Chief Theresa Spence (by Regina Southwind, Rabble, December 17)

As we enter 2013, how is Canada doing? How do we stack up against other rich countries? Emerging from the year of the 50th anniversary of medicare, the 30th anniversary of the Charter, are we making progress? Do we even have any shared notion of what progress would look like?

How we measure our success as a country matters.   It tells us a lot about what we value most.  It shapes what we ask of our politicians and how we judge the performance of our governments.  It shapes politics and policy.

Very often international comparisons of how well a country is doing rely on GDP and this has been the go-to measure in Canada as well.  GDP measures the total value of the goods and services produced by a country and is the best way to track the size and growth of the economy.  On this basis, in a world shaken by U.S. debt, European fragility and the emergence of new economic super-powers, we have been doing pretty well.

Of course GDP is important and especially to developing countries trying to lift their populations out of poverty.   But it is a lousy measure of the health and welfare of a country such as ours.  As countries get richer, growth brings diminishing returns; other things become more important.

Our focus on GDP in media and politics reflects what has been for several decades now a preoccupation with economic growth, a preoccupation that helps explain the tiresome whining of some of our opinion leaders about how badly we were lagging the US even while we were doing pretty well on other counts.  It probably also explains the equally irritating self-righteousness when we now lecture our allies on how they should manage their economies. But GDP tells us nothing about how the benefits of growth are shared or about the costs of growth to the environment, our community and even future economic prospects.  It tells us nothing about those values that sit outside the market – the quality of our political and social commons, and  our relationships to one another and to nature.

International agencies and a number of countries are developing indices that take into account equality, sustainability, democracy, and trust, as well as economic performance.  In Canada Roy Romanow has proposed just such an index, and recently David Suzuki added his voice to the campaign to think beyond GDP – promoting a measure of General National Happiness with a central place for the health of the environment which enables all else.  These are welcome initiatives because they ask us to consider what is important, what our future ought to look like.

To this work I would propose the addition of another measure, which despite its long pedigree is too easily overlooked.  Gandhi and Pope John Paul II, Aristotle and Rawls, and artists through the ages have all reminded us that the real test of any society is how we treat the weakest among us, those who have the least.  Here too, with glaring exceptions, none more shameful than our relationship with Aboriginal Peoples, we have done pretty well.  For example, we have historically been above average on measures of equality, well ahead of the U.S.  We were seen as proof that diversity and equality could coexist, that empathy and sharing could bridge differences in language, culture, lifestyle. We came to see immigration as a solution, not a problem and to be open to refugees.

Even in our relationship with Aboriginal Peoples, this government’s historic apology for some of the most grievous wrongs could have been a signal of a new, more respectful relationship (especially needed after the abandonment of the Kelowna Accord).

Churchill gave particular attention to how well a country treats its prisoners, what he described as a measure of a society’s stored-up goodwill; and here too we managed to be fairly balanced.

As for our global responsibilities, Canada led in getting rich countries to commit 0.7 per cent of GDP to aid and while we never came close to that level (others have), we did, about a decade ago, double our aid budget, with no less than half going to Africa, and took other steps that offered at least some prospect for narrowing the gap.

How do we stack up today?

On many fronts pretty well: we have much to be grateful for. But how about for those who have least?

Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence’s hunger strike has drawn attention again to the suffering of her community, part of a growing movement, Idle No More, which got its impetus from the omnibus budget that weakened environmental protections without consultation with Aboriginal communities.  The movement has spread across and beyond Canada, an expression of outrage at these decisions, at inaction on  injustice.

A few doctors and other health providers have also been leading protests against recent changes to refugee regulations, changes that mean more, including children, are subject to automatic detention and the separation of families, some may be denied essential medical help, and some will be subject to automatic deportation without appeal.  We are also increasingly relying on migrant workers who are not only paid less than domestic workers but are now denied basic benefits that they pay for through EI premiums.

As for unemployed Canadians – too many of whom are young, often indebted graduates – cuts over the last 15 years have meant fewer are eligible for EI benefits or training. Recent changes have made eligibility even more exclusive, requiring the unemployed to accept any work, even at wages of 70 per cent of the job they lost.  Access is now at an all-time low forcing many to go on welfare.  With all the growth of our economy, too many Canadians, many who do have jobs, live in poverty or are just scraping by.  We are nowhere near meeting our longstanding commitment to eliminate child poverty.

