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Time for big ideas: Imagine Canada after Harper
Stephen Harper, too, shall pass into history, recorded as one of the most destructive, personally malignant personalities ever to have soiled the Canadian political landscape.
But in the meantime, Canadians are so distracted by his political blitzkrieg through the agencies, policies, programs and institutions that make Canada what it became over five decades, that we are in danger of losing our imagination regarding what is truly possible in this country. While it may seem counter-intuitive, now is the time for Canadians who actually believe in government and nation-building to be contemplating big ideas - the ones that will take us the next step to equality, economic stability and environmental sustainability. Why? Because if we don’t try to get what we want we won’t even get what we need.
Is this just pie in the sky - are Canadians actually open to big ideas? Absolutely. Here are just a few of the signs.
Five signs Canadians aren’t afraid of big ideas
First: CARP, the Canadian Association of Retired Persons (with a membership 330,000), has just witnessed a sea change in its members’ voting intentions. For most of the past year just over 50 per cent of them chose the Conservatives. But suddenly, two issues reversed that, giving the NDP (which had consistently run a distant third) first place with 39 per cent and the Harperites 31 per cent. The first issue was the changes to the OAS. But the “political game changer,” according to Susan Eng, vice-president of advocacy for CARP, was the omnibus bill. Eighty-five percent opposed bundling so many legislative changes into a single bill. Seniors, a key part of Harper’s broader base, apparently care about democracy even more than their own safety net.
Sign number two: perhaps we should call it free market fatigue, as increasing numbers of Canadians are questioning the Conservative ideology of minimalist government and a free hand for corporations. As I detailed in my last column, large majorities of Canadians are calling for higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations and are willing to pay more themselves to preserve what we have. And they see the tax issue tied directly to that of inequality - the new top-of-mind issue.
Number three: The Alberta election which seemed for weeks to be heading towards the election of a Harper clone reversed course as Albertans suddenly paid real attention. This wasn’t just a vote against bigotry - though it was that, too - but a vote for good government, something the iconic Tory Peter Lougheed reminded voters of just in the nick of time.
Four: The re-election of Liberal and NDP governments in Ontario (where the NDP did well, too) and Manitoba respectively was not just a vote for incumbency - it was a vote for rational governance and against libertarian recklessness. So will be the almost certain election of the NDP in BC next year.
Five: The Quebec student rebellion. Deep rooted rebellions are always messy and imperfect but while many are uncomfortable with the scenes of violence the students are absolutely right to be protesting tuition fee increases. And now the demonstrations are as much about human rights and the reactionary government of Jean Charest as they are about tuition fees. They are sustained by tens of thousands of our fellow citizens prepared to make real sacrifices for what the rest of us pay lip service to: equality.
But this is also a good example of the role of big ideas. Why wouldn’t we be demanding zero tuition fees - so that all education is free and paid for collectively? We are now, as a nation, well over twice as wealthy per capita (in real, inflation adjusted dollars) as we were when Medicare was established in 1967. The money is there - and in a democracy the people get to decide how those resources are used. We owe the Quebec students (and their hundreds of thousands of supporters in civil society groups) a huge debt of gratitude for shaking us out of our ideology-induced political torpor.
Their message: a better world is possible, but only if we fight for it.
Thinking about a sustainable economy
Our preoccupation with Harper’s outrages, though totally justified, is distracting us from imagining the kind of world we really want to build. Ironically, the projection of extremely low economic growth for the foreseeable future actually provides an imposed opportunity to examine what we desperately need to do anyway - begin to put together plans for a sustainable economy, a redefined prosperity that is not based on unfettered growth in the private sector - the economy of stuff.
If ever there was a time to move in this direction it is now - with corporations sitting on over $700 billion in cash which they refuse to invest because their own policy preferences and reckless behaviour has destroyed demand for private goods and services. Perhaps a tax on idle capital would make sense - a declaration by government that if the private sector can no longer allocate capital investment in the interests of the country and its citizens, then we will take some of it back and allocate it ourselves as public investment. It’s not that we don’t need investment. A no-growth economy is actually a misnomer, for what its advocates are really talking about is a different kind of growth - the kind that only governments can create: mass transit, green energy, a national food strategy, child care, pharma care, home care, culture and anti-poverty programs including affordable housing.
Capitalism will be around for a while yet, but its current incarnation, the savage capitalism of Wall Street and deregulation, needs to be put to rest. The Canadian corporate sector has proven over and over again that it is utterly inept at improving its performance, its investment in research and development and its willingness to take risks and thus improve its productivity. The experiment with government “getting out of the way” of business has been an abject failure.
