Paul S. Graham

According to an article in today’s Winnipeg Free Press, the projected cost of Canada’s “mission” (i.e., aggression) in Afghanistan will be, by 2009, about $4 billion. To date, the invasion has cost Canada $2.2 billion and 45 lives.

Of course, the numbers don’t convey the real magnitude of the tragedy involved– the tens of thousands of Afghanis killed, the hundreds of Coalition deaths, the thousands of wounded on all sides, and the profound suffering of the families and communities left to cope with the aftermath.

On the fiscal side, I suppose Canadians can be grateful we’re not Americans. Those folks have been saddled an estimated $76 billion tab so far, and they still haven’t nabbed bin Laden. Nonetheless, imagine what we might have accomplished with the $2.2 billion we’ve spent to date on the war. For example:

• Housing: We could have built about 15,000 modest bungalows and given them away to homeless people.
• Employment: We could have paid 73,000 person years of employment at a living wage ($30,000/annum/worker).
• Daycare: We could have created more than 200,000 new child day care spaces.
• Medicine: We could have trained 20,000 doctors or 80,000 nurses or some combination thereof.

Admittedly, my calculations are crude, but the point is, one can do a lot with $2.2 billion. How would you have chosen to spend this money?

How can someone hold both progressive and conservative values at the same time? And how do folks on the Left communicate with them?

Trish Hennessy and Keri-Anne Finn address these questions in the December 2006 issue of the CCPA Monitor, in an article entitled Facing Some Hard Truths: Progressives need to relearn how they “frame” their message.

The key to unwrapping this apparent contradiction and effectively communicating a progressive message is to grasp that we have grown accustomed to placing people on a continuum — left-centre-right or progressive-moderate-conservative — or mainstream versus fringe. Unfortunately, such distinctions are misleading. Most folks just don’t fit neatly into tidy categories. Many if not most of us are “biconceptuals” — folks who can, for example, support unions and care about the environment on one hand and crave tax cuts and vote Tory on the other.

We respond to politicians (and presumably to activists) not so much according to the policies they espouse but to the values we perceive they represent. If their values overlap with ours we are more likely to support them.

We can have the most wonderful set of social or economic policies in the world, but if we do not “frame” these policies in terms of the values espoused by our fellow citizens, our policies will be misunderstood, opposed or ignored.

Finn and Hennessy draw on the work of Dr. George Lakoff and his new book Thinking Points. Lakoff is a senior fellow at the Rockridge Institute, which describes itself as “a non-profit, non-partisan think tank dedicated to strengthening our democracy by providing intellectual support to the progressive community.” At Rockridge, the stated mission is to use “research in human cognition to help progressives make arguments that make sense to their audience.”

I’m not going to recap either Lakoff or Hennessy and Finn’s treatment of his analytical framework. Follow the links and go directly to the sources. I think you will find their discussions interesting and compelling.

What I would like to do, though, is to invite a discussion on values — not the values of the teeming masses of “biconceptuals” out there who stubbornly insist on voting for the status quo. No, what I think we need to talk about are “our” values.

What values mark those of us who consider ourselves “progressive” or “on the Left” or however you want to characterize it? What do we stand for? What is the moral foundation for socialism, feminism, environmentalism, your-favourite-ism?

Try not to confuse “values” with “policies.” Dig deep into your core.

Why is this important?

Because, I don’t think we can begin to convince other people of our ideas unless we can empathize with them. And we cannot begin to empathize until we have a clear understanding of where we are coming from.

That’s the mission. I intend to take a whack at this, myself, in future posts. I hope you will join in.

Canada’s national phone-in show, CBC’s Cross Country Checkup, invited listeners, yesterday, to call and write in on the topic of charity. The question: “What motivates you to give charity? What puts you off?” And for two hours, listeners told their stories.

We learned that most charitable giving in Canada involves the faithful supporting their churches, that people are increasingly skeptical about professional fund raisers and the charity industry, and that many, if not most of the people who phoned in were somewhat self-satisfied with their contributions.

Listeners were invited to email comments as well, and you can find a selection here.

I’m the last person in the world to criticize generosity. I believe that people who share their money and/or their time to help someone else deserve respect. But I gotta tell ya, I really wish someone had seriously questioned why one of the wealthiest countries on the planet needs so many charities in the first place.

Leaving aside whether churches and think tanks (like the Fraser Institute) should be recipients of tax deductible charitable donations in the first place, why do we have so many people in need and why do they have to depend on the charitable whims of their fellow citizens?

Forgive me for stating the obvious, but people are poor when they do not have enough money. And dependence on charity arises when governments evade their responsibilities.

So what is poverty, anyway? The Canadian Council on Social Development (CCSD) has published a handy little fact sheet that sets it out in tabular form. A single person living in a major Canadian city would be considered poor if she earned $20,778 before taxes. The same person living in a rural area could evade poverty by making $14,303. A family of four would need an income of $38,610 to live in Winnipeg, and only $26,579 to live in the country, and so on.

