Boreal

The Fractured Nation Interviews

Boom-Boom Singh

Diane's Letter

Dear Johnny,

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to present your viewers with my final arguments about why I believe it was bad economic policy that led to Canada fracturing the way it did. While I would have preferred being allowed to make my final arguments in person I am sure you will do a more than adequate job.

Our discussion ended with my contention that a developed country like Canada would not have tolerated a frontal assault on a system that provided Canadians with decent wages, usually through collective agreements; a competitive but not a dog-eat-dog competition for jobs; a relatively clean and safe work environment and so on.

To get the Canadian middle and working classes to support policies that were not in their interest, Mulroney appealed to the compassion of the Canadian people. This successful appeal to the compassion of Canadians would complete the descent to beggar economics for Canada or what I refer to in my book Freddy the Freeloading Country as the freeloading economic model.

To summarize the descent, it began with Diefenbaker redefining the vocation of the country as mainly a resource exporter when he cancelled what would be the last major high-tech engineering project that the country would undertake on its own – the Avro Arrow all-weather Canadian fighter/interceptor project. This was followed thirty years later by the Mulroney Conservatives putting the country up for sale by removing any protection against foreign takeover of Canadian companies.

During his second mandate Mulroney followed the sale of the country with the gutting of John A. MacDonald’s National Policy by having Parliament pass the first Free Trade Agreement which did away with MacDonald’s National Policy which had, until then, effectively protected the country from absolute complete domination of its economic interest for over one-hundred years.

These actions in themselves, while country destroying, would not necessarily have led to Canada adopting the freeloader economic model. I am not convinced, the historical record is not clear on this matter, that Mulroney understood the implication of his actions. I am also not sure that Mulroney understood that by making what amounted to business decision to increase profits for his mainly American owners and shareholders that he was going to make beggars or more accurately create a situation where Canadians would adopt an economic model that encouraged parasitical behaviour.

To increase profits he had to reduce wages and related cost. His government’s solution for putting downward pressure on wages and demand for improved working condition was to import cheap labour from the third world – lots and lots of cheap labour from the third world.

My theory about what brought about the almost threefold increase in immigration from poor countries during the Mulroney years is not universally accepted. I am fairly certain that your scheduled guest for Thursday, Maude Barnstone will take exception with some of the arguments I make here, including Mulroney’s motivation for almost tripling the number of immigrants Canada took in every year. I will let her explain it.

Prior to 1984, prior to the Mulroney Conservatives coming to power, immigration policy was made on the basis of what was good for the country and what was good for those who chose Canada as their home. Immigration policy was administered by impartial bureaucrats based on a formula that took into accounts the needs of the country in term of skills, the ability of the newcomers to start a new life here and the state of the economy.

With the coming to power of the Mulroney Conservatives all that changed. During the last year of the Trudeau government, Canada took in 84,000 newcomers. In the 15 years following the Mulroney initiative (the Liberals, when they returned to power, continued the policy of draconian immigration levels – an explanation for this is forthcoming) Canada accepted 3,035,615 immigrants, an average 202,000 newcomers a year.

To put this number into some kind of perspective, people who came to Canada during these 15 years constituted at least 20 percent of all who came during the past 150 years. In 1993 the last year of the Conservatives government, immigration levels reached an unheard of 256,000. Mulroney’s final poisoned gift to the nation, the gift that would turn Canadians into economic parasites was making the economy dependent on cheap labour.

With American companies deciding what Canada could manufacturer and when, with Americans business and government interest deciding at what price Canada would part with its resources, Canada became more and more dependent on this cheap immigrant labour to maintain a rapidly deteriorating welfare safety net.

Eventually Canada’s standard of living became completely dependent on a steady flow of cheap labour – not only to keep wages low and factory workers worried about their jobs but even cheap professional labour such a doctors and engineers, whom the third world could ill afford to part with.

The Canadian government gave the same reason for this plundering of the third world’s educated and skilled classes as it did for the poor less skilled immigrant – it was all done in the name of compassion. The fact that working conditions, if work could be found, were less than ideal, Dickensonian is some respect, did not seem to bother the benevolent government in the slightest. Canada, like the Roman Empire before it collapsed, could not survive as a nation of freeloaders.

Like the Roman Empire, the Canadian nation made the mistake of depending on outside assistance for its survival. To protect the integrity of its borders, Canada looked to its powerful military neighbour to the south – the Romans to mercenaries. For its economic survival it depended more and more on enticing people from around the world to come and provide it with the cheap labour or skills their freeloading economic model demanded.

Compassion was, in the end, the key Canadian trait that was perverted by self-serving, short-sighted politicians – in the case of Mulroney, for his love interest – that made The Fracture, in my opinion, inevitable. Enough said. Thank you, again for what you are doing for me, for my reputation. I hope reading this letter on the air will not adversely affect your career.

Yours truly,

Diane Smith

P.S. Call me.