To foster innovation, productivity, and a green economy, markets need to be pushed and challenged by our government.
In the lead-up to the NDP leadership convention scheduled for next March, The Mark has reached out to the various leadership candidates, asking them to offer their visions for their party and for the country. Last week, we featured an article from MP Paul Dewar, the week before an article from MP Nathan Cullen. This week, we welcome MP and former party president Peggy Nash.
We’re at an interesting and unusual moment in time, both here in Canada and around the globe. The understanding that profound inequality does exist within our economy has begun to take hold. With its populist slogan, “We are the 99%,” the Occupy movement has struck a chord with many of us.
I have entered the race to become the leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party, but this is also the start of the campaign to become the next prime minister of Canada.
Canada needs, and deserves, a prime minister who understands that the economy must work for the benefit of us all, and who sees job creation as an important step in building a fairer society.
The two million Canadians who are effectively unemployed, or whose jobs are eroding, becoming temporary, part-time, or precarious, know that Stephen Harper’s policies have failed. The millions of Canadians who are living paycheque to paycheque, or who go from contract to contract, know that something has to change. Stephen Harper’s strategy of blindly giving away tax breaks to profitable corporations has failed. There’s no evidence that it creates the jobs he promised. Instead, it has left the social programs that so many Canadians rely on vulnerable.
That’s why the next prime minister of Canada will need to make sure that the Canadian economy works to help all Canadians, not just a few at the top. But to make sure that happens the economy must be made strong and stable.
The current prime minister understands neither of these things. I understand them both. Come the next federal election, Canadians will be looking for a real alternative, and, as leader of the New Democratic Party, I will be the one to offer them that choice.
I will start with a real plan to create good jobs across the country, which will form the core of how we start rebuilding our economy so more Canadians benefit.
A strategy to create value-added jobs, where we not only harvest our country’s vast natural resources, but also focus on keeping the processing sector in Canada, will mean we’re not exporting jobs along with our raw materials. The resulting value-added jobs will demand high skills, and will bring Canadian workers high pay. This will also mean that companies will create research and development centres close by in order to support workplace innovation and productivity, thereby reviving local economies and creating opportunities for local suppliers and businesses.
Our manufacturing sector needs to be strengthened. After years of erosion that devastated whole communities, we can use government investment to establish manufacturing revitalization and new energy technologies that will generate quality, innovative jobs.
We also need to reshape government policy to create a greener economy. We can achieve that by ending subsidies to the oil sands and using those savings to help diversify our energy sector and support provinces and municipalities with infrastructure renewal and other investments.
But to realize this dream of a strengthened, green economy with quality jobs, we need real action and real leadership. Our party’s challenge between now and the next election will be to connect the fair-mindedness that is found across our country with concrete government action – to connect the passion for a better, greener world, and the need to turn our economy around, with the political will to get us there.
As leader of our party, I will bring the experience to show Canadians that New Democrats can manage the economy to create quality jobs, work with key economic sectors to grow investment, and make innovation and the green economy of tomorrow a priority. Canadians will need to see that they can trust social democrats to create wealth, not just money. Social democratic governments – here in Canada and around the world – have done it before, and, under my leadership, we can show all of Canada that a New Democratic government can do it, too.
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