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The Common Good and Alberta

by Gordon Laxer, Parkland Institute Editorialist

  Alberta
   

In Alberta, we hear little talk about the ‘common good’ anymore. On the other hand, ‘democracy’ is still invoked, in a ritual incantation with no real content. But you can’t have one without the other. Real democracy requires the idea of the good of the community. Because we hear the word ‘democracy’ so often, we tend to forget that democracy is very radical idea. Rule by the people. Now wouldn’t that be a nice change? Real democracy challenges, indiscriminately and irreverently, all forms of privilege.

That is why the elites abhor democracy so much, although they do not usually admit so in public. One exception was the Trilateral Commission, set up in 1973 by David Rockefeller, Zbigniew Brezinski and other corporate and government authorities in North America, Western Europe and Japan. Trilateralists decried an “excess of democracy.” “The democratic spirit is egalitarian, individualistic, populist and impatient with the distinctions of class and rank,” they said.

Nationalism was the other target. Rockefeller called for “a massive public relations campaign” to explain the necessity for the “withering of the nation-state”. Why did Trilateralists oppose nationalism? Combined with democracy, national sovereignty posed the greatest challenge to corporate ‘plans for the world’, to use Rockefeller’s exact phrase. They and others of like mind, invented a new word for their program – ‘globalization’. I prefer to call it a campaign against the common good.

What did thinkers and activists for democracy in the past say about the common good and popular sovereignty?

Aristotle was the first to write about democracy: “The real difference between democracy and oligarchy is poverty and wealth … The rich are few and the poor are many…Where the poor rule, that is democracy”.

Why don’t they teach that in school?

‘Things cannot go well in England, nor ever will, until all goods are held in common, and until there will be neither serfs nor gentlemen, and we shall all be equal’, declared John Ball. A poor man, itinerant, and peasant priest, Ball was a leader of the Peasants Revolt in England in 1381. He was hanged.

In 1933, John Maynard Keynes wrote: “We do not wish … to be at the mercy of world forces working out … some uniform equilibrium according to ideal principles … of laisser faire capitalism … We wish …to be our own masters … We all need to be as free as possible of interference from economic changes elsewhere in order to make our own favourite experiments towards the social republic of the future”.

To pursue the common good, there needs to be a strong sense of political community. Community is not just inherited, it is continually made and remade. To achieve deep democracy and pursue the common good, it is important for citizens to have a sense of solidarity, of sharing in common, of mutual commitments with unknown others in the political communities to which we belong - municipalities, the province, the country. We do not yet have effective, democratic political communities above the level of countries.

On replacement for the ideal of the common good is the notion of the ‘Alberta Advantage’. This is just a different term for the ‘Washington Consensus’ – that is, just another means of describing corporate globalization and the harsh process of ‘structural adjustment’ imposed by the World Bank and other powerful institutions on the Global South.

In Alberta, people are no longer portrayed as citizens and wage earners in a democratic community. They are now consumers, investors and stakeholders, acting as individuals in the private marketplace. Everything public is discredited.

The Alberta Advantage opens up Alberta to foreign owned transnationals, almost as if they were immigrants we were welcoming in. ‘Come and invest in Alberta. We have the lowest corporate taxes, charge the lowest royalties on oil and gas, have the lowest minimum wage and the most anti-union legislation.

You can make a bundle.’ Instead of welcoming the huddled masses, our province now says, ‘Send us your rich, your coddled corporations.

The huddled masses will work for low pay and ship you our raw resources.’ The Alberta advantage gives advantage to the rich and takes advantage of the rest. Alberta has not always had governments so disposed towards giving so--called "advantage" to the rich.

When Alberta was a have-not province, Premier Aberhart declared: “It is the duty of the state to organize its economic structure in such a way that no bona fide citizen shall be allowed to suffer for the lack of the basic necessities ... in the midst of plenty.” The 1940 speech from the throne pledged “to provide food, clothing and shelter for the people to the limit of our financial ability…[W]e will continue our unrelenting fight for monetary reform and social security with the determination to relieve unemployment and banish poverty from Alberta …No person should be allowed to lose his farm or home”.

Aberhart even spoke of limiting greed; according to him, no one should be “allowed to have an income ... greater than he himself and his loved ones can possibly enjoy, to the privation of his fellow citizens.”

Imagine a Premier making similar statements for the common good today? If the Alberta of the dirty thirties could set itself those kinds of goals, why can’t we today, when Alberta and Albertans are so much more able to?

The common good must include First Mations peoples. In 1952, Jim Brady, Metis leader from St. Paul, Alberta, said: “The national liberation of the Indian people and the Metis people in Canada cannot be completed until Canada as a whole and the western world … free themselves [from colonialism]”.

In September 2004, Her Honour Lois Hole called for a new spirit of community and caring. “We’ve been fortunate in that we have so much to be thankful for, because without the oil and the gas, it would be a different province … Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to share with some of the others – other Canadians, low-income Albertans … look after the people who can’t help themselves … I think we’ve got people who would like to share and who would share.”

My common good:

  • My common good includes a world without war, poverty, exploitation, illiteracy, environmental destruction or racism;
  • My common good does NOT include Canada becoming Deputy Sheriff to the American Empire;
  • My common good includes rule by citizens in political communities that have the popular and national sovereignty to democratically choose their own destinies;
  • My common good does NOT include corporations posing as citizens with more rights than people;
  • My common good includes the homeless;
  • My common good does NOT include oil corporations injecting our scarce, common water heritage into oil wells, to be lost from the water cycle;
  • My common good includes workers, the paid and the unpaid, who have built Alberta and Canada;
  • My common good does NOT include giving away our common, natural energy resources to foreign-owned transnationals;
  • My common good includes same-sex couples who want to marry in Alberta.
  • My common good includes Alberta sharing some of its good fortune with other Canadians and the needy in the Global South;
  • My common good includes government support for the arts in Alberta.
  • Finally, my common good includes the severely handicapped in Alberta, who deserve respect and a decent income Mr. Premier.

About the writer:

Gordon Laxer is a Professor of Political Economy at the University of Alberta and the Director and Co-founder of the Parkland Institute. This article is an adaptation of his opening remarks to the Parkland Institute’s 2004 fall conference. ‘Uncommon Dreams. Visions of the Public Good’.

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