30
Élites
FOR A MEMBER OF THE ÉLITE WHO wishes to take without giving back, there is no easier society to function in than a democracy. That’s because power in a democracy is not intended to be linked to the concept of noblesse oblige. The obligation of the élites is therefore tied to their ability to see themselves as citizens and to act as such every day.
This suggests a modest status for men of money and power. They may find it unpleasantly modest. Indeed you can usually tell when the concepts of democracy and citizenship are weakening. There is an increase in the role of charity and in the worship of volunteerism. These represent the élite citizen’s imitation of noblesse oblige; that is, of pretending to be aristocrats or oligarchs, as opposed to being citizens.
There are advantages to being an oligarch or an aristocrat in a democracy. After all, in an officially corporatist or aristocratic civilization there are real obligations attached to the concept of noblesse oblige. These may be manipulated, minimized or in some cases even ignored. And these obligations always represent a denial of the legitimacy of those who receive the largesse, while reasserting the legitimacy of those who give it. But what we would be dealing with in those societies is a type of formalized responsibility. In a democracy there are no formal class structures. Therefore there are no specific, formal obligations tied to privilege. The concept of noblesse oblige floats freely, as you would expect from something which represents a pretence of superiority among those who can afford it. The whole idea relates only to charity, which is nothing more than the goodwill and ongoing generosity of the jumped-up citizen. In other words, our pretend noblesse oblige is tied to ego not to duty.
The true obligation of the élite within a democracy has nothing to do with charity. It has to do with disinterested participation in the name of the public good. And it requires more personal, ongoing effort than any other sort of society requires from individuals.
In Canada this sort of participation comes with a particular complication. We have always been a middle-class democracy. ‘Middle-class citizen’ has always been the highest real rank we have to offer. There are, of course, those who pretend to be more. Everyone has the right to their personal delusion. The impression they create in the Canadian context is vaguely comic, but that is their problem. Unless, that is, they come to represent a whole class. If the élite pretend to be more than middle-class citizenry, they are betraying the idea of Canadian democracy.
On the other hand, it is unusual for anyone to pretend to be less. Look at the photos of the Winnipeg strike in 1919. These may be workers, but they are in suits. J.S. Woodsworth may be a ‘dangerous’ socialist leader, but he dresses and talks like a prime minister. Arthur Meighen could have done worse than to take lessons.
What makes life in the Canadian élite triply complicated is our colonial background and our current colonial status. This increases discomfort with the middle-class idea, which was never understood by the British colonial establishment. And it certainly isn’t understood by the new empire to our south, which is driven by the desire to create republican aristocracies.
In spite of these complications, Canada has produced generations of élites capable of accepting and working within the middle-class reality of an atypical country. Unfortunately, these generations have been interspersed with counter-waves of élites which can only be described as colonial. From the Second World War through to approximately 1980, it seemed as if we were finally escaping this cyclical problem. The experience of the war had built on that of the 1914–18 experience and an atmosphere of growing self-confidence spread among the élites. Then, abruptly in the eighties, it seemed to evaporate; as if those with responsibility had found it too much work being in charge of a real place. Perhaps more depressing, this decline coincided with the departure from active life of the wartime generation and those closely influenced by it. It was as if the self-confidence of those anglophones and francophones had not spread beyond the particularity of their experience. All that had happened was that a new generation had come along and discovered a new empire to feel happily subservient to.
We are an ignorant and stuttering people . . .
We are not particularly brilliant.
But have a great talent for appreciating
others.1 Of course that’s not the way our élite imagines itself. And if so many books and other cultural expressions are now produced and consumed, surely things are no longer as Michèle Lalonde described them. Yes and no. If you pause to concentrate on the underlying references of those who occupy the various positions of power, you discover that almost all reveal a great talent for appreciating the brilliance of what is done elsewhere.
This, they would say, is a sign of their internationalism. But again, calm observation reveals that most of their qualifying references are to a single dominant empire. And most of what is left over refers to two ex-empires in Europe. Colonial élites have always put their emotional dependence on a single foreign model down to sophisticated internationalism. Tribal leaders spoke that way of Rome; Indian rajahs that way of London; Vietnamese princes that way of Paris. In other words, the essential references of our élites indicate a strong inferiority complex.
This explains in part why the voice of positive nationalism is almost as silent among anglophones as among francophones. Oh, it is there. And it can be heard. But somehow, in both languages, it is out of sync with the structures of power. No matter how appropriate or popular or useful to the public good are the humanist ideas put forward, they seem irrelevant to what is actually decided and done. And if the policies chosen by our élites seem to be failing, that also appears to be of little importance. The structure has a life of its own and those who occupy it—as in the 1780s in France—are very pleased with themselves and have great difficulty identifying as reality the extent to which the citizenry are not pleased with them.
It’s a situation not unlike that described by the Polish Nobel poet Wisława Szymborska—“He who wishes to drown himself must have an axe at hand to cut the ice.”2 Somehow, the process here is more passive than for the Poles, with Russia on their border.
It is as if our élites simply can’t bring themselves to believe that this is a real place; in part because it is a non-conforming model. As so often with those who have succeeded in complex, atypical structures, they quickly lose the sense of who they are and so succumb to a desire to conform to the dominant, typical model of the day, even though this means undermining the structure upon which their success and their power are based. When Brooke Claxton retired from politics and took over a large company, he was struck by the unintellectual mental climate and the “. . . constant pressure right across the board towards conformity and conservatism.”3 But the problem goes much further than the traditional anti-intellectualism of managerial circles and their sudden importance in a generalized corporatist atmosphere. The playwright John Gray puts it that “Canadian leadership over the last decade has consisted of leading the bow to the inevitable. The leaders are not leaders. And when, because of this, they begin to feel desperate, they engage in symbolic acts,” as if they were leading.4
Yet there is a long and very different élite tradition in Canada. At key moments the quality of those willing to assume responsibility has been remarkable. The defining moment in the 1840s was filled with men who knew exactly where they were and why they were doing what they were doing. Papineau, Mackenzie, Jesse Ketchum, Dr. Baldwin, LaFontaine, Baldwin, Wolfred Nelson, Edward Blake’s father, William Blake, Georges-Étienne Cartier and so on. Part of this reality was a strong contingent of reform-minded business leaders. And characteristic of them all, although most of them came from isolated, small cities and settlements, was their ability to imagine the other. LaFontaine and Baldwin set the standards. But one of the most imaginative, almost surreal examples was that of Cartier’s relationship with British Columbia, an essentially inaccessible place.
