Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Mitchell Anderson writes that personal debt may be the most important hidden issue in Canada's federal election:

The reason Canada cannot act in a more moral manner might lie in ballooning amounts of household debt. Canadians now owe an eye-watering $2.2 trillion or 178 per cent of disposable income — a measure that has doubled in the last 20 years. Personal bills now amount to more than our entire GDP, making us the most indebted citizenry in the G20 and fourth highest in the world.

Over half of Canadians report they are only $200 per month away from insolvency.

How can you care about climate change or global stability when your credit cards are maxed out or you are dodging debt collectors? Owing vast amounts of money seems now a defining Canadian characteristic and is increasingly enabled by indulgent political leaders.
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If Canada has a financial moral injury, it is largely self-inflicted. No one forced consumers to incur such massive personal debts for the trappings of a detached house and everything that goes in it. Canadians spend $2 billion every year on lawn mowers and $85 billion on new vehicles.

What is non-consensual, however, is the pervasive pressure to borrow. Consumers are bombarded with ads from financial institutions and credit card companies encouraging them to borrow ever more. Aggressive marketing by mainstream and B-list lenders targets those least able to carry more credit. If civilization collapses due to inaction on climate change, the marketing departments of major banks should reflect on their contribution to that apocalyptic outcome.

All this debt might seem more rational if it made people happy, but evidence suggests the opposite is true. Forty-eight per cent of Canadians fret that they are on the edge on insolvency. Financial worries are the number one source of stress.

Personal debt is the elephant in the room of Canadian public policy. Decades of cheap money have undermined our national character and now prevents us from being a more principled nation. Canada remains an incredibly compassionate country but in order to meet the moral challenges of the coming century, we need to ditch our debt.

- And while Aaron Wherry takes note of the atmosphere of anxiety around the election campaign, Ed Finn rightly challenges the claim that Canada lacks the resources to address the most prominent stressors facing voters.

- Meanwhile, Health Providers Against Poverty offers (PDF) its assessment of the health platforms of Canada's federal parties.

- Larissa Atkinson examines the impact of secretive privatization schemes in building and renovating health infrastructure. And David Robertson offers ten reasons to oppose the development of Toronto's eastern waterfront as a corporate-controlled, privacy-free "smart city".

 - Finally, Yanis Varoufakis and David Alder argue that a foreseeable recession should be treated as the impetus for a Green New Deal.