Open letter to Canadian politicians

The war drums are beating and almost every day, I see some reference in the news to when the next election will be. Here is what I’d like to see and not see from politicians running for office. I’ll start with what I don’t want to see.

What I don‘t want

Odious character assassination: Don’t tell me the other guy is wrong bad and the cause of all the world’s problems. I will simply assume from that such statements that you have no ideas of your own.

What I want to see

?Policies: I want to see what your actual policies are, in detail, not vague statements. I also want to see them in a timely fashion, not just dropped on the public the day before the election so that most won’t have the time to read and think about them. Absent of such detailed policies, I will assume that what you plan to do is either so intellectually deficient or so morally repugnant that you dare not actually tell the electorate what you plan.

What I believe needs to be talked about

While everyone will have their own ideas about what the key issues are, I would like to see a real discussion of the following issues, which are all interrelated and one way or another deal with the economy and Canadian life. A detailed discussion of why these are important follows:

·????? Climate change

·????? Artificial Intelligence (AI), automation and robotics

·????? Wage stagnation

·????? Our aging population and immigration

?Climate change

?Climate change is real and is arguably the largest existential threat to our civilization that we currently face (National Academy of Sciences Research Council, 2010) (Stern, 2007) (Homer-Dixon, 2007) (IPCC Working Group 1, 2013). In their technical report to the Ontario government, the Climate Risk Institute and Dillon Consulting wrote:

Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time. Rising atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases are altering the earth’s climate, driving increases in global average temperatures and variability and extremes of weather. These changes are causing unprecedented impacts, transforming ecosystem structure and function, damaging infrastructure, disrupting business operations, and imposing harm to human health and well- being. Physical climate impacts and risks to human, natural and built systems in Ontario are driven by average annual warming temperature and extreme heat, drought, changes to intensity and frequency of precipitation and other climate variables. Avoiding or reducing the worst impacts of human-induced climate change requires action on parallel fronts: rapid and deep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and proactive and planned measures to adapt to current and imminent future changes. While there are adaptation efforts underway to address these impacts, the rapid pace of climate change requires large scale, accelerated action in all facets of our society and economy. (2023, p. xii)

?In terms of the economy, not acting would be far worse than acting. According to the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy (2011), costs to the Canadian economy were predicted to rise to about $5 billion per year by 2020. Given the extent of the damage caused by wildfires alone in the summer of 2023, I expect that the $5 billion figure is low.

What I want to know from politicians is exactly what they plan to do to mitigate the effects of climate change, with, for example, emission targets, details about alternate energy sources, etc. ?

Artificial Intelligence (AI), automation and robotics: Problems and benefits

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Problems with the adoption of AI, robotics and automation:

There has been a lot of nonsense written about the employment impacts, current and future, of AI, robotics and automation. Much of it comes from senior executives making soothing noises about there being no job losses while laying people off. This headline is a case in point:? “CNET says it’s a total coincidence it’s laying off humans after publishing AI-generated articles: Nothing to see here folks!” (Landymore, 2023) . However, we’ve known for a while now that people are being replaced by automation. For example, this is an exchange between a reporter and the US President during a press conference:

QUESTION: Mr. President, our Labor Department estimates that approximately 1.8 million persons holding jobs are replaced every year by machines. How urgent do you view this problem, automation?

?THE PRESIDENT: Well, it is a fact that we have to find, over a 10-year period, 25,000 new jobs every week to take care of those who are displaced by machines, and those who are coming into the labor market, so that this places a major burden upon our economy and on our society. It is one to which we will have to give a good deal of attention in the next decade. I regard it as a very serious problem.

