Three Steps to the Good Life

Flourishing in Canada: How to get the Good Life boils down to three core goals.

If we can achieve these (not insignificant) goals, we’ll be well on our way to living, collectively, with dignity:

1. Shift the Lens from GDP to Flourishing

Doing so will shift our framework, bringing the focus to individual lives and thus bringing into relief the two additional core causes of unhappiness, causes connected to the power of the 1% through the GDP lens.

2. Eliminate Tournament Culture, as Culture, with Its Ethos of Position

We must subvert this culture by not only recognizing but also acting upon the fact that it has come to be by valuing subversive and distasteful realities about people over realities that reflect our better natures. 

3. Give Canadians Capabilities that Respect and Foster Dignity as Autonomy

Canadians will be equipped through policy and education with the capabilities required for coping in a rapidly changing and more equal context – most specifically, three core capacities will be required:

1. Autonomy (as distinguished from “independence”)
2. Resilience (not always an internal capability)
3. Ability to Form Connections (cooperating rather than competing to meet a challenge)

Meeting these core goals will foster flourishing within four dimensions of life. Comfortable subsistence and the enjoyment of life are the primary entitlements of our birth and are captured in the rights to: 1. Income (as long as we are using money); 2. Health Care; 3. Education, at all stages of life; and 4. Access to Leisure and Culture (which presupposes having personal time).

Fulfilling entitlements will seem prohibitively costly to some, but taxation of the wealthy (and the banks) will be made more meaningful and significant current costs – such as the costs of poverty and of illness – will be either eliminated or meaningfully diminished. ¹⁾Ontario alone currently spends $10-13 billion dollars a year on poverty programs and payments. The cost of poverty includes among other things the costs of social services, health care, and criminal justice. In 2011, the federal government spent almost $20 billion on Employment Insurance payouts. See “How Expensive is Poverty in Canada?” At Canada Without Poverty: The Cost of Poverty. Accessed May 19, 2021.It will be interesting to see whether the new federal budget of 2022, in which there is a plan to increase taxation on banks, will come with legislation prohibiting banks from raising service and other fees to pass this cost to consumers. Without such legislation, the move is empty: Feds Tax Banks. Accessed April 9, 2022

Canadians in possession of the three core capabilities to exercise their rights under the four core dimensions of life can function cooperatively, without malignant competitiveness, and desire goods that support a fair community in which people don’t have to “win” to have their needs met. Opportunities cannot be equal, while people nonetheless simply are so. Economic equality through basic income reflects not a command that all people’s incomes be the same but a core value of each person as being morally entitled to the human dignity of a decent quality of life including access to education, time, and leisure and culture. This Canada recognizes that only a culture of cooperation (and optimized competition) grounds sustainable social growth.

Adapted from our book, Flourishing in Canada: How to get the Good Life, with new (brief) discussion of the 2022 Federal Budget added today.

Photo: Elizabeth Neill