Thousands have also protested the government’s punitive crime agenda, which, while politically popular, marks a sharp departure for Canada, at a time when crime rates are going down.  The evidence is overwhelming that such tough-on-crime policies don’t work, that they make us less safe, result in prison overcrowding and inattention to rehabilitation, turn jails into “asylums” for the mentally ill, and contribute to the creation of an underclass permanently excluded from opportunity.

Internationally, apart from freezing aid, our parliament recently said no to a bill promising cheap drugs to poor countries, choosing, as Stephen Lewis put it, patents over people.  And when U.N. envoys criticize us, we are outraged, turning against the critics rather than asking how we might do better.

These changes cannot be justified on the basis of fiscal prudence.  Where there are savings, they are miniscule.  Increased incarceration and detention will create considerable costs.   While we all recognize the need for efficient administration, these changes put the burden on, thereby doubly victimizing, the weakest among us.  They reflect an indifference to those with less or, even worse, a view of people in need as shirkers and slackers.

What all this yields is a meaner Canada.   When governing is all short-term economic growth, damn the consequences, then aboriginal rights and environmental protections become inconveniences to be ignored or managed.   Refugees, the unemployed, and the poor come to be seen and treated as freeloaders, a drag on the economy, rather than fellow citizens, often victims of an increasingly mean version of capitalism.  And criminals are demonized, convenient scapegoats for our fears and discontents, the most heinous offences and frightening offenders used to blind us to the reality that those are people in our prisons, most of whose lives could be repaired.

Our leaders try to convince us that the health of the so-called job creators is more important than that of the weakest among us.  And, it seems, many of the richest and most powerful come to believe this and act on that basis, what some have called “trickle down meanness,” one of the consequences of rising inequality, particularly when growth disproportionately benefits a small group of super-rich able effectively to secede from society and its mutual obligations.  On measures of equality, we are slipping to the bottom relative to other rich countries.  We ought to measure up to the best.

An obsession with short-term growth, with money, may well blind us to the things that really matter, to the possibility that there is some common good important enough that we might modify or even sacrifice our private interests.

The debate brewing about how to measure success is not just about measurement.  It is a recognition that we need to participate in a real discussion about what we mean by the good life, the purpose of the economy,  the kind of Canada we want. It is about decency and dignity.  It is about our political and democratic institutions, the need to find much better ways to ensure that all voices, particularly those speaking for the marginalized, are heard.  This may be the only way to restore a sense of the common good and win back the many who have given up on politics, party and government.

(This article first appeared in The Toronto Star.)

Part of the answer lies in the preeminence of markets and market thinking over the last three decades.  We are not simply talking about our market economy, but more our conversion to a market society in which money can buy almost anything, we are more consumer than citizen, and inequalities and their corrosiveness grow, undermining solidarity and any sense of a common good.   With the market society comes a thinned out  “bargain basement citizenship” – Canadians expect less from their government, give less, and get less.  In this world, citizen takes a backseat to consumer/taxpayer, and democracy takes a back seat to the market. While few would be comfortable with American economist and libertarian Bryan Caplan’s statement that what we need is more market and less democracy, he captures well the bleeding of market thinking into our social and political relationships.  How did we get here?

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union ushered in what philosopher Michael Sandel calls “market triumphalism”.  The genius of market mechanisms for organizing the economy and generating prosperity held the key to the good life. The common good was no longer a matter of citizens contesting ideas or governments shaping the future; common citizenship, civic virtue, collective engagement were the old way.  The new way was to pursue our individual interests in “free and voluntary” market exchanges.

