Are rural people better off when cities prosper? That’s one of the questions I asked myself when I read the recent report by the Conference Board of Canada “Canada’s Hub Cities: A Driving Force of the National Economy”. The report argues that government money (a portion of the gas tax) should be invested more in Canada’s largest cities than in smaller towns. According to this logic, Alberta would be better off if the gas tax generated by the smaller towns of Grande Prairie, Hardisty and Oyen were invested in Calgary or Edmonton rather than being distributed more evenly. According to the Conference Board of Canada, the economy of Alberta (as measured by the Gross Domestic product) would grow more, and all Albertans would be more prosperous if governments targeted the largest cities for investment.
I remember talking to a young Albertan some time ago who wanted to move from his parents’ farm and buy a farm on his own near Olds, AB. He put in a bid on a good working farm and found he was outbid by a lawyer from Calgary. The lawyer wanted a weekend country place. The farm land offered him scenic beauty but he had no time to be an active farmer. The lawyer turned around and hired the young farmer to farm the land for him. From the point of view of Gross Domestic Product, the value of farmland in the area increased because of this sale and therefore the wealth of the area increased as well. According to this way of measuring, the region became more prosperous. From the point of view of the young farmer, he went from being a prospective land owner to being a tenant – a journey his grandparents had in the opposite direction when they immigrated and homesteaded so many years ago. Is the community better off as a result of this shift? Has our collective wellbeing increased?
The Conference Board of Canada report assumes that an increase in economic activity in a region means that everyone is better off. This is clearly not the case. Saskatchewan’s economy can be growing even while the vast majority of its small towns are dying. A close reading of the report reveals a tiny footnote at the end that admits “that some of the communities that converge do so, not because their rates of GDP increases are so fast, but because their population is declining. This is not a happy story.” A better question to be asked is ‘are we better off’? Are we more healthy, more literate, more balanced, more community minded and more generous? Are we realizing the goals and values we cherish for our society?
The Canadian Index of Wellbeing is a new initiative sponsored by the Atkinson Foundation and chaired by former Saskatchewan Premier, Roy Romanow. It seeks to measure not just the growth in economic activity but the extent to which we are realizing our values and goals and whether we are leaving to our children a better world. It is developing a set of indicators that will measure “educational achievement, economic security, a clean environment and social equity.” With these kinds of measuring sticks we can distinguish between the kind of economic growth that depopulates rural Canada and the kind that promotes health and clean air.
Economics is not value free but its values are well hidden to the untrained eye. Congratulations to the Atkinson Foundation for helping us ask and answer the right questions. You can learn more about this initiative at www.atkinsonfoundation.ca/ciw.
First published in August 2006
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
Spiritual Values Seek Political Expression
Apparently there are some people in my town that want to kill me and my friends. That is the allegation at least. According to the press, there is quite a lot of evidence to support this charge. I have friends who work on Parliament Hill, family members who work at the CBC and I am frequently walking in downtown Toronto. These are all places named last week as potential targets of terrorist attacks.
I am used to people in Canada importing conflicts from abroad. People of Irish descent have been supporting different sides of the Irish civil war for ages. More recently it has been Eastern Europeans, Kashmiris, Tibetans and Chinese. But the terrorist threats against targets in Toronto and Ottawa are not like these others. These threats come from Canadians and are made against Canadians. Their objective is to force political change in Canada’s relations with other nations, most specifically with the United States and Afghanistan.
The last time this happened in Canada was 35 years ago during the FLQ crisis. At that time an armed group kidnapped politicians and killed one. They were trying to achieve the political goal of Quebec as a sovereign and independent state.
The current group of violent, Canadian plotters also has a political agenda – the release of Muslim political prisoners and the withdrawal of Canadian troops from Afghanistan. But they also share an Islamic faith. How will we understand this?
One of their distinctive characteristics is their spiritual motivation. They identify themselves coming from a shared religious tradition, Islam. Some are converts from another faith (Hinduism & Christianity). Some have been active trying to convert others.
One of the characteristics of contemporary western culture is that we live as if our material and spiritual worlds can be separate. When we live as if they are separate, we tend to live as if one of those worlds doesn’t really exist. Some of us will live in a spiritual world and pretend that the material world doesn’t exist, won’t last or doesn’t matter. We will live in isolation from the world or wait until the apocalypse or become indifferent to the worries of the world.
Others of us will live only in the material world and pretend the spiritual world doesn’t exist, is something you grow out of or is a private choice that has no real consequence for anyone else. Both of these points of view are distortions of reality. Our spiritual life is real and seeks expression in the material world. Spiritual values make real claims on people and communities. Disagreements about spiritual values will create real political, social and economic conflicts but they will be hard to see if we pretend they don’t exist.
