31

The Sensibility of an Idea

HISTORY FUNCTIONS AS HISTORY when it embraces a broad sweep of functioning memory. It is not about converting our condition into solutions. Yet many Canadians have come to the astonishing conclusion that if there is a problem in the system and it cannot be solved, well then, the system should be destroyed. That this problem may actually be the central condition of the civilization—and therefore its strength—escapes notice. Such an approach converts our functioning memories into little more than sequential sitcoms with clearly stated problems followed by clearly stated resolutions.

None of this would be of great consequence if there were not such a crisis within our élites and we were not so confused about the nature of nationalism. For example: Why do we have so much difficulty recognizing the difference between positive and negative nationalism? In part because the essential Canadian debate—that which pits the school of reconciliation and reform against the anti-reformers—has been obscured behind a secondary argument over which level of government should have which power.

All argument over the nature of our social contract has been buried beneath an abstract theoretical debate over constitutional powers and administrative ambitions. In the process, Canada as a coalition of ideas based on an assumption of the public good is being transformed into little more than an alliance of powers and interests.

Of course there is also a perfectly valid, ongoing argument to be had over the balance of powers between the national government and the provinces. In the right circumstances there is every reason to favour or at least to consider decentralization—in some areas, massive decentralization—providing that the public interest is the core consideration. But today decentralization is being used largely to institutionalize corporatism and negative nationalism. Decentralization, as we are approaching it, is destroying the reforming ideas and the force of the reforming coalition on which Canada is built. What we are taking part in is the final undoing of the work of LaFontaine and Baldwin and the victory of a revamped version of the Family Compact–Château Clique. It has only taken those forces 150 years to work out how to get their way. In historical terms that is not an unreasonably long wait.

Such a statement may sound apocalyptic. But realism isn’t pessimism. And though the anti-reform interests have won an unconscionable number of battles over the last decade, the war is by no means over.

When the public interest is reduced to self-interest everyone’s attention span is gradually shrunk until it is narrowly focused on gaining powers. Control over specific powers are the chips in what is little more than a corporatist poker game.

We live in a world of constitutions and laws. What was once the privilege of the king to bestow is now a matter of legal and back-room jockeying. Suddenly, powers are spoken of as if they were sacred objects. This is the ultimate abstraction of negative nationalism.

But what are powers if not for the most part utilitarian, administrative tools? The real question should be not who has what power, but in what administrative configuration is the citizen’s idea of her society best served. That can only be established through a debate. Not a debate about configurations, but about the public interest. Yet we act as if that sort of discussion were virtually impossible.

Canada has spent more time on constitutional questions, according to Peter Russell, than any other country, and has done so more intensively and passionately. Yet this effort has led nowhere except to draining “the creative energy of the leaders.”1 Why? Because no matter how much beautiful language is stuck on, constitutions remain rather low-level organization charts. And because our constitutional debate is never about which structures can serve the reforming tradition versus those which serve self-interest. It therefore has very little democratic purpose.

The result has been a continual drift towards decentralization. The citizenry have difficulty identifying this trend because it is the product of intergovernmental negotiations taking place out of the public eye. Most of the public rhetoric denies that anything of consequence is happening. Ottawa goes on blustering about a strong and united Canada, whatever that is, and the provinces go on wailing that Ottawa is intransigent.

Those very provinces which complain most of duplication and overlap now talk of creating a third level of government to coordinate the powers they control. Being intergovernmental and administrative, this structure would remain invisible to the citizenry and inaccessible to any sort of practical democratic control. Curiously enough, it resembles the Quebec premier’s proposal of a partenariat. It is also typical of a corporatist society: you insert successive levels of executive or administrative government in between the voting public and actual policy-making. The effect is to water down, even remove, the citizen’s real role.

Again, the problem is not decentralization, but the absence of debate about the content or real intent of decentralization. For example, over 150 years, with very few exceptions, decentralization has favoured the promotion of individual self-interest as against the public interest. That is, it has favoured social inequalities. Just as it has, almost without exception, been accompanied by the mistreatment of linguistic minorities. Remember, the Manitoba School Question was primarily about provincial rights. Not just provincial rights versus federal rights, but provincial rights versus reconciliation and the public good.

The added problem today is the impossibility of regional governments financing complex, universal programs when the real financial levers needed to raise money now lie somewhere between national governments and the international market-place.

We erase our conscious sense of these realities by concentrating on the abstract debate over powers and the very real sense of alienation which a number of provinces feel. Yet the confusion between equality real and false, alienation real and mystified, and for that matter between corporatism and the public good, is exactly what requires real debate. What does each of these elements mean? What are their actual functioning relationships? What should they be? This debate ought to be going on in both the federal parliament and the provincial legislatures. Instead it takes place in a purely structural manner in invisible intergovernmental committees.