According to the Canadian Union of Public Employees: “A wage of less than $10 an hour is widely accepted as a low pay poverty wage because a single individual working full-time all year would need at least this amount to earn above Statistics Canada’s low income levels for a larger Canadian city. Single parents and those supporting more than themselves require at least $13 an hour to reach these low income levels.”

Also according to CUPE: “analysis of detailed labour force survey data for 2005 shows:

• Over 17% of Canadian workers (more than 2.3 million) were paid less than $10 per hour in 2005.

• More than one in five of all working women – over 1.4 million – were paid less than $10 an hour in 2005.

• One in eight male workers (12.8%), or 892,000 workers, were paid a poverty wage in 2005.

• Over 1.1 million of those working for less than $10 an hour were 25 years of age or older.

• More than 50% – or over 1.3 million – of all young workers were paid less than $10.

• A high ratio of seniors – more than 21% — also work for less than $10 an hour.

• More than 1.2 million “full-time” workers (defined as those who worked more than 30 hours at their main job) were paid less than $10 an hour at this job. Many other low paid workers worked multiple jobs at low wages, but were classified as part-time.”

That’s the so-called “working poor.” Folks who rely on social assistance are worse off, both financially and in the sense that they are in most cases unable to escape dependence on a miserly state.

So, how poor are they? Once again, the CCSD has a useful fact sheet. Check them out. Social assistance rates, depending on where you live and if you have dependents, provide from 20% to 73% of what you need to reach the poverty line. They are a disgrace. And 2.5 million Canadians live that reality.

Is it any wonder that the number of food banks in Canada has grown from one, 25 years ago, to 649 this year. Or that the Canadian Association of Food Banks reports that over 750,000 people per month use their services?

As I stated so simplemindedly: people are poor when they do not have enough money. And dependence on charity arises when governments evade their responsibilities.

We are long overdue for two reforms in this country that would go a long way to relieving poverty:

1. increase the minimum wage to a living wage
2. increase social assistance rates to enable those who are unable to work to live above the poverty line

We can afford it. The federal government (and every provincial government, excluding that of PEI) have posted budgetary surpluses in the past year. There is no shortage of cash; all that is needed is political will.

If every person who made a charitable donation in the past year (however this is defined) were to insist that our elected officials would enact these two measures, the need for charity in Canada would diminish greatly.

Charity, on the domestic front at least, would be reserved for exceptional circumstances. What an uncharitable thought.

In Canada it is an unquestioned article of faith that taxes are – at worst, a Satanic invention – at best, a necessary evil that needs to be restrained. Opponents of taxation argue that government taxation restricts economic growth and makes us poor. The sooner taxes are reduced, the better for all, they say. In the words of Prime Minister Stephen Harper , “all taxes are bad” (presumably this includes the ones that pay his salary).

The tax cutters come in all sizes, shapes and political persuasions. Even Manitoba’s NDP Premier, Gary Doer, boasts of having brought in “significant and sustainable tax cuts in four main areas: personal, business, property as well as Manitoba’s first corporate income tax cut since the Second World War.”

When social democrats like Doer shamelessly proclaim neo-con dogma, it seems unlikely we will find politicians who favour maintaining taxes, or good heavens, increasing them. And it’s too bad, because there is strong evidence that taxes are good for us. A study conducted by Neil Brooks and Thaddeus Hwong, and published by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives December 6, 2006, argues convincingly that “tax cuts are disastrous for the well-being of a nation’s citizens.”

The study compares high-tax Nordic countries and low-tax Anglo-American countries on 50 social and economic measures and finds the high-tax Nordic countries score better in 42 of them. For example, the high-tax Nordic countries have:

• lower rates of poverty, more equal income distribution, and more economic security for their workers

• a higher GDP per capita (GDP is “gross domestic product” — the total market value of all the goods and services produced within the borders of a nation during a specified period.)

• higher rates of household saving and net national saving

• greater innovation, including a higher percentage of GDP spent on research and development

• a higher ranking on their growth competitiveness by the World Economic Forum

• higher rates of secondary school and university completion

• less drug use, more leisure time, and higher life satisfaction

The CCPA says “the U.S. falls near the bottom of the 21 industrialized countries in a strikingly large number of social indicators. It also ranks as the most dysfunctional country by a considerable margin. In contrast, Finland ranks near the top of the industrialized world in most of the social indicators and has been named the most competitive country in the world by the World Economic Forum four years in a row.”

Canada falls somewhere between the two extremes but our political and business elites seem dedicated to accelerating our race to the bottom.

The 55-page study is available for download free of charge. You’ll need Adobe Reader to open the 512kb file.

It’s well worth reading. And the next time you hear politicians chanting neo-con mantras (taaaaaxxxx cuuutttsss . . . taaaaaxxxx cuuutttsss), spank them with it (metaphorically speaking, of course). Then, sit them down and educate them. With a federal election (and a Manitoba provincial one) around the corner, there will be lots of opportunities.