From: wlsmith@valve.heart.rri.uwo.ca (Wayne Smith)
Subject: Re: The economic effects of the "referendum"
Organization: The John P. Robarts Research Institute, London, Ontario
Distribution: can
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1992 01:22:56 GMT

In article <1992Sep28.201532.15723@ee.ubc.ca> jmorriso@ee.ubc.ca (John Paul Morrison) writes:
>
>>It's time we stopped being the banana republic of the world that knows only
                                         I meant of the north ^
>>how to cut trees or dig crap out of the ground and started exporting
>>high value-added finished products instead vomiting our natural resources
>>all over the world at an ever increasing pace.
>
>I agree. I don't wan't to to be too for/against the NAFTA, since
>in this recession, it is impossible to seperate jobs lost/gained
>due to the FTA. Time will tell.
>
>We need to cut redundancy and waste in government: there is a lot of
>overlap in federal ministries, and even more when you add in provincial
>ministries.

For the past few decades, we've seen the result of biz-grads and
management grads as they go into gov't:  gov't can't help but see
itself as just another business/empire -> to get better is to get 
bigger.  

>- we must keep our social programmes, but spend the money more effectively.

It's always a hard call as to the pro's and con's of the depth and scope
of having social programs.  As a whole, I would posit that they make the
present easier to cope, while setting us up for a worse situation in the
future.

>- we must fix our whole education-training system from kindergarten to
>  technical, apprentice, and university training.
Too many see the first priority of school as baby sitting, and in this
generation of dual-parent workers, they are less likely to be critical
of the the quality of their kid's education.  Besides, if everyone's
kids are getting the same education, then we still have an even playing
field don't we?

You can blame the cut-throat teacher-school requirements for the current
crop of school teachers.  Many of them come from the arts, where 
high marks are easier to come by, and then many of those people then
findt themselves teaching science and math, while we graduate
hundreds of master's students in the sciences every year, many of
whom have had teaching experience, but they can't get past the artificial
bottle-nech of teacher's college.

If you want a better student, start by getting better teachers.
If you want better teachers, AND competition for teaching jobs,
then acknoledge that teachers colleges are just gate-keepers that
maintain a low number of "qualified" teachers while they pretend to
give the potential teacher an education that is not available 
anywhere else.  By giving students with masters degrees (or higher) 
the ability to compete for public school teaching jobs, you end up 
with a vastly superior talent pool and wage competition as well.

>- face the fact that our productivity is declining, along with our 
>  competitiveness, and fix that. It is useless to blame the rest of the
>  world, when it is ourselves to blame for falling behind.

Both the US and Canada have been told by social engineers that 
we, as a society, need far fewer of us involved in direct production.
So we find ourselves farming out low-skill manufacturing jobs to
the third world.  That means our gov'ts want to see a shift of jobs
from primary production to value-added production and other
white-collar jobs.  The problem is is that it isin't happening.
These new jobs aren't happening, and probably won't as long as
unions have a strangle-hold on the membership of
"specialty" trades, etc.

We can blame our gov'ts for trying to make a fundamental shift in
our economy, and even going overboard by helping local manufacturers
to re-locate overseas, while not recognizing that people are still  
facing barriers to the kind of jobs that our leaders would rather
see us employed in.
Newsgroups: can.politics