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Faith & Pastoral Care

The Northeastern Catholic District School Board is pleased to offer the services of our Pastoral Care Worker, Michael Buhler, to our students and staff as part of our effort to enhance and enrich our Catholicity. Mr. Buhler continues to be active in all of our school communities, visiting classrooms and working with our teaching and non-teaching staff members. In collaboration with our teaching staff, he enhances and supports the Catholic values, policies and goals of the Board.

Mr. Buhler works with liturgical committees and supports the faith journey of students through relationship building, counseling, opportunities for faith development and retreats. He offers support to teachers in infusing Catholic teaching into all subject areas. He also serves teachers and other staff in adult faith formation. He raises social justice issues with students and staff and provides relevant information as to how we might respond as Catholics to global issues.

As a spiritual guide, he provides insight and gospel teachings while promoting and modeling the mission statement of the Board to "...guide our students on a journey of discovery that celebrates life."

Mr. Buhler can be reached by email at buhlerm@ncdsb.on.ca.

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Reflections

Catholic economics 101

2010-05-12

At Christmas I wrote a piece on Scrooge and layoffs, stung by the news of the Met Site closure by Xstrata here in Timmins. During Catholic Education Week O'Gorman High School hosted a 'Teach-in', where the issue being discussed was globalization. We had Gilles Bisson, MPP, Steve Watson of the C.A.W., and Mrs. Teena Simpson of ManuLife as our guests and panelists. The teach-in was not focused on the Met  Site specifically but rather globalization in general, and the speakers were given guiding questions stemming from the Catechism of the  Catholic Church to aid in their preparations. The primary points we focused on from the Catechism included: work can be sanctifying, the economy is to serve the people and the common good, social relationships cannot be based exclusively on economic factors, and the market place cannot be expected to regulate itself when the common good is remembered.

Economic globalization is a large, nearly uncontrollable system that I find myself embedded within. My retirement funds, which boast of large
returns on my investments, may well be invested in the very companies that close a plant in Timmins, use sweat shop labour overseas, or
contribute to environmental degradation here and in poor countries far away. Although I try not to shop at certain places and try to invest in
or purchase people-friendly and earth-friendly products and foods, the fact is that I cannot separate myself from the world as it is. I was very interested therefore in what the guest speakers had to say.

Mr. Bisson and Mr. Watson stated on more than one occasion that regulations were indeed necessary to keep multi-national corporations in check. How else to control how people and nature are treated by billion dollar business operations? It was acknowledged that people who run these corporations are often fine people and good citizens as individuals, but that they find themselves operating in a business climate that  does not always encourage honest and modest behavior with an eye to the common good. Regulations, therefore, would help keep the business and social climate healthier for all.

Mrs. Simpson, on the other hand, suggested that multi-national corporations could not be regulated in any meaningful way because they are too powerful and their operations too far reaching. Mrs. Simpson acknowledged that for a multi-national corporation, making a profit is often not good enough. The profits have to offer a certain return for investors, and trends had to suggest growth or the possibilities of growth for a company to maintain present practices. Mrs. Simpson also offered a sense of hope in people which could be the basis of a whole new  discussion; she suggested that our consumer habits, including the accumulation of debt, played a part in steering the economy in certain directions, and that we could use multi-national companies for our own good by living with greater modesty and showing greater concern for human rights and the environment. An element of capitalism, the argument goes, is that companies respond to people's needs and values.
At the same time, Mr. Watson made a strong argument showing that in the last thirty years there has been an organized push-back against organized labour and increased de-regulation in the economy. In 1988 Canada's top CEO's earned 106 times as much as the average worker's wage. By 2005 the top executives were making 240 times the average worker's wage. Further, while Canadian productivity increased by 37 percent from 1980 to 2005, the average annual wage for a Canadian worker grew a mere 53 dollars from $41,348 to $41,403 (in 2005  constant dollars). The same despairing numbers are seen in the wealth share rates in Canada, where the poorest households are poorer today than they were in 1984.

Finally, students asked the panel about sweat-shop labor and other abuses of the world's poor by multi-nationals. An argument was put forth that the building of sweat shop factories in poor countries was good because it at least showed a dollar investment into a country, an investment which could conceivably provide a foothold up to an ever better economy. It was also suggested, in a mild agreement to this  idea, that organized labour and increased regulations in poor country sweat-shops could somehow provide the world's poor with access to a middle class life as many of us enjoy in Canada. Both of these approaches to the world's poor betrayed an ethnocentric view of poverty whereby we judge people who survive by growing their own food with their neighbours as poor because they do not have bank accounts, and we think that the world will be a happier place if everyone lives like us in suburbia with too many consumer items and suffering relationships with our neighbours and the earth. And in light of Canadian and American over-consumption of the world's resources, questions then include whether or not a growing global middle class as we see in Canada is sustainable in any way across the globe? As well, if we have relatively wealthy people in large numbers in North America and Europe, do we not need to build this wealth on the backs of an ever growing poor population?

The panelists drove home for me that in the absence of a local, community based economy, a strongly regulated economy that looks out for workers and the earth is desirable. At the same time, I remember Mrs. Simpson's point: in general we live beyond our means in Canada.  For me, living a more simple life prayerfully, with greater mindfulness of the poor and the earth, is something that regulations and legislation cannot control. It is through grace and the consequences of over consumption that our steps will be directed in that regard.

And in the end, when I understand what the Met site and her workers could accomplish in terms of productivity, I cannot help but think that in this case Timmins' workers have been serving the economy. The economy is not serving us. We have been left high and dry by a  company and a system that treats us as drones; how much profit do we bring to the bottom line? I would rather Xstrata keep to themselves their well publicized donations to various community groups and take a look at how to protect honest work and the families who thrive  because of it!