Nothing captures better the imperialism of this view than former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s pronouncement that there is no such thing as society.  Only individuals and their interests and fears are real.  To the extent that one is looking for more – meaning, purpose, solidarity – that can be found in church and the communities into which we are born and which give us structure and comfort.  Government, in this view, is part of the problem unless it restricts its role to protecting the market and, inevitably, those who benefit most from it.  Caplan worries that our woeful understanding of the laws of economics – as if there were laws – makes democracy a dangerous thing.  This is just a bolder version of the worries of market fundamentalists that when we interfere with the market we jeopardize its efficiency and thereby its capacity to deliver the good life.  Those less sanguine about markets are warned about the economic imperatives in a globalized economy which, the argument goes,  severely limit the scope for government action. Less government, less taxes, more market.  Lost is the understanding that the job of democracy is to define the good life and harness market forces to shape a better future. That this market preeminence persists even after the recent financial meltdown and current meltings is testament to its powerful hold over us.

At the same time as we have taken the common good out of politics and transfered it to the market, the growing inequality of our society makes it almost impossible to imagine ever formulating a shared sense of the good life.  The very idea of the common good becomes a stretch given the profoundly different ways in which the super rich, the poor and the majority experience life.  They breathe different air and especially as social mobility dries up they lose touch with each other.  In an increasingly privatised world, they do not meet as fellow citizens.  Their kids go to different schools.  They live increasingly in different neighbourhoods.  In Canada the last place that is meant to accommodate all of us in shared experience is our public health system – and no wonder the pressure to privatize is relentless. Money always matters but in an increasingly privatised world where everything has a price, it has never mattered more.

At the top, the extraordinary gains of a small global elite have given them an outsized capacity to shape the agenda while at the same time allowing them to secede from much of society.  They need the state far less than ever before.  And even as extreme inequality undermines equality of opportunity, the myth of meritocracy emboldens many to believe that they are entitled to all they have and that their interests are best served by keeping it. Down the economic scale, just as the very rich want to see taxes cut to hold on to what they have, so too do the majority want to withhold their money from a state they no longer trust.  Even if the financial meltdown and its aftermath have shaken confidence in the promise of markets, they have not restored confidence in governments – and why should they given lost manufacturing jobs, tainted meat, deteriorating institutions, and an inability or unwillingness to tackle the big issues.  And, in a perfect self-fulfilling prophecy, taxes are cut, the state shrinks and  becomes less trustworthy, the services it provides less relevant and increasingly shoddy, and the distrust grows and curdles into cynicism about the idea of progress.

The result: a ?marketized” politics of propaganda and pandering and an impoverished democracy that treats us as consumers and taxpayers, not citizens, and prefers to obscure the issues rather than engage us in defining the kind of society we want. Interesting that our government eliminated the direct public subsidy to parties, a subsidy that made every vote count for something,  yet another demonstration that politics is a private affair.  Increasingly those who want more, who want to take their future back, are looking outside of conventional politics for expressions of the democratic spirit: to their communities, or global causes, or to the streets.  It was striking how many of the participants in the Occupy movement and the Quebec student protests found a new solidarity in their activism.  Through action together these young people are taking a shot at rebuilding civil society and rediscovering the common good.  Perhaps it is only ever from the outside that we can hope to find the answers of what kind of country and what kind of democracy we want.

So, perhaps the answer is that many Canadians  do care about democracy but many, especially young Canadians, have given up on Canadian politics and the impoverished version of democracy on offer.  That is both understandable and dangerous. The new activism and rebuilding of an independent civil society are essential but not enough.

Student leaders from Quebec have recently launched a cross-Canada tour to promote political activism, to help Canadians learn how to build social movements that offer a richer kind of democratic experience than provided by contemporary politics, but also to explain to those who feel disenfranchised why voting and political participation still matter. They understand the dangers of leaving any government to its own devices, unconstrained by a vigilant citizenry. These young Canadians seem to be looking for a new politics tuned into the voices in the community and on the streets and one that at least begins to offer some real engagement on the issues that matter – inequality and poverty, jobs and youth unemployment, climate change and environmental degradation.  And they continue to express the hope that a renewed democracy will allow us to take back our future.  It is now up to our political leadership to take up the challenge.

A shorter version of this article was first published in the Toronto Star.

“An Auction”. William Pyne and William Combe (1808).