‘If our economy is moving forward, we can absorb this 1.8 million, even though in particular industries we might get special structural unemployment. We have seen that in steel, we have seen it in coal, we may see it in other industries. But if our economy is progressing as we hope it will, then we can absorb a good many of these men and women. But I regard it as the major domestic challenge, really … ?to maintain full employment at a time when automation, of course, is replacing [workers]. (da Costa, 2017)

Here we have the US President acknowledging that jobs are indeed being lost to automation, in fact, lots of them. 1.8 million persons being replaced per year is a big number. The US would have to find 25,000 new jobs per week to keep up with these losses. But the problem is even worse than it sounds. The US President who said this was John F. Kennedy in 1962, and the problem has grown tremendously since then. Anyone who is saying that there will be no job losses due to AI, automation and robotics is either being disingenuous or outright lying. The current situation: “Up to 20 million manufacturing jobs around the world could be replaced by robots by 2030, according to analysis firm Oxford Economics” (Cellan-Jones, 2019). That’s just robots, AI is another factor entirely, and can be expected to affect 40% of jobs (Liang, 2024).

?What I want to hear is a discussion of is what plans will be in place to assist people who lose their jobs. There will be three main groups who will need help:

• People who can rapidly upgrade their skills to the new jobs.
• Where will they go to get this help, and what plans are being made?
• People who are starting so far back that upgrading is not really possible. Friedman and Mandelbaum (2011) give the story of a man in his early fifties who was laid off due to automation and took a two-year upgrading course. But the pace of change was so fast that his new skills were obsolete by the end of the training period. He took a second two-year course, but the same thing happened.
• How will we help people who cannot upgrade their skills quickly enough?
• Students in school or just out of school. “There is really no such thing as a low-end job anymore … If it were really routine, it would have been automated. Every two or three years the skilled thing you are doing is going to get scrapped. The question is whether you are going to scrap it and own the next job, or let someone else do that …” (Friedman & Mandelbaum, 2011, loc. 1573).
• Everyone with a job is going to have to upgrade their knowledge and skills on a regular basis. How will we make it possible and affordable for people??

Governments in general have been doing a poor job of planning for foreseeable problems. They like to wait until the problem is upon us before acting, at which time it’s too late and the actions taken are hasty and often ill-considered. This is a case where the crisis is already here but hasn’t reached its peak. Yet we see little or no discussion of this.

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Benefits of AI, Robotics and Automation:

From what I‘ve said above, it sounds like I’m opposed to the use of AI, robotics and automation, but I’m not at all opposed. There will be huge benefits from the proper adoption of these technologies, new jobs will in fact be created. As Evans notes (2023),

We should start by remembering that we’ve been automating work for 200 years. Every time we go through a wave of automation, whole classes of jobs go away, but new classes of jobs get created. There is frictional pain and dislocation in that process, and sometimes the new jobs go to different people in different places, but over time the total number of jobs doesn’t go down, and we have all become more prosperous. (p.1)

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In my comments above, I want us to be aware that the people who lose their jobs often won’t be the people who get the new jobs (Strauss, 2023). We need to plan ahead. Nonetheless, AI, robotics and automation is the way of the future (Deschamps, 2024) and for Canada’s economy to succeed, we need to encourage this as much as possible.

My question here is, what is your plan to encourage the adoption of these new technologies so that Canadian businesses can remain competitive and workers benefit?

Wage stagnation

?Frequent comments are made these days with reference to TV shows from the ‘50s through the ‘90s. These shows, for example The Honeymooners (‘50s) and The Simpsons (starting in 1989) depict a nuclear family able to afford to get by on a single income. These shows look quaint and out-of-date these days because this is no longer possible. In fact, many families are struggling to get by on two full-time salaries. A recent Pew Center report suggests that 59% of US parents have helped their adult children financially in 2023, and that among adults under age 25, 57% live with their parents (Carpenter, 2024). It appears to be similar in Canada. If the only way adult children can afford to live is with parental help, then effectively, parents are subsidizing businesses that are unwilling to pay people a living wage.

Part of the problem here is wage stagnation, which has been going on in North America since the 1970s. Figure 1 shows the Canadian average and median incomes in 2021 constant dollars.