Joseph Trutch, one of B.C.’s negotiators for entry into Confederation, described how their successful deal had come about. Cartier had from the beginning offered them generous conditions. When the government MPs in Ottawa began to balk at the costs involved, Cartier simply told the whole caucus that he and his Quebec members would vote alone for the Treaty whatever they did. “We must all remember in B.C.,” Trutch wrote, “that to Sir George Cartier and his followers in Lower Canada we owe the position we are now in and especially the Canadian Pacific Railway.”5
However, the other side of the élite’s character has also been there from the beginning. The Annexation Manifesto of 1849 summarizes that position. Yes, the Montreal business élite were upset about the arrival of democracy—worse still, middle-class democracy—and yes, they were rightly upset about London’s revocation of their trade preferences and by the resulting depression. But above all, you can sense in their reaction a frightening passivity. This is a colonial élite. In spite of their privileges, they feel a pathological need to belong to someone. They receive. They do not give.
Wilfrid Laurier, forty years later, put it that they were a class “famous for preaching loyalty to others . . . famous for being loyal, as long as it was profitable to be so.” In 1849 they “. . . were gushing in their loyalty as long as they expected the Governor General to be disloyal to the people, but when they found the Governor General was loyal to the people, their own loyalty oozed out of their bodies and vanished into thin air.”6 In a precursor of the trade deal with the United States in the 1980s, the Annexation Manifesto brought together on the same side the extreme wing of the francophone nationalists and the reactionary business community.
Even in the 1960s this passivity and short-term interest-driven psychology could be identified by those who non-conformed. In 1963 the unfortunate John Diefenbaker gave a last speech before his government fell. In it he pointed out “the similarity between the views of the Montreal merchants in 1849 and the wealthy of Toronto and Montreal” who were ranged against him. As George Grant put it, “In neither case did they care about Canada. No small country can depend for its existence on the loyalty of its capitalists.”7
The situation today is both worse and more complicated. Suddenly, in the panic surrounding the last referendum, the business élites became staunch federalists and patriots. The francophones among them joined in the campaign, wrote and campaigned passionately, if rather ham-handedly. The anglophone executives pushed and pulled as if, given a chance, they could have made a difference.
And yet these are the same people who tend to send their children to private schools and undergraduate colleges in the United States. When asked about this they will earnestly talk of the ‘best education’ the way fifty years ago parents of this sort talked of Oxbridge. Why do they do this? For the same reason colonial élites have always sent their children to be educated at the heart of the dominant power. The empire provides the best:
. . . If they live
in the Empire, it matters what they say.8
A colonial élite believes that reality exists there only; and somehow that this education will give their children an advantage when they come back home with the modern equivalent of an Oxford or Paris accent and pedigree.
And they do indeed get a fine education. Unfortunately it is usually structured for people who will live as citizens of a great empire, along with three hundred million other people. Instead they come home with skills unsuited to a northern, sparsely populated, decentralized country with a non-mono-cultural character. When given a chance, they can but apply what they know and do so with the superior inferiority complex of those educated in Rome. They either try to make their country do things unsuited to its reality—which is one of the explanations for our current problems—or they become the classic dissatisfied colonial or they leave.
I’m not suggesting that an international education is a bad thing. I’m talking about when and where it should take place. It is during the school years and those of undergraduate education that we gradually come to understand the nature of our society and how we might fit into it. In general this is a time to be home. Post-graduate education is the time to find out how other societies do things, because we are then in a position to make judgements with a context. What’s more, the need of a small to medium-sized country is not to learn how the great empire does things. If you pay attention you understand that simply by living in Canada. Nor is it useful to worship at the knee of our ex-empires.
On the other hand, we could learn a great deal in countries of a similar size with similar challenges. What kind of countries? What sort of challenges? Decentralized countries. Northern countries. Countries in an awkward geopolitical position. Developed economies with small populations. Countries which are part developed, part developing. Countries with a high natural-resource dependency. Countries with awkward territories. Large territories with small populations. Countries with non-monolithic cultures. With several languages. With heavy immigration. With a mixture of western and aboriginal cultures. In countries with one or more of these characteristics we may learn something which relates to our own situation. We should therefore try to ensure that a good part of the international education we give our students happens in those places.
Even when our élite do keep their children at home for basic schooling, they tend to undermine the public-school system by fighting against the taxation levels necessary to fund it. Or they send their children through the private system. They forget or wish to forget that public education is the keystone of a middle-class democracy.
These are or may well be some of the same people who sought airline deregulation, which discourages east–west travel and travel to smaller destinations; they who have pushed north–south economic integration to such an extent that it endangers national and provincial social programs; they who, in that same way, have undermined the spreading of wealth to the poor and the poor areas; they who have turned their backs on those parts of Canada—most of it—which are not urban or are not an income source for business. Through all of these actions they have artificially turned the country away from itself and towards the south. And isn’t it they who have undermined the culture of national broadcasting by starving public broadcasting and by misusing the private systems? On all occasions at all times it seems that the structures useful to the citizens as a whole must be sacrificed to their short-term profit.
