Recession and a Conservative dynasty loom
Fragmented future of Canadian politics and the real-world crises ordinary Canadians will face call for new thinking.
by Ish TheilheimerThe corner of the world I call home offers a telling snapshot of how a global economic crisis works. The complicated calamity is really fairly easy to understand. Businesses and consumers around the world inflated the prices of real estate, energy and all commodities by throwing around money that wasn't theirs.
Now the house of cards has fallen down. And the pain is starting.
The biggest industry in my home riding of Renfrew-Nipissing-Pembroke, which voted 60 percent Conservative on October 14, is the military. The second biggest — and by far the oldest — is forestry. Because the big timber of the past is long gone, all local sawmills depend on the sales of wood residue such as sawdust and chips to survive. Even in good times, they can't make a living on the lumber they produce.
Last week, all the local pulp mills and fibre board processors — the end users of sawdust and chips from local sawmills — shut down indefinitely due to market uncertainty. No one is going to build a house anywhere when the market is flooded with foreclosures and properties on sale for half what desperate, panicking families paid for them.
The huge processors of chips and sawdust are all owned by American-based corporations, which, in turn, could be owned by investors from anywhere. Until a couple of decades ago, many of these operations would all have been locally-owned or, at least, Canadian-based. Now it's different.
One of these huge plants, built with an estimated $50 million in government grants, was purchased by a multinational corporation, stripped of its key machinery, and shut down. The company, it is said by local business people, had an excess of inventory and did not want competition with its American plants.
The upshot of all this is that many sawmills across Renfrew County, already teetering on the edge of viability, will soon be shutting down. Hundreds of people will be thrown out of work. They won't pay taxes or buy very much locally, which will put a pinch on government revenues, the local market economy and the bigger economy, which depends so badly on consumers who feel free to flex their plastic.
The upshot of all Wall Street's maneuvering, asset-flipping and speculation will be widespread misery, here in the Ottawa Valley and far beyond.
Of course the local situation is hardly unique. The cancer has been spreading through Canada's resource and industrial communities for years. Now, with world oil prices almost half what they were two months ago, the pain may well spread to the oil-based boom economies of western Canada.
South of the border, US President George W Bush has become a laughing stock or, as our contributing artist Jim Kempkes suggests in this week's editorial cartoon, potentially a kitsch lawn ornament. On this side of the border, it took the province of Quebec and its "separatist" regional party, the Bloc Québécois, to save Canada from a majority government run by W's last remaining fan, Stephen Harper.
Linda McQuaig tells us Americans are turning against the greed and the obscene excesses of an economy that rewards speculators, asset-flippers and con-artists, but doesn't give a rat's ass about ordinary people and their communities. Perhaps Canadians will too, once enough of their homes and jobs vanish, but our quirky politics have just installed one of laissez-faire capitalism's last true believers.
The complexion of our politics is sobering.
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