Does Canada have a socialist tradition
Plus, when democracy is bad news
Does Canada have a socialist tradition? The other day somebody on Twitter went on about how both the US and Canada are equally wild-west-capitalist, with no socialist traditions to speak of and I did offer her some counter examples:
- at least two serious Universal Basic Income pilots – one in 1970s in Manitoba, one as recent as Kathleen Wynne’s government
- federal single-payer medicare, obvi, which is not as comprehensive as one would hope (no dentistry, pharmacare or psychotherapy) but is in a decent shape, anecdotally even better shape than the NHS
- the cooperative housing federation. There are 160+ co-op buildings in the GTA (‘co-op’ here means something different than what a co-op building would mean in NYC, say)
- I mentioned Winnipeg General Strike as an early consciousness-raising event in the history of Canadian working class
- Stephen Lewis’ foundation that assists HIV-related grassroots projects in Africa
- Left academic publishing – with houses and distributors like Fernwood Publishing (which it just so happens gave me my first Canadian job in 2001) and figures like Leo Panitch (whose PhD advisor was Ralph Milliband and who was a long-time editor of Socialist Register)
- A mainstream social-democratic party that is/was the NDP which provincially at least sometimes even gets to run things.
- Quebec has its own socialist groups, traditions and lobbying, one well-known outcome of which is their cheap universal daycare
- Ontario’s electricity bill subsidy for people earning roughly under $40,000
- Maternity and parental benefits, child tax benefits etc.
- Some income supplement schemes to the modest national pension plan for those who reach retirement age as low income earners.
- The legacy of the left-flank of the Liberal Party of Canada – for example, the unemployment insurance (not particularly generous at 55% of former income and only if you’re made redundant, but it exists) and the open immigration system welcoming at least new 200,000 people a year of any ethnicity (but not of all income levels).
- Toronto Public Library and Foundation. That thing is freaking thriving. The branches are becoming the social centres for the 21sth century. (A lot of other Canadian cities have thriving municipal libraries.)
- Some arts funding – through a complicated multi-level peer-review process, sometimes arbitrary or ideological, but it exists and it sometimes helps bring about masterpieces like Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young’s Revisor.
- Some free recreation spaces and programs run by the cities – skating rinks, tennis courts etc – and city-subsidized rec programs that charge nominal fees (but hard to get into due to popularity).
Can anyone think of anything else? And which items here are still alive and well? UBI gone, medicare not expanding before urgent demand for mental health, medicine and dentistry healthcare. Ontario electricity subsidy needed because the hydro industry deregulation and pricing got out of hand. The building of the co-operatives largely stopped – with the odd exception like this one right here which I’ve been following closely. Maternity and parental benefits part of the EI system, so suffering its fate and trends. In regular non-pandemic times, there is effectively nothing for people who use up their one year’s worth of EI benefits and can’t find living-wage work: the municipal social assistance programs that you then default to can’t cover half of the rent in a city like Toronto. Housing situation in Toronto has never been more dire: there is close to no available housing that low income, fluctuating, and low-middle income in Toronto can afford (and there is no chance in hell to ever get onto the property ladder). Toronto’s City Hall is terrified of raising property taxes on a wealthy house ownership market that’s been on the up and up, and is spending a massive chunk of its transit budget on the Gardiner Expressway upkeep. For a variety of reasons, few artists and writers can make a living in Canada off of their artistic production only. (I was going to say the market is small, but it isn’t small, I think it’s more interested in American culture than its own…) Nationally subsidized daycare is an ongoing unsolved problem.
The NDP has largely turned itself to identitarianism, and before that, federally, it weirdly turned toward austerity vocabulary, with Justin Trudeau taking up their abandoned seat with a more relaxed approach to deficit funding. I don’t think the emergency pandemic largesse by the feds will result in the country moving toward a more communitarian understanding of Canadian citizenship, because no taxes were raised, nobody was expected to pay more of anything. Will the government’s creditors come a’knocking at some point? Has the rulebook changed by governments printing their own money to cover all those new expenditures (while somehow managing not to cause massive inflation?) – asks this interesting segment on the Sunday Edition from June 2020 and answers with a cautious yes. Will there be a will though to reshape the country’s main blind spots of solidarity: childcare, housing for mid and low income in large cities, the off-shored manufacturing (as the lack of vaccine making capacities demonstrated all too cruelly), favouring car-use infrastructure to public transit? Signs are not good.
Quick links:
After two European translators got pressured out of the job of translating Amanda Gorman because of their wrong ethnicity, Mridula Nath Chakraborty asks in The Conversation Is this the end of translation?
The very slow-burn Romanian documentary Collective just bagged two Oscar nominations, in the best foreign and best doc categories. Which was a surprise: seemingly bland films like this don’t usually grab the imagination of Academy members. We follow an investigative team at a Bucharest sports daily as they uncover layers of corruption and negligence in Romanian health care system causing deaths and suffering. Much of the film is one meeting after another. A Young Turk reformer minister of health is appointed at one point, and the camera follows him to his meetings and press conferences. Just as a major reform of the hospital management recruitment system is about to be enacted, the elections come and the party that established the rotten system in the first place wins a historical majority. Democracy in Eastern Europe once again does not deliver what it says on the package. From Canada you can watch Colectiv on the Hot Docs website, and for the US there are lots of options, including Apple TV and YT. Europeans I think can get it on their regional HBO.
That’s it for this Monday. Talk soon -
LP