Making Canada Relevant Again- The Economic Super-Thread

[a_majoor]

And of course the middle class population of India is @ 300 million; the same as the entire population of the United States (and we know where the numbers will go WRT middle class Americans); a huge market for our resources and value added products indeed.

The real difficulty might be getting those 300 million Indians to pay attention to the economic activities of the 30 million of us!

 

[Kirkhill]

I'm betting that resources will sell..... resources that will help those 300 million achieve their aspirations.

Somebody said something about butchers and bakers and not appealing to their conscience but their interests.

 

[a_majoor]

Ontario sends the economy further downhill:

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/03/03/terence-corcoran-ontario-s-green-energy-plan-sneaks-in-feed-in-taxes.aspx

Terence Corcoran: Ontario's green energy plan sneaks in feed-in taxes
Posted: March 03, 2009, 7:49 PM by NP Editor
Terence Corcoran, Green Energy Act

The main economic tool driving renewable energy under the Green Energy Act will be subsidies paid directly to producers of wind, solar and other renewables

By Terence Corcoran

In the midst of a major economic meltdown, and with looming budget deficits totaling more than $18-billion, now might not be the best time for the government of Ontario to be embarking on a crushing new green energy policy that could add billions to the province’s electricity costs. But Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty is nothing if not immune to the folly of his own righteous policies and the fiscal crisis he faces as a result.

Mr. McGuinty once promised to maintain balanced budgets and to never raise income taxes, so he raised taxes, watched provincial revenues soar by 40%, and then spent all the money, ending up with major deficits. And now he is set to abandon another sacred provincial principle: electric power at the lowest possible price. Under a new Green Energy Act introduced last week by Energy Minister George Smitherman, Ontario’s new energy strategy is to deliver power to Ontarians at whatever price can be rammed through by government fiat to achieve green results.

Already famous as a green nanny state, where every course at every school is to be larded with environmental propaganda, Ontario is now set to become a kind of green fascist state. The new energy act sets up carbon reduction and renewable energy — wind, solar, biomass — as quasi-religious goals that will be achieved via a massive power grab. Clause by clause, the act transfers authority to the province, giving the Energy Minister and the McGuinty cabinet the right to operate, control, regulate and direct the production, distribution and consumption of every kilowatt hour of electricity.

Mr. McGuinty’s ministers, like the boss, have a habit of making grand pronouncements that turn to policy mush. Finance Minister Dwight Duncan once declared, when he was energy minister, that the government wanted a hands-off role. “We believe that politics has to be taken out of electricity pricing.” That was obviously before the government became a captive of the green energy industry, solar panel makers, windmill operators and environmental activists.

Borrowing concepts from Europe, where the price of electric power is often triple Ontario rates, Mr. Smitherman said the objective is to make Ontario a leading green economy in North America. The government, he said, wants “to increase the standard of living and quality of life for all Ontario’s families. That is best achieved by creating the conditions for green economic growth.”

With Europe as a model, Ontario can therefore expect European economic standards: slow growth, high unemployment, high energy prices — and a continued place among the world’s leading producers of carbon.

Toronto energy lawyer George Vegh writes on the University of Toronto Law Faculty Blog that the new act is not about energy as a supply resource; it is about energy as a contributor to environmental and social outcomes. Economic efficiency, cost effectiveness and sound business practices go out the window. Reducing carbon is the prime objective, regardless of cost. The goal is not to release an economically efficient amount of carbon, but to release as little carbon as possible even if it leads to a net decrease in economic efficiency.

In short, as Mr. Vegh puts it, Ontario’s Green Energy Act represents a decisive shift in Ontario energy policy. Agencies such as the Ontario Power Authority and the Ontario Energy Board will have their mandates rewritten to meet the new objectives. The independent transmission grid will now be forced to hook up renewable power facilities, cost being a secondary consideration, if it is considered at all.

The main economic tool driving renewable energy under the act will be so-called feed-in tariffs. Pioneered in Germany, a feed-in tariff is a subsidy paid directly to producers of wind, solar and other renewables for every kilowatt hour (kWh) of power produced. Ontario and Ottawa have been offering subsidies (see table) that are similar to feed-in tariffs. A solar power producer can sell a kWh of solar power into the grid and receive 42¢ when the going wholesale rate for power is 5.5¢. That means a subsidy of 36.5¢, which is spread out among all power users as add-on charges. Currently, Ontario power users already pay 20% more for power to cover such added costs.

The cost is allegedly small as a proportion of each consumer’s power bill. Canada’s solar power industry says it’s less than the cost of a candy bar; Germans talk about renewables being cheaper than an ice cream cone. That’s how all tax-and-subsidy regimes work — small hits on everybody, big gains for a few.

Energy experts say that the feed-in tariffs set the stage for steady future increases in power costs. The tariffs are essentially feed-in taxes and a great free lunch: The government forces consumers to pay renewable producers to engage in money-losing businesses.

According to Mr. Smitherman, all the subsidized activity will create 50,000 new green jobs. In Germany, they claim hundreds of thousands of green jobs have been built up in the country, erecting and maintaining money-losing windmill farms and solar industries. Such jobs, however, are actually drains on the economy, stolen from other potentially profit-making sectors to produce inefficient solar power. If it takes five people to produce a a million kWh of solar electricity, then the same amount of electricity could be produced by perhaps two people using gas or coal.

But the cost to the economy in lost productivity remains uncalculated. And as for the alleged benefits? The main objective is carbon reduction, but the costs of these alternatives for each tonne of carbon reduced is huge, way above what is touted as the possible market price for carbon — if such a market were to exist. (See Ontario Energy Subsidies table)

Carbon emissions are also not likely to go down. Renewables require the construction and maintenance of massive back-up fossil fuel facilities, using gas, to cover for the unpredictable down times that make wind and solar uneconomic and risky.

Ontario’s green energy future, by the numbers, will bring major added costs, intrusive government policies, subsidies to inefficiency and, in the end, no real environmental gains. Is that any way to get through an economic crisis?

This is the first of a series of FP Comment pieces on Ontario’s Green Energy Act. More tomorrow.

 

[a_majoor]

So vast sums of money are being bandied about as "Stimulus" (or "Porkulus" if you prefer). Here is a visual aid to see what millions, billions or trillions actually look like:

http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html

 

[Edward Campbell]

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s Globe and Mail is an opinion piece by Canadian historian (and occasional Army.ca contributor) J.L. Granatstein  that ought to provoke some discussion:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/so-were-not-a-great-power-big-deal-lets-be-a-great-nation/article1245345/

So, we're not a great power. Big deal – let's be a great nation
Greatness demands self-knowledge, regrettably a thing Canadians often lack

J.L. Granatstein

Monday, Aug. 10, 2009

Can Canada become a great power? Whether Canadians want to be a great power or not is another question, but does this nation have the attributes and will to become a key player in the “great game” of nations?

Realistically, we suffer from some serious drawbacks. There are only about 34 million Canadians in a world where the great nation-states, such as China, Russia or the United States, have far greater numbers. On the other hand, nations such as Britain, France and Germany, within living memory, were great powers with populations well below 100 million. Still, there can be no doubt that, as in other areas, size matters.

China, Russia and the U.S. are vast territories, much like Canada. The former European great powers were relatively small in area. There can be little doubt, however, that geography is a Canadian weakness. With a small population, strung for several thousand kilometres along the border with the United States, with muskeg and mountains dividing us, no one can doubt the problems of distance.

Then, while most great powers have restive populations within their boundaries, Canada has Quebec. This nation's federal system has allowed Quebeckers to bargain skillfully for increased autonomy over the decades, and hesitant national political leadership has permitted this. And Quebeckers historically have taken very different attitudes from other Canadians to overseas military ventures. The present straitened conditions of the Canadian Forces, the tiny numbers in uniform, inevitably also limit what Canada could do, even if the nation wanted more.

That matters because great powers see themselves as mission-oriented. Sometimes, they play imperialist as Britain and France did. Sometimes, they seek global domination as Germany and the Soviet Union did. Sometimes, they aim to spread their capitalist/democratic vision of the world, as Washington does. But they all had or have a vision of the world they want. Canadians can't even agree on the kind of nation – or deux nations – that they desire. It's difficult to tell the world how to act in such circumstances, and Canadian moralizing that “the world needs more Canada” can only be a poor substitute.

