After spending four days touring the region this week, Mulcair said he’s not backing down on his view that the failure to develop Canada’s resource riches in a sustainable fashion is costing the economy.
“We’re always going to have a resource-based economy. We always have had and always will have . . . We also had a very strong secondary sector. We built up manufacturing. Those were choices that were made,” Mulcair said in an interview Thursday.
“We’re killing off that balanced economy and it’s really having devastating effects in regions like southwestern Ontario,” he said.
In the past, Mulcair has blamed so-called Dutch Disease for the loss of 500,000 manufacturing jobs across the country in recent years. Taking its inspiration from the impact of natural gas development in the Netherlands, it refers to when natural resource riches drive up the value of a country’s currency and badly damage manufacturing exports.
When he first raised the issue in the spring, Mulcair sparked a sharp political debate. The Conservatives accused the NDP leader of being anti-growth and trying to pit one region against another.
But in June, a report by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development highlighted the economic disparities across the country. Alberta, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland enjoyed the largest income gains over the last decade, thanks to their booming resource economies, while Ontario lagged because of its reliance on a “sluggish” manufacturing sector, the report said.
It noted that the manufacturing sector had shrunk, taking with it jobs, and blamed the trend pegged on the rise in the Canadian loonie.
However, Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney waded into the debate last week, saying that high commodity prices are “good for Canada” and dismissed suggestions that Dutch Disease is to blame for inequities in the Canadian economy.
He said that only about half of the rise of the Canadian dollar on exchange markets in the past decade can be attributed to higher natural resource prices. Instead, he said changes in the Canadian economy were more the result of external factors.
“The symptoms we are seeing are not those of Dutch disease but rather of structural changes in the global economy to which Canada must adjust,” Carney said.
Speaking Wednesday, Mulcair took issue with Carney’s conclusions.
“We don’t disagree on the fact that 50 per cent of the job losses are the results of the high Canadian currency. Where we do disagree is that he simply points to other outside factors like the international situation,” Mulcair said.
Mulcair spent the week on a “jobs” tour of southern Ontario, starting in Windsor and visiting cities like Brantford, London and Oshawa, where he met with the city’s mayor Thursday. Manufacturing in Ontario remains roughly a third below its peak of 1.1 million jobs in 2004, according to job numbers released over the summer.
“Southwestern Ontario has been one of the hardest-hit regions in Canada in terms of manufacturing job losses,” he said.
“We want to meet with chambers of commerce, meet with business owners, talk to people and find out what’s happening and how it’s affecting them and find out some of the solutions that they are looking for,” Mulcair said.
And he pinned the blame on a Conservative government he says hasn’t done enough to preserve manufacturing jobs.
“Because of their belief that governments have no role in maintaining a balanced economy, they have completely ignored what is happening,” Mulcair said.
“They can put out all the arguments they want but there’s a reality out there that since they came to power, we’ve lost several hundred thousand good-paying manufacturing jobs,” he said.
Original Article
Source: the star
Author: Bruce Campion-Smith
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