Figure 2 shows similar data from the US, but also shows the decoupling of worker pay from productivity–being more productive no longer provided economic benefits to US workers.

Starting in the ‘90s, globalization was heralded as the solution to sustained economic growth. However, the benefits of globalization have been anything but equally distributed. As Figures 1 and 2 show, wages have remained stagnant. However, inflation, even at low levels, has eroded the buying power of those wages and people are now left barely able to get by in many cases. Ross and Bateman (2020) comment that high employment rates are good only if the jobs pay a living wage. Meanwhile, between 1973 and 2005, median US income levels of the average family rose by 28% (less than inflation), that of the top one percent rose by 160% and of the top 1/10th of one percent income rose by 350% (Nicholson, 2008). This is why Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum has suggested that a challenge for the world will be, “… to reform market capitalism, and to restore the compact between business and society” (2017). Elsewhere, Schwab comments,

Unless public- and private-sector leaders assure citizens that they are executing credible strategies to improve peoples' lives, social unrest, mass migration, and violent extremism could intensify, thus creating risks for countries at all stages of development. It is crucial that people are secure in the belief that they can engage in meaningful work to support themselves and their families, but what happens if there is insufficient demand for labour, or it the skills available no longer match the demand? (2016, loc. 654)

New research indicates that automation is one factor responsible for the disparity in income (Dizikes, 2023). He notes, “Since 1980 … they estimate that automation has reduced the wages of men without a high school degree by 8.8 percent and women without a high school degree by 2.3 percent, adjusted for inflation” (ibid.)

What is your plan to reverse wage stagnation and create credible strategies to improve people’s lives??

Our aging population and immigration

Aging population:

Figure 3 shows the profile of Canada’s population at three different periods: 1900, 1970 and (projected) 2025 (Statistics Canada, 2022).

As can be seen, the population profile has changed over time. In 1900, younger people far outnumbered older people. Lack of antibiotics, poor nutrition and other causes meant people died younger. By 1970, this had started to change and as well, we began to see the effects of the post-WWII baby boom, creating the bulge at the bottom. By 2025, we can see that the bulge remains, and is larger than the number of young people. There are two reasons that this is of concern:?First, we have a large, aging population who are increasingly likely to become disabled in a number of ways (e.g., senile dementia) and we are unprepared for this (Sivananthan, 2024). Sylvestre-Williams (2024)reports that this is putting a huge burden on the children of the aging parents, and they often have to take time off work to care for them. The replacement costs in hours lost to business?from this care is over $97 billion; people are spending 5.7 billion unpaid hours each year on caregiving; government-run long-term care runs to over $1900/month for the lowest cost homes; and the wait list in Ontario for a place in long-term care home is 30,000-40,000 people long. This is going to get worse.

How are we preparing for this in terms of new long-term care spaces, support for people caring for parents whether in place or in the children’s homes?

?The second piece of the aging problem is that we don’t have enough young people to support the social programs we have committed to for older people (pensions, medical care, etc.) Hence, we need to discuss immigration.

Immigration:

One way to get enough young people to support the aging population is to increase immigration. I believe that this is one of the primary reasons for the current efforts to promote immigration to Canada. ?Recently, a report from Conestoga College appears to support this position. The report references the baby deficit, and said that, “… the prosperity of the local communities is threatened by the pressure on the labour supply — a result of a declining birthrate and an aging workforce …” (Keung, 2024). However, there are problems.

I formerly taught at the City Adult Learning Centre in Toronto, and we had a large immigrant population. One thing that became very clear to me was that immigrating to Canada in the modern world is vastly different than in the past. Higher education levels are required to find jobs, computer skills are expected, as is language facility. New immigrants need support to get these so that they can function effectively in Canada’s labour market. Promoting immigration is one thing; providing them the required supports is another, and neglected, part of this.

What supports is your party planning to enable new immigrants to participate fully in Canada’s labour market?

