Conversations with Liberals

The Governor-General is going to call an election on Saturday. When we win Okanagan-Coquihalla and overturn the long Conservative dynasty here, aren’t we going to surprise the nation? And we’re going to simply astonish the Conservatives. What fun.

The themes for the national campaign are going to be around trust, transparency, and the economy – all areas where the Tory record doesn’t bring much credit, and where the national party is going to focus its attention. Here in the riding, I’ve learned a lot from conversations with people about important ways to bring back our pride in our country. Many have told me about health care, education, stealth fighters and mega-prisons, the environment, fiscal management and, of course, about renewing trust. Above all is a hope that we can bring back a sense of ourselves as compassionate people who care about fairness, poverty and equity as well as encouraging success. It’s no coincidence that these are in our national platform – we are Liberals, after all. Here are some thoughts inspired by these conversations.

Post-Secondary Education
Like so much right-wing rhetoric, we’re being trained to think of post-secondary education as a commercial venture – simple job training. The Conservatives like to follow models like this which have already failed in the Unites States. There, student debt is just a way to buy a job. But education is not an expense to train workers – it’s an investment in citizens, the most important asset any country has. I heard from a mother who has two grown kids, university graduates, without decent jobs and with what seems to them like enormous debts. It’s a common story. How’s that to encourage others to get the learning we all need? Canada is one of the richest countries in the world – anyone who has the grades, desire and work ethic should be able to go to university. I now that’s Mr. Ignatieff’s goal, and I know it can be achieved. I know as well that the burden of student loans on individuals can be dramatically reduced at little burden to the public purse simply by not handing them over to banks at commercial rates - this is common in Europe (except now with another neo-Con government in England). If we think creatively, without doctrinaire blinders, we can work through these issues.

Health Care
I had a long talk with a charge nurse who wants to know how we’re all going to deal with each other when we elders die off at the same time as her nurses are retiring. Where are the new people in the caring professions going to come from if we don’t train them, and if we don’t hold the jobs in high public esteem? Where are the support staff and home care professionals going to come from to help us care for each other? None of these questions has a simple answer. What is clear, though, is that the belief that all will be worked out if we move more and more of this to “the market” is not only simplistic, it’s just wrong. Delivery of health services is a provincial responsibility, but the federal government can lead in lots of ways – early childhood nutrition, education again and again, incentives to allow people to care for loved ones at home – investments like these will lead to reduced health care costs and more satisfying lives.

Prisons, Social Investment, Poverty
A drug and alcohol counsellor and child protection officer in our riding told me about the grave difficulties faced by poor single mothers and about the lack of useful help for people with addictions. Again, we’re following a path well-worn in the US. Locking up drug addicts and the mentally ill is not a humane way to treat human beings with medical problems. When our great-grandchildren look back on policies like these, they won’t be able to tell them apart from the horrible asylums of the past, with people with dementia, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and the rest chained to walls and fed by keepers. There is no evidence anywhere in the world that a punitive approach to crime or to addiction, and certainly to mental illness, has any positive effect. And blaming poor people for their poverty doesn’t help them not to be poor. Mentally ill people need care, drug addicts need help, desperately poor people need assistance to get back on their feet. You bet, there are violent criminals and bad guys out there, and of course they should be taken out of circulation. But 18% of the prison population in Canada are First Nations people, with few ways out of the poverty trap, and 16% are mentally ill, with no help at all inside the slammer. Again, this is not “Liberal big spending”, just re-allocation of existing resources to productive means. Take 34% of the money for new prisons and use it as a social investment in people, rather than against them. Then there would be tons of space for the really bad guys. Above all, let’s stop treating people with problems as if they were the enemies of the economically efficient, and help them as members of what Mr. Trudeau called the “Just Society”.

Of course, anything about policy in one paragraph is bound to be simplistic (although not as simplistic as the 8-second sound bites people get to explain their views on TV). I’d love to have your comments, criticism or new information – just comment on this blog or Facebook page or respond to this email and I’ll get back to you.