This is a process which appears complex to the citizenry, dominated as they are by the dialects and methodologies of the technocracies, public and private. We are forced to observe power through the intellectualization of administration. Public debate is reduced to a curious mixture of inaccessibility and glibness, the tools of executive government.

This exclusionary system is deceiving. After all, complexity is not necessarily a sign of intellectual content or of ideas. Indeed executive politics are profoundly anti-intellectual. They are a denial of Canada’s strength as an idea of a country. They relegate progress through ideas to the margins of unprofessionalism. Instead we are dragged away from our originality and down into the banal predictability of courtierism and managerial in-fighting.

Perhaps I am creating the impression that our problems stem from a lack of ideas, indeed a lack of policies. Not at all. We are drowning in policy ideas and policy analysts and policy studies.

A sensible strategy to drive the diversification of our trade policy is there for the asking. A complex but nevertheless integrated, long-term foreign policy would not take a great deal of creative effort. We have good thinkers inside and outside of government. There is absolutely no reason why we have to deal with the mid-life crisis of our social policies by putting a bullet through their heads. There are dozens of ways in which they could be strengthened to work for yet another quarter-century—a long time in political policy. There is no need to open up gaping holes in the safety net, as we now are doing. Indeed, the whole immobilizing confidence trick of neo-conservative economics can easily be seen for the superficial, regressive romanticism it really is. The reintegration of the aboriginal community into the centre of our society is actually well on its way. What lies ahead could be the easy part, if we wanted it to be. No doubt the question of francophone–anglophone relations is politically the most complex that we face. Yet again, it is not so difficult to conceive of positive approaches, especially given the very real and creative changes of the last half-century. In particular there is the remarkable progress made over language inside Quebec and New Brunswick, at the national level and in the other provinces. I’m not suggesting this could or should eliminate the nationalist movement. We are all in need of it. But we could, much more easily than we think, establish the extent to which the school of negative nationalism is retrograde—in fact, bizarrely retro—and so rehabilitate the ideas of positive nationalism.

Our problem is not a lack of policy, but rather an inability to believe that such a thing as long-term, integrated policy could still have a place in Canada; particularly policy which responds to the particularities of the place. We seem unable to believe that power could be anything more than self-interested manoeuvring obscured by false-populist bombast.

What is it which so impresses or depresses us? After all, if you step back from the arid rhetoric of the interest groups and the negative nationalists, they suddenly come into focus, as if metamorphosed. Abruptly, Sir Allan MacNab, Monsignor Bourget, D’Alton McCarthy, Maurice Duplessis and a little crowd of their historical doubles stand before us. As if with the flick of a magic wand you can see how essentially destructive they are for a society which believes in the public good; how essentially comic are the BCNI, the C.D. Howe Institute, buffoons like Messrs. Harris, Klein and Landry.

What is it that frightens us out of believing that original or non-conforming action is possible, if not the rhetoric of our corporatist élites? They in turn are mimicked by many of our public figures, who seem reassured by their own ad nauseam repetition of the sort of received wisdom which transfers their personal sense of being victimized onto the public. They convince themselves that there is no need to act in an original manner when the big picture is so effectively controlled by globalization and other clichés. Responsibility, they murmur with false sophistication, consists of tacking tightly to keep some small part of the ship of state afloat in this unprecedented storm of change. The whole idea of the public good recedes, as if it were an old-fashioned ideal rendered obsolete by the horizonless complexity of the new ways.

History is reality. But it is also the product of how we imagine reality. In a successful society this is a creative process and the result is a mythology on which the community can continue to build. When a society becomes fixated by a few ideological truths, it loses the ability to see the reality of its own history, let alone to imagine its shape. Then it falls easily into a negative approach full of blame, bravura and promises of salvation. An aura of mystification replaces mythology and the result is a generalized sense of inescapable immobility. It is that sense of being victimized by one force or another which frightens us out of believing that original and non-conforming action is possible.

Yet our experience tells us that the opposite is true. The series of original and unexpected actions which made the idea of Canada practical in the first place came during particularly difficult times. It is a conceit of each generation that the new erases the old and that their changes and crises are the like of which no one has ever before seen.

