Jobs and Morals

Hot debate in Canada

While the U.S. Roman Catholic bishops are refining their critique of the Reagan Administration's nuclear arms strategy, their colleagues in Canada have stirred up a nationwide controversy on economics. Businessmen are howling, labor leaders cheering and politicians buzzing over a statement issued last week by the bishops' commission for social affairs charging that the economic slump is producing "a deepening moral crisis." Canada's government should reverse field, the paper says, targeting unemployment rather than inflation as the major economic problem to be solved.

The seven-page document is officially the product of only the eight bishops on the commission, but it was approved by the hierarchy's four-member executive committee, and has been getting widespread back ing from other bishops, though Emmett Cardinal Carter, the Archbishop of Toronto, says it is "risky" for the church to get into specifics on economics.

Bishop Remi De Roo of Victoria, B.C., the commission chairman, has been happily astonished by the strong reaction, since the bishops' conference has been saying much the same with little effect since the 1970s. "Events have shaken the complacency of people," he said. Canada's current unemployment rate is 12.8%.

The bishops' paper is a direct attack on the proinvestment policies of Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, a Catholic. Trudeau has argued that Canada must stress profits, wage restraints, investment and productivity. Challenging those priorities, the commission condemns "the renewed emphasis on the 'survival of the fittest' as the supreme law of economics" and asks for controls on profits, soak-the-rich taxation, a bigger role for labor unions and government programs to create jobs.

"We want people who presently are powerless in society to become participants rather than statistics who are told what to expect from the mandarins and the corporate executives," said De Roo. Trudeau, traveling in Thailand last week, was unimpressed by the bishops' statement: "I don't think their economics are very good."

The debate in Canada may be echoed south of the border. After the American bishops complete their nuclear arms decree this spring, they plan to carry on with a pastoral letter about economic problems; it is likely to contain an implicit attack on Reaganomics. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.