Alex Himelfarb.
In a six-week series of interviews, Canadians with a variety of experiences discuss the major challenges our country is facing and how best to address them. Today's final instalment deals with building healthy communities.
Alex Himelfarb, former clerk of the Privy Council, was interviewed by Adam Kahane.
What keeps you up at night?
Himelfarb: The number one issue for me is inequality. Let's think of the bottom, middle and top of society. On the bottom, even if, as some argue, over the past few years things aren't necessarily getting worse, they aren't improving and certainly not at the rate that we see in many other rich countries. Compared with other rich countries, we're doing badly, and on First Nations and aboriginal issues and on child poverty, unforgivably badly. Most troubling, we are moving in the wrong direction. Austerity at every level of government–largely self-imposed through years of unaffordable tax cuts – has eroded our key redistributive institutions, welfare and employment insurance, and continues to squeeze the programs that mitigate the consequences of inequality, including medicare. Austerity has yielded a kind of trickle-down meanness.
The middle class is also unquestionably stretched. Two things mask the extent of the problem. First, over the last decade, women have worked more hours than before, so many households have not actually fallen in income, although people are working longer to stay in place. The second thing is petro jobs. The oil-rich provinces have done pretty well for some working-class folks, because they have relatively high-paid jobs, but this success is regionally focused and fragile.
Then at the top, we have witnessed the very rich getting very much richer. Capital always talks louder than labour – that's why it's called "capitalism" and not "labourism" – but now the bargaining power of capital is through the roof. So money talks louder than ever.
What is the impact of this growing inequality on our society?
Extreme inequality is corrosive. When the people at the top and the people at the bottom are breathing such different air, it's hard to imagine them finding any common interest or shared purpose. When people at the top are so rich that they can decide they no longer need public services, they effectively secede from society. When the gap is extreme, they also seem increasingly to believe they somehow deserve all they have. Hence trickle-down meanness. If they don't need the services and deserve their wealth, why pay taxes? People at the bottom start to think that the game is fixed, and there's nothing in it for them. They don't want to vote and they, too, don't want to pay taxes. Why pay or play when the game is rigged?
Does government have a role to play in countering these problems?
We have had 30 years of an assault on government. The right's greatest success has been to redefine taxes as a burden or punishment and an unjustifiable constraint on our freedom, and to equate government with inefficiency and corruption. For decades we've heard that our main problem is the size of government. Is the problem climate change? No, the problem is the size of government. Is the problem inequality? No, the problem is the size of government. And the solution is to make government smaller. That's a conjurer's trick! That's a distraction! And it has worked profoundly. Of course, government has to be made better, but that won't happen so long as the very idea of government is seen as the problem.
The biggest impact of austerity is that it stunts the political imagination; it makes it seem like nothing's possible collectively. Each of us is on our own. So I see not only this invisible, incremental, hard-to-talk-about growth in inequality, but also the loss of the collective capacity to do anything about it.
Possible Canadas is a project created by Reos Partners, the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation and a diverse coalition of philanthropic and community organizations. For more interviews, or to join the conversation, visit tgam.ca/possiblecanadas or possiblecanadas.ca
This interview has been edited and condensed.