Of course, Canada has oil, metals and minerals, wheat, lumber, vast resources. Often, these are owned abroad. Too often, global commodities markets fluctuate, creating boom and bust cycles. Historically, the Canadian difficulty has been that we extract the resources but do not process, refine and turn them into finished goods here with our own people getting the lion's share of the benefits. There's not much sign of that changing soon.

Above all, what great powers have is drive and will. They want to be supreme; they want control; they believe in their destiny and strive to achieve it. Adolf Hitler was a monster, but he had the will to dominate and brought the world to ruin in the process. Happily, no Canadian has tried to emulate Hitler, but no Canadian could readily argue that this country has the drive to succeed, let alone the will to create an industrial strategy or even an internal free-trading market. Canadians are divided and diverse, unfocussed and ordinarily rudderless, and that is not a recipe for an aspiring great power.

So, we can't be a superpower. But don't be too sad. That relieves us of heavy obligations and great power responsibilities for the preservation of peace and, when peace collapses, it saves us in all likelihood from heavy casualties in (some) overseas wars of empire. We are now what we will continue to be – a developed democratic nation-state with a high standard of living, and that is no mean estate.

But if we can't be a great power, can we at least be great? A great nation, in contrast to a state of no distinction, understands its weaknesses and strengths and seeks to maximize its potential. It strives to better the economic and social well-being of its people as it protects them from the threats of others. It jealously guards its sovereignty at the same time as it tries to play a responsible role in the global community. Greatness demands self-knowledge, and this regrettably may also be something Canadians lack. Too many Canadians trumpet our virtues, real or imagined, overestimate our influence, and despise our neighbours for their success.

Greatness for Canada means becoming both modest and honest. We need to know what we are and understand what we can be. We must strive to be not more powerful, but better. If we can do that, we can make Canada great.

Historian J.L. Granatstein is a senior research fellow at the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute.

Prof. Granatstein lays out some undeniable roadblocks to great power status:

• Small population;

• Great geographic dispersion which equates to too few concentrations of population; and

• Québec – which is a huge (nearly 25% of the population, about 20% of GDP) anchor that keeps Canada moored, firmly, in the “little Canada,” isolationist shallows in which the Canadian political centre has wallowed for a century.

So how to we become a great nation even as we recognize that we cannot be a great power?

We need to start, Granatstein suggests, with one of the things we lack: self knowledge.  Then Canada needs to, in Granatstein’s words:

1. Maximize its potential;

2. Better the economic and social well-being of its people;

3. Protects them [its people] from the threats of others;

4. Jealously guards its sovereignty; and

5. Play a responsible role in the global community.

Numbers 3, 4 and 5 all have a strong military component, and so, to a lesser extent, do 1 and even 2.

This, the explicit call to increase our military presence in the world, in furtherance of our own self interest, will infuriate the large, diverse “little Canada” crowd. This group is not equated, just, to Québec – indeed Québecers are interventionist when they perceive that their (French speaking) interests are at stake – as in Haiti and Franco-Afrique, for example. The “hard core” of the Liberal/NDP left, in fact, is in Toronto, Anglo-Montreal, Vancouver and Winnipeg; that they make common cause with the left wing BQ on foreign and defence policy issues is, simply, an alliance of convenience. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” sort of thing.

But that “little Canada” crowd is large – it may actually approach a majority position in Canada, less evident in electoral politics because urban (often “left wing”) ridings are seriously underrepresented in our parliament while rural (often “right wing”) ridings are grossly overrepresented.

The solution begins, as Prof. Granatstein suggests, with “self knowledge,” and that begins in classrooms. But the requisite “self knowledge” is never going to materialize so long as the educrat establishment in Victoria, Winnipeg, Toronto, Québec City and Halifax remains a captive of the ill-educated, economically and historically illiterate, historically and socially particularist “left” – as is now the case. 

 

[Edward Campbell]

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provision (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s National Post is a bit of common sense from a usual source of that rare commodity:

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/08/22/conrad-black-much-ado-about-china.aspx
The key points, it seems to me, are:

• None of this means that China won't continue to rise, or that the U. S. won't again have to prove its staying power as a world force;

• Matter-of-fact assertions, complete with timetables, of an imminent Chinese assumption of world leadership, are rubbish;

• Multipolarity, not the hegemony of a sole superpower, will replace the bipolarized Cold War;

• [China] has no credible legal system, and is rife with corruption;

• The rise of China is impressive and an objectively good thing;

• The United states is labouring;

• The U. S. has a functioning, if conspicuously imperfect, political and legal system, formidable resources, an incomparably productive work force, nearly four times China's GDP, and a popular culture that dominates the world. It must put its house in order, which will be painful, but a trifle compared to the challenges facing China; and

• The United States has seen off greater challenges than this.

“Multipolarity” is the way of the world. The US is one major pole; China is another but not the other. Europe is also one of the “multi poles”, but not quite as strong in so many areas as either America or China; ditto India, but weaker still as are Japan, Russia, Brazil, Indonesia and, and, and ...

This opinion, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s Globe and Mail is related to a lot more than just health care:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/americas-an-argument-that-never-ends/article1264167/

America's an argument that never ends
Canadians keep their voices down for fear an honest argument would wreck the country

John Ibbitson

Wednesday, Aug. 26, 2009

The debate over health care has brought out the worst in Americans. Nutbars have shown up at town halls and rallies with photos comparing Barack Obama to Hitler. At one presidential rally in Phoenix, a dozen people arrived packing heat.

George W. Bush was also subjected to Nazi comparisons. This is always a contemptible diminishment of one of the great evils of human history. If you would hold up a photo of either president with a Hitler mustache, then we know you didn't fight at Normandy or Monte Cassino and probably don't have a father or uncle who did, because you'd know better.

But it's also true that Americans and Canadians have different brains. One example: Even in the heart of Alberta, you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who believed Canada should completely scrap public health care and move to American-style private insurance.

And you won't find many Americans who want to adopt Canadian-style universal public insurance, even though almost everyone 65 and older has Medicare.

But that's just a symptom of something deeper. Canadians seek to avoid big political fights. Americans revel in them.

Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff agree about everything that matters. Their approaches to health care, education, equalization and other social policies are identical. They concur on the fundamental assumptions about employment insurance, although we may wage an election on the details. Canadian foreign policy, to the extent we have any, is largely bipartisan.

America is a culture of profound divisions: between the majority who treasure their right to bear arms and the minority who abhor gun violence; between those who want less government and those who want more; between North and South and Southwest and Great Plains and Pacific Coast; between older and younger and richer and poorer and black and white and Latino and Asian.

America is an argument that never ends.

The differences between the two political cultures – ours of accommodation, theirs of confrontation – contribute to the anti-American streak that infects too many Canadians. We are polite, consensual, communal, caring, goes the stereotype; they are loud, rude, violent, rabidly individualistic.

This is not only false; it misses a crucial distinction between the two societies. Americans yell at each other in full confidence that their country is the finest place on Earth and that it will always endure. Canadians keep their voices down for fear an honest argument would wreck the country.

Because we started out as a union of English and French – two cultures that had been at war for centuries – Canada never congealed as a nation. There are advantages to this. We may be the most tolerant place on Earth precisely because we have no strong sense of who we are. Nonetheless, we are left with a residual fear of Canada's fragility.

The United States may be the most national state on Earth. For all their many divisions, Americans are bound together by an idea: that they are free. Historian Simon Schama observes that the American Revolution was actually the last English civil war. In each conflict, the issue was individual liberty pitted against the authority of the state. Liberty always won.

That is why there are so many Americas. People are free to strap on a pistol in Arizona, attend a same-sex wedding in Vermont, not pay state income tax in Texas (because there isn't one), receive publicly funded health care in Massachusetts, obtain government services in Spanish in California but not in English-only Tennessee.

The sanctity of individual liberty is why American society is so dysfunctional and so robust. Canadians believe we are a free people, and we are. But at a certain level, we defer; Americans don't.

The United States has some big problems to solve. It is embroiled in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the immigration, education and health care systems are deeply flawed; its structural deficit threatens to bankrupt the country.

But Americans have gotten themselves out of far worse jams. Anyone who has bet against this country has lost.

Put it this way: How confident are you that, 100 years from now, the United States will still be here? How confident are you that Canada will still be here?

Exactly.

I’m with Ibbitson on this one. Making Canada great would be nice but keeping Canada together is the first challenge or obstacle, depending upon one’s point of view.

