THE SUBSIDIZED SOCIETY:
Bishop, Jordan
LIFE IN CANADA THE SUBSIDIZED SOCIETY A few weeks ago an advertising campaign was launched in the Canadian media, with the sincere flavor usually employed to sell soaps and deodorants. They...
...Health care is a provincial matter, and arrangements vary from one province to another...
...In Nova Scotia a hefty seven percent sales tax (food, clothing and baby blankets excluded) insures health care for residents of the province and insures the medical profession against unpaid bills...
...A not atypical example is a grant to the Cape Breton Irish Benevolent Society to research and write a history of the Irish in that predominantly Scottish corner of Canada...
...The big worry voiced by opponents of such cuts is not Soviet missile development, but the loss of civilian jobs around the country...
...they were giving it away...
...but the corporations lost no sleep over it and his opponents yawned and said in effect that tax reform was old hat...
...Some three years ago a Senate Commission on poverty recommended a more permanent solution: a guaranteed annual income pegged somewhere below the poverty line...
...LIP (Local Initiative Projects) can happen around almost anything...
...Ask any resident draft-resister...
...The bland tranquillity of most of English-speaking Canada provides an eloquent witness to the success of Liberal strategy—one sometimes suspects that the ad hockery is not haphazard or bumbling, but part of a plan...
...Today Cape Breton boasts the only socialist MP from East of the Ottawa river—he is a Catholic priest...
...If there are trees to be planted, hiking or snowmobile trails to be built, day care centers to be organized and staffed, or any of a hundred other ideas, original or unoriginal, that will "create" jobs (ten is enough) at one hundred dollars a week, the Federal Government will recognize the business and the honest taxpayers' money will pay the wages—which are themselves subject to taxes...
...In the 1972 election campaign David Lewis, then leader of the NDP (New Democratic Party, Canada's voice for democratic socialism), centered his campaign, with florid examples, on "corporate welfare bums...
...This year MSI is to extend coverage to dental care for children and prescription drugs for senior citizens...
...It is hard to imagine anything in Canada that is not subsidized in one way or another...
...Cuts in military spending have raised questions in Parliament...
...As an entertainment, it was enjoyed by all...
...The coverage is excellent, and under the Canada Assistance plan the Federal Government subsidizes health and welfare programs to the tune of fifty percent...
...Jordan bishop (Jordan Bishop, a regular contributor, teaches at the College of Cape Breton in Nova Scotia...
...The Liberals might not define it that way, but their response has been to cope with the problem of distribution on an ad hoc basis...
...The adverts appealed to people with ideas to present them (in proper form) to the local Canada Manpower office...
...As another winter approached, another season of LIP was about to begin...
...A sales tax is regressive, but with the sales tax pre-empted by MSI (Medical Services Insurance) it can't be levied for anything else...
...In the '20s miners in New Waterford proclaimed a soviet that had to be dissolved by the intervention of the militia...
...Family allowances were raised last year to twenty dollars a month per child—from six dollars—and are now subject to income tax...
...The truth is that it might substitute an efficient means of distributing wealth for the present inefficient ones...
...One wonders if it can possibly last, until, having finished, it turns inside out and starts all over again...
...Lewis and the NDP caucus, holding the balance of power in Parliament, threatened to bring the government down if tax concessions were given to the "corporate welfare bums...
...One group of New Leftists got a grant to produce a tendentious pamphlet on the turbulent labor history of Cape Breton Island, looking back to the days when Cape Breton miners rebelled against John L. Lewis' international union because it was too conserva~ five...
...OFY (Opportunities for Youth) has been as wide-ranging as LIP...
...So while the proposal was no more radical than might be expected from a Senatorial Commission, the Liberal response continues to be a myriad of ad hoc measures, subsidies to meet very real needs assumed to be temporary, with only a growing awareness of the fact that many of them must inevitably become permanent...
...Trudeau's precarious government, voted with Trudeau on that one...
...Income taxes are of course progressive, so the family allowance is wiped out for anyone making thirty-nine thousand a year or over...
...It might even put some minor bureaucrats on the receiving end of such subsidies, instead of on the dispensing end...
...After his 1972 campaign Mr...
...Noises are still made in some sectors about free enterprise and the capitalist system, but the welfare state is well established, and the welfare of the capitalists themselves has a high priority...
...the Tories, baying hard for power on the heels of Mr...
...In the 1974 campaign the Liberals, after two years of minority government, won a comfortable majority and settled down to improve a system that provides ( subsidies for almost everyone, from the corporations to dirt farmers to unemployed revolutionaries...
...The difference may be that while the elusive but real LIP grants are annual, one-shot affairs (a feature that allows for control of any projects that might upset the system), the subsidies for the more affluent sectors of the economy are built in on a permanent basis...
...The problem, which Canada shares with most post-industrial societies, has been defined by John Capstick, an economist from Cape Breton Island (in Canada we are supposed to laugh when Cape Breton or Newfoundland are mentioned) as follows: die system for producing wealth is more efficient than the system for distributing it...
...Canada is different...
...The overall impression is that of a great snake eating its own tail...
...They weren't selling anything...
...Under the multicultural program folk dancing and crafts have blossomed...
...The real question is still jobs, not tanks...
...It is not as bland as it often appears, but on the whole subsidies are more effective than mace and riot guns— and possibly as deadly...
...Trudeau alleged that the country could not afford it...
...There are programs for senior citizens ("New Horizons"), programs for ethnic groups centered around the exciting discovery that Canada is not only bilingual but multicultural...
...One high-ranking military spokesman, queried by a reporter on the danger of an invasion from the United States (the only invasion that appears feasible to most Canadians) answered with a straight face and no obvious irony that enough resistance would have to be made to show that we were serious about it...
...There was no danger, as Mr...
...It was their first real chance to divide the Liberals and their NDP supporters—but the price was too high...
...Lewis himself was well aware...
...A cynic might note that the establishment is alive and well, and that subsidies work much better than militia...
Vol. 101 • January 1975 • No. 13
