Policy Year in Review: Finance - Happy New Year to Mark Carney and the Occupiers

By Ard Van Leeuwen

During 2011 economies around the world continued the current roller coaster ride kicked off by the 2008 financial crises. Reports of continued sluggish performance, high unemployment and unmanageable sovereign debt head lined the news. Perhaps it was all summed up best by the Occupy Movement. As far as protests go this was as a bit of a strange one. Not only did it not claim to have any solutions, it was even short on demands. It was more an expression of frustration by people who felt that they were still footing the bill for the financial sector’s excesses, that Governments weren’t adequately protecting the public interest and that the gap between rich and poor, especially in North America, was ever widening.

The Occupy Movement’s themes resonate loud and clear with Green Party values of fiscal responsibility, government accountability and social justice. They seemed to have struck a chord too with some less likely sympathizers. Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of Canada and recently appointed leader of the G20’s Financial Stability Board (FSB), called the movement “entirely constructive”. Bill Gates came out in support of an international Financial Transaction Tax and super rich Warren Buffet said that the rich don’t pay enough tax.

Our government however, was not so sympathetic to the Occupy Movement. Instead we were constantly reminded that that our banking sector is the strongest in the world, that our national finances are stable and that our economy has outperformed the rest of the world during the downturn. That may be true but ironically much of that is despite our governments rather than because of them. Conservatives and Liberals before them weren’t able to deregulate our financial sector as quickly as they would have liked. Sometimes it pays to arrive late on the scene. Even so, when our federal debt is combined with provincial and municipal debts we see that Canada is no shining star when compared to the levels of public debt incurred by other developed economies.

Showing up fashionably late to the global financial deregulation party certainly helped Canada.  But we are well beyond being fashionably late to another global movement and this time it will hurt our economy on a grand scale. It’s bad enough that Canada is at the top of the world league when it comes to our per capita emissions. Combine that with the fact that we are the least determined to do anything about it and we see that we are burning candle at both the economic and environmental ends. Without any kind of feasible strategy in place to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, our economy will not be able to compete with those that do. We may even run into economic sanctions for our refusal to pull our weight on climate change.

Here’s to hoping that moving forward we can avoid the worst of another future, bigger roller coaster ride by putting the public interest first and putting in place measures and incentives with teeth to modernize and build a smarter Canadian economy. After all, that’s another fundamental Green Party value: ensuring we don’t burden future generations with our foolishness.

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Ard is an entrepreneur with a passion for economics and the environment. For most of his professional life, the Dutch-born Van Leeuwen has been involved in starting and nurturing business organizations in the information technology sector. Currently he is a founder and principal of the New Toronto Group, a specialty software services provider to the North American marketplace.

His professional career has led him to live abroad in Europe and Asia where he was exposed to an extensive range of business environments, cultures, and governments. He was responsible for expanding the company's presence in those regions. Ard is also fluent in Dutch and conversational in French.