By the same token the material world is also real and also seeks expression in our spiritual life. Our political, social and economic realities seek affirmation in spiritual terms. Political movements seek to bring in a new order, social movements make claims of fundamental identity and economic movements make claims to salvation. If we continue to deny our spiritual reality we will refuse to come to terms with the meaning of our most fundamental choices.
The Canadian terrorist suspects seem to be trying to turn their spiritual values into a political reality. They feel their spiritual identity as followers of Islam to be under attack by Canadian military involvement in Afghanistan. According to opinion polls, most Canadians seem unsure about our country’s involvement there. Why do we have over 2,000 troops there? Are we not peacekeepers? We seem to be in armed combat yet we are told we are not at war? Are we really trying to support the reconstruction of a war-torn country or are we protecting American economic interests in the Middle East?
This is a challenge in two parts. For those of us who are religious (and especially Muslim), this is a challenge to articulate the spiritual values we are deeply committed to that are deeply present in our society. These spiritual values include the dignity of every person, male and female, the real tolerance of difference and the practice of democratic decision-making.
For the rest of us, the challenge is to consider how the world’s dominant empire, based on economic globalization, American military interests and western culture, represents a violent threat to other cultures, other interests and other ways of doing business. Westerners tend not to think of this empire in spiritual terms but other groups experience their whole way of life and being in the world as threatened. For them this is a crisis on all fronts, including the spiritual, and they seek spiritual sanction for their political responses.
First published in July, 2006
I am used to people in Canada importing conflicts from abroad. People of Irish descent have been supporting different sides of the Irish civil war for ages. More recently it has been Eastern Europeans, Kashmiris, Tibetans and Chinese. But the terrorist threats against targets in Toronto and Ottawa are not like these others. These threats come from Canadians and are made against Canadians. Their objective is to force political change in Canada’s relations with other nations, most specifically with the United States and Afghanistan.
The last time this happened in Canada was 35 years ago during the FLQ crisis. At that time an armed group kidnapped politicians and killed one. They were trying to achieve the political goal of Quebec as a sovereign and independent state.
The current group of violent, Canadian plotters also has a political agenda – the release of Muslim political prisoners and the withdrawal of Canadian troops from Afghanistan. But they also share an Islamic faith. How will we understand this?
One of their distinctive characteristics is their spiritual motivation. They identify themselves coming from a shared religious tradition, Islam. Some are converts from another faith (Hinduism & Christianity). Some have been active trying to convert others.
One of the characteristics of contemporary western culture is that we live as if our material and spiritual worlds can be separate. When we live as if they are separate, we tend to live as if one of those worlds doesn’t really exist. Some of us will live in a spiritual world and pretend that the material world doesn’t exist, won’t last or doesn’t matter. We will live in isolation from the world or wait until the apocalypse or become indifferent to the worries of the world.
Others of us will live only in the material world and pretend the spiritual world doesn’t exist, is something you grow out of or is a private choice that has no real consequence for anyone else. Both of these points of view are distortions of reality. Our spiritual life is real and seeks expression in the material world. Spiritual values make real claims on people and communities. Disagreements about spiritual values will create real political, social and economic conflicts but they will be hard to see if we pretend they don’t exist.
By the same token the material world is also real and also seeks expression in our spiritual life. Our political, social and economic realities seek affirmation in spiritual terms. Political movements seek to bring in a new order, social movements make claims of fundamental identity and economic movements make claims to salvation. If we continue to deny our spiritual reality we will refuse to come to terms with the meaning of our most fundamental choices.
The Canadian terrorist suspects seem to be trying to turn their spiritual values into a political reality. They feel their spiritual identity as followers of Islam to be under attack by Canadian military involvement in Afghanistan. According to opinion polls, most Canadians seem unsure about our country’s involvement there. Why do we have over 2,000 troops there? Are we not peacekeepers? We seem to be in armed combat yet we are told we are not at war? Are we really trying to support the reconstruction of a war-torn country or are we protecting American economic interests in the Middle East?
This is a challenge in two parts. For those of us who are religious (and especially Muslim), this is a challenge to articulate the spiritual values we are deeply committed to that are deeply present in our society. These spiritual values include the dignity of every person, male and female, the real tolerance of difference and the practice of democratic decision-making.
For the rest of us, the challenge is to consider how the world’s dominant empire, based on economic globalization, American military interests and western culture, represents a violent threat to other cultures, other interests and other ways of doing business. Westerners tend not to think of this empire in spiritual terms but other groups experience their whole way of life and being in the world as threatened. For them this is a crisis on all fronts, including the spiritual, and they seek spiritual sanction for their political responses.
First published in July, 2006
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