One of the obstacles to greatness and unity that Granatstein and Ibbitson identified is the huge disconnect between “English” Canada and Québec.

Canada is, economically, “sound.” Not “good,” just, perhaps, good enough; but we could be and should be much better. Once again, one of the problems, is the national disconnect in so many areas, including, for example, the regulation of securities and markets. We need a national securities regulator; Québec will not participate; the obvious solution is go ahead without Québec, the only “victim” would be the Montreal Stock Exchange which would lose so much value that it would almost cease to exist – something that would provoke yet another national crisis that would, in turn, require yet more compromise.

And so it goes. 

 

[Monsoon]

We need a national securities regulator; Québec will not participate; the obvious solution is go ahead without Québec, the only “victim” would be the Montreal Stock Exchange which would lose so much value that it would almost cease to exist – something that would provoke yet another national crisis that would, in turn, require yet more compromise.

I agree that a national securities regulator would be better, but it would be easy to understate the extent to which the existing provincial regulators work together through the Canadian Securities Administrators. They have all managed to essentially harmonize their regulations (at least in the broad strokes) through National Instruments, though the real hold-out to harmonization isn't the Autorite des marches financiers, but the Ontario Securities Commission. Quebec has launched an appeal against the Federal government setting up a national regulator and I hope they lose, but things are much better now than they were ten years ago.

The Montreal Stock Exchange hasn't existed for a great many years, and the Montreal Exchange (derivatives only) is owned by the same company that holds the TSX. The launch of a federal regulator (sans Quebec participation) would have little effect on the MX, as long as the securities issuers complied with both the federal and Quebec securities laws when they sell to investors in either jurisdiction. This is exactly how the MX and TSX deal with the current fractured regulatory regime.

 

[Edward Campbell]

I agree that a national securities regulator would be better, but it would be easy to understate the extent to which the existing provincial regulators work together through the Canadian Securities Administrators. They have all managed to essentially harmonize their regulations (at least in the broad strokes) through National Instruments, though the real hold-out to harmonization isn't the Autorite des marches financiers, but the Ontario Securities Commission. Quebec has launched an appeal against the Federal government setting up a national regulator and I hope they lose, but things are much better now than they were ten years ago.

The Montreal Stock Exchange hasn't existed for a great many years, and the Montreal Exchange (derivatives only) is owned by the same company that holds the TSX. The launch of a federal regulator (sans Quebec participation) would have little effect on the MX, as long as the securities issuers complied with both the federal and Quebec securities laws when they sell to investors in either jurisdiction. This is exactly how the MX and TSX deal with the current fractured regulatory regime.

Thanks. I knew the TSX had bought the MX. I had forgotten (maybe never noticed) that the MX was trading in derivatives only - likely because my portfolio didn't have any derivatives. (It is managed by one of the very few firms that eschewed them.)  I should take more care with the examples I choose.

 

[Edward Campbell]

This Globe Essay by veteran journalist and former NDP candidate Michael Valpy, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s Globe and Mail, calls to mind an argument by Michael Bliss about “old Canada” vs. “new Canada:”

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/is-this-the-end-of-the-age-of-our-social-cohesion/article1269043/

Is this the end of the age of our social cohesion?
Discrepancies in recent poll results may be a symptom of increasing fragmentation in Canadian society, rather than of any fault in the methods of data collection. It is harder to find a representative sample when people actually have less and less in common

Michael Valpy

Saturday, Aug. 29, 2009

For eight months, opinion surveys have told Canadians their enthusiasm for their two main national political parties has all the liveliness of a dead cod. Then a few days ago, without anything having happened, a poll placed Stephen Harper and his Conservatives 11 points in the lead.

The Conservatives themselves doubt its accuracy. The pollster, Darrell Bricker of Ipsos-Reid, defends the findings, saying they show the Liberals have no momentum and their Leader, Michael Ignatieff, is a “cipher” whom Canadians do not know.

That presupposes sufficient numbers of Canadians are accessing media where Mr. Harper and Mr. Ignatieff might be expected to appear. It pre-supposes that enough Canadians have sufficient knowledge of national affairs to pass meaningful judgment on what the two parties are doing.

It assumes that out of the fractures – the eroding social cohesion – of Canadian society, the poll bears a message that would actually serve to guide the two parties on how they should serve Canadians' democratic interests.

In True Patriot Love: Four Generations in Search of Canada – Mr. Ignatieff's new book that, like all his books, reads significantly better than his speeches – the Liberal Leader touches eloquently on the need for social cohesion.

“We need a public life in common,” he writes, “some set of reference points and allegiances to give us a way to relate to the strangers among whom we live. Without this feeling of belonging, even if only imagined, we would live in fear and dread of each other. When we can call the strangers citizens, we can feel at home with them and with ourselves.”

And reaching for a codicil from his intellectual hero, he adds: “Isaiah Berlin described this sense of belonging well. He said that to feel at home is to feel that people understand not only what you say, but also what you mean.”

A glorious objective.

Since his book was published in late spring, Mr. Ignatieff has been indicted by media commentators for offering a dearth of glue to bind his fellow citizens together. That should not tarnish the importance of his thesis.

Canadians have a conundrum of a country whose inhabitants, particularly anglophones, demonstrate a higher attachment to their nation than the inhabitants of any other advanced Western nation – says the Ottawa-based Ekos Research – but whose sense of common purpose and belonging together is disintegrating.

According to social scientists who study the issue, Canada is developing a social-cohesion deficit. Too little holds us together, and the potential threat to the democratic conduct of our affairs is cause for concern.

Canadians collectively have not thought seriously about nation-building since the Trudeau just-society era of the 1970s. The politics of consensus once so strongly imprinted on Canadian society have vanished.

At a time when historians are re-interesting themselves in the nation as a cultural notion, as a frame for identity – after a long hiatus when they sought to escape the dead-white-man narratives of political and economic nation-building – Canadian culture shows up with cleavages deep enough to be indecent.

The demographic bloat of baby boomers, more pronounced in Canada than anywhere except Australia, has dragged the country from Yuppiedom to Grumpydom – from young urban professionals to grown-up mature professionals – shifting the public-policy agenda along the way from social equality, human rights and statism to crime worries, security and fiscal retrenchment.

The Canadian median age in 1967 was 26, when Pierre Trudeau was getting ready to lead the country. It is now 43. Thus, not surprisingly, for the first time since Ekos began asking Canadians 15 years ago how they self-identify, a slightly larger number label themselves small-c conservative rather than small-l liberal, reinforcing policy indicators such as declining support for pacifism and a single-payer public health-care system.

The boomers eventually will totter off stage, but the people behind them are cleaved into two significant age-related groups, what Ekos president Frank Graves calls “open cosmopolitans” and “continental conservatives.”

The open cosmopolitans, with an over-representation of Generation X, are extremely receptive to diversity, immigration and the outside world and hold generally progressive views on issues such as foreign policy. The continental conservatives, with an overrepresentation from Generation Y (the under-30s), are comfortable with current government directions and see Canada being more closely drawn into a North American partnership.

There is no identifiable successor group on the radar screen to the vanishing supporters of Pearson-Trudeau progressive statism, in case anyone was hoping.

A DEEP SPLIT

But there is a deep split between megalopolitan Canada and everywhere else. (Think of a Conservative government with no elected members in Vancouver, Toronto or Montreal.)

There is a deep split between those with postsecondary education and those without. Canada has the world's highest proportion of people with postsecondary education.

And there is a marked split between genders. Among current voters, for example, women tend significantly to dislike both Stephen Harper and Mr. Ignatieff. Actually, for the past three years, Canadians as a whole have rarely got beyond mustering tepid interest in the two major parties, a favour the Conservatives and Liberals have returned by offering nothing approximating a national vision.

No mind-map, no soul-map, of Canada.

A nation is an imagined community, wrote the U.S. political scientist Benedict Anderson.

Thought is not private, contrary to what Rodin's statue of The Thinker implies. Thought is predominantly public and social, and therefore a nation is a community of people who understand that those with whom they shop, ride public transit and share the roads and the sidewalks also share values, community knowledge and mythologies.

It is what enables us to talk to one another with some confidence of being not only heard but, as Isaiah Berlin would have it, being understood. It is what enables Canadians to live together with sufficient levels of trust and security and to conduct their democracy more or less under the rubric of having a common purpose and serving the common good.

It is that facility which is in danger of unravelling – without, it should be noted, any rescue being offered by polling, the shotgun substitute for public consultation that politicians and governments have so heavily relied upon.

