Consumers can choose not to buy from companies that they consider to treat their employees as wage slaves. They generally don’t though, and so we have efficient, thriving fast food, fast merchandise, and fast everything sectors (other than government services which have cornered the market on slow and innefficient).
Consumers can be quite the hypocrites, bitching about low labour rates, foreign workers, and corporate greed while munching on a happy meal and holding big corporate stocks in their RRSP portfolios. Consumers en masse go for the deals, and that is human nature. During times of threat, “Buy Canadian” will only work to some extent, for a while, but there is a price to be paid for patriotism that will only tolerate so much gap.
I agree that what we are left with is government workers, resource companies, and businesses that just serve the local Canadian economy. Oh, and money grubbing banks, lawyers, and politicians. Even the charities just want your money and happily skim their healthy admin costs.
Taxing, penalizing, and fining companies that are successful at what they do is not the answer, popular as that sentiment might sound. That would be like kicking your dog for being a dog. Better to set up effective ground rules and a regulatory framework that encourages free competition and innovation. We could sure use better competition in telecom, internet, and cable services. Placing fines on Telus, Bel, or Rogers won’t accomplish that. Making it feasible (Gasp) for Verizon, T-mobile, or O2 to challenge the fat biggies here could.
However, an industry ground rule could / should be that some proportion of Canadian-based employment serves Canadian-based markets, and every company has to pay competitive living wages by category / location. Then the government should get the fuck out of the way and let the market decide.
I’d like to see minimum wages changed to an assured income model. We still need opportunities for entry level workers and recent grads, but someone who can drive a delivery van or has operated a printing press for five years ought to have a wage bracket that starts higher up. One minimum wage just dumbs us down as an economy and actually lowers our standard of living. Set the brackets up correctly, and adjust them annually to include all the shit that comes up in bargaining, strikes, lockouts, and reasons for company to leave Canada. No fines needed and minimum pay doesn’t need to become a crippling labour issue if fairly set, nor competitiveness for local markets.
Now if there is no captive Canadian market and we still want a secondary manufacturing industry to turn Canadian minerals and aluminum into dishwashers and laptops, but we can’t compete internationally in these sectors, then either the government needs to provide income supplements (not sustainable), tax relief, transportation passes, assisted housing, etc. for specific strategic export industries, or simply except that these businesses are going to have to operate with more flexibility and lower labour rates, red-tape reduction, tax incentives, logistics and import/export streamlining, etc. Otherwise, our value-added export industries go tits-up, which they largely have. And those that haven’t are clearly vulnerable to tariffs.
I don’t know if Carnage or Pee-Pee can figure this out. If they don’t, we will be mired in conflict for the rest of our working lives.
