Week of October 21, 2004, Issue #470
FRONT
Wake up and smell the Avi
By CHRIS BOUTET
Just before he quit his job hosting CBC’s CounterSpin to make a documentary in South America last year, writer and political pundit Avi Lewis rounded up a CBC film crew for a series called “Globalization in Your Backyard,” in which he went from coast to coast conducting town hall debates in Canadian communities that had been touched by globalization and the policies our ruling bodies have in place that facilitate it. What Lewis found, he says, was a country that feels defeated, alienated from and unsupported by its own government, a country that knows things aren’t how they should be but that can see no viable alternatives. With this in mind, Lewis and his wife, Globe and Mail columnist Naomi Klein, went to Argentina looking for stories that would show Canadians that somewhere out there, there was still hope for a better world.
“I think that Canadians are really aware of and articulate about how globalization and the domestic policies that support it are changing the way that we work and the way that we live,” says Lewis, who is being brought into town by the Alberta Teachers’ Association this Friday (October 22) to speak on globalization, the future of public education and his documentary, entitled The Take, which will hit theatres early next month. “The problem is that everyone feels, as Margaret Thatcher famously said in the 1980s, ‘there is no alternative.’ So Naomi and I went off on a journey to try and find places where people are responding by building really concrete alternatives to the privatization and deregulation model of globalization which is causing factories to close, cutbacks, closing hospitals and clinics and schools, even in a time of unprecedented wealth in privileged countries like Canada—and of course, in developing countries it’s much more severe.”
What they found in Argentina, Lewis continues, is what they refer to in the film as “the new impatience,” a type of activism that eschews the usual placards and chants in favour of direct action and direct democracy, a sort of forceful taking back of the public institutions that were dismantled by a severely privatized economic model. “It’s a kind of activism that says, ‘We’re tired of going down to the legislature and shaking our fists and demanding that the government make promises that we know they won’t keep,’” Lewis explains. “We’ve given up on the hope that the political system is going to fix things because we keep seeing things getting better on one level for people at the top while those things in the public sphere like our healthcare system and education system are getting worse.
“And look at Argentina,” he continues. “What [former president] Carlos Menem did there in the late ’90s makes Ralph Klein look like a member of a socialist knitting circle. They privatized everything—even the street signs in Buenos Aires are brought to you by MasterCard; they just sold the state. The national oil company went from having 100,000 employees to 10,000 employees overnight, and the same happened in electricity and gas and railroads and universities and health. They provoked a crisis of incredible unemployment and then their currency melted down and they had this famous economic crash. And in the rubble of this failed model, these incredible experiments in grassroots democracy and community building started springing up.
“So our film is about this phenomenon of workers who had been casualties of the economic crash going back into their bankrupt businesses and basically taking them over, putting them back to work as co-operatives without bosses. They’ve taken over 200 different businesses: schools, health clinics, bakeries, printing presses, as well as industries like auto parts and steel. They’re trying to reclaim their local economies from a system that has failed them.”
According to Lewis, the Argentinean example is one that Canadians would do well to remember; while things may not seem as bad here as they are down south right now, one could argue that we’re heading in the same direction. “What happened in Argentina, and what I think is happening in Canada,” he says, “is a global attack on the public sphere. It’s been a major shift that in some places has happened very quickly; in Canada I think it’s happening in slow motion. The way that we built this country and our social safety net and our public institutions in the ’50s and ’60s was on the belief that one of the roles of government is to create the conditions in which we have a well-fed, well-housed, well-taught and civic-minded population. And the government had a really important role in assuring our future prosperity by building public institutions, supporting national industry, creating our universal public health system and old-age pensions; it meant an agreement in society that the government had a constructive role, a role in building things.
“And over the years,” he continues, “and particularly in the Reagan/Thatcher/Mulroney period in the ’80s, we’ve subtly shifted our perception of what government can do. Now, after 20 years of this rhetoric from right-wing politicians, we’ve sort of accepted that the role of government is just to get out of the way and leave everything to the market. And I think that we’re really seeing the cost of that. We made in Canada more money in the boom of the late ’90s than had ever been generated in a short period in country before, and yet the actual inequalities in society has increased, and the number of children still living in poverty somehow has remained unchanged. Something is wrong.”
Ultimately, however, Lewis stresses that the message of his talk and of his film is one of hope. “I’ve hosted over more than 500 debates over the last three years about Canadian society and our economic and governmental models, and in that time I’ve found that the single biggest barrier to making Canada the country that we want is the sense of inevitability about rising student debt, healthcare and poverty, despite all this economic growth. This is not the Canada that we want, but we look at it and we think there’s nothing we can do about it, there’s no alternative,” he concludes. “This is what they want us to think. We found that throughout making this film and travelling the world, there are alternatives—there are alternatives as long as there are communities that care. I feel hopeful when I see people doing something about our ever-shrinking public sphere, and I hope I can convey that hope to the people in attendance on Friday.” V
Global Challenges: An Evening with Avi Lewis
Presented by the Alberta Teachers’ Association • Fri, Oct 22 (7:30pm) • Barnett House (11010-142 St) • Free admission • Call 447-9400 for more information