THE GREAT ISSUE OF OUR TIME
Leaders are always surprised when the sweep of history intervenes. They have become used to exercising power, setting policy, shaping the public atmosphere, managing the details. Then suddenly their brilliant inevitabilities resemble plasterboard constructions. They collapse or are swept away. Reality reasserts itself. If these people in power are not completely cut off from the world outside their personal domains, they will realize that leaders are rarely remembered as they wish. They get caught in an undertow or crushed in a tsunami. Somehow history, with its use of the collective unconscious, forms the way a government or a prime minister will be remembered.
Most daily dramas slowly disappear from our memories. The details of particular financial policies. Battles to balance budgets. Glorious trade deals. The mishandling of military equipment purchases. Corruption. Senatorial fools. PMO manipulations. Ministerial messes. These triumphs and catastrophes are reduced to the crumbs of the past.
What remains is the public good. Leaders and governments are largely remembered for improving that public good or for worsening it, for great good or great evil. History is pretty unforgiving that way. The leaders’ economic theories or social theories – what they think will happen if they do something – don’t really count in the long run. What counts over time is what actually did happen.
In other words, governments are not remembered for their day-to-day economic management. That is taken for granted as a basic qualification for governance. Governments are remembered for what they do to better or worsen the shared public good. If Mr. Harper’s government, for example, insists that its principal quality has been economic management, then it will damage its own reputation.
After all, it inherited, upon coming to power, a relatively healthy economy with a large surplus. That surplus had been accomplished by Canadians at great cost to ourselves. Through the 1990s, we had accepted a decade of cuts to necessary programs. The new Harper government immediately set about eliminating the surplus through tax cuts. The ministers had been warned by senior finance officials that there was a high risk of some sort of financial crisis. Central bankers around the world were counselling caution.
And yet a government describing itself as led by economists expert in economic management threw away our hard-earned surplus. They threw away our safety margin. The crisis then struck. So the government led us into debt, intentionally or unintentionally. It then devoted the rest of its time in power to getting us out of the debt it had created through bad financial management, while continuing to repeat that theirs was a government led by economists and good financial managers. The war against debt, of course, involved more cuts to programming.
If I were in their shoes, I would not have insisted so much that their badge of honour was financial management. History is likely to remember them as Canada’s worst economic managers since the 1930s. Good management, after all, is about understanding reality and dealing with it. Good economic management is about protecting surpluses, not throwing them away, particularly in risky times, particularly when the resulting deficit doesn’t serve a new or improved purpose or build a program that will strengthen society. What we have been living with is a perfectly avoidable deficit brought on by naïveté or incompetence.
Governments are judged above all on what they have done for the public good, unless they have failed as economic managers. In which case they are judged on both.
Robert Borden, prime minister during the First World War, was well-intentioned and worked hard, but his reputation has never quite recovered. Why? Because there is a sense that he left behind too many dead and the country deeply divided. John Diefenbaker’s reputation, on the other hand, is continually growing because, even if he wasn’t a particularly competent government manager, there is a sense that his Prairie radicalism was centred on ideas of egalitarianism and inclusion – ideas that fit with the history of Canada, and helped Canada along that road. His failures as an administrative leader are overwhelmed by the way in which he opened the country up to its real pattern of justice and inclusion, a pattern that draws citizens together. People still talk about the way he and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru stood together at the 1961 Commonwealth Conference against Britain – and indeed the British monarchy – to keep South Africa out. This Diefenbaker–Nehru alliance in effect created the modern anti-apartheid movement. There you have the complexity of history. The man who thought he revered Britain will be remembered for having humiliated it and the monarchy in the Commonwealth. History will hold on to that, as it will hold on to his decision to return the vote to Aboriginal people, as well as to remove many of the remaining racist elements in our immigration system. And it was Diefenbaker who laid the foundation for the Charter of Rights, which Pierre Trudeau eventually put in place. And so Diefenbaker will be part of the humanist history of Canada, along with his predecessor and his successor, Louis St. Laurent and Lester Pearson. Despite St. Laurent’s embarrassing ending and Pearson’s messy governance, all three advanced our sense of the egalitarian and inclusive.
History has placed Mr. Harper at the centre of a great Canadian issue: justice for Aboriginal peoples. It is an issue that will help shape who we are, how we see ourselves, how others will see us.
This is the great issue of our time. Why? First, because it is the great outstanding issue of fundamental injustice in Canada, one with a long and destructive history. Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin spoke of this in May 2014. She said she saw the focus of the Court shifting over the next few years from Charter issues to Aboriginal issues. “We’re in the early days of the saga.” “Canada, I believe, is a project of reconciliation. Our successes have always been in recognizing the differences and accommodating them and in working together with respect.” And this is the most important issue of reconciliation on our plate. It is a matter of justice and dignity.
The Aboriginal opportunity today is the equivalent of the Quebec issue in the 1960s and 70s. As with the francophones of that era, so the Aboriginals today are ready for a struggle to right the wrongs. And a growing number of non-Aboriginal Canadians are with them.
Yes, there are particular utilitarian issues to be handled. There are economic programs to be launched on reserves, regionally, and nationally. There are hundreds of issues and programs to be worked out. But this is not simply a utilitarian or economic crisis. As David Arnot, chief commissioner for the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission, has put it, “[T]reaty dialogue did not focus on barter, but on accommodation and trust.” What we are faced with is a fundamental social and cultural issue that is of equal importance for all of us, whether Aboriginal or not. It is a question of broad justice. Of fairness. Of social balance. First Nations leaders constantly refer to the treaties as the key to the whole situation because the treaties contain the elements of this fair relationship.
So far Mr. Harper has taken one important step – the apology that was made in the House of Commons in 2008 – and made a few careful moves. For example, the government has named someone in the Privy Council as the prime minister’s point person on Aboriginal questions. There have been a few other highly specific initiatives. But the omnibus bills still stand, throwing dark shadows over the Aboriginal role in Canada. And if the analysis of the indigenous leaders is correct, then these omnibus bills represent a dangerous direct attack on Aboriginal rights. History will see them as a symbol of Canada’s failure to address the great issue of our time.