And aren’t these the people who have sold off such quantities of the Canadian economy that we are an unprecedented example of a developed country whose economic activity is dominated and designed from abroad? This is not a new phenomenon. Walter Gordon was already worrying about it in the 1930s. He wanted to create a large holding company to offset the trend.9 The new francophone business élite seemed at first to resist these sell-off tendencies. During the 1960s and 1970s they seemed to identify with the Quiet Revolution going on in Quebec. But now they are cashing in their businesses at more or less the same rate as the anglophones.10 In the name of what sort of national interest or élite responsibility are they all doing this?
The most common reply is that the question itself is old-fashioned and the concern irrelevant. Apparently in the new global economy it no longer matters who owns what. Capitalism no longer spins around the ownership of the means of production, but around the acts of trading and producing. Those who produce and trade win. Ownership is just a series of accidents in the ever-changing market-place. And that turns on how attractive a geographical location is to financial markets.
Declarations of revolutionary change in the underlying rules of the market-place always make me think of John Law and the South Sea Bubble; the two great financial ‘revolutions’ of the eighteenth century, both of which ended disastrously. The funny thing is that ownership has been relevant for the full history of western economics. It has also been central to that of Asian economics, which goes back further than ours. The argument therefore is that something which has been true for at least three thousand years and through dozens of fundamental technological changes has ceased to be true in the last twenty years for no particular reason. Why not? But then again, why?
The one thing I don’t understand is why every bilateral, multilateral and international economic agreement we have signed over the last decade goes out of its way to prevent the citizens, through their governments, having any say in the shape of ownership. I thought ownership didn’t matter.
The response to this question will perhaps be drowned out by the second answer to my original question about why everything is being sold off.
‘Internationalism! Globalization!’ But they can’t really mean that. They can’t be that naïve. No other developed country has interpreted globalization as if it meant allowing half of your economy to be directed from elsewhere. No one.
As V.S. Naipaul put it about Argentina, to be European—i.e., to be sophisticated—“was to be colonial in the most damaging way. It was to be parasitic.”11 I suppose you could see this selling off of the farm as a peculiar form of originality. But no, it isn’t. It’s plain laziness, passivity and a result of that inferiority complex which our business élites first revealed in 1849.
This is not a phenomenon exclusive to Upper and Lower Canada. Look at the half-dozen most important Maritime fortunes. None of these families have acted as if they were the élite of a society or even of a region. They have treated the Maritimes as if it were their back lot, to be used however they wish.12 Or look at the Newfoundlanders who were ruled by a thinly disguised autocracy controlled by the merchants of St. John’s. These were people “. . . who failed to provide the institutional support and politics necessary for erecting a sovereign and self-reliant economy.”13
And, for that matter, the very obsession of the national élite with a single market to the south has undermined the more international approach which a country with two languages should quite naturally embrace. They talk endlessly of globalization and world markets. The reality is quite different. They have made us more dependent on a single market than any other developed economy. What’s more, they seem frightened by other markets. A recent study showed that in ten of eleven developed countries, over half of the businessmen are expanding into new, foreign markets. In Canada the figure is only 35 per cent.14
In such a context it isn’t surprising that the former Official Opposition in Ottawa—the Bloc—identified so closely with the United States. Or that the new Official Opposition’s program is mainly aimed at harmonizing Canada in every way with the United States. The Reform party calls for elections every four years, an American-style Senate, wide-open election financing, a straight free-market economy, an end to bilingualism and the passing of balanced-budget laws. Their foreign policy turns on a single axis—seeking greater harmonization with the United States.
Any sensible person would now be thinking of the urgent geopolitical need to seek a better balance by developing relationships with other players. But the colonial élite never seeks geopolitical balance. What it wants is to suckle at the mother’s teat and so feel better about its sense of inferiority. Yet geopolitics are almost entirely based on countervailing influences or powers. If a small to medium-sized country lives next to a large country, its only hope for a reasonable relationship with its big neighbour is to have other countries as allies in order to create an effective counterweight.
To sell 80 per cent of your goods to a single market represents a terrible strategic weakness. And I mean strategic in every sense. The old cliché about having all your eggs in one basket takes on new meaning with Canada and the United States, because there is something even more wrong about having all of your eggs in someone else’s basket. It is worse still if that country is much larger than you and worst of all if they don’t have all their eggs in your basket. This is not a relationship. It is a dependency. Canada’s survival will depend largely on its ability to change that dependency back into a relationship. And one of the key factors in doing that will be the redistribution of our trade. But we can’t do that if we have no politicians willing to take the lead.
So what are we to make of an élite which waxes patriotic while selling off the reality of the nation? Are they not eerily similar to negative nationalists like Maurice Duplessis, revealing an impossible divide between rhetoric and reality? We could settle for name-calling in the wonderful manner of A.M. Klein:
You elephantine ass who stolidly
Idealize idealess success,
You plutocrat of gilded emptiness.15
But when the rhyme is finished they’ll still be there. This is, given the victory of neo-conservatism, the dominant élite of our era. And they will sell off far more than their own companies.
Hockey—a sport which combined making money with a solid relationship to the Canadian reality—has been reduced to, or rather deformed into, an American spectator sport. In order to do this, the driving forces of commerce and communications have simply removed all but the crumbs of the professional game from Canada. They accurately say this is a way to make more money and hypocritically talk about spreading the gospel of the sport. But the hypocrisy is not designed to disguise single-minded commercialism. Like so much in corporatism, money comes second.
The ownership of sports teams has always been as much about ego, or rather personal expressions of power, as it has been about making money. Since Rome, successful businessmen have often seemed to need the illusion of controlling gladiators. But that illusion was tied to a celebration of the particular and to prestige in the community. Increasingly it is now a reflection of corporate conformity and of communications theories in which sport is just another global entertainment.
Global entertainment is about interchangeable modules of distraction, all functioning in a similar way. The style of a sport can change for many reasons and can be counted on to evolve with time. But the most important factor in the case of hockey is that the vast majority of the audiences in the new NHL arenas can’t skate. They are not there for the hockey per se. They are gathered around the ice as they might be around a boxing ring—for the thrill. And so there is little desire among the managers of the league to control violence or to encourage more than a workmanlike game, providing there are a few Heroes for the crowd to cheer.
