Good jobs will continue to erode across Canada in 2012 - the Electro-Motive Diesel lock-out in London, Ontario is the tip of the iceberg - and hard-working communities will suffer as result.
When healthy wages and benefits are gutted there will be those who say, for example, that “Electro-Motive employees need to realize they are (a) lucky to have a job” and be grateful they were left with something a bit better than Ontario’s paltry minimum wage.
Those are real words and sting in the face of rising profits for manufacturers who want ever-cheaper wage payouts.
Canada’s short-sighted Conservative federal and provincial governments offer stinging messages as well when hopes for job growth and security are considered.
Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said his government will be assessing public sector pensions before the 2012 budget is reviewed. “Overall, sure, I think we have to. If one’s going to make any sort of intelligent assessment of government spending in Canada, one has to look at... benefits and pensions.”
Review all you want, I say, but any intelligent look at government spending must be twinned with an intelligent look at declining government revenues, and here our government is lacking. Not one word has been mentioned since the Conservatives came to power about the decrease in revenues as a result of their lower corporate tax rates in the near past or what will happen to revenues after future decreases in tax rates.
Not one intelligent word has been spoken about how the increase in spending related to fighter jets and prisons (no one knows the final cost of these two very expensive ventures) may be related to public sector pensions, even though most Canadians can see the two are related, and that someone’s pension may well pay for a concrete prison cell inside a country with declining crime rates.
In Ontario, provincial Progressive Conservative finance critic Peter Shurman says, “We can say that there are some things that are sacrosanct. One of them is you (Liberal leader) will continue with the reduction in corporate tax rates. (We) are unwavering about lowering business taxes.”
Some innovative and far-sighted business ventures do turn tax cuts into jobs and live up to the name ‘job creators’. However, many corporations pass most ‘low tax rate benefits’ along to only the owners and share holders and will move from one community or country to another in search of the cheapest labour, not to create good, secure jobs, but to create more profits. Many times the title ‘job creator’, which our Conservative Prime Minister throws out with abandon, should be replaced by ‘community destroyer’ - to be fair - but don’t hold your breath waiting to hear it. Some things are sacrosanct, but not good, secure jobs for willing workers.
When it comes to job creation, short-sighted government policies come up short.
[Photo by GHarrison]
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Please click here to read 2012 in Review PT 6: “Harsh attitudes in the present will crush the less-fortunate”
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