Sovereign Socialist

Several eras of architecture in the same frame, united by perspective and the oxidation of copper - work of the author, Spring 2009

1. Unpaid Internships and the Death of Dreaming

Have you tried looking for a job lately?

Apparently there’s a major economic recession going on, despite the oft-too-rosy predictions and prognostications of the federal Tories. And who’s bearing the brunt of this recession, seeing precious few options for employment and far too many chances to be taken advantage of? The answer, students and immigrants, should hardly seem surprising.

And what’s perhaps most sickening about the realities of our economic decline is how similar these two groups are when it comes to their financial situation and their respective job prospects. What’s worse is that while both of these groups struggle to keep their heads above water, they are often stuck in an unenviable position, weighed down by competing against each other for precious service-sector jobs, spiraling personal debt and a host of social stigmas. Worse still, both groups are often ridiculed by the ‘job-providing-elites’ in government and industry for their apparent inability to remove themselves from dire financial situations, and the seemingly vicious circle of bad employment, bad credit and perpetual economic hardship and financial insecurity.

Perhaps you’re a recent graduate, not so different from myself, carrying a load of student debt that is driving your credit score down while eating up precious quantities of the limited funds you take home. If you’re lucky enough to be employed in a stable job you enjoy, you may be able to keep up with your payments, but it is unlikely you will experience real financial freedom and stability until these debts are paid in full. Given the scarcity of career paths these days as Baby Boomers hang on to their jobs for as long as their experience is an asset to the company, recent graduates are generally forced into unfortunate positions where they continue to compete with enrolled students for part-time, service-sector jobs. The big difference though is that they now have considerably larger bills to pay off and as such are undesirable. Believe me I know. I once tried making a part-time job a full-time one, and paid for it by losing the job outright. I was ‘too expensive’.

And so the recent graduate returns of the university job banks and online classifieds looking for new opportunities. And boy how they abound on-line!

If you’ve ever spent any amount of time surfing Craigslist for jobs, you’ve doubtless realized there are an inordinate number of scams and shady operations vying for undiscerning students and recent graduates desperate for work. For students unfamiliar with Montreal or the French language, the chances you might be scammed out of money you worked hard for becomes quite high. By contrast, looking for jobs with reputable operations in your field of study almost always result in the momentary-joy-followed-by-sudden disappointment of learning the job is in fact an unpaid internship.

Without a word of a lie, I spotted an ad today on a university job bank advertising payment as a ‘letter of reference’ for three-months service as an unpaid intern in an advertising agency. Not even a chance at employment with the firm. What. The. Fuck.

Students, much like recent immigrants, are ripe for exploitation in the workplace, and often, both groups have almost no recourse against employers. Typically students don’t work enough hours in a given year to qualify for employment insurance, and reckless employers can easily manipulate records-of-employment to deny you benefits if you’ve been terminated or otherwise find yourself without employment. Immigrants, in some cases, aren’t even aware of the social welfare net in place in this country, and may go months without income. The common misconception that students and recent graduates have an additional safety-net in the form of parental assistance is perhaps the sickest of jokes, given how many students (particularly in Québec) work outside school to support themselves throughout their university careers. These students often have to go into debt to pay their way through school, holding onto the faint hope that there will be a bevy of employment opportunities post-graduation. So far, this doesn’t seem to be the case for anyone who has graduated in the last three years.

I find it interesting that these two distinct socio-cultural groups, so thoroughly exploited on the job market and often unaware they’re competing against each other despite overwhelming demographic similarities, continue to operate separately. It would be difficult, if not impossible, for an ethnic group to form a syndicate in any real sense of the term, but this is not the case for students, who have been organizing for diverse reasons in this country for some time. The principle difficulty today is how student unions have become heavily manipulated by university and college communications & P.R. offices into becoming something akin to the ‘Party Planning Committee’ of the popular sitcom The Office. Simply put, it’s more advantageous to a university to have a group of students hand-picked to attend cocktail parties than it is to have a politically active student syndicate. Whereas these organizations were once extremely effective at mobilizing the middle-class to support key social justice issues, the branding of student activists as being somehow akin to anarchists and vandals has effectively limited their reach. And in the same vein, whereas these groups were once able to form cohesive bonds with socio-cultural minorities cohabitating the urban environment, the perception that the middle-class is merely a temporarily poor upper class is reflected by the student mentality of temporary poverty. ‘Playing Poor’ I like to call it, as though all the middle-class children of the suburbs are expected to go through a period of decadence, debauchery and generally poor nutrition as an element of ‘the growing process’. Apparently it will lead to great job opportunities.

When I began my ‘university career’ I was told that I was ‘investing’ in a ‘real education for the real world’. Seven years later I’m cynical, bitter and unemployed, despite great references and a lot of pertinent professional experience. Time and time again the best job offers are out of my reach for the fact that they don’t pay or pay too little to be viable options. Time and time again, forced to look for less appealing, less demanding jobs, I’m told I’m over-qualified. I’ve had to make a CV filled with shitty jobs I did many years ago just to prove I have some customer service experience, which in turn leads prospective employers to enquire why I haven’t worked in several years. And when I provide all my experience, shitty and professional, I’m told once more that I’m not a good fit. It’s maddening, and it pretty much sums up my experience with free-market capitalism and the current job market in Canada.