The truth is that LaFontaine and Baldwin brought about their revolutionary reforms while surrounded by general disorder. Society was weighed down by a major economic depression, caused by London’s free-trade policies. There was social turmoil because of the massive immigration brought on by the Irish famine. The Orange Order and the Toronto Tories, frightened by the unrest in Europe, were repeatedly rioting. There was serious industrial unrest involving railway employees and sailors. There were riots going on in rural French Canada against Meilleur’s new education system.2

It is precisely in times of difficulty and confusion that the public good needs most to be asserted and imposed by the citizenry and their representatives. What this requires is a belief in the long-term cause of reform—the unbroken line from Mackenzie and Papineau, LaFontaine and Baldwin. This is not a romantic view of history. The recognition of our past actions is a central part of our ongoing, unfinished experiment. As for the received wisdom of our day, what conclusions are we to draw from élites which shower inevitability upon us, except that they are failing to do their jobs?

How do we so easily forget that reconciliation and reform are at the heart of the country’s creation and survival? The explanation lies perhaps in our ongoing confusion over the nature of equality.

The Canadian experience has shaped individualism to mean some sort of balance between equality of opportunity and equality of results. This is the attempted equilibrium of a middle-class society, eager for freedom on the one hand and the stability that comes of minimizing extremes on the other.

As the century wears on, so a very different American view penetrates ever deeper into our society, thanks to their domination—direct and indirect—of every imaginable means of communication.

By their definition, individualism is limited to equality of opportunity, the result being real inequality.

Our own practical counterweight to this siren call has been the physical reminder, all around us, of a more balanced equality, created and maintained by a reasonably effective social-democratic system. But now our élites are carefully removing that structure, indirect step by indirect step, never facing the electorate clearly on the question. In fact they keep insisting that they are not doing what any fool can see they are doing. And so our practical reminders of balanced equality gradually fade, ceding the public place to a more ideological, abstract American view.

There is another, more complex confusion surrounding the idea of equality. This is part of the tension between our two levels of government and between the different regions. Quebec rightly claims a particular or special or unusual or separate status, all of which in practical fact it already has. Other provinces talk of the equality of provinces when what they actually mean is a generalization of what Quebec means—that is, special status. It is gradually becoming clear that the concept of equal provinces actually means the rich provinces get to keep their riches and the poor their poverty.

As for real equality, it consists of a constant rebalancing act—one which the federation carries out through the participation of both the national and the provincial governments. That act is centred on the redistribution of both money and services. And those services have as much to do with culture as they do with our physical well-being. It was our commitment to this sort of equality which lay at the centre of Canada’s evolution. That was the meaning of the Mackenzie–Papineau cooperation, as it was of LaFontaine and Baldwin’s belief in their “absolute necessity not to be found lacking.” Their sense of “obligation” led to the idea of a country built on the conception of ongoing reform. The railway was a redistribution device, just as public broadcasting has been over the last sixty years, just as Medicare and transfer payments have been over the last quarter-century. The service of the public good in such a complex federation is based on the unending application of ever-evolving methods of redistribution. That is the meaning of reconciliation and reform. It isn’t just financial. It may be linguistic and cultural or social and political. That is why, whatever you think of the 1982 constitutional revision process, one of its true accomplishments was the guaranteeing of minority language rights.

Our rush to decentralization has carried us away from the delicate balance in which equality refers to the public good. Instead it refers to special status all around. As you would expect when individualism is based only on opportunity, no one asks what happens to those who have neither the financial nor the political clout to exercise their tiny portion of that opportunity.

The question must surely be whether the problems, which people sought to address through this theoretical equality of provinces, have been addressed. Or has the increasing decentralization of powers actually aggravated the old problems and created new ones? And if it has, what is the reason? Is it that this decentralization has been taking place without the question of content being seriously addressed?

To a dispassionate observer it would seem that increasing decentralization has led to or been accompanied in both anglophone and francophone Canada by the growing dominance of American models and thus of America. The greater endemic poverty of the Maritimes and Quebec in comparison with the other regions has been accentuated rather than reduced. The Canadian idea of a balanced society has been weakened. The social instability into which we are moving seems to have had the effect of driving us away from our mythologies and back into the ancient mystifications of victimization.

I am not making in any way an argument for centralization. Rather I am describing the need for a continuation of the Canadian idea of reasonable balance. The struggles between the various levels of government over which should have which power are always rich material for the animation of current affairs. And, for that matter, they often involve questions of great importance. But if such battles take place outside of the essential context of reconciliation and reform, and thus outside of our solid mythological context, then they are no more than self-indulgent posturing. A country which is an idea of a country is not a theoretical or utopian ideal.

The Inuit quality of isuma summarizes that essential context. It has as much to do with positive nationalism as with the public good. Isuma—intelligence that consists of the knowledge of our responsibilities towards our society. It is a characteristic which grows with time. If you choose to look, you can find it at the core of events through the long line of the Canadian experience. It is an intelligence, the Inuit say, which grows because it is nurtured.