TOO MANY "OLD DOGS."

In politics you can’t teach new tricks to anyone. They are stuck. They are mired in an ideological rut so deep they simply don’t know how to change, and even worse, don’t seem to know that change is imperative.

Reading Frank Rich in the Sunday Times is refreshing but nothing really gets done. He fulminates endlessly about how things must change, but real change is never part of the argument.

Look at the chaos around the Health Care changes. The President, who has showed far less backbone that I had hoped for, has been backed into a corner. He can hope only to salvage some “face” by having the reluctant Congress make some changes. But the changes take place only within the ideological mindset of the country. Have I got your attention so far?

As I said in at least one recent posting, countries foundering in economic distress have to look at their “value added” production. At the heart of the problem of sending manufacturing offshore is the reality that America, and Canada, both have no real economic policy. The policy is dictated by corporations.(Just as in America where health policy is controlled by insurance companies)They understand that their power is so great that governments will accede to their imperative – make it cheaper, but enhance profits.

I can’t blame them.If we believe in a Free Enterprise system, we should also believe that it works.

But not always. And certainly not now.

I admit that I come from an ideological mindset, but it is not fixed in cement. I have always believed in the value of a “mixed” economy. I have always believed that Free Enterprise is often, as Tommy Douglas used to say: “Neither free nor enterprising.”

Both our countries need an economic policy that reaches beyond resource exploitation, or consumer demand for low(punitive) prices. Other countries have been very successful in creating models that we should try. For example: when Bombardier wins a contract to supply transit for a country, part of the deal is that they will “partner” for some of the production with a company in that country. They will be in effect “spreading the wealth.” And as the pundits like to say: it’s a “win-win situation.

The only way we can add a value-added dimension tour economic policy is to admit that we have allowed that policy to float, to be unregulated, to be controlled by corporations.

It’s like urban sprawl that cannot be controlled by municipalities because housing “policy” originates at the offices of the developer. He has the land. He builds the houses. We stammer out a few words asking for restraint, but the builder, with the help of the Ontario municipal board, gets his way.

One final indication that ideology trumps good sense: the cabinet recently overturned a CRTC ruling and gave a new wireless company access to the Canadian market. Most people seem to be in favour. Most people don’t understand that high-powered, often punitive competition, while it lowers prices, ravages the industry and eventually the consumer gets stuck with the remains.

I would ask the cabinet, which in the name of “competition” has sent an industry into cost-cutting chaos; will America reciprocate by allowing Canadian capital a majority role in any of its wireless or broadcast facilities?

I ramble. I hope you’ve kept up. Without you there will be no change.