That should bring back the big idea of a much more planned economy - a robust, imaginative industrial strategy that directs the allocation of private capital to where it is most productive, produces the most and best jobs and provides stability and balance to the economy (NDP leader Thomas Mulcair is on the right track with his Dutch disease analysis). It is the other half of the capital allocation equation. The CAW has taken the lead amongst private sector unions with a 10-point plan to promote the long-term growth of the auto industry. First on the agenda is a national auto policy.
Continuing with the theme of public investment it is long past time that we use the powers of the Bank of Canada to lend to governments (including provincial and municipal governments) at virtually zero interest rates (just enough to cover administrative costs). The insane practice of accumulating a massive public debt by borrowing from private banks ranks as perhaps the most perversely destructive practice of the past forty years.
Democracy and reclaiming the commons
Policies and programs administered by government bureaucracies will not give us what we want - especially given that these bureaucracies are now populated more and more by people dedicated to dismantling government itself. The big idea that will make the difference is a radical, deeply rooted democracy that includes the obvious reforms needed to the electoral system but involves far more than that. Participatory budgeting, institutionalizing citizen participation in the design and delivery of social programs, government subsidies for citizen study circles (as they have in Sweden where some 300,000 such circles are reported each year) which promote education, political literacy and discussion about the kinds of programs and policies people actually want should all be on the agenda.
That’s just a start - add to them yourself by simply using your imagination about what kind of world you would like to wake up to. How will these things ever come to pass? I have no idea - except that unless we think about them, imagine them, and talk about them amongst ourselves it is an absolute certainty that we will never achieve any of them. It is a question of choosing between despair over the historical accident of Stephen Harper and hope rooted in what we know in our hearts to be possible.
In the end it is all about reclaiming the commons - robbed from us by the one per cent and the perverse ideology of neo-liberalism. Maybe we could begin with a small step in that direction - by reinstating Sunday closing. I know, there are lots of objections (its initial roots in Christianity being one) but imagine there actually being a day when you couldn’t buy more stuff. We could bring back an ancient commons tradition: talking to each other.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Let’s think big and bold, and imaginatively. Let’s think about changing the face of Canadian Politics. Let’s encourage women to run for office and get 50% representation. Let’s think about occupying the economy. People need more community, more genuine discourse, more involvement. They crave it. Our chosen political party shouldn’t be contacting us only when they want a donation, on the one hand, while on the other hand answering our e-mails with “Sorry we have no time to answer (or read or listen) , we are so busy” and um, on the third hand saying that they know what the grass root thinks and they have their ear to the ground. If they are too busy, then delegate. Stop relegating all communication and power to the top echelon. People could get together and have garage sales, teas, fashion shows to raise money for their political party, but I don’t think that the powers that be want people gathering and INTERACTING and be seen and heard to be interacting. That takes the conversation out of their hands. Often, we have to just listen to a speech. ZZZZZ. The old Divide and Conquer is a powerful weapon. Isolated souls are more easily manipulated. I like how Thomas Mulcair communicated with people in my city of Nanaimo. His INTERACTIONS with the crowd were heard by all.
#1. Posted by Madeline Bruce in Nanaimo, B. C. on May 23rd 2012 at 10:19pm
Yes. Yes. Yes. I echo that.. women and men who are exemplars within their lives and communities please apply to clean up and take charge of their electoral ridings. Personally I don’t care what ‘party’ they may belong to.. if any. I’m not sure how many electoral ridings there are in Canada, but I’m fine with each being its own ‘Party’ and bringing their cares and issues and honesty to the commons in Ottawa.
Thanks for the harsh lessons on thuggary, corporocracy, bluster, pensions, secrecy, wacko evangelism, F35’s, and how Americans can help Canadians get elected so they can sell our resources or poison wolves to save the boreal caribou.
A blind monkey could pick strangers from small towns or cities across Canada and come up with a far more honest, bright, thinking group of Cabinet Ministers than the foolish or misdirected louts Mr Harper has cultivated and groomed. Kent ? Oliver ? Clement ? Kenney ? Flaherty ? Baird ? Fantino ? Mackay ? Hadfield ? Moore ? Goodyear ? Are you kidding ?
Certainly we need vision, exemplars .. farmers and firefighters .. doctors and mothers .. store owners and mechanics .. writers and scientists .. we do not need political animals
#2. Posted by timber in Canada on May 25th 2012 at 9:00am
Quote from Katherine Graham, the proprietor of the National Post, which exposed President Nixon and brought about Watergate and Nixon’s resignation:
“What they were trying to do was undermine the whole democratic process…trying to stay in power by dirty tricks and nefarious schemes, not leaving the decisions to the electors.”