This is a Disneylike view of a world made up of predictable factors and rounded edges. Hockey, like other sports, like adventure movies, is therefore to be packaged as a conventional, Hero-driven, goal-obsessed entertainment and sold to audiences on a ‘quick-hit’ basis. Audiences which are interested in the game—in a non-spectator way—actually deform and so slow the efficiency of these interchangeable modules. Hockey needed to be removed from Canada for its own good, so that it could grow through the freedom which would be produced by minimizing its particularities.
Of course the promotion of hockey to an entertainment-module theory is progress in many ways. While Canadians may be marginalized in their own game, they get the advantage of becoming marginal in American games such as baseball and basketball. But marginality is not the central advantage. The point of colonial status is hope. The hope of being noticed in Rome once our foot is in the door. I would like to use the image of the barbarians who ended up not only noticed, but in charge. However, the barbarians outnumbered the Romans even more than the Americans outnumber the Canadians. So the point is hope itself and not the hope of anything in particular happening. The colonial mind-set is just that, a mind-set, not a reality.
In the twenty-four hours leading up to the 1997 baseball All-Star game in Cleveland, the Canadian media went into a brisk fibrillation over the opportunity being offered a Canadian quartet—the McAuley Boys. They were to sing “O Canada” during the opening ceremonies and so would be heard by millions of Americans, who would certainly notice them. There was hope that someone who mattered might be listening—Ted Mack, Ed Sullivan, Johnny Carson, perhaps even David Letterman. The effect on their careers might well be immeasurable. The next morning there was another little fibrillation, this time filled with surprise and embarrassment. The network had run a series of ads while “O Canada” was being sung. These ended just in time for the American anthem. And why not? But the tone of the commentary was one of hope. Next time the McAuley Boys might be heard.
When Comsat, a telecommunications group, bought the Québec Nordiques, they turned the management over to its entertainment division. The president said—“Professional sports are the same business and the same culture. They’re vertically integrated entertainment business.” He therefore concluded that “People feel good about a winner. That’s the business we’re in.”16
Of course, sports are businesses and hockey has changed since my grandfather played for Winnipeg teams like the Monarchs, in the days before the NHL existed. But I have also seen a Maple Leaf Gardens crowd give Wayne Gretzky in his prime a standing ovation for scoring against Toronto. It was a beautiful goal. And it wasn’t the goal itself they were cheering, it was the way in which it had been done. They apparently didn’t think hockey was just about winning.
My point is neither romantic nor idealistic. The large and successful Canadian business élite, both the individuals and the corporations, have been virtually invisible during the hijacking of professional hockey. They might reply that the market-place has spoken. Not at all. They allowed the market-place, of which they were part, to be redefined in such a way as to virtually eliminate them and in the process make more than a marginal Canadian presence impossible. So, in business terms, they allowed themselves to be artificially eliminated from a basic Canadian business. What could be more basic than the business of the national sport? They might reply that ownership doesn’t matter. Except that it clearly matters to all those businessmen south of the border who went to so much trouble to redefine professional hockey on their terms.
As for the attitude of the modulizers of hockey, it is a good parallel to the schizophrenia of the false populists and the negative nationalists. They seek to create a great movement of solidarity around the sport by removing its purpose and character.
Why go on about hockey? Because it reveals attitudes which can be found in much of the business community. For example, there is little difference between the pattern surrounding hockey and the public letter written to the prime minister on June 20, 1997, by the main Canadian business lobby group—the Business Council on National Issues. This is an organization with money and talented advisers. And yet the arguments they put forward in this major, public statement are contradictory and basely self-interested. In an attempt to distract us from this depressing reality they write as if in the national interest.
The three major economic problems facing the nation, they say, are unemployment, public debt and high taxes. Their principal suggestion for job creation is better education. What they don’t mention is that the per-student expenditure on education is dropping across the country because there isn’t enough public money available. And the reason there isn’t enough money is because of a campaign led in good part by the BCNI to reduce government revenues. In fact, in this same letter they call for further tax cuts, which would again weaken, not strengthen, education.
Their specific tax concern is “top marginal tax rates.” In other words, they can’t even manage to see the economy through the eyes of their businesses or of economic theory, but only through their straight self-interest as members of the top tax-rate bracket. This is the exact opposite of an élite using their privileges to act as citizens on behalf of the public good.
It’s hard to know whether the BCNI’s prestigious executive committee of CEOs really read this drivel. It’s hard to believe that they wouldn’t be embarrassed by the low intellectual level of the arguments, the blatant contradictions and the transparent self-interest. Perhaps the blame should rest on the shoulders of the organization’s chief paid courtier, Thomas d’Aquino.
Even the concept of high corporate taxes taken as a general problem doesn’t stand up to any kind of examination. In 1950 almost half of Canadian income tax (46.4 per cent) was paid by corporations. This did not prevent them from enjoying a period of strong growth and high profits. In 1992 the corporations were paying only 7.6 per cent. One of the chief reasons for our public financial crisis is that the principal source of revenues is extremely lightly taxed; lightly even by western standards. The BCNI letter makes the point that our top marginal tax rates put us at a disadvantage against the Americans. As with their contradiction between education and taxation, so with the Canada–U.S. differentials. They don’t bother to explain just how lower taxes will permit us to “provide more efficient delivery of services to citizens,” which they also call for. They spend some time on the political crisis and Quebec and talk about making our “social union work.” But that social union is, precisely, made up of social programs which are not harmonized with those in the United States. If you remove our tax differentials, you effectively starve the government and so close down one of the key characteristics of Canadian society—its social programs.
