And why not, the growth lobby owns the MSM. They were prescient enough to realize that mass immigration, congestion, unaffordable housing, low wage jobs and paving over farmland were outcomes with little public appeal so they bought control of the national conversation. This assures that the message was “more” even though it actually meant more for them and less for everyone else.
Since a group of speculators, developers, debt mongers and cheap labour employers took control of Canadian public policy over 4 decades ago the wellbeing of both Canadians (particularly the young) and the land has plummeted.
- Equality (from #2 in the world to the mid-30s currently – an unprecedented decline)
- Debt (5 times greater)
- Housing affordability (50% higher percentage of income required for housing than 30 years ago)
- Job Quality (higher percentage of cheap labour, tax negative jobs created)
- Quality of life decline
- Access to nature reduced
What Canadians wanted:
- Stable population
- No change in ethnic or religious makeup of Canada
- Healthy communities
- High quality jobs
- Less Cities, more Access to nature
In 2024, a broad-based, well-informed national conversation would have seen politicians scrambling to restore balanced levels of immigration to avoid further exacerbating the disastrous impacts that an additional 13 million people have had on the country. It would have prepared the nation for the coming challenges of climate change and the transition to renewable energy. Instead, we are paving over some of the best and most reliable farmland in the world and reducing the per capita reserves of our resource base.
Hardly what a country with a vision of a sustainable future would do.
But the interests (developers, banks, speculators and cheap labour employers) who pushed this extremely profitable (scores of $billions annually) are not going away and they just hate to not make huge amounts of money. Perhaps they can do with a little less power if it is accompanied by less work.
What if the growth lobby could be persuaded to loosen their stranglehold on the political apparatus voluntarily? What if we made them an offer they couldn’t refuse?
A Modest Proposal
They like money; what if we gave them free money??
Not exactly “win-win” but at least it is breakeven for the lobbyists and a “lose-less” for the rest of us.
This is not about victory, it is about damage mitigation; arriving at a policy that stops the destruction of Canada and costs less in taxes than the current mass immigration/grow-forever fiasco. We do that by selecting the top 5,000 mass immigration profiteers in the country and pay them each $10 million annually (tax free of course) for the rest of their lives.
The cost to the Canadian taxpayer will be $50 billion a year. This is vastly less than either the economic or fiscal damage done to the country without even considering the environmental impacts, loss of farmland, quality of life, and the reduction of both food and energy resilience.
We have to recognize that a tax-free $10 million annually represents a huge reduction in wealth accumulation for many of the chosen 5,000 but perhaps the free time they gain will allow them to implement their retirement dreams a decade or two early.
For our part, we would expect them to relinquish their grip on media corporations, government committees, party infrastructure, academia and the many “activist” organizations they control through their large donations.
Of course, there would be expenses beyond the $50 billion. Pity the poor politicians so looking forward to their juicy post-retirement directorships, consultancy contracts and low interest loans that fall like rain upon those who have supported the growth lobby. To prevent ex-MPs and Senators from accumulating on street corners adjacent to highway overpasses, clearly their pensions would have to be increased.
And then there are all of the growth policy promoters and hangers on. Perhaps some could eventually retrain to fill productive jobs. More likely though most would apply the manipulative skills they’ve honed extolling the virtues of endless growth and money printing. They could repurpose their promotional skills to hawk equally greasy endeavours such as multi-level marketing schemes, selling low cost, 100% deductible insurance policies or opening franchises of factory-direct antiques etc.
No matter which path they chose, it would be less damaging than the environmental and social juggernaut they are helping to foist on us now.
Also, with the loss of growth lobby donations from banks, developers and speculators, election campaign budgets for many politicians will dry up. (MacDermid, Funding of City Politics) Perhaps we can use tax money to open up debates, illuminate platforms and adopt proportional representation. This will cost a trifling amount of money and the growth lobby won’t be in a position to block this democratic upgrade a second time.
The taxpayer will benefit from the cessation of subsidies of the growth lobby owned media which have amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars. This industry has been joined at the hip with the finance industry but would now be able to shift back to its original mission of actual investigative journalism for the purposes of informing the public with real information.
All of this would allow experts to offer their best advice and citizens to speak their minds in an open, informed and broad-based national conversation. Putting democracy back on the tracks is critical to the establishment of a sustainable and egalitarian sustainable society.
Canada could get back to nation building for progress rather than market-building for profit.
The playing field was tilted by the growth lobby decades ago and the only way to even it out is to depose the interests who profit from it. Paying off what amounts to organized crime to get out of town may offend those with a clear moral code (just about everyone who isn’t in the lobby) but this is not about morality, it is about turning our downward spiral into at least a glide pattern.
If you can’t beat ‘em, buy them off.
** The original “A Modest Proposal” by Dr. Jonathan Swift 1729 Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal
A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick,[1] commonly referred to as A Modest Proposal, is a Juvenalian satirical essay written and published anonymously by Anglo-Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift in 1729. The essay suggests that poor people in Ireland could ease their economic troubles by selling their children as food to the elite. Swift’s use of satirical hyperbole was intended to mock hostile attitudes towards the poor and anti-Catholicism among the Protestant Ascendancy as well as the Dublin Castle administration‘s policies in general.[2] In English writing, the phrase “a modest proposal” is now conventionally an allusion to this style of straight-faced satire.
Also: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1080/1080-h/1080-h.htm