Now that some time has passed since the federal budget it might be useful to step back and assess what it says about where the government is taking us. Reaction has been pretty muted. The “centrist punditry” generally see this as an incremental budget, business as usual, “balanced” and “mature”. For our Globe editorialists, for example, this was not the transformative budget the government promised and a majority government supposedly made possible. According to them, the budget was OK; it earned a passing grade but had no vision, not much transformation. Canadians, according to one poll at least, did not much like the budget but found it benign. No matter how often the government tells us it is changing the game, we seem reluctant to believe it.

To some extent the apparent indifference can be attributed to the success of the time-tested techniques of strategic leaks and hints of even more drastic measures. Apparently that trick never gets tired; we are always relieved that things are better or at least not as awful as we feared. And of course, cuts to the public service probably always play well – this is easy politics, if costly policy – and scant detail is provided on the implications of those cuts for citizens. What information we get is in dribs and drabs and so we still don’t have an overall view. And budget debate was to some extent eclipsed by serious allegations of voter suppression, electoral misconduct, and misleading Parliament and the electorate on the costs of jets.

Governments rarely move an agenda through big dramatic acts such as the Patriation of the Constitution and the creation of the Charter, or the great Free Trade debate, or the 1995 austerity budget, all dramatically visible, divisive and fiercely debated. Rather, a government’s agenda, even if it represents profound change, is more often achieved in increments, small steps which gradually reshape what we perceive as acceptable and normal. Often it is only in retrospect that we get a sense of how far we have moved, how much what is in Overton’s Window has changed, how far “the centre” has shifted. The danger, absent debate, is that we will sleepwalk into the future, that a very different Canada will have crept up on us, a Canada we would not have chosen.

Smashing the Progressive State

This budget gives pretty clear signals of a different Canada, perhaps hard to get at because it is not about building but about dismantling: not dismantling the state – witness the expanded use of the coercive criminal law power and the build up of our military and security apparatus – so much as rolling back the progressive state. Some conservative pundits have been continually disappointed in this government for its readiness to spend for its purposes or to intervene in the market when it suits. No, this is more about redefining the purpose of government and undoing, brick by brick, in the slowest of motion, but inexorably, the institutions and programs built over decades following the second world war, by governments of quite different stripes.

Some will say that the cuts in this budget are not big enough, deep enough or sufficiently targeted to justify such a conclusion. After all, the cuts in the mid-1990s were deeper and unquestionably consequential. And today’s cuts do come after a few years of sharply increased spending. But these arguments obscure the differences between now and the 19990s when there was a broad consensus that we were in a dangerous fiscal crisis, over a third of every tax dollar was going to debt servicing, and taxes were much higher. And whatever one’s views of that period of austerity, and there is much to criticize, cuts were treated as a necessary evil, witness how quickly after achieving a budget surplus that money was poured back into health transfers, science and education, child benefits, and infrastructure. And yes there were tax cuts – huge tax cuts – which reinforced the growing anti-tax, small government rhetoric, but at least they were funded by budget surpluses and not increased borrowing.

The current government inherited a double-digit surplus that created room for transforming outdated programs, considering new investments, helping struggling provinces, responding to crises, and lowering taxes. There was no spending crisis. And while we have a deficit now, it is relatively smaller than those of our colleague countries – we are certainly not Greece – and the service charges are nowhere near where they were a decade ago – this is not the 1990s. This deficit was caused by deep and unaffordable tax cuts, necessary and inevitable recession spending which is now finished, and increased spending in some areas such as the military and security apparatus, punishment of criminals, and layers of bureaucratic control.

No, this round of cuts is not the result of a fiscal crisis. It may rather be exactly what the government has told us, a milestone in transformative change. Monte Solberg, an ex-Cabinet Minister for the current government, and generally a moderate voice, gives us a glimpse of the new contract between government and citizen this budget implies:

Thursday’s federal budget was another important step in fulfilling Stephen Harper’s hidden agenda of making Canada recognizable again.

For 40 years “progressives” called the shots in Canada, and their influence affected and infected everything. They left big bruises on the economy, social policy, immigration, the armed forces, law, foreign affairs, cultural policy and, of course, the Constitution. Much of the Canada that we grew up with was indiscriminately swept away, good and bad alike.