Perhaps I’m naïve to try to take Mr. d’Aquino seriously or to treat his letter to the prime minister as a real argument. Perhaps it’s meant to be treated as PR bumph. But I can’t help thinking of the 1929 Depression and the Kidd Report commissioned by the B.C. government in 1931. Twenty-two organizations (corporations in the Mussolinian sense) were involved. All the interest groups: the Canadian Manufacturers Associations, the Chambers of Commerce. They concluded that taxation couldn’t be raised, expenditure had to be cut by about 22 per cent, education cut by one-third, free tuition limited even at the public-school level, the number of teachers cut, public funding for universities ended, funding for social services frozen.
Fortunately an election followed, the government was defeated and the report shelved. But proposals such as that of the BCNI present themselves as new thinking, when they are just the tired, self-interested arguments which the interest groups have been trotting out for almost seventy years. At their core lies the failure of large sections of the élite to rise to their obligations as citizens. They hide this close-focus selfishness behind the rhetoric of neo-conservative economics. But that’s what neo-conservative thinking offers—short-term self-interested self-gratification. The BCNI wants the government to deal with the nation’s political crisis, but calls for policies which would make it explode. It’s worth going back once more to the crisis which led to the burning of the Parliament Buildings in Montreal in 1849. In the debate which preceded the rioting, Edward Blake’s father, William Blake, the Solicitor General West and one of the great reforming parliamentarians of the day, intervened to chastise the anti-reform party—the BCNI of the day:
There are two sorts of rebellions. You can rebel against your country or you can rebel against your king. You gentlemen, for fifty years you have trampled on the interests of the people, you have laughed off their complaints, you have mocked their demands, you have rebelled against their most legitimate desires. It is you who are the real rebels.17
I repeat, this was the voice of the solicitor general in the defining Canadian government; the great coalition, which brought us democracy. Blake’s was an argument which Laurier would rework forty years later during the Riel crisis and J.S. Woodsworth another thirty-five years later during the Winnipeg strike.
The point is that a part of the business community has always made a strong argument against the public interest. They have gone so far as to burn down parliament. And they have been answered and stood up to on a regular basis by the political mainstream. That’s why these citations are not gratuitous insults. They are the meat and potatoes of Canadian legitimacy. The self-interested argue that “poverty makes virtue flower—la pauvreté fait fleurir les vertus.”18 And the mainstream, from Blake Sr. on, reply severely. What we are missing today in our politics is the vigorous echo of that reply.
The first step is to stop taking seriously what are in reality mediocre and predictable bits of propaganda. For example Mr. d’Aquino, in a puff piece published on the opinion pages of The Globe and Mail, enthused in 1997 that the “Outlook for social progress [was] bright.” “History shows us quite clearly that trade and direct investment are powerful catalysts for economic liberalization, democratization and the improvement of domestic social conditions.”19
Well actually, no it doesn’t. History is full of examples of trade taking societies in all sorts of contradictory directions or, more often, being used in a measured manner by various societies. What do I mean by a measured manner? Well, for example, a pure trade-based society kept a comfortable dictatorship going for centuries in Venice. Today trade is consciously used to reinforce a severe dictatorship in China and to solidify a strict dictatorship in Singapore. On the other hand, in some places these same economic factors have been carefully harnessed by democratic forces and made to fit in. So trade, like economics in general, is primarily a tool to be used and not a cause in itself. As for “technical superiority,” it does not exist, as the Swedish writer Sven Lindquist put it, to provide “a natural right to annihilate the enemy even when he is defenseless.”20 The point holds, whether taken literally or figuratively.
That’s why Harold Innis was such an important economist. He kept arguing in favour of “an economics which derived its laws from the history of the place, rather than deriving the place from a set of all-purpose laws formulated in Britain.”21 Or, now, in Chicago.
I am not making a negative-nationalist statement. It is almost pure positivism. That is, I am treating economics as a practical business, no matter how global the forces at work. The question which I am raising is: why are governments such as ours signing broad abstract trade agreements which relate to unprovable theories and negate the physical reality in which economics takes place? Part of the answer is that we have given leadership within our élites to business managers who tend to have a narrow view of their own self-interest and no view at all of the public good.
And so there they are, in the largest province, redesigning it as if there were no particularity, as if Ontario were just an extension of western corporatist theory and of American neo-corporatism.
Our parliamentary system is only very partially based on law. Much of it is the daily result of unwritten conventions. The system depends on all sectors respecting those conventions. Instead, the provincial government began by passing an omnibus bill which transgressed the most fundamental conventions of democratic process. This was done behind a false populist façade of saving money in a crisis (described as if it were worse than any world war). What is fascinating is the Barnum and Bailey revivalist, born-again moralizing which accompanies this cutting process; as if something unprecedented and evil had taken place and needed to be cut out of our lives like a cancerous growth.
But overspending is among the most common characteristics of human organizations, whether governmental, business or personal. It comes in cycles as it has for thousands of years. It is as common as debt cycles or love-handles. From time to time a serious government has to act with some severity to rectify the cycle. But there is no reason for this to be a matter of moralizing. It has to do with administrative standards, not policy, and should not distract politicians or the public from what a government actually stands for.
If a government presents cut-backs as if they were essential policy, indeed a moral obligation, then they are probably trying to distract us from their central policy intentions. The attack on overspending, while perhaps to some extent necessary, is then fundamentally a tactical distraction.
Indeed, Mr. Harris’s advisers—who are a mix of downtown ideologues and Bay Street conventional thinkers—have organized a cutting program filled with extremely specific patterns. For example, there is a concentration on removing both the observers, investigators and enforcers from programs which protect the public interest, and the powers which allow this monitoring. The pesticide-residue inspectors are mostly gone. Water-pollution regulations are to be eased. Environmental assessment programs have been moved almost under the minister’s discretion. Great Lakes pollution research and monitoring is cut heavily. Spending on the judiciary is cut, while that on prisons goes up.
