CharityVillage® Research: Canada turns a corner --- part three: looking ahead

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Canada turns a corner --- part three: looking ahead
by Doug Jamieson
September 23, 1996; CharityVillage NewsWeek
This is the third instalment of a three-part series about the major, and disruptive changes underway in Canadian society as we approach the millennium. Part One, The Road To Here, and Part Two, Grasping the New Reality, are available.
Part Three: Looking Ahead
The experts are stymied. Most of the high profile economists attached to the banks and other financial organizations have been predicting an upturn for the past couple of years. Clearly, they are perplexed that growth in the overall Canadian economy continues to be virtually static, currently growing at 1.2 per cent annually, according to Statistics Canada. U.S. growth, by contrast, is at four times the Canadian rate. In the second quarter of 1996, Canadian consumer spending increased by a paltry 0.1 per cent.
Could they be applying economic models that were developed for the industrial era and are no longer relevant for the information age? Recently, they cheered a current account surplus (more money flowing into the country than flowed out), after 12 years of deficits, as yet another harbinger of good times.
Most of the improvement, however, was in merchandise, with exports (led by automobiles to the hot U.S. market) zooming while Canadians purchased fewer imported goods. When you're out of work or concerned about your financial security, you're less likely to buy expensive, foreign products. Economists call this "anecdotal evidence." The rest of us call it living within our means.
It seems clear that we're in a period of major adjustment to a new type of economy, and that this adjustment is wrenching for many of us. While predicting the future is precarious at best, a fuzzy picture is beginning to emerge. It appears to include:
A radical restructuring of the world of work.

"Having a job" is giving way to "providing a service". It's more than just semantics. It's an entirely new way of thinking about yourself as a producer of goods or services in the context of the economy. Long term employment relationships with a single employer are being supplanted by short-term contracts with multiple "clients".

Technology continues to replace humans in the traditional white- and blue-collar brackets. The pay for low- and medium-skilled work is under pressure, as the supply of labour exceeds demand by larger and larger margins. Jobshift by William Bridges, The End of Work by Jeremy Rifkin, and The Empty Raincoat by Charles Handy are among recent books attempting to help us understand these shifts.

High-skilled techno-jobs, on the other hand, are exploding in numbers, outstripping the supply of qualified (mostly young) people, who can demand relatively large paycheques and other perks . For example, virtually all graduates of the computer graphics and animation programs from Ontario's Sheridan College are immediately snapped up by the North American entertainment industry. Companies like Microsoft Corporation and Silicon Graphics grow by unimaginable leaps and bounds. The Internet is also creating a wave of specialized job growth. If you know your way around C++, Java, Macromedia Director and DBMS, opportunities abound.

A dramatically revised role for government in the economy.

Throughout modern times, we have consistently maintained a larger, more intrusive presence for governments in our society and economy than have the Americans.

The concept of the crown corporation, initially a device for getting things done in the urgency of wartime, encompassed at its peak a large collection of major players in our most important industries. Compared with the Yanks, Canadians have been willing to give government a long leash in implementing industrial strategy, picking future economic winners and losers. These concepts have been replaced by a move to privatization, self-regulation, reduced protection (Mulroney's free trade), and government as international salesman for industry (Chretien's Team Canada) --- altogether a degree of laissez faire capitalism unseen in Canada since World War II.

A dramatically reduced role for government in society.

All around us, we see government's withdrawal from areas that Canadians have traditionally viewed as legitimate public sector roles. As does the hangman's noose, bankruptcy has the ability to "marvellously concentrate the mind," and all governments now clearly understand that the previous levels of expenditure can not be sustained. Inevitably and regretably, in the rush to fiscal prudence, some wrong choices will be made, with unintended consequences that will come back to haunt us in ways we can not yet understand.

Nonetheless, governments have generally received a public mandate to balance the books, and that initiative proceeds apace. As a consequence, the fundraising profession is one of the hottest career growth areas. For evidence of that, one need only visit our own CharityVillage Career Centre.

A blurring of the traditional roles of the private, public and nonprofit sectors.

In conjunction with the retreat of government, we are seeing the early signs of a coming proliferation of businesses to provide services formerly in the government domain. This direct transfer of roles to the private sector is accompanied by an increase in indirect corporate involvement, through sponsorships, partnerships, and joint marketing arrangements involving companies, governments, quasi-government institutions and nonprofit organizations.

Meanwhile, nonprofit organizations, including registered charities, are spinning off commercial enterprises that compete head-on with tax-paying businesses in the private sector, while for-profit corporations evolve creative new hybrid structures that include nonprofit components, in order to "do well by doing good" while reducing their tax bills. This blurring of the lines that divide the three sectors has the potential to massively change the way services are delivered, and perhaps to redefine the nature of philanthropy and voluntarism. Some, like Jeremy Rifkin, think the "third sector" (nonprofit organizations) can be a vehicle for expanding employment opportunities, although it's difficult to see how that could be sustained without ongoing taxpayer support, which is at odds with the current trend to reduced government funding.
So, where does that put us?

