I have been always leery of our astute leaders and I could never reconcile the fact that these leaders would strive to avoid taxes, use politics and business to make money at the expense of others, and preach their patriotism at home while protecting their money in secure safe deposit boxes at home or abroad.

And I was right in being suspicious, and we found the truth little by little, analysing first our provincial public policies and finding the lies behind the 'numbers' of former Economic Development Minister Janice MacKinnon, and later branching out in federal public policies and discovering the constitutional fibre of our Prime Minister Jean Chretien.

We, at Ensign, have been asking the elusive question "Why our quality of life goes down if the GDP goes up? And we found the answer! The answer is that we have an elitist leadership which has created an hegemonic social system all over the world, and this is why our elitist leadership is more concerned about hoarding money and legal (physical and intellectual) properties all over the world rather than pursuing the natural social goal of healthier communities with their set of community values, their languaging and culture.

And our elitist leadership has been hiding behind the economic myth to have an ever greater Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a measure of our social progress; and as a consequence, they have been designing a social, educational and business infrastructure to exalt money and the growing GDP numbers as signs of our happiness.

I spent the last few days researching the importance of social capital as opposed to financial capital and public capital, and I came across the good news that we are not alone at Ensign to recognize the perverse mentality of our elitist leadership and their economic gurus. In fact, I stepped casually on the website managed by the post-autistic economics network and I find a world wide new movement to debunk the current conventional (neoclassical) economic theory in favour of a more pluralistic and interdisciplinary approach.

This new movement to debunk neoclassical economics started in June 2000 with a position statement signed by a small group of French economics students and its influence has widened to include many economists around the world. There is the possibility that the economics curriculum can be revised at French universities very shortly, and more students are demanding the end of economics scientism monopolised by a single approach to the explanation and analysis of economic phenomena.

As we are concerned here in Saskatchewan, let's hope that our university researchers debunk their widespread golden standard single approach of statistical correlation and join the post-autistic economics network.

Some references

Related social and economic articles published by Ensign

Public institutions and civil society: How can we improve participatory democracy and active involvement of citizens? Rapporteur: Mrs. Susan George http://stars.coe.fr/Dossiers/Societe/E_SusanGeorge.htm

The post-autistic economics movement. A brief history, by a group of French economics students http://www.paecon.net/

Opening Up Economics: A Proposal By Cambridge Students, June 14, 2001 http://www.btinternet.com/~pae_news/Camproposal.htm