None of this has to do with money. The amounts involved are peanuts. What it does have to do with is removing the mechanisms which permit the citizenry to understand what is happening inside their society. There is nothing abstract or theoretical going on here. This is an attack on applied democratic practice; a conscious and persistent removal of the citizens’ right to know. More importantly, it is a denial of their need to know. After all, they are the source of social legitimacy. Informing the citizens of social practices is not about indulging their curiosity. They need to know in order to be able to do their job as citizens.
Like all false populism, that of the Harris government is based on contempt for the intelligence of the citizen. In classic terms, they are engaged in organized and conscious censorship. In rather more mundane terms, it is all about acceding to the demands of corporate lobbyists.
And beneath all of this we are continuing to play out a self-inflicted struggle which goes far beyond Ontario and Canada. Ever since the democratic systems permitted their various courts to give corporations the status of persons, the individual as citizen has been on the defensive. How could it be otherwise? If you are a person before the law and EXXON or Ford is also a person, it is clear that the concept of democratic legitimacy lying with the individual has been mortally wounded. It is also clear that our élite, in allowing the continual solidification of this aberrant concept, have given in to their role as beneficiaries and/or prisoners of corporatism. At the same time, they have betrayed their most profound responsibilities as citizens. I find it difficult to imagine how democracy can prosper, so long as corporations maintain their artificial status as persons.
A very simple illustration of the extent to which our understanding of our democratic obligations has been deformed can be found in the lack of reaction to Mr. Harris’s decision to reduce the number of MPPs by twenty-seven. His argument is a continuation of the moral need to save the taxpayers money. But these members are the only link between the citizen and the government. They are the citizen’s only practical way into the democratic process. If Ontario is a presidential-corporatist society, he has done the right thing. If it is a parliamentary democracy, he has transgressed the underlying principle of representation.
That this removal of an important percentage of the representatives hasn’t received much attention is in itself a sign that false populism is well advanced. After all, much of the citizenry have been convinced that it was a democratic victory to get rid of their representatives.
What I am describing is not only a society dominated by corporatist structures, but by the received wisdom of a corporatist atmosphere: one in which the élites are interest-driven, whatever their jobs. And so the society is gradually being redrawn to suit this ethic-free system. I go to the Canadian figure-skating championships and discover that they are now the Royal Bank Canadian Figure Skating Championships. One public building after another is financed up to 90 per cent by the taxpayer and then named after the corporation or father of the president of the corporation which gives the last 5 or 10 per cent. In July 1990, there is a disastrous flood in the Saguenay and Premier Bouchard immediately announces that “It seems to me obvious there is no blame to assign. It’s a phenomenon that happens once every 10,000 years.” His minister of the environment, David Cliche, repeats this. Why? Why this instinctive, automatic, immediate defence of constituted authority, whether public or private?
What do these two individuals actually know about dams and floods? What did they know about the specific actions and inactions of the private corporations and the public service in the Saguenay? Nothing. It isn’t even their job to know. In the end, the sensible public protest forced the provincial government to name a commission of enquiry. And the commissioners found out that there was a great deal of blame to assign and therefore systems to be reformed.
So whatever the flood was, it wasn’t an act of God. At most it may have been a test by God. And the various constituted authorities and structures failed the test.
The point here is, why did an intelligent provincial premier and an intelligent minister of the environment instinctively blame everything on God in order to avoid even raising the possibility that those responsible on a rather more day-to-day level might need to be questioned? The answer is that they operate within a perfectly corporatist and therefore anti-democratic mind-set. They automatically see their job as that of protecting the corporations, whether public or private.
The Somalia Enquiry report is published in July 1997, and the profoundly mediocre Art Eggleton, having been minister of defence for three weeks, immediately, instinctively, automatically defends his staff officers. But he knows nothing about the military. He wasn’t involved in either the scandal or the enquiry process. He doesn’t even have personal experience which might be helpful in evaluating the situation. Is it his job immediately to defend his staff, as if there were something to hide? Only in a corporatist society.
Premier McKenna goes to the Olympics in Atlanta. He is the guest of IBM. In other words the head of government is given a handsome present. Public protest eventually causes him to assume the costs. The premiers meet in Alberta. Their conference is literally sponsored by various companies. They pose in jackets bearing private-industry logos. The Ontario Securities Commission, the most important in the country, has been so starved that it has hardly any investigators. It’s close to becoming a joke. The government of Quebec farms out part of its foreign representation to a bank. The federal minister of state for finance admits that bank lobbying forced the government to water down its review of the financial services sector. And so on.
Were I describing a functioning democracy, this litany of wrongdoing would have been accompanied by a continual and impossible-to-ignore outcry from elected representatives. Instead we might as well be living in pre-revolutionary Russia. There the élites acted as if they had—in Tolstoy’s words—“no conception of life without authority and submission.”22 Men and women, theoretically entrusted with great power, plead inevitability and stare curiously at us with “. . . the pure smiling eyes trained only for Form.”23
Suddenly all of this seems normal. I am struck by the curious reflection that if everything is inevitable, as our élites tell us, well then we don’t really need them. After all, this is the biggest and most expensive élite in history. Either they should do their job or make way.
Instead they wield the tools of defensive silence and insidious fear with increasing expertise. As a result, we find ourselves believing that government fails at everything; that public programs are ineffective and expensive; that a disinterested structure is probably a mess; that only self-interest works; that the public interest is a romantic dream and probably part of an outdated theory of left-wing paternalism.
I step back from this panicked atmosphere and look around. Most of the public services seem to work if they are properly funded, reasonably transparent and open to questioning. I notice in passing that Algonquin Park was set up in 1893 to control lumbering and stop settlement. This wasn’t a socialist creation. It was a mainstream public-interest idea. Now, for the first time, the administration of these parks is being thrown into doubt. Profit-motivated services may be used. But the system in place hasn’t failed, isn’t expensive and is part of a mainstream, public-interest method of running public institutions.
