What would you do if you were Prime Minister?
Responding to a Reddit thread. I'd obviously what to add a lot more detail if I ever were running for office (though I know people won't let me ever get close to being in power).
It's important to keep in mind that a Prime Minister's initiatives and goals are often tempered by both international conditions and national politics. It's more than just a matter of passing some laws; the PMO and government in general has to be constantly involved in discussions and negotiations. That said...
- Restore the balance income equity in society by restoring corporate and wealth taxes to where they were before the decline of the last 45 years (this by itself will address a lot of the affordability issues people have been facing, both by reducing corporate/wealthy buying power, and increasing income for lower and middle classes)
- As often promised and never delivered by years of Liberal governments, institute national pharmacare and childcare programs. This includes not only a single-payer system, but also regulates these industries (eg., by capping drug prices). Special note would be paid to working conditions for people in health care industries, including doctors, to prevent overwork and burnout.
- In tandem, begin development of national dental and eye care insurance.
- Begin gradual movement to a national guaranteed income in aligned with progress to a 3.5 day work week (I recognize this will be harmful to exploitative employers like McDonald's but cerate a lot of room for entrepreneurial development and creative industries) and improved protection for employees and trade unions
- Address environmental issues seriously, ending coal, oil & gas subsidies and ensuring these and related industries pay full costs for extraction, use and disposal of raw materials, without offloading costs on society at large
- Begin negotiations to establish an 11th province consisting of Canada's indigenous people with territory to be made up of land-back agreements; this agreement will be contingent on the protection of existing property rights for non-indigenous Canadians both inside and outside the new province, as well as conditions for democratic governance and national sovereignty (thus we will also revisit 'citizenship' in other provinces, such that eg. a person born in Newfoundland is always a 'newfoundlander') unless/until they explicitly revoke this citizenship
- Fund a national infrastructure program focused especially on distributed alternative energy production, public and alternative (bicycle, e-bike, e-ATV and trail) transportation, access to broadband information services, support for local community, health and education centres, etc; this includes tuition-free learning opportunities at all levels through a national education program; this program would also include investment in housing resources and the creation of new communities across the country (ie., government funded housing where ownership is gradually assumed by tenants)
- Decentralize government by funding and piloting programs to support sub-governance networks (for example: parks would be governed and regulated by a national parks network consisting of people/stakeholders with an interest in parks, based on consensus formed by associations of mutual interest), the intent being to employ citizen participation and technical support to establish mechanisms for direct governance wherever possible
- Work toward and foster Canadian values of diversity, equity and inclusion (ie., the idea that we're *nice* to each other), with an emphasis on the freedom to live one's own live without unreasonable interference, and celebration of the distinct cultures and heritages that define our backgrounds, beliefs and values, grounded and guaranteed by a system of fair laws and justice, practiced with the goal of peaceful co-existence and progress for all informing resource allocation and decision-making (I know that's pretty fuzzy but there are a lot of concrete actions that would be taken, for example, policies for homeless people, response systems for mental crises, addictions management, community governance, etc.)
- Support for social resource production (eg., agriculture, aquaculture, forestry, mining, energy, etc). to encourage distributed ownership (rather than concentrated monopolies) by de-risking investment (through mechanisms of price management and insurance) and support for cooperative buying and selling networks, aligned with an investment bank supportive of larger numbers of smaller-scale and environmentally appropriate production systems
- Transition of Canadian military services to a more broad-based civil emergencies agencies, which enables a much larger force, attending to a broad range of crises, with military capacity (it's sort of a half-standing-army half-civil-emergencies enabling up to throw a large number of people into whatever emergencies face us at a given time)
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