David Dodge, meet Lorraine Small
By Simon J Black
Published: 06/23/2007
I don’t imagine David Dodge will be calling Lorraine Small to offer his condolences any time soon. And why should he? Apart from a sense of common humanity they may share, what does the President of the Bank of Canada have to do with the mother of Toronto’s latest victim of gun violence? Dodge is a member of Canada’s economic elite; a white man with a privileged life, attending Ridley College, a private boarding school in St. Catharines, before going on to Queen's University and a PhD in economics at Princeton. Lorraine Small is a black single mother, struggling to raise her children in one of Toronto’s most socially and economically marginalized neighbourhoods; a neigbourhood long stigmatized by the media and much ignored by politicians. Although they live in the same country, their worlds could not be further apart.
But the lives of Dodge and others who walk the corridors of power in Canada are very much intertwined with the lives of someone like Lorraine Small. Dodge and his ilk have stood by an economic and social model that is failing many Canadians, especially the most disadvantaged. The government’s economic policies, led in part by Dodge’s monetary agenda at the Bank of Canada, are having deleterious consequences for working Canadians. Dodge and finance minister Jim Flaherty seem willing to write off central Canada’s manufacturing sector which has lost 220,000 jobs since 2002. Neither is poised to intervene in this crisis and Dodge is more concerned about the inflationary pressures driven by the booming Alberta oil patch than about the prospects of fairly well-paid manufacturing jobs in places like southern Ontario. For his part, Flaherty thinks we need to get use to the idea of a post industrial economy. This means that the manufacturing jobs that once employed hard working immigrants in places like Toronto’s Jane and Finch neighbourhood are to be replaced by low paid and precarious service sector jobs. The working poor are having the economic ladder kicked from underneath them.
To make matters worse, the Bank and the Feds have long abandoned the goal of full employment. Dodges inflation target of 2% is based primarily on a theory which holds that when unemployment falls too low, the inflation rate is likely to quickly rise. Thus it becomes necessary to avoid full employment in order to avoid the inflationary pressures associated with it. And to those jobless victims of this policy, what do we offer? An employment insurance scheme that due to tightening eligibility requirements fails to actually insure many of the unemployed. To those on social assistance we offer inadequate welfare benefits which give recipients the dire choice of paying the rent or feeding the kids. At least we could provide adequate housing, but as The Star recently reported the backlog of repairs in Toronto’s Community Housing is just one outcome of the federal government’s unwillingness to fund public housing and provide decent living conditions for all.
And here we have Jane and Finch, one of the United Way’s “priority neighbourhood areas”. After multiple studies we have come up with a new name for communities like this; they are now called ‘at-risk’. But what they really are is poor. Not poor in spirit, culture, and community life, but economically poor. Mounting frustration marks years of government neglect and economic policies run by technocrats out of touch with the real economy and the people who struggle to survive in it. The gun violence, the social alienation that fuels the gang and drug economy did not appear out of thin air. Violence is merely a symptom of broader social problems, particularly poverty and unemployment; a fact now acknowledged by community leaders, service agencies, and an increasing number of city politicians.
No one would argue against the idea of a healthy economy. Yet what’s healthy for David Dodge and Jim Flaherty might not be healthy for Jane and Finch. Does a healthy economy provide steady well-paid employment or low-end service sector work? And a healthy economy produces wealth, but what do we do with it? Do we fund community programs, build safe schools, and invest in health care and education? Or do we build jails, hire more police officers and give tax cuts to corporations and the richest 10%? Do we build strong neighbourhoods and give areas like Jane and Finch the investment, support and services they need to thrive? Or do we leave them subject to the ebbs and flows of the Canadian dollar, ‘inflationary pressures’, and globalization? To answer these questions, we not only need more pubic dialogue, debate and discussion. We need the likes of David Dodge to sit down with the Lorraine Smalls of our country and listen for a change.