the worst. When Ottawa finally got around to releasing a report last October about how the various levels of government had handled the crisis, the report’s authors pointed out that its recommendations closely mirrored those in an exhaustive report on the 2003 SARS outbreak in Ontario, which in turn had closely mirrored a 1993 report on the HIV epidemic.
That same inability to focus on issues that don’t provide instant political gratification is exacerbating the threats coming from the Trump White House. The tariffs are all the more potent when applied to a Canadian economy that
Ottawa and provinces have been happy to coast on the fumes of North American free trade, never imagining this might come back to haunt the country.
Politicians of all stripes have repeatedly ignored calls to make the country more competitive and increase its productivity. That includes tearing down the ludicrous interprovincial trade barriers that have been shaving points off of Canada’s gross domestic product for decades.
…
And why? Because it’s easier to sell Canadians on immediate largesse the year before an election than it is to convince them of the need for long-term investments that will cost billions and may not be needed for years, or even decades.
Federal politicians of all stripes are guilty of this. We haven’t seen a serious response to climate change, the housing crisis, or Canada’s collapsing productivity. We get weird bandaids (immigration to pump the GDP/workforce, reducing GST on property purchases), but rarely do we see well thought out plans with multi party support.
Original: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-the-lesson-that-politicians-never-learn/
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How is the an amazing oped?
All it does is say that Canadians need to plan for long term… okay, how?
Focusing on short term growth is a trait of capitalistic democracies, the solution would be to move away from the profit motive being in every aspect of our life.
The article just implies we need to try harder…
Politicians of all stripes have repeatedly ignored calls to make the country more competitive and increase its productivity.
Oh come the fuck on. They just couldn’t resist taking a swipe at labour, how true to form.
Sorry the government didn’t bend and spread widely enough for capital, G&M.
I don’t think productivity has to be in opposition to labour and employee quality of life (I’m not sure how else to describe it).
This is certainly a political trait, but perhaps more importantly, it’s a human one.
Immediate gratification feels better than distant gratification. Avoiding something bad never feels as good as getting something good.
I don’t know what the solution is. Education, I guess? The population at large needs to fully understand the nature of the threats, and the consequences of failure.
We’ve become a society of instant gratification, to the point where having to wait a week for an online delivery feels like a hardship!
I dont know the solution either. As individuals we can try to not chose the “easy” over the “good”, allow ourselves a little bit of discomfort for the better good. Learn to live a little bit slower. I don’t know how to translate that to a whole society.
Just my $0.02 to add, I guess.
Unfortunately, I don’t see this changing in time to prepare for a huge upcoming change in the form of AI + humanoid robots putting hundreds of millions or billions of people out of work. AI+bots will be a gigantic tech improvement and could improve things by a huge amount very rapidly, but by essentially doing NOTHING to prepare for the unemployment, it will likely be a disaster that certainly does not HAVE to occur.
How politicians just ignore this worst case scenario is super frustrating. It’s hard to imagine most countries being able to pivot their entire approach to keeping their citizens alive, not to mention just ‘not miserable’ fast enough, if they keep on doing nothing for a few more years. It’s mind boggling that somehow they don’t realize how fast this change will occur compared to previous seismic shifts. They must have advisors who are supposed to bring up important issues, I would think.
I guess politicians simply don’t want massive rapid change to happen, to such an extent that it always seems best to them to just pay attention to the short term gratification. I wish they would accept that it’s not up them whether massive changes occur or not.
