Globe & Mail Trashes its Own Political-Economic Wisdom

The top editorial for today is "A Generation's Raw Deal" and in it, the G n' M appears to be trashing the political-economic policies its been advocating for decades:

Forget the dream of a better standard of living. Young Canadians just want not to fall behind, but even that more limited aspiration is now in jeopardy

Wow. Strong stuff. What's brought this on I wonder?

As a group, youth expect three things: that jobs will be available to them; that opportunities for further training and advancement are within reach; and that they will not be saddled with costs bequeathed by previous generations. In each regard, young Canadians are getting a raw deal.

Hear-hear! And this is absolutely intolerable!

The recent data on jobs are staggering. Employment for those from 15 to 24 years of age has fallen by 200,000 in the last year, or two-thirds of the total national decline. The summer unemployment rate for students is now at 20.9 per cent, the highest since at least 1977, when this data started to be collected.

Imagine that.

But the recession has hit seasonal tourism, labour and service jobs especially hard. Public employers have not stepped in to fill the temporary need. Private employers, in delaying hiring, are punting the responsibility for skills training to government-funded apprenticeships and government jobs programs themselves.

The federal and provincial governments have been schooled too well in the 19th-Century economic policies espoused by the Globe & Mail I'm afraid. Instead of ratcheting-up spending to combat the recession, they've been retrenching, stupidly imagining that our debt-to-GDP ratios are unsustainable and imagining that the sight of fiscal prudence in the public sector will magically compel the private sector to invest in the future. Meanwhile, private employers are simply doing what the Globe and Mail in ordinary times has always advocated: pursuing rational self-interest.

Compounding the situation for high school graduates is an increasingly burdened postsecondary system. Tuition increases for undergraduate education have averaged 4.4 per cent a year in the past decade, nearly twice the rate of inflation in the same period. Despite the financial deterrent, students are managing to enroll, but are finding larger classrooms; the increase in student numbers was three times the rate of increase in faculty hiring from 1995 to 2005.

Yes, well, hasn't this all been the point of public policy for years now? To rein in spending and make people more responsible for their individual lives? So what if it's meant larger class sizes, higher tuition levels and increased debtloads upon graduation into a shitty job market of insecure contract work mainly in the service sector.

And this generation of Canadian youth is facing new deficits more urgent than any other. The recession and the resulting stimulus spending will increase the federal debt by $85-billion over five years. Demographic trends will divert more health-care spending toward the aged. As for future environmental deficits, these are difficult to quantify now, but the cost of reining them in will grow with each year of comparative inaction.

Well, which is it? The government should hire more people to lower unemployment but shouldn't increase the size of its deficit? What?

Youth, especially those outside school, have not traditionally been a strong lobbying force in national politics. The raw numbers, and their increasingly shared experiences of hardship, should make them take notice and make them demand more of their leaders, both public and private.

Really? What should they ask for Globe & Mail? Should they ask governments to enact more legislation compelling labour "flexibility"? ["We DEMAND that you make it easier to fire us!"] Should they ask governments to sign more corporate-friendly "free trade" deals that allow manufacturing jobs to fly overseas? Should they ask for weaker unions? Less restrictions onf capital flight? More foreign ownership? Less funding for education and deregulation of tuitions? What exactly? And how, pray tell, should young citizens make these demands? Let's forget for a minute the utter insanity within the mindset of the Globe & Mail's editorial board, that imagines that the policies that have CAUSED this problem are what's needed to fix the problem. Let's forget that what these boneheads are asking for are the same policies that neoliberal politicians happily implement daily, and just reflect on the hilarity of how they think politics works.

Supposedly Canada is a democracy, and if, say, young people are tired of getting dicked around all they have to do is rise up and demand action from the country's public and private leaders. Yet this same editorial board has nodded approvingly every time politicians IGNORED the will of the majority. The Globe and Mail has advocated for the 1989 Free Trade Agreement, the 1994 NAFTA Agreement, the invasion of Afghanistan, the Security and Prosperity Partnership, the anti-inflation policies of the Bank of Canada, the creeping privatization of healthcare. All of this was opposed by the majority of voters at the time. (Over a decade of propaganda and disinformation and lowered expectations have made a majority of Canadians approve of "free trade" but successful delusion or a con-job isn't genuine consent.)

In all these things, neoliberal politicians have been celebrated for pointedly ignoring the supposedly immature and ignorant majority, and for displaying the "courage" to lead the public rather than listen to it. They do what they want and we can all go to hell. If, upon occasion, some people, tired of politicians shitting on democracy with impunity, really do "rise up" they are to be quickly smashed back down again. And once again, the Globe & Mail approves.
And leaders in the private sector? Just what are unemployed young people supposed to do? Stand on the road outside the factory demanding jobs? You know what would happen if they tried that. The second they set foot on private property they'd be arrested for tresspassing. They'd have to remain on the road until the police broke up their rally for not having a proper permit.

Obviously this editorial is the result of panic and confusion. How else to explain the way it demands that employers should ignore what the Globe & Mail would otherwise identify as "economic reality" and hire more young people. If the government tried to force employers to hire more young people, train them, and make them productive, the Globe & Mail would be shrieking about intolerable invasions of the private marketplace and reality-defying "make-work" schemes. But this is a major recession and the poor saps are simply at a loss for how to respond.