Beyond Bay Street

Let's add one final follow-up point to Jack Layton's speech at the NDP's Regina caucus meeting last week. While it's never surprising to hear Layton point out the problems with corporate privilege (and indeed a major plus that he and the NDP continue to do so), it's worth noting that the phrasing of Layton's message seems to have been based more on tapping into past themes than a thorough depiction of current corporate culture:

Stephen Harper isn’t helping out the middle class family. He’s giving breaks to Bay Street bankers.

5 billion dollars worth this year alone.

The very people who need the help the least.

Again, the "Bay Street" language is bound to be well-known in NDP circles. And it's true enough that the largest beneficiaries of the Cons' corporate tax slashing will be the biggest Canadian banks.

At the same time, though, there's some risk in focusing solely on domestic interests when the battle between people and profits is playing out no less obviously on the global stage. While it's useful in some sense to point primarily to examples which will be readily familiar to observers, it's also important not to be seen as addressing only parochial Canadian concerns while ignoring the bigger picture. And indeed, the surest way to lose in a long-term contest between people and profits is to aim solely at national policy questions when capital can flow freely around the world.

What's more, it's not as if there's any lack of material worth pointing out on the global front. Indeed, the Harper Cons have been among the worst offenders in favouring big-money interests around the world, with examples ranging from their efforts to push through free-trade agreements with violent regimes to their cheerleading for gratuitously expensive military procurement to their stonewalling on behalf of the oil industry against any meaningful action to fight climate change.

So while it's well and good to criticize the Cons' corporatism, it may be time to move past targeting Bay Street above the similar battles taking place around the globe.