No flipping

For the past year and more, the Canadian federal government has been running a shamelessly partisan advertising campaign touting "Canada's Economic Action Plan", a ragbag of policies that have supposedly kept the economy afloat while the rest of the world has been mired in recession.  With the next election no more than two years away, yesterday's Throne Speech to open the new session of Parliament unveiled a bit of a change of course: the Tories are going all populist on us.

Truth to tell, it's another ragbag of stuff.  The government plans to force cable TV companies to let customers pick and choose the channels they want, rather than having to buy bizarrely "bundled" services that include all sorts of dreck that nobody wants. (For example, if you want something like Bloomberg TV or BBC World, you'll probably find you have to pay for something like Nickelodeon or Homes and Gardens TV as well).  Phone companies are to be forced to reduce roaming charges (though there's to be no action against the peculiar pricing regime that requires you to pay for incoming calls and messages on your cell phone). Companies that charge customers extra for paper bills, as opposed to electronic ones, will be required to cease and desist.  The government even wants to ensure that Canadians shopping at home pay the same prices that they would pay for the same goods in the US, which frankly seems like a completely unattainable goal.

It's an amazingly interventionist agenda for a government that loudly trumpets its opposition to excessive regulation  of the private sector.  It's also a real volte face for the Harper Tories: as the opposition NDP has been quick to point out, Harper has consistently voted against any and all such pro-consumer measures that have been suggested in the past.

It's also an agenda that's largely irrelevant to the economy's real problem: inadequate employment.  Although it's true that Canada has done better than the rest of the G8 in the last half-decade or so, the job market is in poor shape.  The most recent monthly employment data showed rising numbers of young people becoming discouraged about finding work.  Stories about unpaid internships fill the media.  Increasing numbers of workers in all age groups find themselves unable to find anything other than short-term contract work.  Thousands of the  notionally "employed", especially in retailing,  now have no guaranteed hours of work each week.

These depressing trends have gathered pace even as the ballyhooed "Economic Action Plan" has unfolded. With the government restating its fiscal austerity stance and its determination to eliminate the budget deficit by the time of the next election, there's nothing in the Throne Speech to give the unemployed and underemployed much hope.