Polling methodology is breaking up on the rocks. People's increased unwillingness to respond to surveys is making it harder to assemble demographically representative samples and thus meaningful results.

Public cleavage is contributing to polls' debased value as an expression of public will: What public, or how many publics, are we talking about?

And the erosion of shared knowledge is undermining polls – not to mention social cohesion: that fundamental element of Benedict Anderson's imagined community, the information and knowledge that enable citizens to engage in debates and have opinions about what they should be doing together as a society, whether it is university education, health care or garbage pickup.

The central instruments of social cohesion have been the mass media, now being gnawed away at by specialty channels and the Internet, and by new generations who do not feel affiliated (the word communications theorists use) with TV networks or CBC radio or newspapers.

And what appears to be the greatest single impact of digital media is the disappearance of what political scientists call the public space – the very public space that, two centuries ago, newspapers created in Canada.

Prof. Gene Allen of Ryerson University's school of journalism cautions against assuming that mass media created some monolithic national consciousness in the past. “The fact you give someone a message,” he points out, “really doesn't tell you what they're going to do about it.”

Rather, he says, the significance of shared knowledge and its importance to social cohesion is more complex.

Shared knowledge means that equally important to what is said on the nightly newscasts, or what newspapers say, is that so many Canadians can assume that so many other Canadians are watching the same newscasts or reading the same newspapers.

As the U.S. media sociologist James Carey once said, reading a newspaper is like attending mass.

NEW GLUE

With network ratings and circulations falling farther and farther behind population growth, there remains, says Prof. Allen, “a strong desire among people to know what is socially known … [but] the cohesive core of common information is shrinking.”

The nature of the glue being provided by the new social networking instruments like Facebook and Twitter at this stage isn't known, he says. What may be immediately at peril is the mass-media serendipity of being intellectually challenged and engaged.

“The thing about newspapers is that you always find things you didn't know you were looking for. You come across views that you don't agree with or don't like,” says Christopher Waddell, director of Carleton University's school of journalism. “When you're searching for things on the Internet, I think it's much less likely that you're searching for things that challenge you. You're much more likely to be searching for positive reinforcement.”

The resulting risk, he says, is a polarization of attitudes. People will be less likely to expose themselves to opposing legitimate views.

“Society is always better when someone is trying to undermine your views. And particularly, social cohesion is better, because being challenged forces you to think through why you believe what you believe. It's the stimulus for debate and discussion and a recognition of multiple others.”

Pierre Trudeau once declared that if Canada broke apart, it would be a crime against humanity. What would he say if its citizens become strangers to themselves?

Some, likely many, will take issue with Valpy’s (self serving) explanation of the media’s role in informing opinion. I do not. For a very long time the media, in various forms, including bards and minstrels, presented fairly (internally) consistent and coherent explanations of the issues of the day. There were, and are, usually, healthy partisan differences between different media “brands” but, by and large, the mainstream media tried to separate news from opinion – often they succeeded. The end result was that most Canadians, regardless of region or language, had a fairly “common” big picture. But despite having a “common” base of information Canadians still divided themselves into what Bliss described as “old Canada” – everything East of the Ottawa River and “new Canada” – Ontario and the West and the North,* because, in part, as Prof. Gene Allen (Ryerson) said, we don’t use the common information in a common way. Bliss’ explanation of “old” vs. “new” was, essentially, attitudinal and was reflected in how they views what Valpy calls ” Pearson-Trudeau progressive statism.” The thesis is that “old Canada” embraces it and “new Canada” rejects it. Statism, of any sort, equals economic and, indeed, social stagnation. Québec is one of the most enthusiastically statist societies in the Western world; it is also one of the least “attractive” to business, capital and entrepreneurial immigrants. It, like (most? all?) other statist societies, is in a long, steady, albeit reversible decline.

The reasons for the “cleavage” are many and varied and Valpy gets some of them right. What he gets wrong is Berlin’s view of the “sense of belonging.” Berlin most certainly did not believe, as Valpy appears to, that we have to have some sort of “common” view or even a “common”: base of information for our views. Berlin was a true liberal – see, elsewhere, my comments on Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty” – who was, broadly, offended by Valpy’s views of society and politics.

The “real” situation is that, over the centuries, “our” (Anglo-American) attitudes and politics swing, constantly, to and fro – not like a simple clock pendulum but, rather, like a conical pendulum. We do not just swing from economic left to right, we swing from liberal to conservative, even to big government/big spending conservatism à la George W. Bush, and we swing (often very, very quickly) from bold to timid, and so on.

That is ongoing, today, in Canada and Valpy examines one “point” on a very complex, non-linear, moving pattern. The current “point” we are, for the moment, is, in Valpy’s words, where we are relatively evenly split between

• “The open cosmopolitans [who] are extremely receptive to diversity, immigration and the outside world and hold generally progressive views on issues such as foreign policy”; and

• “The continental conservatives [who] are comfortable with current government directions and see Canada being more closely drawn into a North American partnership”.

What frightens Valpy (and the Liberals and NDP) is that the “open cosmopolitans” are not guaranteed Liberal or NDP voters but the “continental conservatives” are highly likely to vote anything but BQ/Liberal/NDP. 


--------------------
* I cannot find the Bliss item – I’m about 99% sure it was Bliss. It was published at least ten years ago and I’m sure I saved a copy but I’m guessing that hard drive crashed a few years ago and I probably didn’t put everything from the backup on to a newer drive. Pity.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Speaking of Michael Bliss, this article, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from The National Post but archived on hydro, is a Bliss opinion piece from late 2001:

Is Canada a country in decline?
There was a time when the future of this blessed land looked hopeful.
But when we write the history of the past 30 years, it will be a sad
story of squandered opportunity

Michael Bliss
National Post

It has been too bad that the career and personality of the messenger blinds so many Canadians to the message Conrad Black has been trying to deliver. Strip away the ego-tripping and exaggeration, cut the adjectives and redundancies from his prose, and Black has been rather desperately trying to awaken us to the fact of Canadian decline.

He isn't alone in this. In the past few years, the speeches of business leaders, the columns of journalists, even the off-the-record musings of politicians have increasingly been marked by anxiety about the shortcomings of our national performance. In nearly all the dimensions of national life, we Canadians are falling behind both our southern neighbours and our own potential. The fact that from certain perspectives we remain such a wonderfully successful country has a tendency to mask our weaknesses. But these weaknesses are becoming so numerous and so glaring that a moment of national truth is approaching, a time when we have to face up to the implications of Canadian decline.

Here are the ways in which we are falling short:

(1) Economic: Although Canada remains one of the world's richest countries, our standard of living has been failing since the 1970s to keep pace with that of the United States. Our per capita wealth, which nearly matched the United States in the 1960s, is now 75% to 80% of that of Americans, and continuing to decline relatively. Thus, as Black has pointed out, in the aggregate Canadians are doing economically about as well in the world as black Americans, a people who have had a few more handicaps to overcome.

The decline in our dollar against the American, from above par in 1977 to recent record lows below 63¢, is a fair index of our relative shrinkage. We have proven unwilling or unable to level the tax playing field with the Americans; we are relying on the low dollar to keep our export industries competitive; in area after area of our economic life, from retailing to banking, our firms are having trouble competing in the free trade climate. The national government and most provinces continued to be burdened with high levels of public debt; as the recession bites, they're sliding quickly back into deficit financing. We are haemorrhaging talented, highly trained Canadians to the United States.

(2) Social: Canadian social policies are no longer pioneering, innovative or of much interest to anyone outside of Canada. Instead of being copied by other countries, our health care system is out of step with international practices, and in desperate need of reform. As our wealth declines relative to the United States, we are increasingly hard-pressed to compete with the Americans in a wide range of social policy, from educational and research excellence to urban infrastructure. There is no evidence that our national gun control legislation has achieved anything but cost overruns, bureaucratic bloat and citizen vexation. Forty years of national social policy aimed at regional equalization has perpetuated inequality and dependency, while spawning regional resentment. Our aboriginal policies are, at best, an anachronistic holding operation.

(3) Cultural: Save for a handful of brilliant writers, Canada's contribution to global culture is minimal. We make no significant contribution to global popular culture. Our domestic publishing and entertainment industries remain on taxpayer-provided life-support. There is no evidence that the strong French presence in Canadian life has made any significant difference in our total cultural achievement. Effective bilingualism or biculturalism ends in Canada about five miles west of Ottawa. An increasingly multicultural society cannot, by definition, have a meaningful cultural identity.