#3. Posted by Madeline Bruce in Nanaimo, B. C. on May 31st 2012 at 8:19am
This article comes at a good time for me. Thank you. I was watching the sub-committee hearing on Bill C-38, the so-called “Jobs, Growth and Long-term Prosperity Act” (aka omnibus budget bill, or Trojan Horse). What a spurious title, ‘long-term prosperity.’ This Act has nothing to do with long-term; it is all about short-term—and many other discouraging intentions. But I do digress.
The sub-committee hearing on this Bill is nearly an absolute farce!
The conservatives sitting sitting on this committee are asking only friendly, soft-loaded questions of their witnesses to the hearing. Their questions are like this: “So how terrific is this bill?” And the answers are like this: “Super terrific!”
The non-conservative questions are tougher but the chair, Blaine Calkins, conservative, continually interferes with the line of questioning, refereeing by bringing up points of order thereby thwarting due process of the purpose of the bill which is to scrutinize the bill’s merit.
Anyway, I could use some hope in the dark.
#4. Posted by Gilbert James in Victoria on June 3rd 2012 at 1:21am
Whoops. Bad grammar in my original post—> 2nd to last sentence. The original read: “The non-conservative questions are tougher but the chair, Blaine Calkins, conservative, continually interferes with the line of questioning, refereeing by bringing up points of order thereby thwarting due process of the purpose of the bill which is to scrutinize the bill’s merit.”
It should read: “. . . the purpose of the ‘sub-committee hearing’ which is the scrutinize the bill’s merit.”
thanks
#5. Posted by Gilbert James in Victoria on June 3rd 2012 at 1:29am
Hope in the dark…....Canadians are waking up to the real peril in our country, and that is our own government. The occupy movement, the students in Montreal, and now laws are being enacted to limit peaceful protest. Policing is becoming ever more brutal, with masked, helmeted, shielded, and armed riot police herding protestors into makeshift cages without lawful arrest, men and women together, and these cages have toilets with no doors, and in at least one case, according to tearful testimony on CBC television News - no toilet paper. This new humilation/torture toilet practice was used at Matsqui Prison also, according to the Vancouver Sun newspaper. A wounded mentally ill man, crawling on all fours, was shot in the head and killed by police, which scene was caught on film by a passerby, and is being shown now on National TV. Stephen Harper is the focus point for the creeping, or galloping tyrany in our country, but the sad truth is that he cannot do it alone. He has many unscrupulous henchmen with him, to help him pull this off. THEY are starting to wake up, thank God. Here are some words by Sudheer Kumar, from his Self-Developing Blog:
Good news: Evil will not last. This is for the simple reason that it takes more than one person to perpetrate evil. It needs a well organized network. What prompts them to do evil? Selfishness and discontent. If they had a balanced sense of asset distribution they wouldn’t resort to unethical means. So for effectively running any nexus of evil, the members need to follow the rules of the organization. They need to be selfless (!) in subservience, sacrificing their interests (their souls, I would add) for those of the organization. How long will they be able to maintain such an attitude? Not long, when they see the games going on within the mafia—the spoils are not divided equally or in proportion to the effort and the risk taken…...(This is all played out for us in Francis Ford Coppola’s three Godfather movies. Remember the weak son, who betrays the family with THEIR enemy because he was not given a big enough piece of the pie?)
#6. Posted by Madeline Bruce in Nanaimo, B. C. on June 3rd 2012 at 8:16am
My hat is off to MacLean’s Magazine columnist Scott Feschuk. He accomplishes a lot with satirical humour, and he entertains at the same time His piece on Conservative MLA David Wilks in the June 11, 2012 edition is an undeniable, carved in stone, irrefutable yet funny send-up of Wilk’s about-turn on Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s omnibus budget bill. I was thrilled at the prospect of hearing one honest decent man among Harper’s henchman, when phttttt! he took it all back. It is hanging heavy on my mind how all those conservative MP’s are cow-towing to Harper’s dastardly deeds. He couldn’t be doing this all alone. We know Harper is power-mad, but what’s THEIR excuse? This kind of thing has happened before in history, but - yech! In Canada?
