Globalization

Canadians and other peoples don't have to accept that globalization is only for investors and their money. Ordinary people around the world have as much in common with each other as bond dealers do. Capital has globalized. It is time for social democracy to globalize as well, and time for Canada to begin working towards that goal.

International Solidarity

Working people have common interests - interests that transcend nationstates, ethnic groups, languages, and other divisions.

One of the most fundamental of these common interests is our obligation - an important portion of our share of the "world's work" - to address the obscene disparity in living standards and quality of life between the industrialized north and the developing south. In 1990, the income of the richest 20 per cent of the world's population was 60 times greater than the poorest 20 per cent.

Working people have a common interest in resisting and preventing genocide and war - of which there is a rising tide in this post-cold-war era.

Working people have a common interest in building effective international institutions, that pool efforts to promote health, literacy, human rights, and economic development around the world.

Key Points:

We believe Canada should renew its commitment to rebuild, re- energize and reform the United Nations and its associated institutions - still potentially the world's best common instruments to promote development and peace. Critically, reform should include the World Bank and the IMF, two institutions which have manifestly failed in their missions.

We are committed to working for fair trade policies with developing countries, and to work in solidarity with developing nations to promote locally-driven, environmentally, economically and culturally- appropriate economic development.

We reaffirm our commitment to attaining the goal of 0.7 per-cent of GDP to aid and development programs. Canada should stop tying aid to the purchase of our exports.

As a nation of immigrants, Canada should increase efforts to assist the world's displaced people - who are mostly women and children - and establish a non-discriminatory humane immigration policy.

An Internationalist Strategy on Trade

We are committed to working with Canada's trading partners to re-regulate speculative capital investment, and to build real, enforceable and progressive labour, environmental and social standards into Canada's trade agreements - the first steps towards a "global civil society". We are also committed to expanding and diversifying Canada's trade.

In the middle of the last century, the only people in the industrializing west with real economic rights were investors. More than a hundred years of patient construction at the national level built civil societies, in which economic rights were much more widely shared. Minimum wage laws; labour standards; trade union rights; occupational health and safety; public health care and education; a beginning at environmental protection - these were some of the building blocks of national civil societies.

In the past twenty years, investors have largely broken the bounds of nation- states. Investors' rights have been globalized, through regional trading agreements like NAFTA, and decisively through the new World Trade Organization (the successor to GATT).

This new global economic reality leaves labour, social and environmental rights to die on the vine at the national level - coin to be traded in a permanent international auction for investment capital.

It doesn't have to be that way. Social Democrats have long held that there are common interests between working people of all nations and countries. This has never been more true than it is today, when capital has globalized, but protection of the rights of working people hasn't.

Our goal is therefore clear: we need to work in partnership with social democrats and progressives in other countries to build, step by step and brick by brick, a counterweight on the scale of global capital.

A good place to start: working with our partners to re-regulate speculative capital investment, and to write real, enforceable and progressive labour, environmental and social standards into global trading agreements.

All of Canada's regional economies are built on trade, and all are dangerously dependent on American markets.

There is nothing wrong with competing with Americans in their home market, especially with value-added products. But Canada would do well to diversify its trading partnerships, reducing the political and economic leverage the United States holds over our country.

We are therefore committed to diversifying and expanding trade ties to other markets - notably including the Pacific Rim, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Western and Eastern Europe.

Key Points:

Capital has globalized. Social Democracy needs to globalize, too. We should commit to working with other progressive parties towards that goal.

First priorities:

  • Re-regulating and fairly taxing speculative international capital movements;
  • Re-establishing a measure of democratic, national control over the economy, consistent with global realities.
  • Real, enforceable and progressive international labour, environmental and social standards in international trading agreements.

Canadian trade is dangerously dependent on the U.S. market. Trade strategy should aim to diversify and expand trade links with other markets.

Global Action On The Environment

Protecting the environment is one of the most critical issues that working people around the globe have in common.

The commercial extinction of the northern cod and the destruction of Canada's Atlantic fishery is a national tragedy and a clear warning to Canadians - unsustainable economic activities have direct, frequently irreversible, and tragic consequences. Some other messages from our planet:

  • Canadian forest clear cuts can be seen with the naked eye by orbiting space shuttle crews.
  • Globally, the extinction of plant, fish and animal species is accelerating - up to 30,000 a year, according to some estimates.
  • Our planet's ozone layer is disappearing, and greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise - leading to higher cancer rates and rising global temperatures, among many other effects.

There are limits to this planet's ability to endure the unlimited, unrestrained consumption and destruction of its resources.

Key Points:

Our goal is to work with other nations to achieve sustainable communities, capable of living within the carrying capacity of the environment.

That means working towards economies:

  • That use renewable resources at rates within their ability to regenerate;

  • That reduce the use of non-renewable resources so they do not exceed the rate at which sustainable renewable substitutes are developed; and

  • That steadily reduce the emission of pollution until it no longer exceeds the ability of the environment to assimilate it.

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