(4) Political: The embarrassingly inept complacency of our aging Prime Minister is only the tip of the iceberg of our political malaise. Ottawa arguably has fewer leaders of real stature than at any time since 1867.
Not only has our two-party system disappeared, but the calibre of the replacement talent within the governing party is not high. A lucky, run-of-the-mill Finance Minister, and a disaster-prone Health Minister are the best of a shockingly bad lot. The opposition politicians are not credible alternatives.

Worse, the individuals reflect the system. Canada's monarchically derived parliamentary government is anachronistic in the modern democratic world. Quite apart from the institutionalized scandal of our Senate, the House of Commons has sunk into irrelevance while the Prime Minister's Office has risen to autocratic dominance. The continuance of patronage and the plundering of the public treasury to advance the interests of the governing party would be seen as an affront to civic ideals, if only we still had ideals to offend. Our most respected pundit, Jeffrey Simpson, publishes a devastating attack on our political system as A Friendly Dictatorship, and Ottawa barely yawns. Everyone knows it's true. Nobody cares.

(5) Military and Diplomatic: There is an important parallelism here. Just as we have armed forces fully trained, equipped and prepared for anything but fighting, so we go through all the motions on the world stage until it comes to actually having influence. The lies and exaggerations about our role that are spread for public consumption in Canada are accurately dealt with in the foreign media -- they just ignore us.

Unlike Conrad Black, at age eight I had not yet visited New York or London, nor had I begun to formulate my vision of a great Canada that might be. In the early 1950s it was my mother who wrote the very successful public speech I gave as a 10-year-old on "Canada's Future," in which she/I predicted boundless possibilities for this rich and blessed country.

For the most part over the next 20 years, peaking perhaps in 1967, Mom and I were right. In those years it was still possible to dream about Canada doing better than the United States. Ours would be a country with a higher standard of living, thanks to the wise use of its resources, a country with better social programs, a stronger commitment to civic and social order, cities that worked, more responsive political institutions and a balance of power and professionalism in world affairs. Ours would be a country on cultural and educational frontiers, a country that attracted talented Americans and offered boundless opportunities for its own people.

Yes, Virginia, there was a time when we could envisage Canada as being on top in North America. Now it has become evident that when we write the history of the past 30 years of Canadian national life, it will be in substantial part a sad story of squandered opportunities and decline. It will be a story of ill-conceived national economic and social policies, of onanistic obsession with Quebec, of the mindless parochialism of provincial governments, of the decay of civic spirit, of the full flowering of our national penchant for self-delusion, complacency and mediocrity.

On the other hand, part of our "decline" has been inevitable. I don't see how we could have avoided the north-south continental economic integration that was well on its way before NAFTA and now poses so many border-related conundrums. Nor is it clear how any distinctive "Canadian" identity could have evolved in a country that was opening and enriching itself to all the cultures of the world and becoming steadily more tolerant of multiple identities. How could we pride ourselves on monarchical government in an age of popular democracy, on being a law-and-order society in love with the RCMP in an age of civil liberties and charters? How could we resist Hollywood and fast food and Disneyfication? If globalization was bound to weaken all national cultures and governments, how could we have opted out?

Because the notion of Canadian decline is more nebulous than clear-cut in the world of the 21st century, the country's future is similarly uncertain. We seem to have four options. Ranging from the least to the most likely, and from the most to the least preferable, they are:

(1) Reinvigorating the Canadian nation, in accord with the optimism of 1967 and the aspirations of the Fathers of Confederation in 1867. This is least likely because of globalization, continentalization, the stubborn self-interest of our provincial governments and the black hole on Parliament Hill.

(2) Organic union with the United States. It may happen in the long term, and it might be the best possible solution, but there is almost no popular support, nor will there be unless or until Canadians sense they have reached a national crisis signalling the end of the road. Union negotiations would take years, and there is a distinct possibility Americans might not agree that Canada is worth having. Would Prince Edward Island be a state? Why would Republicans want to add eight or nine Democratic states plus Alberta?

(3) The creation of Greater North America, modelled after the new Europe. Perhaps the logic of free trade and 9/11 will lead to the explicit harmonization of continental tariff and immigration policies, security and defence. Gradually Canada's tax policies will have to be harmonized with those of nearby U.S. states. The debate on a common currency is not going to recede. As American economic influence on Canada continues to evolve, the pressure for erasing the border in every non-political aspect may be irresistible. While it's true the Americans will inevitably dominate all supra-national North American institutions, the possibility of having some representation and influence is surely better than having none.

(4) The status quo: national half-life. Inertia is one of the most powerful forces in politics, especially in Canada. As the Chrétien government has shown us in recent years, it is perfectly possible to drift from season to season, riding American coattails, adjusting policies occasionally to keep Washington happy, and either denying that we have problems or blaming them on forces beyond our control. None of Mr. Chrétien's probable successors is likely seriously to change direction, seriously to upset the status quo. It's a comfortable kind of life up here in the northern backwater, not exciting or challenging, not so affluent, but not so stressful either. As someone has said, Canada makes a good decaffeinated USA -- it's a country you can do a lot of sleeping in.

So what if the whiners and the American wannabees and the men on the make leave? When they go they take their votes with them. Every new immigrant is a potential new and grateful voter. A system like this can go on for a very long time, its hollowness hidden by the gewgaws of independence -- flags, Canada Day concerts, beer commercials, the CBC.

Relative to most of the rest of the world, Canada does very well indeed. The current generation just shouldn't have as high expectations as the Americans do, or as Conrad Black does, or as Canadians brought up in the 1950s and 1960s came to have. Yes, you can ungratefully bad-mouth Liberal Canada, but now and for a long time to come it will remain possible to be affluently Canadian, happily Canadian, complacently Canadian.

It makes things easier also to be resolutely, privately Canadian, for when you think about the quality and future of public life in the country you may slip back into dismay. When you think of how we rely on the United States for our security and our economic well-being, you might start having dark thoughts about Canadian hypocrisy. We still mouth the platitudes about our achievements and importance and sovereignty, but do we really believe them? When it comes to being committed to excellence, to real achievement, to making real contributions to the life of the world, it's increasingly hard to be proudly Canadian.

And Canada is a country to be a little less proud of every time it drives out citizens like Conrad Black. For all his faults Lord Black invested money, talent, ideas and hope in this place. He challenged us to do better. He may not have succeeded, but Conrad Black served his native land far better than the ninnies who write puling, pusillanimous editorials and letters to the editor of The Globe and Mail.

Michael Bliss is an author and a professor of history at the University of Toronto.

It would be groslly unfair to describe Prof. Bliss as anything except a conservative and Conservative historian. His distaste for the Liberals was/is quite well known.

I expect that he feels sadly vindicated when he re-reads these words:

None of Mr. Chrétien's probable successors is likely seriously to change direction, seriously to upset the status quo. It's a comfortable kind of life up here in the northern backwater, not exciting or challenging, not so affluent, but not so stressful either.

 

[a_majoor]

The end result was that most Canadians, regardless of region or language, had a fairly “common” big picture. But despite having a “common” base of information Canadians still divided themselves into what Bliss described as “old Canada” – everything East of the Ottawa River and “new Canada” – Ontario and the West and the North,* because, in part, as Prof. Gene Allen (Ryerson) said, we don’t use the common information in a common way.

Robert Kaplan made a similar observation:

Officers at Levensworth read "The Economist" and "Foreign Affairs" and watch "The Newshour with Jim Lehrer", but that does not mean they interpret the information the way civilian policy makers and people in the media do. However sophisticated the reading lists, the people doing the reading here often come from rural, blue collar America.

"It matters less what you read than where you you live and where you come from, because that determines how you interpret knowledge", explained Major Susan P Kellett-Forsyth, one of the first female graduates of West Point."

An Empire Wilderness; page 11

 

[Kirkhill]

This author has long been out of favour in Canada - and yet I find Ignatieff and Valpy both echoing his century old observation.

The Stranger within my gate,
He may be true or kind,
But he does not talk my talk—
I cannot feel his mind.
I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,
But not the soul behind.

The men of my own stock,
They may do ill or well,
But they tell the lies I am wonted to,
They are used to the lies I tell;
And we do not need interpreters
When we go to buy or sell.

