By Christopher DeMarcus (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: October 16, 2013
The movie Sharknado had quite the buzz this year, despite being an absolute piece of garbage. The film’s low-quality cheese-factor is what propelled it into popular view. Cable picked up the movie; viewers had to know how such a brainless and vulgar plot, smothered in barely passable CGI effects, could get any type of traction.
The pointless spectacle of Sharknado reminds me a lot of our local politics. We’ve shifted from an engaged democratic experience to a gong show of complaints and boutique special interest groups. Like how Sharknado was a b-movie for the sake of b-movies, playing politics has become the only reason to be in politics.
Let’s start with the big three issues: economy, environment, and equality.
Economy: we can’t frack our way out of this. The biggest problem today is unemployment and underemployment. Right now, the main solution from the BC Liberals is to up the export of our resources, mainly mining and natural gas. That sounds alright because it’s what we’re used to. But the globalized economy has changed. Jobs that would be made in these industries do not employ enough to sustain us for the long term.
If you want to make new jobs, you need to make innovative industries. We don’t have to re-invent the wheel here, but we do need to look outside of our resource-only toolkit.
International education is a strong sector for BC in a globalized economy, but we can’t confuse the good universities with Sharknado-U. Private “career schools” need to better labelled and regulated. Too many of our hard-working youth fall into the private school trap – training for small, almost non-existent careers like audio engineer, aroma therapist, or artist manager.
Environment: we still can’t frack our way out. We need the water, you know, to drink it. Oh, and we can also sell it. Companies like Nestlé are currently pumping millions of litres of our own natural water, so they can bottle it, sell it back to us, then charge us to recycle the bottle. This may sound like madness, but welcome to stimulating the economy. So hey, while they’re pulling us by the chain, why not at least charge them for the water?
Because BC doesn’t have any legal method to regulate the water. The Water Act is outdated. And the government doesn’t think it’s important for Nestlé to pay. On the other side of the equation, Nestlé Canada’s VP said on CBC Radio back in August that they’d like to pay, but there is no government there to bill them. Ah, the West, a new frontier for water profiteering!
Equality: greed is not good. Like I said, there is more to an economy than oil and gas – we also have a good, globalization-friendly education sector. Education heals the gaps in the economy. Knowledge is an equalizer for social gaps: i.e. income, gender, and race. The university provides an environment where innovation can take place without the pressure of free-market competition. The academy serves as a container for those that have fallen through the economic cracks.
Higher education often gets demonized in our culture with pathetic platitudes: “Those that don’t do, teach,” or “Student loans are a debt trap.”
But the reality is, it is much harder to teach than do. A monthly student loan payment, even in these bleak economic times, comes out to be about the same as a new car payment. A new car will not make a student as happy as an education. In fact, education is a mental health issue. It keeps people happy. The examined life is one worth living.
We should be asking more from our leaders than Sharknado politics.