But with new immigrants, we come back to wage stagnation and the erosion of income from inflation. Because of the difficulties of finding jobs, housing and a decent income to support a family, we are now experiencing a brain drain. As Watt puts it (2024),? “…our economy [is] suffering from an alarming brain drain with many high-skilled immigrants picking up their bags and turning around shortly after arriving.” We have been, for years, relying on the inherent superiority of the North American economy to entice immigrants to come and live in Canada. At present, however, they are finding that Canada is not making them better off than before and they are leaving. In fact, Lewchuk et al. (2013, p. 12) report that, “The Canadian economy today has an income profile comparable to what it was in the 1920s"–and that was in 2013. It‘s worse now. The rest of the world has been catching up, but we’ve been sliding backwards, except for the highest income brackets.

What policies will your party enact to enable immigrants to lead better lives in Canada and therefore stay here?

Interrelations

At the beginning, I said that all of the things I want talked about were interrelated, and I want to finish by making that explicit. Fixing things is going to take money. Climate Change, as evidenced by the wildfires in the summer of 2023, is horribly expensive and we need to mitigate it for that reason if no other, and there are many other good reasons. Likewise, AI, robotics and automation possess great promise for stimulating the economy and increasing prosperity, health and providing other benefits. But the wealth gains from this, as noted by Schwab (2017) have to be shared out more equally and Canadian political leaders need to work towards this. Ending wage stagnation and providing supports to those whose lives are disrupted by these changes will go a long way to keep immigrants here as well, something that is essential for supporting the aging population. It is because of these interrelations that we need to have these discussions.

In brief, the issues and the questions

• Climate change
• What I want to know from politicians is exactly what they plan to do to mitigate the effects of climate change, with, for example, emission targets, details about alternate energy sources, etc. ?
• Artificial Intelligence (AI), automation and robotics

What I want to hear is a discussion of is what plans will be in place to assist people who lose their jobs.

• People who can rapidly upgrade their skills to the new jobs. Where will they go to get this help, and what plans are being made?
• People who are starting so far back that upgrading is not really possible. How will we help people who cannot upgrade their skills quickly enough?
• People out of school. Everyone with a job is going to have to upgrade their knowledge and skills on a regular basis. How will we make it possible and affordable for people to do so?
• Adopting AI, robotics and automation. My question here is, what is your plan to encourage the adoption of these new technologies so that Canadian businesses can remain competitive and workers benefit?
• Wage stagnation
• What is your plan to reverse wage stagnation and create credible strategies to improve people’s lives?
• Our aging population and immigration
• How are we preparing for the aging population in terms of new long-term care spaces, support for adult children caring for parents, whether in place or in the children’s homes?
• What supports is your party planning to enable new immigrants to participate fully in Canada’s labour market?
• What policies will your party enact to enable immigrants to lead better lives in Canada and therefore stay here?

References

Carpenter, J. (2024, 25 Jan., 2024). Well into adulthood and still getting money from their parents. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from https://advisorstream.com/read/well-into-adulthood-and-still-getting-money-from-their-parents/?c=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJub2RlX2lkIjoxMTUyMSwicHJldmlldyI6dHJ1ZSwiY29tbV9pZCI6OTMzMjY1NSwiZGVzdF9pZCI6bnVsbCwicmVhZGVyX2lkIjpudWxsLCJwZXJzb25hX3ByZXZpZXciOmZhbHNlfQ.Y8sTfE17qJeFlDKYf05mEqNFMMPb-Pv3L0Redg6fyBI

Cellan-Jones, R. (2019, 26 June). Robots ‘to replace up to 20 million factory jobs’ by 2030. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48760799?ns_source=facebook&ns_mchannel=social&ns_campaign=bbcnews&ocid=socialflow_facebook&fbclid=IwAR0nirF7_SELDq6b5qHkWe9YNuHJF4hf_GoQxQkG5FplDvVbb2WpXTHtYEw

