Standard of living

The movement spread via social media and blockades and demonstrations to other cities.

It quickly broadened beyond schools to demands over inequality, public spending, and living standards.

Now, I can agree to that.

Inequality, there's always going to be inequality.

And I'm mainly referring to the percentage point, but I'm sure a lot of public waste does exist.

You have a lot of, yes, malice, but you also have a lot of incompetence in government.

Living standards.

Well, living standards comes down to, are you printing capital out of thin air? Do you have a large inflation number? Are you approving commercial banks to create these large credit lines? And it's disproportionately helping benefiting the large corporations.

So essentially we represent large high... you know, large scale employers, typically exporters, um, you know, investors and so forth.

And our mission is really to improve the, the prosperity of the province through advocating for, you know, sound economic policies that, uh, en- ensure that, uh, we have a thriving business community because we think through that, that's gonna lift the living standards for all British Columbians.

Okay.

Wonderful.

That's just-

Yeah

... a recipe for declining living standards, and that's what we would've had in Canada if not for the fact that we got that lift from commodity prices that I mentioned earlier.

Huh.

Look, lots of people have views about this.

Um, my own view is that it's, it's a reaction against stagnant living standards.

Uh, they've been stagnant for, you know, the best part of a decade or, or more, and migrants are an easy scapegoat to blame for this.

So, you know, your, your example just a minute ago that the, you know, there's so many temporary migrants out driving Ubers and doing deliveries and picking fruit and what have you, that it's-- is holding back wages in the economy as a whole.

And if you were standing back and looking at the evidence, you would unquestionably say that migrants are-- have added to Australian prosperity.

Uh, in particular, the-- one of the big benefits we get from this is because they are, are so young and their prime working age, we have, um, more people in our labor force than we'd-- we would otherwise do, uh, if we didn't have migration on the scale, uh, scale that we did, and that increases the, the overall level of, um, not only of GDP in the economy, but GDP per head.

But that sort of reaction to, um, the stagnation of living standards seems to be fundamental.

I mean, that's-- I suppose what you need therefore is a change to the way living standards work.

And I don't know when you hit that wall, but if things keep going the way they are, eventually, you're going to get there.

From a societal perspective as well, the erosion of the living standards of the average American, does that concern you if it continues this way? Because that's not sustainable either.

They were looking at these metrics a few days ago about the inequality and how unaffordable a home is becoming.

There was one analyst that was calling it, it's almost a luxury now in the US to own a home.