Memo to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and U.S. House of Representatives speaker John Boehner:
For all the job creation mega projects of the past decades, and for all the tax revenue and economic stimulus generated by these projects, the economies of Canada and the U.S. are in pretty dismal shape.
If your promises about these projects were true, we should after all these decades have full employment and unprecedented wealth for the average citizen. Instead, we have persistent high unemployment along with chronic structural unemployment, an increasing wealth gap, declining purchasing power, national deficits, record levels of personal and national debt, tens of thousands of homeless in Canada and about 1.5 million homeless in the U.S., the latest census data in the U.S. saying that 50 per cent of Americans are classified as either “poor” or “low income” and Canada is racing to match that figure, rates of illiteracy and semi-illiteracy estimated to be as high as 40 per cent of the population, and signs of increasing civil unrest in both countries. Meanwhile, we continue to further poison the biosphere for our children.
And yet, here you two are, making the same promises over and over about new mega-project proposals.
Did you two ever stop to think that maybe, just maybe, you are on the wrong track?
Rick Shea