Climate Risk Institute (CDRI), & Dillion Consulting Ltd. (2023). Ontario Provincial Climate Change Impact Assessment Technical Report. Retrieved from Ontario: https://www.ontario.ca/files/2023-08/mecp-ontario-provincial-climate-change-impact-assessment-en-2023-08-17.pdf

da Costa, P. N. (2017, 17 Jul.). We’ve been worried about technology stealing jobs for 200 years but one solution is plain to see. Business Insider. Retrieved from https://www.businessinsider.com/retraining-solution-to-robots-automation-2017-7

Deschamps, T. (2024, 10 Jan., 2024). AI skills in demand as companies develop 2024 hiring plans for Canada. Toronto Star. Retrieved from https://www.thestar.com/business/ai-skills-in-demand-as-companies-develop-2024-hiring-plans-for-canada/article_2a950577-21e5-5b60-876d-3da0b1f99d8e.html

Dizikes, P. (2023, 14 Jan.). New MIT research indicateds that automation is responsible for income inequality. SciTechDaily. Retrieved from https://scitechdaily.com/new-mit-research-indicates-that-automation-is-responsible-for-income-inequality/

Evans, B. (2023, 2 July). AI and the automation of work [Newsletter about AI and automation].? Retrieved from https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2023/7/2/working-with-ai

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Landymore, F. (2023, 3 Mar.). CNET says it’s a total coincidence it’s laying off humans after publishing AI-generated articles: Nothing to see here folks! The_Byte. Retrieved from https://futurism.com/the-byte/cnet-coincidence-laying-off-humans-ai

Lewchuk, W., Lefleche, M., Dyson, D., Goldring, L., Meisner, A., Procyk, S., . . . Vrankulj, S. (2013). It's more than poverty: Employment precarity and household well-being. Retrieved from https://www.unitedwaytoronto.com/whatWeDo/reports/PEPSO.php

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Sivananthan, S. (2024, 21 Jan., 2024). Canada is not prepared to deal with onslaught of dementia patients.Toronto Star. Retrieved from https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/canada-is-not-prepared-to-deal-with-onslaught-of-dementia-patients/article_5c97432e-b6e9-11ee-9e34-f329cd9ae36a.html

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Statistics Canada. (2024, 7 Feb.,? 2024). Table 11-10-0239-01? Income of individuals by age group, sex and income source, Canada, provinces and selected census metropolitan areas. Data. Retrieved from https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1110023901&pickMembers%5B0%5D=1.1&pickMembers%5B1%5D=2.3&pickMembers%5B2%5D=3.1&pickMembers%5B3%5D=4.3&cubeTimeFrame.startYear=1976&cubeTimeFrame.endYear=2021&referencePeriods=19760101%2C20210101

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Strauss, D. (2023, 28 Mar.). Generative AI set to affect 300 million jobs across major economies. ars technica. Retrieved from https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/generative-ai-set-to-affect-300-million-jobs-across-major-economies/

Sylvestre-Williams, R. (2024, 18 Feb., 2024). More of us are becoming unpaid caregivers to our aging parents. Here's how to prepare for and navigate the crushing costs. Toroto Star. Retrieved from https://www.thestar.com/business/personal-finance/more-of-us-are-becoming-unpaid-caregivers-to-our-aging-parents-heres-how-to-prepare/article_e3ea672e-c1d5-11ee-818f-cf5b6aca60d3.html

Watt, J. (2024, 11 Feb., 2024). To compete with Donald Trump, Canada needs a new political tool box.Toronto Star. Retrieved from https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/to-compete-with-donald-trump-canada-needs-a-new-political-tool-box/article_ac5443e6-c759-11ee-b2ec-cb2942793d36.html

White, G. B. (2015, 25 Feb.). Why the gap between worker pay and productivity is so problematic. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/02/why-the-gap-between-worker-pay-and-productivity-is-so-problematic/385931/

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Disclaimer:

The views expressed here are my own and not the official views of any organization with which I am associated.