Funding the CBC and Deficit Reduction

The following is based on a letter I e-mailed to James Moore, Minister of Canadian Heritage, Thursday, July 14th.

I listened to the Minister on CBC Radio’s On the Island this morning. He not only falsely denied the Conservatives’ pre-election promise to maintain or even increase the CBC’s funding, but he also had the effrontery to chide the CBC that it must do ‘its share’ for deficit reduction. This, even as the Federal Government of Canada, persists, through its holier-than-thou crusade against drug use, in squandering hundreds of millions of dollars annually to enforce drug prohibition.

It’s bad enough that drug prohibition doesn’t work; it’s worse that it turns a relatively minor medical problem into a major social one; worst of all is that the very laws enacted in the name of preventing drug use and addiction, actually encourage more drug use by creating and sustaining several extremely lucrative black markets, along with the criminal gangs who operate them.

The Harper Conservatives consider drug use immoral. However, it is even more immoral to make matters worse, as the Conservatives are now doing. All the social ills associated with drug use and addiction—thefts and muggings to obtain the price of a fix; gang wars and murders; our over-loaded prison system, and the erosion of our civil liberties—are directly due to the use of the Criminal Code to address a medical problem.

If the Government is serious about cutting the deficit, with the least pain for citizens, ending drug prohibition would be a significant first step. Not only would the Government save hundreds of millions of dollars annually on reduced police, court, medical, and incarceration costs (more prisons are the last thing we need), taxes from the sale of marijuana would add hundreds of millions of dollars annually to government coffers.

Think of it—cutting costs and increasing tax revenues while simultaneously delivering a major blow against organized crime by destroying their black market—all for the price of repealing some very bad legislation.

But Stephen Harper, that smug, self-righteous, despot-in-the-making, will never let good public policy trump his private punitive principles: The CBC’s funding will be cut, and criminal gangs will continue to flourish.

May 2, 2011 was a sad day for Canada; the Harper Conservatives are not a party that can be trusted with majority power, as the above examples demonstrate.

And this is only the beginning of four long years of Conservative dictatorship.

Consumer Debt

Periodically, and lately, with increasing frequency, a great to-do is made by economists, bankers, politicians, and the press, about the excessive level of consumer debt, now averaging around $140 of debt for every $100 of income. If any steps at all are taken by government or related institutions such as the Bank of Canada, to deal with the situation, they are generally counter-productive, as they lean to reducing or maintaining very low interest rates which, as is well-known, is more likely to encourage the taking on of new debt than the repayment of old. A much more effective tactic would be to raise interest rates, but this remedy is not applied precisely because of its effectiveness—the higher the rate the less people will borrow, and eventually, the lower their debt.

However, to stop going into debt means cutting back significantly on buying things, especially vehicles and housing, and the economy would very likely to go into a recession. And no one—no economist, politician, businessman, or worker—wants to advocate any debt-reducing policy that would trigger a recession and the loss of both dollars and jobs. (Stock market reports illustrate this mind-set—all doom and gloom when prices are falling, all good cheer when prices rise. And a rising dollar is taken as good news when, for an exporting country like Canada, it’s not good news at all.)

We’re living in an era of what can be called ‘climax capitalism’, the global dominance of multinational corporations with allegiance to no one but themselves, and symbolically at least, their shareholders. Unfortunately, for them and us, climax capitalism suffers from an inherent defect, a malignant brain tumour bred of greed, fear, and pride—an insatiable greed for money combined with the fear of shrinking, of losing size and power, and the concomitant pride at having ‘the biggest’ company or profits or market share, or whatever, around—which makes it unlikely they would be willing, or, indeed, capable, of surviving in a low, or no-growth economy.

Therefore, because of the cancerous pursuit of economic growth, consumers, goaded and tempted by advertising on all sides, are more likely to increase than to reduce their level of debt. And no one is going to do anything effective about it because no one is willing to take responsibility for the consequences. It’s growth at all costs, and debt is the price we pay.