The Stranger within my gates,
He may be evil or good,
But I cannot tell what powers control—
What reasons sway his mood;
Nor when the Gods of his far-off land
Shall repossess his blood.

The men of my own stock,
Bitter bad they may be,
But, at least, they hear the things I hear,
And see the things I see;
And whatever I think of them and their likes
They think of the likes of me.

This was my father's belief
And this is also mine:
Let the corn be all one sheaf—
And the grapes be all one vine,
Ere our children's teeth are set on edge
By bitter bread and wine.

Rudyard Kipling "The Vancouver World" April 1908

Ever since that poem was published the Liberal (Large L Edward) establishment has been doing its best to dispute the observation described in the first 4 verses fearing that the prescription offered in the fifth verse is the only one available.  I don't dispute the observation.  I do dispute the prescription.  But I fear that many others accept the prescription - and in particular that is true of the BQ.

I still stand by an oft repeated position of mine, which Valpy echoes repeating Carey's observation on papers and the mass, that Canada's divisions are not to be found in language but in religion. 

One portion of our intellectual heritage is convinced of the need for a common message.  Without a commonality of understanding then there no future but that of disorder and chaos.  This is the view, in my opinion, of the Michael Valpys of the world, with their statist bent: a view that finds favour amongst the intellectual class, the university class, the bureaucratic class, the media - the canting classes.  They find kindred spirits in the Ancien Regime, the Dominie and the Episcopalian Church - Anglican, Roman or Lutheran.  This was Trudeau's world.

The other day, flipping channels, I came across one of those roundtables beloved of the media where they interview themselves (circlejerks of a sort) and bemoan the state of the world.  Before I passed on to the next station to get a fill of T&A I heard one individual declaring that the problem with the new media is that everybody works in isolation.  In the good old days you could bounce ideas off the herd to determine if you were on the right track - or, as I might better put it, were thinking correctly.  In such manner were heresies prevented.

The other portion of our heritage derives from a school that throve on chaos and disorder,  that embraced varying and constantly dividing views, that gave us Presbyterians, Calvinists, Baptists, Methodists, Anabaptists, Southern Methodists, Wee Free and Wiccans but also gave us the free spirited, freedom loving, capitalist society that built the current world order.  Edit - I could/should add that the list of splintering groups includes various non-spiritual groups including the invisible college, the Royal Society, the Masons, the Hellfire club, the Elks, Lions, Rotarians and Kiwanis, the Labour party, the Socialist, Anarchist and Communist Internationals and all our modern political parties and NGOs

Interestingly that world began with the clarion call of an Edinburgh fish wife who, objecting to the service at her church, picked up her stool and threw it at the offending priest shouting :  Wha daur say MASS in my lug*.

There you find the true divide between the statist and the individualist ( I leave it to Edward and Thucydides to parse the beauties of liberalism and libertarianism).

* for the uncivilized amongst you that don't understand guid Scots - Who dares to say Mass in my ear.

 

[a_majoor]

Kirkhill gives me a lovely opening to move into the topic of "Civic Nationalism".

Since the idea of Civic Nationalism is based on the concept of common systems of beliefs, it should be quite clear that Canada is never going to be able to create a strong sense of "Canadian Identity" under the current prevailing beliefs of "Official Multiculturalism" or the ingrained belief that Quebec must be accommodated for partisan political purposes.

There is a giant wellspring of resistance to "Civic Nationalism" in Canada, at least among the political and media elites, as could be seen by the heaps of scorn and disdain poured on the Reform Party and their calls for all Canadians to be treated equally (ending regional and ethnic based programs, for example). Most Canadians did not see this issue as being important enough to make Reform more than the opposition party, and the lure of getting benefits paid for by someone else was also far more powerful than arresting the slow decline of Canada as a political, economic or even cultural entity.

 

[Edward Campbell]

See here for some background.

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s National Post is some good advice from columnist Don Martin:

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/08/31/alberta-to-u-s-use-the-oilsands-or-lose-them.aspx

Alberta to U.S.: Use the oil sands or lose them

August 31, 2009

Don Martin

OTTAWA -- To lift a quip from Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Arctic sovereignty policy and apply it to the American view of Alberta’s oil sands: use it or lose it.

The Chinese government pushed its shovel deep into Canada’s energy motherlode on Monday when it announced a $2-billion stake in a five-billion-barrel reserve of “dirty oil” that Americans increasingly find unworthy of fuelling their vehicles.

The 60% claim by PetroChina in two projects owned by Athabasca Oil Sands Corp., while small compared to the great gobs of capital pouring into oil sands expansion and extraction, are the global giant’s largest investment in Canadian energy yet.

And China usually buys into product it aims to consume.

Sources in Washington predict politicians there will not be pleased at having a massive supply of secure energy on their northern doorstep slipping under Chinese ownership.

Well, too bad.

Under the greenish Obama administration, “oil sands” is becoming a dirty word as Americans take on the delusional swagger that they can be picky about which oil is good enough to buy in a recession when supply is temporarily ahead of demand.

Canadian oil sands exports are increasingly encountering U.S. political resistance at federal, state and municipal levels as low-carbon fuel standards move through the legislative process to erect barricades against an energy with an extraction problem.   

But it is delusional because there is no post-refining difference between conventional and non-conventional oil and banning it in one state or city merely moves it to another, with no corresponding reduction in carbon emissions. 

Yet the difference between the American and Chinese views of oilsand imports suggests that Canada is nearing a moment of decision.

It can be forever held captive to the whims of U.S. refineries, which import 60% of oilsand production or about 780,000 barrels a day. Or it can create a battle of demand between the two energy-consuming superpowers that will soon find there is not enough oil to satisfy their combined thirsts.

That will require Canada, whose pipelines now head only north and south, to punch a hole in the Rockies and open up a crude flow to the west coast, from where oil could head overseas.

Environment Minister Jim Prentice is no fan of a single-buyer market for exported bitumen, which actually sells at a discount in the U.S. compared to Middle East oil despite coming from a friendly neighbour. He’d like competition injected into the system.

“Doesn’t it help Canada’s exporter to have alternative market choices?,” he noted in a recent interview. “We need transportation mechanisms to ship it to the West Coast. Refineries in the U.S. have limited capacity and we don’t have anywhere else to sell it. Having the capacity to ship it to the West Coast would keep everybody honest, so I think it’s good policy.” 

That’s so obvious as to be rhetorical, but the cost and complications of a new west-bound pipeline may be prohibitive for the private sector to go it alone.

The proposed Enbridge Inc. Northern Gateway pipeline, which was been on ice for several years, is being thawed for reconsideration.

That’s at least five years off and the project faces numerous environmental, aboriginal land claim and geographical hurdles, which is probably why they weren’t talking it yesterday — although they weren’t ruling it out in the longer term either.

But to understand China’s strategic investment interest, keep in mind that 2009 will likely go down as the first year when car sales in the Communist country beat the United States, making it the world’s largest car-buying nation.

At the risk of stating the obvious, cars consume gasoline, gasoline comes from oil and the world’s largest deposits of oil, albeit locked in tar, straddle northern Alberta and Saskatchewan. 

If America doesn’t want to use it on environmental grounds, they’re only one pipeline away from losing it to someone else. 

National Post
dmartin@nationalpost.com

A trans-mountain pipeline, a (Canadian) Pacific petro-port and increased oil and natural gas exports to China are all good policy. They require the Government-of-Canada to “stand up” to the USA – always good politics and to support (spend money on) a new pipeline – never a wholly popular (but always inflationary) course of action.

I understand I have posted bits about this “topic” (China/oilsands) in three separate areas during one morning but it touches several areas of interest.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s Globe and Mail is an important column/book review by Neil Reynolds:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/commentary/canadas-downward-path-from-nation-to-fiction/article1280143/

Canada's downward path from nation to fiction
'Canada is no longer a community of strongly held principles. It's as simple as that'

Neil Reynolds

Wednesday, Sep. 09, 2009

The population of Quebec will shrink to barely one-fifth of Canada's by 2031 - implying, according to economist Brian Lee Crowley in an important new book, "a big drop in the province's relative weight in the House of Commons." In fact, he calculates, Quebec's influence will fall from 75 out of 308 MPs to 75 out of 375. The political implications would be profound.

British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario together would have roughly 250 members," Mr. Crowley says. "Winning three-quarters of those seats would give a political party an overall majority in the Commons without a single Quebec seat, or indeed a seat in any other province." Ottawa's long bidding war with Quebec for the loyalty (and votes) of Quebeckers would end - and an historic transformation of Canada would begin.

