Democratic governments aren’t businesses

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/08/2023 (965 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

DEMOCRATIC governments worldwide, in the last half century, have taken an unsettling turn toward a market corporatism which undermines their fundamental purposes, policies, and activities. As a result, what might be called business mentality and biases have assumed undue public influence on governments’ commitments as revealed by changes in public languages, agendas, and practices.

While many businesses and their approaches have served us well, an unfounded adoption of, and reliance on, prevailing business models is compromising governments’ ability to govern sensitively and responsibly.

By now, terms that roll off our tongues easily, have changed the political landscape drastically. Rather than talking about citizens, governments use the language of business, deferring instead to customers, consumers, products, taxpayers, and perhaps the most insidious, stakeholders.

Each of these, by association, emphasizes an individual and exclusive, sometimes exclusionary, relationship to the world defined as business. In that world, transactions benefit those who have the means and the knowledge to navigate and employ its systems.

Such business terms not only carry baggage, but also they affect the way we are seen and the way we view others.

Governments now often refer to us as stakeholders, implying people who have a greater right to be consulted on, or speak to, particular matters because they have greater interest or more at stake in the policy decisions.

On the flip side, there is also the implication that some of us have nothing to contribute to some political initiatives or have self-serving biases which colour our attitudes and responses. This is a significant concern for unions who are often portrayed as adversarial stakeholders whenever they attempt to improve service to the public, the lot of their members, or simply working conditions or labour practices. Stakeholders becomes a meaningless or insidious term to describe citizens, because in democracies we are all stakeholders of all political decisions.

Equally problematic is the now ubiquitous term CEO, originally used to describe business leaders with far ranging responsibilities and discretion focussed on increasing the profitability of industries and corporations for the benefit of their investors or shareholders.

This term, with its interest in financial management for return on investment, has crept into the vocabulary to describe prime ministers, premiers, health care, education and union leaders and has unfortunately changed, not for the better, organizational expectations, how they view themselves and their work and how they are viewed by the public.

In my own experience, too many have become tyrannical in their entitlement to manipulate systems and the lives of others to their own advantage. Perhaps more importantly, they have also fallen prey to business agendas.

Without claiming too fine a point, the Chambers of Commerce are a good exemplar of the overall business agenda regarding politics. They have a reputation for promoting tax cuts, centralization and standardization, de-regulation of public safeguards, reduction of public services and the public workforce, and limiting minimum wage increases.

In education this looks like forced amalgamations, cutting administrators and redefining their roles, raising class sizes, interfering with collective bargaining, and eliminating “frills.” In health care it translates into privatization of laboratory services, limited oversight over personal care homes, long wait times for treatments, limiting access through a provincial system micro-managed from a central authority, a shortage of health care professionals, compromised working conditions and the like. The business mentality has clearly shaped these two areas of public life in a negative way because business and politics must differ in fundamental values.

We must acknowledge that health care, education, regulatory bodies and other public services must be clearly business-like in some ways. They must systematically and, preferably, transparently plan, budget, manage personnel and provide services.

But governments are also called on to meet obligations to a public in totality and to be politically accountable to all citizens, neither of which are expected of private corporations and both from which the law often shields them. Moreover, directly connecting health care and education to the strength of the economy is a political, not a technical issue.

Just as governments should not take full credit when the economy is soaring, they should not take full blame in a corporatist world for a faltering economy. More importantly, politics should not be highjacked by business ideals and values.

Instead of bowing to the pressures to cut public services politicians should be upholding our public institutions, while at the same time recognizing that there is more to be done for many of our most needy and vulnerable citizens.

John R. Wiens is dean emeritus at the faculty of education, University of Manitoba.