Economic 'exhaustees':

...Sorrfe may well be replaced by robots, others may be exported to the many free production zones in those parts of the Third World now called the Newly Industrialized Countries (NICs...

...Part of the problem, although not many people like to say it aloud, is that Canada's economy is so involved with that of the United States that very little can be done about it...

...It is no news to anyone that the economy is in serious trouble...

...As elsewhere, high interest rates here resulted in an un-precedented number of bankruptcies and high unemployment...

...Exhaustees are human beings who have gone through the statutory fifty-one weeks on unem-ployment insurance without finding a job...

...If Canadian rates are lower, the smart available money flows South across the border, resulting in a balance of payments problem and a weakening of the Canadian dollar, which is supposed to be floating but which has been maintained at about eighty cents U.S...

...to handle the overload...

...Beneath the surface, the picture is worse...

...Under fire from the opposition, the government redefined the prob-lem of interest rates as a technical problem in money manage-ment incumbent on the Bank of Canada, which continued the pattern established when the government accepted responsibil-ity for it: to keep interest rates a couple of points above those in the United States...

...and more adequate welfare systems, al-though that of Montreal - and of almost every major city in the country - is groaning under a vastly-increased caseload...

...Combined with soft markets for a country which depends to a much greater extent on exports than does the United States, the results are catastrophic...

...Almost every day the morning news brings word of yet another mine, paper mill or manufacturing plant that has either closed down or made drastic cuts in the work force...

...Quebec, for several months now, has been living with the possibility of massive illegal strikes in the public sector be-cause of a threatened roll-back of some twenty percent, cancel-ing in effect wage increases granted last year...

...This has been combined with a highly-publicized program for "six and five" - six percent wage increase this year, five percent next year - in the public sector, which has public service unions up in arms...

...These continue as the country learns to live with the worst depression since the 1930s...

...On the surface, life goes on almost as usual...

...While the U.S...

...When, after fifty-one weeks on U.I.C, the unemployed are redefined as exhaustees and move into an already-overloaded welfare system, the economy itself be-comes more and more exhausted...

...The reigning Liberal party, which creeps on with a safe parliamentary majority, is famous here for ad hoc solutions to problems...

...The local CBC station is sponsoring a contest for the best homemade Christmas presents...

...Some Canadian economic forecasters have recently said that the depression has "bottomed out," but that the effects of "recovery" on jobs lost will not be seen for three to five years...

...It is quite possible that this is the best we can do under the circumstances...

...On the federal level, a number of new jobs have opened up in the U.I.C...

...This in turn put a strain on the federal unemployment insurance (U.I.C...

...While we read in the papers of middle-class people in the queues for soup kitchens, it is still nothing like the thirties...

...JORDAN BISHOPars...

...We now have U.I.C...

...At Stelco in Hamilton, Ontario, some five thousand men of a work force of fourteen thousand have been laid off...

...Some observers wonder whether many of the jobs that have been eliminated during the depression will ever be open again...

...What is less publicized is that much of this involves transfer of production facilities by corpora-tions from the established industrialized countries, to places where they can institute a labor discipline and wage rates that remind the historian of Manchester or Leeds about 1820...

...As in the United States, the fashionable prescriptions for combating inflation have taken their toll in unemployment...

...and the exhaustees became a significant part of the Canadian population, even as the government continued to define inflation as the most serious problem faced by the economy...

...For those of us who are old enough to remember the depression of the thirties, this makes a crucial difference, but for the economy as a whole, a twenty-five or thirty percent pay cut translates into a serious reduction in consumer demand...

...Thus while Canada's depression, unlike that of the thirties, is in a sense the direct result of anti-inflation policies in the United States, sharpened by the enthusiastic cooperation of the Canadian government, there are deep structural roots in the world economy that make matters worse...

...plus forty dollars from a company plan - in all, about $200 US...

...Ambassador recently raised hackles here by suggesting that Canada spent too much on social services and not enough on defense, the government, already looking at a budget deficit of twenty-five billion dollars, has announced programs of "job creation" which apparently have as their goal not the creation of new permanent sources of employ-ment, but simply of enough work for exhaustees to qualify them to go on U.I.C...

...Yet in early December Christmas advertising is notably lacking in its usual frenzy...

...And while politicians and economists continue to debate about what might be done about it, the depression continues...

...JORDAN BISHOP...

...That, of course, isa short time compared to the thirties...

...They average something like two hundred and ten dollars a week on U.I.C...

...Rea-ganomics brought unprecedented high interest rates...

...It is long enough for the twelve percent of the Canadian work force who were unem-ployed and actively seeking employment (those who have given up are not counted) as of December 1982, as well as for the increasing number of small businessmen and farmers who went under during the past two years...

...Unlike in the United States, interest payments on private homes are not deductible for federal income tax...

...As in 1981 a number of retailers, both large and small, are looking at Christmas inven-tories with mounting apprehension, although they do not face the astronomic interest rates of last year...

...Allan J. MacEachern, who as Finance Minister presided over several unpopular budgets in the crusade against inflation, has just finished presiding over the GATT meeting in Geneva, where almost everyone cried loudly about protectionism and the need for free trade as they maneuvered to maintain whatever forms of protection they had managed to work out within the framework of GATT agreements...

...again...

...This is nowhere more obvious than in labor policy...

...There were always a few of them around, but this year their number has increased to the point where they are a statistically significant sector of the Canadian population...

...The reason of course is that a great many jobs have already been exported as free production zones have been opened in the NICs...

...You don't see that any more...

...The other day this writer was shown a pair of trousers by a shopkeeper on the Boulevard Saint Laurent in Montreal: "Made in Canada...

...The reason is fairly simple...

...The busses and Metro of Montreal are full of people going to work in the morning...

...At this writing, interest rates have come down, although that is small consolation to bankrupt farmers and businessmen and to those homeowners who had to renegotiate mortgages at seventeen or eighteen percent, especially the unemployed...

...Arthur Selwyn Miller, in The Modern Corporate State, re-marks that "Conglomerates, in some respects, represent a reversion to primitive capitalism...

...Unions continue to complain about cheap labor abroad...

...On the whole, provincial public sectors have eagerly joined the feds...

...Already schools in Quebec were closed and hospitals placed on an "emergency-only" basis by a one-day general strike in public services...

...Meanwhile the Hon...