Mr. Crowley's book – Fearful Symmetry: The Fall and Rise of Canada's Founding Values - argues that Canada went disastrously off track in the 1960s and the 1970s for two reasons. The first was the rise of Quebec nationalism. The second was the population explosion following the Second World War. The need to appease Quebec separatism, Mr. Crowley says, warped federal policies and federal politics for two generations. The baby boomers, he says, provided a dubious justification for a rapid expansion of the welfare state.

Didn't governments have a responsibility to find jobs for the baby boomers - and especially for Quebec's baby boomers? Without federal jobs, wouldn't these rebellious young people opt for separatism? Separately and in combination, these self-reinforcing influences induced successive federal governments (beginning with Liberal prime ministers Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau) to abandon Canada's traditional laissez-faire governing principles and to substitute the statist assumptions favoured by intellectual elites in Ottawa and Quebec City. The federal government's obsession with finding work for the baby boomers, for example, led to the creation of vast numbers of federal and provincial "pseudo-jobs"- which inexorably corrupted the work ethic for which Canadians had, in earlier years, been famous.

The consequence was predictable, Mr. Crowley says. Canadians had prospered as a society of makers. They became a society of takers - and Canadian productivity inevitably faltered. The Canadian state became an intellectual conceit, "a great fiction through which everybody endeavoured to live at the expense of everybody else." Mr. Crowley's citation of this famous aphorism, crafted by the famous 19th century liberal economist Frédéric Bastiat, is persuasive. Bastiat's corollary is corroborative: "Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone."

Mr. Crowley's unique interpretation of Canadian history rings loudly with clarity and conviction. Perhaps intuitively, many Canadians appear to sense, with profound regret, the radical changes that have taken place in this country in the past 50 years. This sentiment is more than nostalgia; it is a growing awareness of personal loss. Canada was once a community of strongly held principles - principles shared by French-speaking Canadians as well as English-speaking Canadians. They included a profound commitment to limited government, personal responsibility and the rule of law. Canada is no longer a community of strongly held principles. It's as simple as that.

Mr. Crowley tackles the mythology that Canadians are natural statists, that the welfare state is the product of a collective preference. Before the country began to change in the 1960s, he says, Canadians were "resolutely North American." In some ways, he says, the British tradition made Canadians even more leery of the expansive state than the American tradition did south of the border - notwithstanding "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

He is absolutely correct. For much of the country's existence, governments needed less than 10 per cent of Canada's GDP to fulfill their obligations - because these obligations were narrowly defined by universal consent. Government was limited because Canadians wanted it limited, a fact attested by innumerable witnesses. In his memoirs, for example, J.A. Corry, principal of Queen's University in the 1960s, observed that Canadians were as alert historically to government aggrandizement as Americans.

"Jeffersonian democrats," he wrote, "littered the ground in Canada." Mr. Corry regarded the centralizing federal state as the biggest threat to Canadian democracy. Mr. Crowley quotes iconic Canadian essayist Stephen Leacock to illustrate the strong aversion of Canadians to intrusive government well into the 20th century: "We are in danger of over-government; we are suffering from a too-great extension of the functions of the state."

Leacock wrote this judgment in 1924, when governments spent 11 per cent of Canada's GDP - roughly one-quarter what they spend now (which is modestly less than in 1992, when government spending peaked at 50 per cent). A couple of generations later, Montreal economist William Watson concluded that Canada finished the Great Depression as "probably the most laissez-faire country going." In a word, as Mr. Crowley amply demonstrates, Canada got mugged - and never recovered its valuables.

Founder of the Halifax-based Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, Brian Lee Crowley has written a courageous book with absolutely unique analysis and interpretation. Part lament, part celebration, Fearful Symmetry is most of all a profoundly optimistic book. Why? Rush to read it as soon as you can.

More about Brian Lee Crowley can be found here.

Everything wasn’t perfect or right or even pretty good prior to Pearson/Trudeau but they, Trudeau especially, did, indeed, overturn the socio-economic/political applecart and they, again Trudeau especially, did create a corrosive, destructive culture of entitlement taking us from being a ”society of makers” and turning us into a ”society of takers.”

If we cannot fix the (relatively few) really important bits that Trudeau broke – and I’m not convinced we can – then Canada, as a modern, prosperous, sophisticated, wealthy, capitalist nation-state is doomed.

 

[GAP]

I would submit that sovereignty in its various guises (Quebec/Western Alienation/Pacific) will break this country apart within the next 50 years, with much of the good producing parts coopted into the U.S.. The rest will cling to a memory, but basically be disfunctional....

 

[Edward Campbell]

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s Globe and Mail, is the second half of Neil Reynolds’ comments on Brian Lee Crowley’s new book Fearful Symmetry: The Fall and Rise of Canada's Founding Values:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/commentary/demographics-dictate-a-return-to-traditional-values/article1283358/

Demographics dictate a return to traditional values
People will need to work longer and harder, which will restore the ethic that once made Canadians an extraordinarily productive people

Neil Reynolds
reynolds.globe@gmail.com

Saturday, Sep. 12, 2009

In his illuminating new book, economist Brian Lee Crowley anticipates a historic restoration of the principles by which the country governed itself in the past - among them, the classically liberal principles of limited government and personal responsibility. Entitled Fearful Symmetry: The Fall and Rise of Canada's Founding Values, Mr. Crowley's contrarian assessment explains why, demographic step by demographic step.

The fading of Quebec nationalism will combine with an eroding population to reverse the dysfunctional trends of the past 50 years. Put simply, Canada will soon lack the workers necessary to fund Big Government. The only alternative will be less government and more personal responsibility.

The two facts that will most significantly determine Canada's economic future, Mr. Crowley says, are the fact that Canadians do not have nearly enough babies to sustain Canada's approaching peak population and the fact that immigrants can't make up the difference. The probable consequences are: (1) Canada gradually loses influence in the world as its population shrinks and (2) Canada's standard of living stagnates.

Mr. Crowley, most recently the Clifford Clark Visiting Economist with the Department of Finance, says people will need to work longer and harder, which (though difficult for people desperate to retire at 55) will restore the work ethic that once made Canadians an extraordinarily productive people. Canadians can expect less government because government won't be able to subsidize people who choose not to work harder and longer, he says. We can expect more personal responsibility because economic survival will require it.

But Canadians won't increase the country's birth rate merely by working longer and harder. Nor will government. The implications are dramatic - especially when contrasted to the United States, whose population will expand as Canada's falters. By 2050, Canada's projected population will be 44 million; the U.S. projected population will be as high as 550 million, reflecting a birth rate that The Economist magazine has described as "astonishing."

Canada and the U.S. will diverge in other ways. Canadians are already massing into three or four big cities; Americans are dispersing to outer suburbs and to the countryside, but places more distant from the U.S.-Canada border. In 2050, the median Canadian age will be 42; the median American age will be 36. The "shape" of the Canadian population will be like a vase - narrow at the bottom (reflecting the lack of children), wide at the shoulders (reflecting the higher percentage of older people); the "shape of the American population will be almost cylindrical. (By 2020, the proportion of children in the U.S. population will surpass China's.)

Canadians must anticipate that the "prosperity gap" between the two countries will grow much larger. Mr. Crowley observes: "Half a billion Americans, with the highest productivity in the world; a relatively young, flexible and highly educated work force, and a willingness to spend a significant share of GDP on defence would be a superpower perhaps even more formidable in 2050 than today - and possibly less inclined to pay attention to Canada's interests." (In these circumstances, Canada might be wise to negotiate a mobility-rights treaty with the U.S. - either to give Canadians an escape route or to give Americans easy entry to our labour force.)

Canada's falling birth rate, Mr. Crowley suggests, has many causes, but he adds a couple of his own to the usual list (the zeitgeist, the contraceptives, the two-worker family). "Overweaning government," he says, "has undermined families for the last 50 years." He attributes part of Canada's falling birth rate to the struggle to keep Quebec in Confederation and the creation of "pseudo-jobs" to absorb the surplus workers of the Baby Boom generation. Government, he says, has itself operated as a contraceptive.

All this sounds serious and sombre. Mr. Crowley's profound optimism, however, arises from the inevitable withering of the state that lies directly ahead, a withering already under way. "We are on the cusp of a tremendous renaissance," he says, "if we want to seize the moment." The disappearance of surplus workers will bring with it the disappearance of the government programs that purported to create jobs, "pulling hundreds of thousands of people out of dependency, pseudo-work and premature retirement." Real work will once more become the norm. Family will become important again, as will marriage.