Well, maybe not completely swept away. That old middle-class Canada could still be found hanging around Legions, hockey rinks and the kind of coffee shops where the only coffee they serve goes by the name “coffee.” But make no mistake — that Canada had been kicked to the curb and anyone who believed in it was expected to shut up and pay their ever-increasing taxes while their progressive masters turned their country inside out….

Anyway, that whole way of thinking must be smashed and Flaherty has made a start on it, but only a start. By definition, prudent governance means that cutting ineffective programs should be a yearly occurrence, not a once-in-20-year event….

In the end, paring away unnecessary positions and programs is about much more than just balancing budgets, efficiency and making accountants and economists happy.

Really, it’s about showing a little respect for those regular people who like the old Canada and just want Ottawa to live within its means, and to stay out of their face and wallet.

Solberg suggests that the cuts to spending are part of a new vision, and that the budget does indeed contain real transformative change. I agree – but these changes go to the heart of our sense of this country and need to be debated. The transformative change to Old Age Security, for example, will have an impact on the poorest and the provinces will have to pick up the pieces but it affects only the next generations of retirees and so slips by. The federal withdrawal from health care policy and the transfer of more of the responsibility and risk to the provinces could have profound implications for our public health care but the changes do not kick in for a few years. And again slip by. But the federal withdrawal here signals big change indeed. The federal government seems to be retreating to a much narrower Constitutional set of responsibilities. Gone, apparently, is the cooperative, and yes sometimes combative, federalism that built the progressive state. The process was messy, imperfect, many were left out, but the results, medicare and the social safety net, did become part of our shared citizenship. The national child benefit, employment insurance, student loans and grants, investments in university research and science, the OAS and Guaranteed Income Supplement, which along with the Canada/Quebec Pension Plans helped to almost wipe out poverty among the elderly, all these are part of this social citizenship – what each citizen could expect no matter where in Canada they lived.

As John Ibbitson wrote, though I think approvingly, this budget signals to Canadians that they should expect less from government or at least from Ottawa. The consequences of such a shift are never immediate or obvious; they are subtle and slow burning, inevitably hitting the most vulnerable first and hardest. Writing of the consequences of similar cuts in the U.S., Paul Krugman noted that when the federal government seemed incapable of responding well to Katrina, few linked that to the cuts to government operations decades before – but the link should be made. If we want to imagine the consequences of crushing the progressive state and who benefits and who does not, we might want to have a look at the twenties and thirties, a time of massive inequality and personal vulnerability which presaged the Great Depression.

Bargain Basement Citizenship and the Erosion of Civil Society

But what is clear even now is that these cuts imply a different view of our shared citizenship, of what ties us together as Canadians across language and region and community. They offer us what I have called elsewhere “bargain basement citizenship”. The new deal, the contract, seems to be that less will be asked of us – less taxes, no mandatory long census, no requirement to register firearms – and less will be provided in services and entitlements. Take, for example, the pick-and-choose approach the government has adopted in standing up for Canadian citizens abroad facing the threat of capital punishment. Part of the progressive state that Solberg wants “smashed” is the notion of shared citizenship that came with these national programs. While that state was being built, Canadians had new reason to engage in national politics and a vibrant civil society developed around this. And this strong civic society, engaged citizens and non-governmental organizations, changed and enriched our understanding of democracy, always pressing for improvements, giving voice to the powerless, and demanding collective action on new and emerging challenges. Is this too to be smashed?

I have not gone through every page of the budget or subsequent announcements to chronicle every cut to public information but even a partial list tells a story. Gone – the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy. Established by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, this was the only agency devoted to engaging experts and the public on sustainability. Gone – the First Nations Statistical Council. Still relatively new, this agency recognized that aboriginal people are often underrepresented in the census and that systematic information is essential to aboriginal communities to assess needs and what is working and what is not. Gone – the National Welfare Council. For over forty years this agency produced essential information about the poor in Canada, about the working poor, and child poverty and women in poverty. It was the only federal agency of its kind and is and has been an enormously valued source of information not readily available and all too easily ignored. Long gone – the mandatory long form census, several other Statistics Canada surveys and now additional millions in cuts. The United Nations urges all developing countries to establish a national independent statistical office because we have learned how vital credible and publicly available information is to democracy. Not yet gone but under continual assault – the Parliamentary Budget Office created by this government to help Canadians, through their parliament, to hold governments to account for how they spend. Long gone – the Law Reform Commission that no doubt would have provided a trusted independent challenge to the claims behind the government’s Omnibus Crime Bill. Going – research essential to food and environmental monitoring, to First Nations and Inuit health, the CBC, and who knows what else.