So is there any wonder why I’ve become a Socialist?

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2. Building the New Iconoclasts

A few days ago I was bumming around Reddit when I came upon a heavily up-voted image, a still of a newspaper, perhaps the National Post, with a broad headline proclaiming Jack Layton was like our Obama. It was a “reflective” spread on the state funeral and various public demonstrations of mourning, featuring a collage of perfectly multi-cultural Canadian talking heads and their apparent expressions and opinions on the death of Jack Layton. This from the same paper arguing that Jack penned a manifesto to rally the troops post-mortem with the last strength he had, master manipulator and strategist and all the other fat we chew during the election cycles recycled into copy for the funeral coverage. The headline says it all; the proud ignorance and idiotic reductionism of the modern media machine summed up in one glib statement that demonstrates an almost total disinterest in the ‘details’ of reality. It’s nothing more than a half-assed equivalency, perhaps as absurd as some of King Missile’s examples, though certainly not nearly as subtle or ironic. It’s the filth some in our society misidentify as information, and it poses a threat, especially when it comes cloaked in the veil of incompetence.

There’s been talk of union, of merger, between the Liberal Party of Canada and the federal New Democrats, now that a grand iconoclast has passed into the great hereafter. Perhaps it will be developed into a kind of ‘unite the left’ initiative, much like the successful ‘unite the right’ campaign of the late-1990s. In fact, if there is serious consideration of a merger between the Grits and NDP at the federal level, there’s little doubt in my mind that it will be subsequently marketed specifically as a united alternative to Stephen Harper and the ruling Conservatives. Mergers have been proposed a number of times recently, pretty much each time with the aim of beating Stephen Harper out of 24 Sussex.

Here’s where we encounter problem number one. By acknowledging a media report on a merger proposal (which, let’s face it, may be no more than a facebook group initiative), both parties admit to some kind of public perception of weakness. By hinting, especially now, that either party is interested in a merger, it does not build the public’s trust, but instead demonstrates one of the two parties is simply to weak to stand on its own, and must adopt a new personal politics and ethics, in effect concede elements of their policy platform are hopelessly unrealistic, in order to become part of the bigger, ostensibly more successful whole. Moreover, the word ‘merger’ as opposed to ‘coalition’ or ‘union’ carries certain negative connotations here in Canada, like how many proudly Canadian companies had to merge with foreign competitors in the early-mid 1990s as a result of various Conservative-era free-trade agreements signed into law years earlier. By contrast, ‘coalition’ seems impermanent, something which involves the cooperation of all parties for a short-term period of national emergency. Again, it’s hardly an appropriate term for the ‘sound-bite media’. And union, well, what can I say – it seems that this term evokes about equal amounts of scorn and praise, and something tells me that may have to do with the fact that in French, ‘union’ is syndicate, and thus the word in French is free to embrace the figurative implications of the term. Quel dommage pour nous! It is indeed a shame that this word – through no fault of its own – is impugned with all the seedy, grainy CCTV footage of countless longshoremen busted in Giuliani-era internal affairs stings. But the reason we, whether Greens, Blocquistes, NDPers or Grits, should avoid union is far from a semantic one. It’s a matter of being an iconoclast in your own right, as a sovereign individual citizen, and about using the collective force of our combined society, as progressives united for change, to shift the balance of the political dialogue far into our camp. To swing the pendulum so far off to the left we actually destroy the concept of a political dialogue, simply because there are myriad progressively minded political options.

Then there is the issue of the individual legacies of Canada’s four federal ‘alternative’ parties, which in turn is built upon their individual histories. There are many Canadians who felt a strange kind of national pride with regards to the Bloc – the idea that we are so politically evolved we can function as a federal democracy with a political party that advocates for a new federalism participating in government. This is still valuable, though I’m not sad to see the Bloc’s representation in Ottawa scaled down to a more appropriate level. Then there are the Greens, who let’s face it; have also focused their party on a single principle political issue. Say what you will about Ms. May’s proclivity to praise the world of homeopathy, Canada needs a federal alternative that places environmental concerns at the head of the table. These two parties are relatively young and need time to grow and evolve in their own right.

