Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
Canada today has the most educated populace in the country’s history. In 1970, fewer than 70 per cent of students graduated from high school. Today, that figure is 88 per cent. In 1970, only 22 per cent of Canadians had post-secondary education, compared with 58 per cent today. And yet here we are with the highest support for populist politics in living memory.
People aren’t blank vessels that you just pour education into to make them enlightened. Unless we want to lower standards in post-secondary education even more, we’ve pushed up against the limits of participation.
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2 things here.
1) The socialist in me would love it if Canada absorbed Universities into public education and that everyone was given a post-secondary education of their choice. If they are not interested in getting a BSc in Chemistry then maybe they could go get a trade certification. I believe Sweden does this successfully.
Eliminating the barrier between the population and post-secondary education would likely stimulate the workforce and industry and generate enough tax revenue to pay for the decision to fund the universities on public dollars. Also, eliminating the need to make a profit would drive down the cost of universities.
2) Populist politics should have a lot of support. The problem is that the Conservatives are not populists, they just pretend to be by saying popular things like "common sense" so that they can gain power but none of their policies are actually populist.
Populists should be pushing policies that bring benefit the most people. Their priorities would include: Human rights, Public Education, Healthcare, Pharmacare, Dentalcare, EI / UBI, labour protections, regulations on corporations, ethics in government, etc.
Populists advocate that there is not 3 classes of society (upper/middle/lower) but actually 2 classes of society: Owners v Workers. (Bernie Sanders boils it down to Billionaires v everyone else.)
These are all the opposite of what the Conservative party advocates or acts upon.
The Conservatives have become much more Corporatist (which I view to be the opposite of populist).
- They believe in slashing services and privatization to corporations that will try to make profit off providing necessary services to the people.
- They believe in de-regulation of corporations to increase profits for rich people, even if it means destroying the environment or harming people
- They believe in reducing taxes for rich people at the expense of the rest
- They bust unions and force them back to work when there are strikes
- They use culture wars to divide the population and distract the people from the class war (Owners v. Workers)
- Corporatists will reduce work-life balance by taking away workers rights (weekends, overtime, holidays, paid leave, child labour, retirement age, etc)
etc.
Usurping the populist label has been quite the trick as everything the Conservatives advocate for is actually bad for the average citizen... but then they roll out the culture wars and get everyone all hot and bothered about Trans people so that they vote away their healthcare.
As of right now, the most populist party is the NDP and they have lost their way a bit and have been acting more neoliberal than populist. They need to get back to being the populist party and reclaim the label.