Perhaps that is the lesson this pandemic is teaching us; Look to our own needs

BY STEVEN KASZAB

North American businesses are still reaching out to importers from Asia and elsewhere. Many North Americans allow greed to feed their conscience, instead of moral justice for our dying local businesses. Manufacturing will move to high tech or specialty stuff, or domestically made super cheap items. Canada will be a service industry and/or its usual resource-based colony to other nations.

We feed China with lower costing resource-based materials and then rely upon these firms for cheap products, not North American based, and certainly not long lasting. Lower prices for lower grade items, and we continue to buy them without thought to our local businesses, neighbours or future generations.

We must study what we can manufacture that is unique to North America, something that Asia cannot easily steal and imitate. When you do not have the financial resources or time to study such things, as the pressures of payroll, paying the bills continually grow upon your shoulders it seems like an unbearable struggle. A future is all we are looking for future generations and ourselves. We seem to be losing sight of that light of accomplishment we used to see years ago. The light is dimmer, and certainly does not speak of a better life, but of a continual struggle within our lives.

Many of Canada’s leading manufacturers are pawns to those who have placed us in this situation. The financial investments come from firms on Wall Street and Bay Street, all beholden to unnamed firms out of Asia, the EU and beyond.

A manufacturing firm of metal components pre 2019 became a major source of personal protective products for home and corporate use. They did not receive their financial seed money from a bank, but from a firm in Shanghai. This firm made great connections within the Federal and Provincial governments. The metal components firm used to make parts for Canada’s Military Armored Vehicle Program.

Problems of security and suspicious intentions will certainly abound once our overworked security apparatus notices this flaw. Money is hard to find, and our governments will jump at any avenue of financial fulfilment.

Gas prices escalate constantly. The petroleum/energy firms blame the cost’s increases on green gas initiatives, while the government points to obvious corporate profiteering. We try to figure out how our employees will afford gas so they can go to work, and how we can support escalating logistics and trucking costs. Everything goes downhill until you and I, the consumer, decide to buy something, or not.

Developers are building industrial buildings at a fast pace these days, hoping that businesses will expand, or new foreign firms will reside in them. The cost of money is low, fuelling this crazy growth, as it does the housing market, but I feel certain the interest rates will increase this year, as inflation is making daily life difficult for all.

The Americas are seen in five parts:

• Canada
• America & Mexico
• Central America
• Latin America
• The Caribbean

Four of these regions are colonies for the largest and most wealthy of them all, America. It seems we all work to feed the unending consumption of America. Without this massive market we would have to rearrange our way of doing business, devising ways to centre our attention upon “our” needs, our local economies.

Perhaps that is the lesson this pandemic is teaching us; look to our own needs, our own people and communities. After all, Asia (China) is doing that. They carry out business often at a monetary loss in order to maintain their economy for their massive population, and to continue a form of normality within their communities. People are happy when they are fed, clothed, employed and promised a better future.

Who is stronger? Our local economy, built for our neighbour’s benefit, or economic systems built to continually grow and maintain itself for that single purpose, growth.

We cannot get away from the effects of global economic influences, but we can get some form of control locally that is manageable and based upon a set of values that is centred upon community benefit. Our expectations may need to be revised, but our wants and desires are not what make us. We are more than that.