Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee, for inviting me.
In 1953, the year I was born, Sir Isaiah Berlin, the great Oxford philosopher, wrote a remarkable book, in part about animals. Berlin stated that there are two kinds of thinkers in the world: the hedgehog and the fox.
Hedgehogs view the world through the lens of a single defining idea, and he gave as examples Plato, Hegel, Nietzsche and Proust. By contrast, foxes draw on a wide variety of experiences—for example, Shakespeare.
Today, I'm speaking to this committee as a hedgehog.
I have one more quote. The great general Napoleon Bonaparte stated that generals often prepare for and fight the last war, not the next war.
What was the last war in our time? From the early seventies, when I entered the workforce in Canada, until very recently, Canada confronted relatively high unemployment caused by the entry of millions and millions of boomers, coupled with significant levels of immigration, which many Canadians—I'm one of them—strongly support.
Consequently, for the past 50 years—1972 to 2022—every prime minister, every finance minister and every premier, MP, social activist, scholar and think tank has focused on issues surrounding unemployment, income supports, worker retraining and even suggestions for a guaranteed annual income, while federal and provincial governments have understandably spent hundreds of billions of dollars to address these urgent social problems.
Then COVID wandered into the nation's homes and businesses and, in one of the numerous paradoxes engendered by the COVID pandemic, caused temporary—as we very quickly learned—high unemployment, followed very shortly by a very strong, robust economic rebound, as specifically mentioned several times by Minister Freeland in the April 2021 budget speech. The very sharp economic snap-back exposed the desperate underlying labour shortages that are now the new pandemic in Canada and western countries.
Some MPs may already dismiss what I'm saying. Not so fast—I urge every MP to read the magnificent evidence-based book by Globe and Mail journalist John Ibbitson and Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Reid, called Empty Planet.
Over the last 20 years or so, as we have become ever more concerned with global warming, there have been increasingly loud complaints by environmentalists and activists that the planet is skyrocketing towards 10 billion people—some claim 11 billion or 12 billion—yet in Ibbitson's and Bricker's own words:
[A] growing number of experts are sounding a very different alarm. Rather than continuing to increase exponentially...the global population is headed for a steep decline—and in many countries, that decline has already begun.
These professional demographers, statisticians and mathematicians in leading research universities—not activist lobbyists—show that in almost every country in the world, and most certainly in Canada and the western countries, we are going to witness our population collapse to five billion people on earth. In plain English, this means that about 2.7 billion will vanish from the current 7.7 billion people on earth over the next 50 or 60 years.
The New York Times has regularly documented population decline such as, for example, in Japan, which is requiring the razing of homes, the destruction of homes, due to the lack of younger buyers. However, most MPs, government policy-makers and cabinet ministers advocate policies of yet more and more income support, as if this is 1972 all over again. What is needed is a complete change in what Max Weber called the Weltanschauung, or world view.
As former Liberal deputy prime minister Anne McLellan stated only yesterday in The Globe and Mail:
I'm not one of those who says, “Oh, let's not worry about the deficit and debt.” You absolutely have to. And you have to worry about productivity and you do have to worry about investment. I [want] to see a [growth] narrative in the 2022 budget. What is the narrative to get us to 2030 and net zero [emissions] in 2050?
It is urgent that budget 2022 shift and pivot away from policies that unwittingly incentivize people to remain out of the workforce.
Examples are COVID supports without conditions to require recipients to seek and accept job offers, or policies that incentivize early retirement, before the age of 67 strongly advocated by the OECD.
Indeed, the Government of Canada needs to announce a root-and-branch exercise to review all social policies across the government, with the objective of identifying policies that incentivize people who remain outside the workforce or retire from the workforce before the age of 67 as recommended by the OECD.
In the words of Minister Freeland in budget 2021, “We are all in this together.”
Members of Parliament, it's now time to leave the 20th-century battles behind and start fighting the next war, which has already arrived, of massive labour shortages in Canada.
Why? To paraphrase Prime Minister Trudeau, “because it is 2022”.