The problem lies then not with a bogus utilitarian comparison between the public service and private interests, but with our élites, who have slipped into corporatist conformity. They survive by spreading fear as much as they suffer from it.
There will always be, in any élite, a percentage driven only by self-interest. Now it seems that that relatively small percentage has infected the thinking of the élite in general, no matter how intelligent many individuals may be or how devoted to their particular role. Much of the problem lies in the conversion of our public sector from an ethic, centred on the strengthening of the public good, to an abstract managerial religion.
That in turn has facilitated the massive penetration of the public sector by business interests. The shift in the income-tax burden, which I mentioned earlier, illustrates this reality. But our crisis is not primarily about tax avoidance, or about money. Nor am I making an argument against either business or the market-place. They have their essential role in every society, including a democracy, and the citizenry have everything to gain by helping in the success of the private sector. We do this best through regulations which are simple, clear and strict.
However, private interests are now so integrated into the functioning of the public good that our practical sense of the latter has been erased. It is difficult even to identify this corruption of the public place, except in the less important, blatant cases. The corruption that really matters has been normalized and renamed, as if it were a useful part of the democratic process.
Central to this normalization has been the gradual rise of lobbyists and their sophisticated conversion into the profession of consultants. Slowly but surely over the last twelve years, the arm’s-length public institutions of social, economic and scientific research have been shut down, along with the investigatory and enforcement arms of government. The argument given for their destruction was budgetary, yet the costs these bodies represented were minimal.
The aim has been to blind government. Having removed the arm’s-length vision of the citizenry, the interest groups could then substitute their own eyes. What began with the destruction of the Economic Council of Canada and the Science Council was followed by that of dozens and dozens of lesser-known but important mechanisms. This lobotomization of the public mind continues today with, for example in 1997, the closing of the federal Bureau of Drug Research.
Even the minister of finance now uses consultants to develop policy. The minister of finance! Of course they are not presented publicly in that way.
In 1963 Walter Gordon’s first budget was destroyed when it was found out that he had brought in four financial experts he knew and trusted to complete some work. He was not asking for creative input. He had clearly set the parameters and the purpose in advance. During the election campaign, a budget had been promised within sixty days. Without these four experts, who understood the new policies, the work was not going to be completed in time. Today the minister happily uses consultants on a regular basis to develop policy. In other words, the interest groups are formally invited in to help define, if not actually to define, the very core of public policy.
In 1992 a Conservative Cabinet minister, Harvie Andre, arrived from his modest house in Ottawa at a party given by Harry Near, head of the smoothest of consultancy groups, Earnscliffe, in his ever-growing Rockcliffe mansion. Looking around with awe the minister mused, “Why is it better to know Harvie Andre, than to be Harvie Andre?”24 Was this an unconscious parody of the young Louis XIV, arriving for a party at Vaux-Le-Vicomte, the splendid new palace of his chief adviser, Fouquet? Perhaps it was conscious. The king looked around, drew the obvious conclusions, imprisoned his consultant and seized the property. As for Mr. Andre, he simply went away perplexed. And Mr. Near, along with the hundreds of other courtiers, continued to prosper.
No one is doing the calculation, but this new, anti-democratic system, which exchanges public-service salaries for consultants’ fees in the name of financial efficiency, is probably costing the taxpayer much more, not less. Consultants are expensive and they are everywhere, feeding upon each other in both Ottawa and the provincial capitals, doing government’s thinking for it at hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop. We elect our representatives to work out what lies beyond self-interest. Instead they hire interest groups which redefine the public interest as a mere extension of the market-place; that is, of self-interest.
The result is the institutionalization of simplistic, romantic and ideological received wisdom. More precisely, it is the canonization of anti-thought. The core sentence for which the taxpayer pays in thick report after thick report goes as follows:
On the issue of public interest, an important consideration in assessing the impact on employment of any merger is the rapid globalization and increasing competitiveness of the industry. Canada is not an island unto itself and . . .25
Which industry? It doesn’t really matter. This is religious dogma, not analysis. It happens, in this case, to have been offered as the justification for more or less deregulating the financial sector. Just think of it. We are paying people a great deal of money to tell us we are not an island unto ourselves.
Much of this facile material has its origins in what passes today for independent opinion-making, as produced by organizations such as the Howe Institute and the Fraser Institute. These are little more than the extended and somewhat abstracted tentacles of their funders. Their purpose is not thought or inquiry, but rhetoric and propaganda. They simulate intellectual activity to produce corporatist and interest-based messages, which are in clear contradiction with the ideas which have created and built Canada.
The citizenry are rightfully relieved, at least at the federal level, that we have left the coarse corruption of the Mulroney years behind us. On the other hand, that was only the icing on a cake which has layer upon layer of highly accessible rich cream baked right into it. We are well beyond the straightforward and sensible instructions of Lester Pearson to his Cabinet. He told them they could accept any present they and their wives could consume in one day. A bottle of whisky? Two bottles of champagne? A tin of caviar?
The individuals may drink less, but the state itself now gratefully receives presents from the corporate sector. The premier of Ontario poses in front of piles of prominently labelled breakfast cereals which are to be donated to schools by the manufacturers. He seems to have forgotten that the rise of democracy was driven by the citizens’ desire to escape from the paternalistic and arbitrary charity of those with money. They accomplished this by replacing charity with a fair, balanced, arm’s-length system of public obligation.
The principal tool of that obligation was taxation. I spoke earlier of the distortions created by allowing corporations to become ‘persons.’ The conundrum is that the more they become ‘persons’ the more they seem successfully to avoid the obligations of the person as a citizen.
The real threat in all of this is the normalization of the corporatist mind-set in public debate and in the public sector. So long as that exists we will find it impossible to have any sort of serious debate about the public good. Petty corruption has always existed and always will. But a democracy cannot function if its internal structures are co-opted by interest groups. That is endemic corruption. Until the citizenry deal with it, they will not be able to recuperate their role as the source of political legitimacy.
