For many of us, the start of a new year focuses our minds on goals and plans for the future. It’s a time for a fresh start, a time when we get around to tackling projects that we keep putting off even though we know they’re important for our financial or personal wellbeing.
That same mindset should be adopted by our government as well. With the worst of the pandemic firmly behind us, now is the time to finally start solving some of the key problems that have hobbled our economy and held back our potential as a country.
But where do we begin? We’re confronted by a number of seemingly insurmountable problems: Skyrocketing debt. Falling living standards. A country that’s governed by a suffocating and bloated bureaucracy. An unfair and overly complicated tax system. Rising rates of childhood obesity and disease.
These are some of what I would describe as the critical issues facing Canadians today. Together, they represent a grave threat to our future health and prosperity.
These problems have an enormous bearing on all of our lives, especially the lives of young Canadians. The problems are also all inter-related. Consider, for example, two of those core issues: the national debt and the health and wellbeing of Canadians. The interest we’re paying on our national debt each year is about two-thirds of what the government annually spends on health care. Imagine how many new and badly needed hospitals we could build with the $27 billion per year that gets eaten up by interest payments on the debt? Or imagine how just a fraction of that amount could ensure that every Canadian child never again goes to school hungry by providing a healthy, nutritious meal for them.
But the most important issue is our economy. It is ultimately what drives so many aspects of our lives and virtually every sphere of government activity — from funding for the arts and our military to social assistance for seniors and financial support for daycare and child benefits. That’s why we need to realize that if our economy doesn’t function, nothing else will.
But at the same time, a growing number of Canadians believe that our current economic system no longer functions for the benefit of all citizens and is tilted in favour of the rich. There is a growing divide between the wealthy and the working class, and a sense that the capitalist system is broken, with more money being held by fewer and fewer people. As a result, the hunger to create a fairer, more equitable and sustainable society has never been greater.
And while our society enjoys strong protections for human rights and freedoms, those rights need to be fortified by economic rights, including the right of workers to accumulate wealth through profit sharing. At the same time, we have to fight to preserve free enterprise, because without free enterprise, there is no free society.
Unless we act, in the year ahead we’ll continue to see headlines about financial struggles for a growing number of Canadians, a sputtering economy and deteriorating health care.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. In an age of self-driving cars, space travel and artificial intelligence, in a country blessed with incredible natural resources, there is no reason why we cannot build a better country and enjoy a better future.
The following are what I believe to be the core issues we need to confront if we want to have a healthy and prosperous society:
-Create a healthy environment for our children
-Restore our manufacturing sector to boost living standards
-Pay down our national debt
-Slash regulations and red tape
-Take the chains off small business
-Give Canadian workers a share of the profits they help produce
-Create a simple tax system that every Canadian can understand
I believe most Canadians would come together in support of a set of solutions that would create a healthier and more prosperous society.
In the weeks ahead, I’ll explore each of the issues and put forward simple, common-sense solutions informed by my many years of experience as a business owner and entrepreneur.
Addressing even just one of these problems will put us on the path to increased prosperity and well-being. Tackling all of them at the same time will usher in an economic boom that will create greater wealth and opportunity than our country has ever known.