Ed Broadbent is former leader the New Democratic Party, founding president of Rights and Democracy, and founder of the Broadbent Institute. He is the co-author of Seeking Social Democracy: Seven Decades in the Fight for Equality, with Frances Abele, Jonathan Sas and Luke Savage.
The emergence of severe inequality on a global basis has strengthened racism and nativism in the politics of countries as different as the United States and Sweden. Similar conditions are also found in Britain, Poland, Hungary, India, France and Brazil, to name just a few.
Many Canadians are feeling their lives destabilized, too. The convoy occupation of Ottawa and other parts of Canada in 2022 was an expression of this development. The convoy leaders and their ally, now Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, took up “freedom” as a slogan to justify their actions.
In our time of increasing inequality, the top 1 per cent have become even richer. Many of these affluent Canadians see this as the result of their personal virtue rather than what it is – the inevitable consequence of the neoliberal model of capitalism. Many members of the elite then call for further reductions in state regulation and taxation, claiming this leads to more freedom.
For the majority, however, the truth is the opposite. It was the emergence of social and economic rights in the postwar years – the period from 1945 to 1975, with its promises of pensions, health care, affordable housing and minimum wage as rights of citizenship – that provided real freedom to millions of Canadians.
As the great Canadian advocate John Humphrey pointed out to Eleanor Roosevelt’s United Nations human-rights committee in 1945, it is the implementation of these rights that takes liberal democracy to the next step, toward the greater freedom provided by social democracy.
But in 1979 and 1980, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan launched four decades of a political movement that resulted in, among other things, the slashing of social spending and a program of ruthless privatization around the globe. Our current situation is the result.
Reagan and Thatcher quite consciously set out to roll back social democracy. In Canada, this thinking led to the 1995 federal budget, which slashed federal spending on housing, among other things, and ultimately cut the full array of federal housing programs. Not only was responsibility for delivery downloaded to provincial and municipal governments, but it also prompted governments to increasingly treat homes as investment vehicles – financial instruments disconnected from the needs of people.
Our present national housing crisis is a direct result of these measures.
Rather than turning more and more to the forces of the market mechanism, we need to take more things – such as long-term care and other care services, medications, and public transit – out of the market. We need more of this decommodification, not less. This remains particularly true in housing. In 1976, when Canada’s population was around 50-per-cent smaller, construction began on 273,000 new housing units; in 2021, we started nearly the same number of projects. The freedom for the majority to secure adequate housing has in fact been reduced significantly in Canada and around the world by the politics of neoliberalism.
In the early 1970s, as the housing critic for the federal NDP, I supported the Liberals’ then-housing minister Ron Basford’s creation of a rich mixture of housing programs: regulated low-interest mortgages, co-op housing and social housing of many types. In this period Canada was seen as a world leader on housing, and this direct and multifaceted approach makes today’s federal efforts pale in comparison. And, as it happens, at the time we had much higher levels of taxation for upper-income Canadians, as well as a national economy that was growing at a high rate. This was a period responding to the inevitable inequality produced by “free markets” with new economic and social rights, bolstered by the UN’s International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which came into effect here in 1976.
To be humane, and to deliver freedom to their citizens, societies must be democratic – and to be democratic, every person must be afforded the economic and social rights necessary for their individual flourishing.
Social democracy, with its bundle of rights that counter market-based outcomes, should not be seen as an unachievable utopia. Rather, it should be understood as an aspiration, to challenge the negative consequences of the market. This positive enhancement of freedom and equality can provide an imaginative and inspiring goal for those seeking justice.