There is an urgent need to rebuild the whole arm’s-length sector of research, monitoring and enforcement. Yet this democratic system is still being taken apart by the ideologues, who insist it is old-fashioned in our age of “rapid globalization and increasing competitiveness.” To rebuild such systems, they say, would mean a return to big, paternalistic government.
This is nonsense. Flawed though it has always been, the arm’s-length principle is one of the key inventions of modern democracy. It has nothing to do with big or small government. And it is under attack simply because there is a corporatist assault on the public good. As for paternalism, the only paternalistic retrograde policies on the table are those now being enforced. They are dragging us back towards the self-serving systems of the late-nineteenth century.
What we find disconcerting is that all of this is being done with highly sophisticated-looking consultancy reports written by sophisticated-sounding men. Once you realize that they are nothing more than courtiers providing rhetoric for a demolition of the public interest, the situation becomes much clearer. People like this have always existed, as have their reports. Go back to the eighteenth century. You’ll find the corridors of royal palaces filled with them.
“What we must fight against at this moment,” Laurier said in 1881, “is our destructive tendency to take only personal interest into account, which leads to venality, to the flattening of consciences, to all these infamies that we see around us . . .”26
To escape from the distracting, draining impression that all of this is inevitable, we must imagine the logic of Canada. That has never been about clinging either to the border or to narrowly defined self-interest. The country is simply too marginal to survive as an anti-intellectual profit centre. Beyond the logic of the country we have to try to understand the geopolitics which dominate the continent. Above all, there is an obligation for those who are weaker or fewer in number to try to be faster, better informed, more agile and more strategically sophisticated than the larger party. As Bernard le Calloc’h puts it, when talking of Finland, “The great Finnish politicians have had a profound understanding of the Russians.”27 It was once taken for granted that the best Canadian politicians would have the same sort of understanding of the United States. Somehow we have still not recovered from the Brian Mulroney/Allan Gotlieb naïve and colonial approach, which so weakened our position by acting as if personal friendships and bravado could replace understanding.
The ways of ideology and absolute answers are filled with bravado. Countries of Canada’s relative size, internal complexity and difficult geographical positioning can’t afford ideology or bravado. We do best through a very aggressive use of our smartest and most committed élites. It would be naïve to suggest that only disinterest is central to this, but it must at least be consciously present. In a corporatist society the very idea of disinterested criticism is extremely difficult. Those who maintain it find that their reputations are enhanced in a manner which cuts them off from practical power and therefore, in the end, from social reality.
Confederation came about for several reasons and thanks to a variety of personal drives. But one of the key factors was Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s role. And that was because, as Macdonald put it after the assassination, among McGee’s chief characteristics was “his personal disinterestedness . . .”28
That stance was difficult enough for McGee. It made him the most respected but also the poorest of the important Fathers of Confederation. As the various players consolidated their power after 1867, he was gradually squeezed towards the sidelines. He was, in a sense, too good to be successful. What was difficult for McGee in the nineteenth century is much tougher for the citizenry today. How are they to impose themselves on the role of the market, of self-interest, on the large public bureaucracies? That’s why ongoing participation in political questions and public service are key to any success. That’s why the neo-conservatives, corporatists and false populists so rigorously remove the enforcement mechanisms from as many public services as possible. It is enforcement which makes it possible for the citizen to have a disinterested role.
But there is also a matter of examples being set by those who have power; not because power implies superiority, but because, in a democracy, particularly a middle-class democracy, power is meant to be the servant of humility.
In August 1996, Monique Bégin, the former minister of health, wrote to the Krever Enquiry on tainted blood to state that she would assume responsibility for her role, whatever that might turn out to be. This was a rare example in a corporatist society of someone volunteering to accept responsibility.
In her letter, Mme. Bégin stated that she felt obliged to write, “as a matter of personal morality and integrity.”29 That she did this was particularly important because the Health Ministry and Medicare have become symbols for the humanist idea of society which Canadians keep insisting they want. They see this not, I think, as a privilege or a right, but as a working example of what a decent society can do. That Medicare exists and works is daily proof that the public good means something and that legitimacy can still lie with the citizenry. There is a direct line from Dr. Baldwin’s York Dispensary, offering free medicine in 1832, to Mme. Bégin acting in exactly the manner, I imagine, that Dr. Baldwin would have acted had he been active in 1996. It was an illustration of the old humanist pact struck by the younger Baldwin and LaFontaine, because it showed that a public figure can still act on the basis of principles. And the principle in this case is the well-being of the citizen.
Gabrielle Roy, in her autobiography, described in detail the discussions between the family doctor and her mother over an urgent children’s operation which the family couldn’t afford. When you read this scene, which would have been repeated in millions of lives, Roy makes you understand with perfect minimalism that health care is not a question of privilege but a matter of dignity.30
That’s why the citizenry insist and insist and insist that they are proud of the Medicare system and that they want it to work. They continually send instructions to this effect to their governments. They do so in every imaginable way. And yet, day by day, the governments and the bureaucracies chip away at the system as if in the hope that, by opening holes in it and creating a new ineffectiveness, the citizenry will drop their commitment to it.
The silent, ongoing, committee-room manoeuvring against Medicare has become a great test for the citizens, for the élites and the citizenry as a whole. Will a sufficient percentage of the élites respond honestly to the citizens’ desires? Will the citizens find the ways to ensure that they are obeyed by those to whom they have given responsibility?
The citizenry have now had some experience of the methodical, silent refusal to listen of the constituted élites, and so are becoming better at fighting back. But the message from this struggle between the public good and short-term corporatist self-interest has been that corporatism is strong and smart. And democracy, in the form of Medicare as a practical illustration of the public good, has still not found out how to make the structures of corporatism work on its behalf.
This tells us, on a superficial level, that corporatism dominates. But in a more serious way, it tells us that the élites to whom we have entrusted our democratic system are refusing to do their jobs in a responsible manner.