In our October newsletter we talked about the need for bold thinking in four areas: housing and homelessness, transforming seniors care, embracing the shift to a caring and green economy, and the need to abandon the fixation on balanced budgets and austerity.
As we near the end of year two in dealing with Covid-19, there are many lessons that we can draw upon in charting our future course. Below we present both broader longer-term changes in our thinking as well as long overdue improvements to our social safety net and changes to our failing institutions to help kick-start these shifts starting today.
Action One: Reject Calls To Get Things Back To Normal
The neo-liberal apologists are already beating the drums on the need to get things back to normal. Where it focuses on the personal, with all of us getting more control over our lives and personal situations it makes sense. But when it parrots returning to a world trapped in systems that are failing us or that lead to ecological destruction, its time to abandon these discredited ideas and to find our collective moral compass. Obsessions with mindless economic growth, balancing government budgets, perpetuating massive wealth and health inequalities, and measuring human progress through the limited prism of corporate profits are not the way forward. The solutions lie elsewhere. So, where to start?
Action Two: Strengthen Our Social Protections and Our Communities
We need bold leadership to reverse a generation of austerity and under-investment in social protections. This involves putting human health and well-being at the centre of our thinking about economic progress. It requires a renewed focus on adequate incomes, meaningful work, a right to safe and affordable housing, and a transition away from institutionalizing the elderly.
But it also means a more robust health and community services infrastructure including pharmacare, dental care, child care, skills training and community economic development. Far from a residual effort funded by the private economy, public investments in people and communities are the foundation that makes a market economy possible.
Action Three: Make A National Commitment To A Job Guarantee
Assured access to meaningful and productive work, coupled with a guaranteed livable income are essential elements of a social protection system. The next decade will involve massive shifts in jobs and skills as we move away from extractive industries and toward more caring and green economy work. A universal jobs program, could be closely aligned with such shifts and focus on supporting local communities to successfully make these transitions. The post-pandemic recovery period offers a unique opportunity to boldly restructure the labour market in ways that would make job insecurity and poverty wages a thing of the past.
This idea has come mainly from academic and political circles in the United States, but Canadians are familiar not only with the ideas but have experience with its practice through the federal Local Initiative Programs (LIP) that existed from 1971-1977 as a protection against unemployment and in fostering community economic development. The time has come to create a re-imagined version of this approach – A Job Guarantee. See more detail here..
Action Four: Transition From CERB To A Guaranteed Livable Income
Re-establish and extend a modified CERB benefit set at 80% of the federal minimum wage, and create a two year window between January 2022 and December 2023, to plan and implement the transition from CERB to a national Guaranteed Livable Income. This initiative would occur in parallel with the commitment to full employment and a community job guarantee fund. While there are many challenges in implementing such a program, a two year window is a sufficient time window for doing so.
This transition would involve the elimination of the punitive system of social assistance that is rooted in nineteenth century attitudes to the poor and destitute that have no place in a society based on human progress, reducing health inequalities and democratic values. It would unbundle income support from attachment to the workforce, and be designed to ensure that existing social insurance programs are retained and strengthened, and other programs to meet differentiated needs based on disability, accommodation, and settlement of immigrants are not lost within bureaucracies focused on exclusion and punishing the poor. More detailed discussion is available here, and here.
Action Five: Make Affordable Housing A Right and a Public Good
Housing must be viewed as a social right and not simply as a commodity. We have a collective responsibility to ensure that we create housing that is affordable to all households including those with low and modest incomes. Our existing models bid up land values and distribute the unearned benefits of intensification efforts largely to private developers and investors. Our planning and zoning tools fail to ensure that the benefits of intensification are shared between developers and the community so that lands are transferred to public bodies and used to create affordable homes and rental units. All these market failures need to be reduced and/or eliminated. More details on our proposals can be found here.
Action Six: Re-Imagine Seniors Housing and Supports as Local Communities
Long-term care facilities are in crisis across the country, documented in the Canadian Medical Association’s March 2021 study Pandemic Perspectives on Long-Term Care: Insights from Canadians in Light of COVID-19. It details shocking findings from the COVID-19 pandemic, concluding that older Canadians living in long-term care and retirement homes were 74 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than community-dwelling older Canadians. The study also found that 96% of Canadians over age 65 didn’t want to end up in a long-term care home.
The solution isn’t to build better run institutions, it means admitting that the model of warehousing the elderly is wrong. Evidence from around the world point to smaller, community centred solutions based on supporting people to age in place. It can’t be done overnight, but with 38,000 on LTC waiting lists, and with plans to redevelop or replace 30,000 LTC beds that don’t meet standards over the next 10 years, we need a plan that builds up in home and community living supports. Most important, we cannot lose the opportunity to replace some deficient institutional care beds with community solutions. Seniors want solutions that bring them home to their communities rather than languishing in nursing homes. For more details look here.
Action Seven: Empower Local Governments And Civil Society To Rebuild the Commons
All the institutions of democracy will count for little if our economies remain under the control of political and economic elites. Locally, we need to have more say in economic decision-making and to have a direct voice in political decisions that affect our lives. Civil society enables local stakeholders to develop their own civic power, to declare their common rights as citizens, giving them democratic means for voicing local concerns and translating them into collective action.
We need to transition to a post-growth economy focused on a better distribution of the abundance nature provides us and that we can generate for use by all. Everyone must be able to participate in the management of our shared resources through a rebuilding of the commons and democratizing of our communities and workplaces. This means developing a shared responsibility and accountability for the common good that cannot be achieved without the inspiration and force of civil society groups behind it.