Governments will increasingly revert to "the kinds of policies that underpinned our great success as a nation in our first century." The ensuing power shift will diminish the influence of Quebec and increase the influence of British Columbia and Alberta; in this way, the country will move "closer to the traditional values of our founders." Other provinces will move in the same direction: "Saskatchewan will almost certainly become more like Alberta," he writes.

"In a few short years, the values of the left-liberal welfare state will seem a quaint echo of a receding past," Mr. Crowley says. "Politically, any party that can capture the high ground of Canada's traditional values will likely become the country's dominant party. ... The low rumble that you hear is the traditionalist juggernaut gathering force across the land. ... It will leave nothing as it was."

We can only hope.

I just started Crowleys’ book so I cannot, yet, comment on his projections, but: immigration – highly focused, well managed immigration – can make a big difference.

One problem I think I see with our immigration “system” is that is accepts the fact that too many Canadians are viscerally afraid of immigrants from East and South Asia.

They (Canadians) are afraid of East and South Asian cultural values that are inconsistent with Trudeau’s culture of entitlement that made us a “society of takers” instead of a “society of makers.” They are afraid of the strong “family values” that help so many East and South Asian students do so well in school and, therefore, get the best jobs.

Canadians are less afraid of Africans and Latin Americans because they suspect, maybe just hope, that they (Africans and Latin Americans) are less capable than the Asians.

 

[foresterab]

Town I just moved from...located in north rural Alberta (oil and gas, tourism, and forestry town) was 10% Filipino born. 

And people were afraid of them...but they worked harder and better than many Canadians to the point many local companies had stopped advertising jobs locally and went straight overseas.

A little competition for work is a good thing.
foresterab

 

[Kat Stevens]

I moved to Westlock 7 years ago.  There was a Korean family that owned a gas station, and a Pakistani family that owned a hardware store.  That was it.  Probably the whitest place I've ever lived.  Today I look around town, and there is a considerable Philippine presence,  along with quite a few Mexicans.  In a few short years the spectrum  has shifted quite dramatically.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s Globe and Mail web site, is a good question:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/four-elections-six-years-is-canada-broken/article1286163/

Four elections. Six years. Is Canada broken?
As the Canadian political establishment prepares for yet another vote, with no real issue at stake, our country's major concerns are left to languish

John Ibbitson

Ottawa
Sunday, Sep. 13, 2009

If someone told you that a country, any country, was heading into its fourth general election in less than six years, you would say: That country is broken.

Is Canada broken?

Right now, the Canadian political juggernaut is lurching toward the defeat of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative government, even though there is no real issue at stake (Employment Insurance reform? Come on) and no likelihood, according to the polls, that the election race will result in anything beyond yet another unstable minority government.

“We are in a continuous election campaign with no discussion of issues,” observes Ned Franks, a political scientist at Queen's University and a leading authority on Canada's Parliament.

Major concerns – from immigration to the environment to the very fate of the federal government within Confederation – languish, as the parties use Parliament for an elaborate and futile game of political chicken.

A political system designed to produce majority governments or, at the least, stable minority governments, has malfunctioned, throwing up instead a succession of regimes so fragile that the campaign for the next election begins with the first Speech from the Throne.

This is nowhere better reflected than in data presented by Prof. Franks at a recent gathering of the Public Policy Forum, an Ottawa think tank.

From 1969 to 1973, Parliament sat, on average, 163 days a year. From 2004 to 2008, it was down to 105.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, 96 per cent of legislation introduced into Parliament became law. In Lester B Pearson's minority governments, the figure was 91 per cent. Brian Mulroney only got 73 per cent of his agenda through Parliament; for Stephen Harper, the figure is 48 per cent. Most of what gets introduced into Parliament now never becomes enshrined in law.

“Parliament as an instrument is not being used properly either by the opposition or the government,” Prof. Franks says. “It's not sitting enough to do what I think it should do for Canada.”

Dysfunction like this can break a country.

Except that Canada doesn't act like it's broken, contends Richard French, a well-known University of Ottawa political scientist, former public servant and Quebec provincial politician.

While the United States claws its way out of vicious economic crisis, Canada is recovering nicely from a reasonably mild recession, thanks to the federal government's sound fiscal and monetary policies. Most Canadians have good jobs and receive excellent government services, from education to health care. Most people are content.

Given how well Canadians live, thanks in no small measure to their governments, Prof. French asks, “what justifies this terrible, dark view of the country that Canadian intellectuals constantly indulge in?”

Fair question.

Few would deny that the chickens released in the 1990s have come home to roost today. To rid itself of deficits, Jean Chretien's government offloaded to the provinces increased responsibilities for running health care, education, welfare, environmental policies and a plethora of other duties, without providing sufficient funding.

The provinces, once they stopped howling, set about raising revenue and taking on their new mandates. Today, Canada is a nation of strong provinces with a weak federal government, hobbled by minority Parliaments and uncertain of its own relevance.

The nineties also witnessed the rise of the Bloc Quebecois and the threat of Quebec separation. That threat has receded, but the Bloc remains, immovable, commanding a majority of Quebec seats and making it extremely difficult for any other party to establish a majority.

But the other parties are regional, too. The Liberal Party has become principally the party of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, while the Conservatives are the party of Alberta and rural English Canada, although they are steadily encroaching on the Liberals' remaining urban bastions. In that sense, the major parties encompass the solitudes of urban and rural, multicultural and white, Alberta and the rest.

The country is also divided along generational fault lines. Fewer voters are turning out, and participation among voters under 30 is dismal. Contrast that with south of the border, where Barack Obama's landmark campaign married the power of Web-based social networking to a progressive message as a means of galvanizing younger voters, who turned out in force to help make him president.

The fifty- and sixty-something white men who head up Canada's major political parties speak neither to its multicultural reality nor to the younger cohort of voters.

“It's very important” that the political party elites “open up their parties to the broader public” insists Alison Loat, executive director of Samara, a nonprofit organization that fosters researches on public policy, citizenship and the media. “It's not just limited to the young. It's across the board.”

Though the Prime Minister is convinced he can win a majority this time, the polls, unless they change, say we are headed for another minority. The question then is whether the leadership of the political parties can grow up, and can begin providing the stable, productive government that characterized the minority governments of Mackenzie King and Lester B. Pearson.

“I would be delighted to see [a Parliament] where we're a little more comfortable with compromise,” hopes Ms. Loat. That means having leaders “more willing to have tough discussions without backing themselves into corners that are tough to get out of.”

But that would require a change of culture in Ottawa, a recognition that the day of the political party as a national institution brokering interests within its own ranks and governing within a majority consensus – or at least a large minority one – is at an end, because no party is likely to receive such a mandate in this election or the next.

Party leaders must look at each other as legitimate representatives of sectional interests whose needs deserve to be accommodated. That is no easy concession in any Parliament, and especially difficult to imagine in this one.

If the election returns another conservative minority government, the future of every party leader will be in question. Yet there are no obvious successors.

Perhaps we need these elections to burn through the remaining crop of politicians who rose to prominence in the last century. Perhaps we're waiting for a political party to realize that this century's Canada needs a new generation of leaders. Perhaps we will end this foolishness when we elect a Parliament that resembles the Canada that is to come.

Ibbitson is right to highlight the splits, which go beyond Québec and Canada.

I think there is a way, in the future, for either the Conservatives or the Liberals to become the natural governing party. It involves rejecting Québec and Québec Inc and the "Québec model" and, to a less extent, Atlantic Canada. It involves investing money and ideas and people where there is some “return on investment” and ignoring, even punishing regions and sectors that do not provide adequate “return.”

One area where we get a very, very bad “return on investment” is in government, itself. We need, fairly desperately, wholesale cuts in most of the government. The majority of Canadian government departments and agencies are somewhere between bloated and inefficient, at the “good" end, and perfectly bloody useless, a total and complete waste of money at the other. The problem is not stupid, lazy bureaucrats – most of the people upon whom most of the money is wasted are intelligent and hard working but the “work” they do is useless, it produces nothing of value, in fact it produces nothing at all, and, for that reason, tens and tens of thousands of well paid, hard working civil servants are a drag on our national productivity because they are wasting money and failing to do anything useful in other, worthwhile, productive jobs.