It should be said that every government has been annoyed by these kinds of agencies. They produce information that allows citizens to take governments to task, to demand more or better. They help citizens to better understand their shared needs, to assess, independently of the latest government spin, what is working and what is not, to participate in solutions. They help citizens to hold their governments to account. No doubt every government has wished, at least from time to time, that one or other of these organizations would just disappear. But independent and credible sources of information, information not available anywhere else, are vital for a strong democracy and so they generally survived.

The Budget also takes aim at another essential ingredient of a strong democracy, the charitable sector. Essential to civil society are the many non-governmental organizations that give voice to people otherwise not heard, including future generations who will inherit the consequences of what we decide. These organizations, which so often challenge and criticize, are never much loved by governments. They always struggle for survival. Decades ago governments decided to stop core funding, to limit funding to the purchase of services, to make it hard for charitable organizations to engage in advocacy. But they survived, even if weaker. This budget and some of the chilling rhetoric around it takes the next step, as environmentalists are treated as a bigger problem than climate change and non-governmental organizations are warned that they better be careful about their advocacy if they want the advantages of charitable status. This and the cut to the small but effective Court Challenges Program in a previous budget rob our democracy of the dissenting voices that give it strength. Remembering this cut is yet another way to acknowledge the anniversary of the Charter and the essential role it and an independent judiciary continue to play in creating the progressive state.

If there is not much more to a country than the market, individual interests, and local communities, and the territory within which all that takes place, then citizenship and civil society lose much of their meaning. Little wonder that Margaret Thatcher proclaimed that there is no such thing as society. Little wonder that we ask so little of our citizens and provide less and less in return. But this hollowing-out of citizenship and civil society leads to an impoverished democracy in which we vote every once in a while if we so choose and otherwise retreat to our lives as consumers, producers and private citizens. This leads to something of a paradox. With the weakening of civil society, we demand less of our governments and demand that government interfere less. Instead we are on our own and we look to government to protect us and our community and our territory from terrorists and criminals. But with the hollowing-out of civil society it becomes harder to constrain government, to protect civil and human rights when government does act, and so, in the end, government becomes more powerful and less accountable.

More Democracy

So what is the alternative to the relentless decline of the progressive state? It is, at least in part, the demand for a more robust democracy, more transparency, not less, more public education and information, not misinformation and deception, more citizen engagement, not voter suppression, more diversity of views, not the chilling of dissent. It is the recognition that essential services have to be organized around the citizens they serve rather than be “marketized”, converted to commodities sold to consumers who can afford them. Above all it means a renewal of our sense of the common good and our capacity for collective management of the future rather than retreating to our private interests and fears and surrendering our future to the vagaries of the market.

In many respects, this choice – more democracy rather than more markets – is a far more demanding path. It is much easier to say “let the market do its magic” or leave things to each community than to come up with policies that help shape our future. It is a hard sell to get people to believe that we can act together to achieve something better, that government can be a positive force if it is balanced by engaged citizens and a vibrant, independent civil society.

The pessimism about our collective capacity to make things better flies in the face of how successful interventionist governments, such as in Northern Europe, have been in improving the well-being of their citizens or how successful active governments in Canada have been in sharing opportunity and improving quality of life for the many not just the few. It also ignores the growing evidence that austerity and privatization are hurting economies, allowing inequality to grow at an unprecedented rate, and giving corporations free rein.

Nonetheless, there is no “big idea” that will fix everything. We are right to be wary of grand plans. We are right to be wary of promises that come with no price tag, that pretend that we can have Swedish levels of service at American levels of taxation. And we are right to be wary of hubris. We never do know enough to act with certainty. And we are right to be wary of promises that are always looking backwards, steeped in nostalgia for what worked at another time and only worked for some. All policy is a beta version that will inevitably have to be made better and be adjusted to the times, and progress requires that we learn from our mistakes – and stop over-promising. Taking back our democracy is hard work and comes with costs.

