Local governance still possible in globalized world
According to recent polls, a majority of Canadians believe that the federal government has too much power. Nearly as many believe that local governments—including school boards—should have more power. Most people trust local school boards to make decisions about the education of their children far more than they trust the provincial government to do so.
Why is it that we place such faith in our local community leadership – both councils and school boards – to do the right thing?
The main reason is that they are local. School trustees and councilors don’t make decisions hundreds of miles away; they make them in the communities where they live, and they have to live with those decisions. If local citizens don’t like what they’ve done, they hear about it—in the grocery store, on the way to work, and from their neighbours and spouses. If you are a town councilor or a school trustee, you have no place to hide.
That’s why people have some sense of ownership of decisions made locally, and it’s why they have some sense that they can change those decisions if enough people disagree with them. The problem is local governments are facing more challenges to their decision-making ability, thanks to interference by the other levels of government. And frequently, that interference is not good for our communities.
The Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement (TILMA) between B.C. and Alberta, for example, stops local governments and school boards from making decisions for their citizens and children if those deals interfere with the rights of investors. And so-called public-private partnerships (P3s), which saddle taxpayers with the burden of debt for contracts that can last 35 years or more, put local councils in the position of having to support much-needed infrastructure projects that end up benefiting private corporations more than the communities they are supposed to serve.
So what can we do to free up our communities to make decisions for their citizens? We’ve all heard the clichés about globalization and “the global economy”, which assume there is no alternative to what’s happening now. But that’s just a cop-out for federal and provincial governments to justify how they spend our tax dollars by passing laws, signing contracts with multinational corporations and negotiating trade deals that are neither beneficial to our communities nor something those governments believe requires local input. Globalization rhetoric lets Ottawa and Victoria off the hook for ignoring our infrastructure needs, cutting back on transfers and offloading more responsibility to local governments.
First of all, senior governments need to reverse this trend by making sure communities have the resources they need. One way to start, suggest both the Union of B.C. Municipalities and the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, is to direct a portion of the GST or the provincial sales tax to municipalities. This would help address questions like the infrastructure deficit, among other needs.
We also need to have both our federal and provincial governments take the crisis we have in the B.C. forest industry more seriously. We know how much money goes into Ontario and Quebec to deal with the automobile industry. Do we need to start building cars with pine beetle wood before they start listening? Above all, we need to have serious amounts of infrastructure money to make sure our communities can take advantage of economic opportunities. That means we need roads, sewers, and water systems, and we need them now, when the forest industry is in crisis.
We know that our citizens will hold local community leaders accountable for how that money is spent. And we need to spend that money in a way that has the maximum impact on our communities. For smaller communities in particular, I believe that part of what makes this possible is the right to have some sort of local preference for local businesses. This is nothing new: these very practices—especially in the area of procurement strategies targeting local firms—are common in 25 of 50 states, 13 of 26 large cities and five of 18 large counties in the United States right now.
The critical concept in this policy area—and this is where the individual citizen plays a big role—is the economic multiplier. What this means is that each purchase you make triggers purchases by others. For instance, a dollar spent on rent might be spent again by your property owner at your local grocer, who in turn pays an employee who then buys a movie ticket. And thus you have what economists call “the multiplier”: the more times a dollar circulates within a defined geographic area, and the faster it circulates without leaving that area, the more income, wealth, and jobs it generates. The basic concept in community economics points to the importance of maximizing the number of dollars entering a community and minimizing their subsequent departure.
The TILMA, it should be noted, expressly forbids this. Now the process would have to be open and transparent, and subject to discussion in the community. But not under the TILMA.
Another thing local governments can seriously look at is import substitution. We’ve heard a lot recently about the 100-mile diet. If we buy locally-produced food, it is fresher and easier on the environment. It takes a lot of fuel to fly in apples from Chile. Why shouldn’t local governments and school boards specifically look at sourcing their food requirements locally? And how many other products could we do this with?
Import substitution is the most direct means by which we can build local economic multipliers. But, of course, those kinds of small things that can help build our local economies are not part of the globalization mantra that seems to have us hypnotized.
Import substitution is a lot cheaper than trying to build an export economy. We would probably have to pay $300 million to get a German carmaker to come here. We can support our local businesses and our communities for next to nothing.
A city or region that can produce local substitutions for imports, injects income that will stay in the community for a long period of time, boosting local economic vitality substantially.
Barry O’Neill is president of CUPE BC - This column is an adapted excerpt of a presentation he is giving in Prince George, Quesnel and Williams Lake this week
