April 07, 2004
By Brian Goodman

First, I have to say that the discussion board on this web site is providing me with some education that I may not have otherwise received and I'm happy that people are taking the time to write. So to stay on topic for a second before I completely go off on a tangent, here are a few comments I have about the war in Iraq.

Sometimes you do have to accept the oxymoron "fighting for peace". Put Mohandos Gandhi or Martin Luther King and their strategy of non-violent protest in the place of Winston Churchill in the Second World War and I would be writing and you would be reading this article in German. There is a time and a place for everything.

Mind you, it's been years since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and Iran so it does make you wonder what motivated George Bush to go to war. And there have been no WMD's found in the country so that was likely no more than an excuse. I hope that it was to put an end to the rape and torture camps and the human rights abuses suffered by Iraqis. But then why doesn't he invade the Congo?

So is "fighting for peace" justified in this instance? Only time will tell. When will the deaths of Americans and Iraqis (like the 12 coalition marines and 30 Iraqis yesterday) become too much to bear and the US decides to pull out its forces? How much oil are the Americans going to suck out of Iraq once the dust settles? I think that that will determine what Bush's intentions were.

But that's for another article. This one's about suggestions. My suggestions and I hope your suggestions. We can complain (and I have) about Canada's government as much as we want but if we offer no solutions as to how to improve it, we are getting nowhere. So here's one of mine and I hope to get your feedback on it and to hear some of yours.

I've been thinking about the federal budget that just came down last week. I've been wondering if the money's being well spent. If the organizations that should receive funding are getting it. If the measures taken by the federal government are enough to improve the economy and get more people working.

So I looked at the numbers. $187.2 billion total revenues in 2004-2005, from corporate, income, property and other sorts of tax. So the government takes this money and spends it to benefit the taxpayers that come up with it. $2 billion right now for health care, $7 billion in GST relief for municipalities over the next 10 years, $250 million for Canada's troops in Afghanistan.

Then I started to think, what does this really mean? Who really looks at these numbers and makes a judgement on whether our best interests are being served? Who really understands these figures? Besides bankers and accountants?

So I have a suggestion. What if the government still comes up with its federal budget? Let the bankers, and speculators, and economists have their fun. But what if the government also comes up with a budget that tells us which of our resources are being consumed by government and corporate actions? How many trees, how much water, how much oil, etc. And what effect these actions are having on the environment.

So what would this budget tell us? It would tell us the real consequences of our actions. It would tell us how and how much of our resources are being used. It would give us a framework to use to set goals for preservation of our resources and environment.

You can look at things like inflation, and interest rates, and exchange rates, and revenues, and expenses, and so on. But it doesn't really tell you anything at all. These are numbers. They are figments of our imagination, a series of 1's and 0's on somebody's hard drive. They are the tools that tell us how to divy up our resources. But they are not our resources, which is, ultimately, all that we have.

It is time that we start to look at our lives in real terms. To understand that there are ramifications for hyper-consumerism.

Of course, there are problems. It is difficult to determine amounts of available resources. We may find another water aquifer tomorrow or another oil patch the next day. But why not round up some scientists, let them work together to come up with some kind of estimates of what we have left? And then round up some business people who know which companies and countries have been buying what? And then lock them all in a room until they can come up with some understandable literature on what's being used for what purpose and how much what we have left can be expected to last.

We can then look at things like landfill usage and pollution and include that in the budget or come up with another budget to deal with environmental degradation. And then we can release this budget (or these budgets) with the same or more fanfare than the jumble of numbers called the Federal Budget is released with each spring. At the very least we will have tangible proof that something has to be done.

Anyway, whether this article is a turning point in Canadian governance or some loon's rant is really irrelevant. Because as long as it gets us thinking about positive alternatives to our current system or motivates you to write some down that you have already thought of, it will have been worth writing. I hope to hear from you soon.