I'm a firm believer in the power of helping lift everyone in the culture up as a means of creating a better and more responsible society - a more benign Democracy.

 

As Brian Mulroney used in his election platform a long time ago - "Jobs, jobs, jobs is the best social policy." If everyone has a good and fulfilling job (or the reasonable aspirational hope of obtaining one through diligent application and hard focused work ethics) - then social "problems" diminish and everybody benefits.

 

You cannot generate good jobs without having certain affirmative action programs in place. (Yes - you also need healthy profit and wealth generating Primary Production - Farming, Forestry, Fishing, Mining, Energy extraction - and I guess these days Finance, Free Trade, cross border service agreements etc etc etc)

 

Canada has a tremendous geographical and economical asymmetry - and anything that helps move money from the areas of great wealth creation and into the communities that are struggling - is useful and a net benefit. Encouraging and setting policies that disenfranchise and oppress certain communities at the gain of most favoured ones simply causes great social problems that fester and occasionally explode. It is the reason that societal altruism survives and thrives - it actually helps everyone involved -  both the givers and the recipients. Of course - we always have to find the balance - where there is altruism there is cheating and freeloading. However managing that balance is simple enough - it is not Rocket Science - there are the tools to suppress the cheating at the same time as optimising the benefits. (Society runs into far greater danger by being impotent at the few individuals and corporations that cheat the economy out of millions, billions and even trillions that they ever do by allowing a few at the bottom an easier ride to survival by gaming "The System." And having a "System" so severely monitored and harshly authoritarian so as to prevent all low level fraud and cheating is prohibitively expensive and ultimately doomed to failure. Get the big cheats and frauds.)

 

Canada's future now is hugely dependent on large scale immigration. (To pay for all the demographically challenged social programs that help ensure Canada is leading in the stakes to be one of the most liked Nations on the Planet.) It is also dependent on increasing the population density away from the narrow strip of land along the US border. As well as increasing the population away from the border it is also hugely dependent upon diversifying the economy in places away from the border - and at the same time increasing the services and availability of goods north of the current huge population centres.

 

With people, goods and services comes a decrease in most of the social ills. (Unemployment, addictions, depression, petty crimes, lack of fresh safe drinking water, availability of human resources and moving away from the scourges of temporary "Man Camps" and all the ills that follow along from such as well as the problems of "end of extraction" community collapse. (The mine runs out, the economy collapses, people who get blindsided lose everything - homes, businesses, income, stability.)

 

Private Enterprise cannot do everything - the simple profit motive is good as far as it goes - but only affirmative actions of a national scale - and supported by all as a National Good - can do the things necessary to build the bones upon which Private enterprise can attach its muscles and fill out the flesh.

 

I am far happier to see First Nations people having access to science and technology and business training and jobs within their lands and home settings than seeing such resources taken away or left wanting and the steady out migration from the rural to the urban where everything is out of reach and the ills of oppression, addiction and having to live at the bottom proliferate/ True - some First Nations folks have done extremely well against all odds and have integrated and thrived. But those are the stories of the gifted, the talented and the lucky few. What is needed is a program for all in their communities - and these kinds of programs are the seeds and the green shoots of something good. (And we can afford this!)

 

GS