a healthy economy requires population growth

[CRCP]

Members comments to follow.

[Rick Shea]

Last year, Vancouver was voted the most livable city in the world. Vancouver has experienced significant population growth, and still continues to grow at above the national average rate.

The results:

Housing costs have spiralled beyond the reach of middle-income individuals and families,
non-market housing for Vancouver’s most marginalized residents has been evaporating, and
homelessness has more than doubled in recent years. Housing affordability issues are also
forcing low-income families to congregate in neighbourhoods that, at best, lack the features
and amenities that benefit and support children and parents and, at worst, place children at
risk on many dimensions.

Despite Vancouver's economy being described as "robust" over the past two years

The benefits of economic growth in Vancouver have not been shared by all citizens. Rises in
income have been increasingly concentrated among the wealthiest echelons of Vancouverites,
escalating the disparity of incomes between rich and poor. Between 1991 and 2001, only the
wealthiest 5% of families enjoyed any increase in real income; the remaining 95% experienced a
decrease, and over half of individuals and families experienced a decrease of at least 20%. In
addition, the income gap for families grew from 7.8 to 12.8, an increase more than double that in
Canada as a whole. The richest 10% of families had incomes of $127,000
compared to $9,900 for the poorest 10% of families. Among unattached individuals, the income
gap grew by 100% over the 10-year period, as compared with an average of 33% among other
large cities.

And this is what we want for Kelowna? This is healthy?

Source: Canadian Policy Research Networks "Social Sustainability in Vancouver," available at www.cprn.org/en/doc.cfm?doc=1538

[Rick Shea]

What’s up with the economy?

We keep hearing “you can’t do this, you can’t do that” because it might hurt the economy. We can’t live up to Kyoto because it might hurt our economy. We can’t stop population growth because it might hurt the economy. Grow or die. The economy constantly seems to teeter on the brink of illness, and even one small act can put it to bed with a high white cell count and a thermometer, waiting feverishly for the Doctors of economics to make a house call.

The ministrations of those doctors keep changing, because the patient never really recovers: privatization, globalization, free trade, deregulation, corporate mergers, consumerism – like a long term junkie, the economy needs constant fixes and different cures just to keep going.

The economy has made us many promises, and even kept a few of them. Thus, we can now download the latest cool ringtones and videos right to our cellphones, safe from the poverty, illiteracy, disease, pollution, and wars around us. We can live in our trophy houses and drive our trophy automobiles; securely tucked away from the homeless, the refugees, and the ecological disasters around us, and smugly convinced that having more toys somehow makes us and our ways superior. Ironically, as individuals, we need increasingly large doses of money just to keep going, but wealth continues to be concentrated and controlled by a very few, and economic disparity increases daily.

So we worry about the economy. We obsessively check the doctors’ charts daily - the Dow Jones average, the dollar’s exchange rate, the price of housing.

And, in our worry, we have lost sight of the fact that we and our economy are only part of a larger body called Earth. We have lost sight of the fact that, as our economy increases in scale, requiring more energy and resources as inputs and producing more wastes as outputs, those resources must come from somewhere and those wastes must go somewhere. We are clearly at a point where we are threatening the very health of the Earth by using resources and creating waste at an unsustainable level. Without a healthy Earth, we will not survive, and our economy will be a ghostly irrelevancy. The high priests of technology will be powerless to do anything but administer the last rites.

A significant and prolonged downturn in the economy is called a depression. It is accompanied by hardship and suffering, but people seem to find ways to survive.

A significant and prolonged downturn in the environment is called a catastrophe, and leads to extinction.

Yet neither is inevitable if we listen to the alternative practitioners – the ones who call for gradually scaling back economic activity and seriously changing our ways.

Can we kick our self-serving habits, or are we too addicted to stop? Are we willing to continue to trade short term gain for long term pain? If we continue as we are, the fate of the economy will be out of our hands,