#7. Posted by Madeline Bruce in Nanaimo, B. C. on June 4th 2012 at 1:36pm
Prime Minister Stephen Harper was interviewed on CBC News this week by Peter Mansbridge, who came across as strangely subservient, and forelock-pulling, in my view. Harper didn’t hide the fact that what Canadians want or think or do is of no interest to him, in his decision-making - smugly declared it, in fact. The hundreds of thousands of protestors in Montreal, for the past month, are just a drop in the bucket to him, if that, and that is no exaggeration! I am in correspondence with a Calgarian, and that person is all pumped up for the Tar sands project, let me tell you! Blase as hell about the danger, no, the inevitability of oil tanker spills on our priceless Pacific coast. Don’t blame Tom Mulcair for any splits between the populations in Canada. Don’t try it. There is a big one between B.C. and Alberta now, never mind Eastern and Western Canada! I have just sent in the biggest donation I could muster to Tom Mulcair, and I fervently hope he will be the next Prime Minister of Canada. God bless us now. Vivre Canada.
#8. Posted by Madeline Bruce in Nanaimo, B. C. on June 7th 2012 at 5:33pm
I am thinking about the propensity of men to want, or need to follow, and pay obeisance to, a leader, particularly a militaristic leader. In Tolstoy’s War and Peace, an incident is related where soldiers chose to cross a river under the gaze of Napolean, in order to show him their bravery. Many men and horses were killed. They could have crossed that river in the shallower part, very easily. In the 1950’s movie White Christmas, starring Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney, thousands of men stage a musical at a winter resort, in order to express their boundless love and esteem for an Army General. In the Godfather movie trilogy, we see grown men kissing the ring of the Mafia Godfather. By contrast, the wife of the Godfather’s eldest son, Michael, has an abortion rather than risk having a son to carry on the butchering dynasty, and she leaves the marriage, even at the risk of losing her own children. Out of Nazi Germany, the actress Marlene Deitrich loudly and repeately proclaimed her revulsion at the Third Reich, and on a world stage. A famous German not going along with the madness of millions - that took real strength and Nobility. We need that kind of bravery now, in Canada.
#9. Posted by Madeline Bruce in Nanaimo, B. C. on June 8th 2012 at 9:12am
Vive le Canada.
#10. Posted by Madeline Bruce in Nanaimo, B. C. on June 8th 2012 at 3:57pm
Let’s support THOSE good soldiers - the citizens, and children who have been marching the streets of Montreal for over a month, on their own time, after work at their jobs, along with their housework and childcare, between classes at the university, on their own time, for NO SALARY, no perks, no expense accounts, no free government helicopter ride, to fight for freedom of peaceful protest for all of us Canadians. C’est magnifique. C’est formidable. Canadians - what a concept!
#11. Posted by Madeline Bruce in Nanaimo, B. C. on June 9th 2012 at 3:35pm
We have heard just a bit of rumbling from Conservative MLA’s over the massive bill that is being pushed through pariament that will demolish pollution controls and hard-won labour laws, but nothing bold or courageous or impressive yet. This will do more harm than good to Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Reading an account of the end of the career of the great explorer Captain Cook, in Ann Salmond’s new book Bligh, I find that Cook’s men were apalled at the harsh orders Cook had started to give on the island of Moorea, for the theft of a goat, for example. Cook’s life ended on the island of Hawaii in 1779, when islanders killed him in a melee on the beach, after his squad of marines had fled into the surf. Not that such things happen to leaders in Canada, but it is an illustration of a leader going too far, and not heeding the reactions of those around him. Such a leader will be stopped.
#12. Posted by Madeline Bruce in nanaimo, B. C. on June 11th 2012 at 12:26pm
Maybe some clues coming out now on WHY the real cost of the Stealth Fighter Jets has been so swathed in secrecy and cover-ups. Americans are sounding the alert that a lot of military equipment has counterfeit parts and is not safe to operate by military personnel. Is this the case with these jets that cost Canadian tax-payers tens of billions of dollars?.... More leakage from the big barrel of boasting and snake oil salesmanship from the Canadian Conservative Government - not only are the oil piplelines a threat to our FUTURE, EXISTING ones are ruining the ecology of precious farmland. The Red Deer Alberta river is glutted with an oil spill right now, June 2012, of over 450,000 gallons of oil. The transport of Bitumin is an even worse threat. It erodes pipelines quickly, and makes for a constant, steady seeping into the surrounding environment.
#13. Posted by Madeline Bruce in nanaimo, B. C. on June 13th 2012 at 10:18am
That allegation that Federal NDP leader Tom Mulcair was trying to divide Canada was just an attempt to put him in a bad light. What Tom did was to state that the hyping of projects in the west of Canada was harming the manufacturing sector in the East. I didn’t hear anybody say that that was a lie. People just didn’t like it that he said it out LOUD, so it was a case of trying to shoot the messenger. Albertans don’t want anybody raining on their money parade, and hang the consequences of what that does to anybody else, or to the environmnent.
#14. Posted by Madeline Bruce in Nanaimo, B. C. on June 20th 2012 at 11:26pm