It seems to put us amid a major misalignment between the skill sets in much of our workforce and the requirements of the new industries of the information age. This misalignment won't likely be fully resolved until an entire inappropriately-skilled generation passes on during the next thirty years or so. Most attempts to retrain this group for the new economy are likely to be unsatisfactory, even counter-productive as scarce resources are invested in make-training programs that do little more than raise unrealistic expectations.

It seems to suggest that we had all better get much more entrepreneurial very quickly. Each of us must clearly identify which products or services we are capable of providing competently, and we must learn to market those capabilities effectively, either to a series of organizations in all three sectors, or directly to end users. In many cases, this will involve the creation of new micro-businesses, often home-based and using advanced technology to compete with the big guys.

It seems to require us to shed the notion that life is a progression through a series of discrete boxes --- childhood, education, work life, retirement --- and to embrace concepts such as lifelong learning, internship, mixing volunteer and paid employment, productive retirement, and so on.

It seems to mean that, in the face of generally declining incomes, we will also be stuck with more of the bill for services that have been provided free or that have been heavily subsidized by the taxpayer. Healthcare and old age security are likely to be among these. That means our expectations with regard to retirement lifestyles will, in many cases, require serious revision.

It seems to indicate that many of the social services currently delivered by charities and other nonprofit organizations will be in high demand, as they are asked to fill the vacuum created by governments' withdrawal. Many, perhaps most, of these services have a high labour content --- computers don't do hand-holding, applauding, comforting, encouraging, meal-serving, reassuring, listening, therapy-giving, motivating, coaching, counselling, mentoring, tutoring and thousands of other important, individualized people things very well. That, in combination with an aging population, suggests that the third sector may indeed provide worthwhile employment for many of those with the right skills and inclinations.

It seems to require that we find ways to provide many people with satisfying activity, other than work as it has been traditionally defined. How will people cope with an insufficient supply of work and its accompanying self-esteem, creative opportunity, social interaction and financial security? In North America, our self-definition and our sense of self-worth as a member of society is bound up with our work. Some will start a business. Some will turn to drugs and crime. Some to gambling, or the Internet. Increased family violence is already a by-product of high unemployment levels.

Can we divert some of this surplus skill and energy to positive enterprise through nonprofit and multi-sector initiatives? How can technology help with this?

It seems to mean that we must be open to organizational experimentation and the development of new hybrid bi-sector and tri-sector structures that focus resources on delivering the services that society needs. To do that we must overcome long-held suspicions on all sides.

For example, the nonprofit sector must overcome its suspicion that private enterprise cares only about profits, and not at all about the good of society. This is patently incorrect, because societal turmoil is bad for business. It must also stop proclaiming that government has become the heartless servant of industry, and the enemy of the weak and the poor. Government must always operate within its political mandate, and act as an expression of the public will which, presently, supports deficit reduction and fiscal prudence.

The private sector must learn that the nonprofit sector is not exclusively populated with leftist bleeding hearts who couldn't balance their savings accounts. Volunteers and donors represent all economic persuasions, social strata and motivations, and they do much good work that benefits the private sector, directly and indirectly. It must also revise its view of government as an undisciplined, profligate, wealth redistribution mechanism, with an anti-business bias and inadequate planning and management skills. Government is not a business, and it can not be run like a business. It is a socio-political construction, tasked to introduce order, balance and justice where disorder, imbalance and injustice operate against the best interests of the majority, as well as to maintain services that enable the society to function.

Business must also be open to trying new approaches, such as work-sharing and limits on overtime, that may help spread the available work to more people. People are, after all, customers. Without customers, businesses can not thrive. Government, for its part, must help to provide a climate that encourages the other sectors to innovate and strive for optimum results. To do this, it must know its limits, and avoid undertaking functions best performed elsewhere. It is to be hoped that new legislation will more often be enabling than controlling, and that regulation will be applied only where necessary.

In Summary

The new Canada, for we appear to be inventing a new Canada quite distinct from the old one, is a glass both half empty and half full.

It is being emptied of many of the social safety nets that have made us a somewhat kinder, gentler society than our neighbours to the south. Each of us will make our own judgements about this, and will resist or applaud accordingly. We must await the verdict of history, but it's safe to say that there will be many negative consequences. Some will be disastrous.

On the other hand, it is being filled with opportunities to rise above divisiveness and stubborn intolerance, to invent new solutions, to help each other survive, cope and contribute. This is the time of testing for a Baby Boom Generation that was born and prospered in affluent times, escaped war and depression, and knew little of hardship. It has a responsibility to its elders and its children to see this through.

We can not change the past. The mistakes were made. Too often, we looked on with apathy. That's an indulgence we can no longer afford. We're on a new road now, like it or not, so let's get moving.
Part One, The Road To Here, and Part Two, Grasping the New Reality, are available.