The bigger issue is what will become of the Grits, and I would personally hope they look to their own history as a guiding light for future progress. The Liberals always governed best when they focused on key social-justice issues, but let’s not be glib, they are also a historically autocratic and technocratic party, preferring to govern with strong centralized governments. This is as true of the Liberals in Ottawa as it is of those in Québec City, despite the weakening of that relationship over the last few decades. The Liberals may be wise to try and lure the so-called Red Tories, remnants of the old Progressive Conservatives, though I feel this may have already been accomplished what with Stephen Harper’s regular purging of CPC party ranks for disloyalty. Whatever the case, the federal Liberals have got to regain the strength and momentum of the Mackenzie/St-Laurent/Pearson/Trudeau years, when they governed with an iron fist. In addition to building a massive public service and a national economic foundation of crown corporations, the Grits also pushed scientific and technological research & development, perhaps further in the forty post-WW2 years they largely governed than at any other time in Canadian history. This is their legacy, and they would be very wise to remind the Canadian people of what they have accomplished.

As for my beloved New Democratic Party, I can say only this. Take Jack’s last words very seriously. Take it up as a personal code of conduct. And remember the roots of the NDP – Prairie Populism. The grandparents of the generation that elected Stephen Harper and built his voter base out West over the last twenty years once voted overwhelmingly for Tommy Douglas and the CCF, an admittedly socialist organization with a leader who was regularly spied on by the RCMP. Whatever it was that had these people caring about their fellow man back then surely still exists in the people who live their now, but they have been successfully brainwashed into believing the CPC now has their best interests in mind. It’s perverse, as Progressives know the reality of the situation, but Western Alienation is still a political concern for our nation, perhaps a greater threat to our federalism today than Québec separatism. With the voter base of the NDP now concentrated in Québec and Canada’s major urban centers, we must begin to reach out to those living in Canada’s rural areas, people who may be inadvertently snubbed by the machine that is federal Canadian politics. I have heard too many disparaging remarks made with reference to rural Canadian voters, and I know I’ve said some of these inconsiderate and ultimately prejudicial comments myself.

That being said, I feel the way forward is by building multiple progressive alternatives to the CPC, and by fostering new relationships with rural Canada. The hegemony of the federal Tories can only be broken if Canadians from coast to coast to coast are shown that distinct yet fundamentally progressive, cooperative parties are in fact a better governing option than a regressive ‘Tower of Babel’ built by a small clique of charismatic oligarchs.

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3. What of our prosperity? What of our privilege? A philanthropic challenge…

It bothers me to hear our enlightened and benevolent dictator, one Stephen Harper, prattle on and on about the comparative strength of the Canadian economy vis-a-vis other G20 and G8 nations. He goes up in front of American TV cameras to remind Americans that the good neighbour up North hasn’t been affected by the worldwide recession, and further that we’re always a sound investment. It’s simultaneously economic-nationalist gloating and a somewhat undignified plea for additional capital investment. It’s unclear to me whether Mr. Harper actually believes we’re in a privileged economic position or whether he’s simply trying to feign confidence knowing full-well we’re about to bear the brunt of our own localized melt-down. If we entertain the notion that Stephen Harper is in fact an economic mastermind expertly steering Canada through a momentary fiscal storm, then we are still left with a far bigger problem, that of growing inequities in Canada. In sum, Canada’s good economic track record has only really been good for the richest 1% of our own population, and that our middle-class is in as perilous a position now as we were during the post-Cold War economic recession and re-adjustment. I really would like to know who is benefitting the most from our apparently robust national economy. I don’t see many opportunities, I know the dollar is as valueless today as it was ten years ago (despite actually being worth quite a bit more) and I know that the educated youth are almost all royally fucked, with too few opportunities and too many (subsequently) wasted minds. With no ‘economic stimulus’, young people are left to drift, wondering why they ‘invested in their futures’ with student loans so many years ago.

But perhaps I’m being overly pessimistic. Perhaps I lack faith.

What would rekindle my faith in my Prime Minister, my nation’s economic foundation, and the elites of my nation? A single massive act of charity.

If we are as prosperous as Stephen Harper would like us to believe, then let us provide for those who are truly helpless. In the early 1970s, as an example, Pierre Trudeau welcomed thousands of East African Indians expelled from Uganda, collaborating with the Aga Khan and preventing a genocide. Who can we save today? Who can we provide a path to success for? If we are so strong then it is our responsibility to help those too weak to stand on their own. So why isn’t Stephen Harper offering the might of the Canadian economy to prop up the economies of our allies? Or why not use just a small amount of our wealth to provide homes for the homeless, for people whose lives are actively being destroyed as we speak. It could be anyone, it could be everyone that would fit the bill, but if our elites could choose any one group to help, to transport them here and provide them what they need to begin their lives anew, it would provide the greatest assurance that our nation’s economy was indeed as strong as purported to be. And wouldn’t it be such a coup if we evacuated thousands of poor Mexicans from the American-sponsored drug war-zone along their Southern border? Could we not insure they had better lives here? How many women and children could our nation save?

So what can I say – I’ll say it here first: Mr. Harper – prove our nation’s economic strength by committing a major act of state-sponsored love. Do what Jesus would do – justify it however which way you want but please put my mind at ease. Don’t save a persons life, save a people’s way of life from total destruction. And remind me of the philanthropy which used to go hand-in-hand with real wealth.

I don’t think my challenge will be taken up: relevant.

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