Page 12 - Flipbook

© www.scroll.in

Western democracy; death by a thousand cuts
By: Sudhir Sandhu,
Chief Executive Officer of the Manitoba Building Trades

Arundhati Roy is an acclaimed Indian writer. She won the Booker Trump and now Boris Johnson in England. Both have tapped into
Prize for her poignant work The God of Small Things. More than our anger and came into power with promises of restoring a
a writer, she is a social and human rights activist and speaks for happier past.
those who are often ignored. Recently, Roy said "people spend
Going back to Roy's point, it was about the system. Our despair
so much time mocking Trump or waiting for him to be impeached.
and anger blinded us from recognizing the deeply flawed system
And the danger with that kind of obsession with a single person
and how it got us here. The reason is that the system was broken
is that you don’t see the system that produced him".
by thousands of small cuts along the way. It was never one big
Across the globe, billions of people are dissatisfied with the state thing. We barely noticed each of these small cuts. Worse, we
of our economy, our environment and the breakdown in our social applauded some of these cuts because we believed in those who
and political systems. In many nations, we are becoming promised the cuts would improve our future. But over time, they
polarized and unable to find a compromise to common problems. have eroded the foundations of our economic and political
More importantly, our faith in our democratic institutions has systems. The future is here, and many of the promises have
been shaken. And Roy is right; it took a flawed system to bring proven to be economic sleight of hand.
us to where we are, not any single individual. It is not about
Since the election of Brian Pallister’s Government in 2016,
Trump, Obama, Trudeau or Harper; it is about the system. It is
Manitoba has experienced several new cuts that will only break
about the manipulation of the system to benefit the few at the
our system further. At the behest of organizations like Merit
expense of the rest.
Contractors Association (Merit), Mr. Pallister has been promising
We expected our system to work for us. And people across the to remove wage floors and community benefits agreement (CBA)
political spectrum, right and left, legitimately feel that the system provisions in public sector infrastructure.
has been rigged against us. People lived up to their end of the
bargain in good faith and did what the system expected. And now
people feel that the system bailed on them. Entire industries
were shut down, throwing millions out of work which cost them
their homes, pensions and in some countries, access to
healthcare. At the same time, the wealthy have become very
wealthy. Extremely wealthy.
The people thrown under the bus of yesterday’s broken promises
are now lashing out in anger. They are looking for someone to
blame. Some blame corporations and governments, others vent
their anger at immigrants and global trade. Across the world,
people have parked themselves in opposing camps and neither
likes or trusts the other. Neighbours are pitted against each
other and families have been irreconcilably separated by political
© www.ctvnews.ca
differences. This anger has delivered us the likes of Donald

1 2 ~ E L E C T I O N 2 0 1 9 C A N A D I A N B U I L D I N G T R A D E S M A G A Z I N E