The path of more democracy is also a harder path because it can only work if we make greater equality a national priority; democracy cannot flourish in the face of extreme inequality – and inequality is on the rise.

Perhaps this path starts from outside our formal political institutions. That is, after all, where all big change starts. The path of more democracy, greater equality, is challenging for political parties for many reasons – because there is no single perfect answer, because robust democracy makes things harder for governments, because we will inevitably have missteps and each of those will be seized upon as yet another example of wasted taxpayers dollars and misguided hope than we can make things better. At a time when we have made a fetish of efficiency, the messiness of robust democracy comes with political costs.

We are seeing the extremes of this conflict between more market and more democracy playing out with horrific consequences on the streets of Greece and to some extent throughout Europe. We are seeing this play out more or less throughout the world and closer to home in the Occupy movement. In Canada, we have it pretty good relatively speaking. We are not in crisis. That ought not to mean that we continue to drift to this impoverished view of citizenship, civil society and democracy. This budget ought to generate a bigger discussion than we are seeing. We ought not to wait for crisis to take our democracy back. Canadians deserve an alternative. The growing political polarization recent polls are picking up suggests that Canadians want clear choices and many want something new. Perhaps the increasing number of young Canadians taking power into their own hands and rebuilding civil society will renew our sense of the common good, focus us on the future, and force the kind of reinvention that we need.

C10, the omnibus crime bill, passed third reading and is now over to the Senate for what is supposed to be sober second thought.  The vote could only have been a depressing anticlimax for the many Canadians who were fighting to stop or amend this legislation.  And the implacable inevitability of its passage must surely lead many to ask, ‘why bother, what’s the point?’

This question takes on added poignancy as we read with increasing frequency articles describing the relatively unconstrained power of the current majority government to do as it pleases, impervious to opposition voices or contrary evidence.  I was watching Jamie Watt on CBC explaining that Canadians were turning the page on the crime issue (and, for that matter, Kyoto) and so, the message goes, it’s time to get over it.

Well, maybe not.  Thankfully many are not willing to “get over it”. How heartening, for example,  to hear Leadnow.ca announce that they were simply regrouping for the next stage of their campaign for better justice policy.  So, here are some reasons not to turn the page, instead to continue the fight.

1) Those who spoke to Parliamentary Committees, wrote letters and op eds, called their MPs or took to the streets have made a difference.

All the opposition parties opposed this bill, rejected the smears that they were “soft on crime”, and focused on public safety rather than easy politics.  It has not always been so. And that means that the options are finally being put before Canadians, options for a Canada that is safer, not meaner.

Premiers, whatever their views on the bill, are demanding a more respectful federalism where they – who must administer the legislation once passed – should be engaged at the outset so that they can bring their views and experience to bear.  And several are arguing that they should not have to reallocate money – say from health and education – to pay for the costs of more incarceration and more prisons.

And through the efforts of dozens of organizations, many more Canadians are now paying attention.  And that can only be a good thing.

2) The process is not over.

Whatever one’s views of the senate and its reform, that institution has often played an important role in bringing a reflective, evidence-based perspective to bear on proposed laws.  Because the members do not face reelection,  they are in a good position to avoid the worst excesses of junk politics where pandering trumps the long-term interests of Canadians.

We know that there is a remarkable consensus among the experts here in Canada and more broadly that aspects of the proposed legislation will make things worse and will certainly divert money better spent on prevention, education, rehabilitation where possible, restoration and help to victims,  and the safe reintegration of offenders into the community.

Of course, we can all do the math.  A Conservative majority in the Senate  tells us that the bill will pass, yet again, with the same anticlimax we saw earlier this week.   But the Senate does have a job to do and there is definitely work to be done.  Let’s hear the evidence, the experts, the risks, the costs.

3) This legislation is transformative as it puts punishment and prison at the centre of our criminal justice system.

This has never been the Canadian approach; our balanced justice policies have always focused on safety and justice – and the best evidence of what works.  Such a change  in direction should never happen without a vigorous debate – a good fight.

That’s all the more important because as we have seen in the U.S., this punitive approach leads to more of the same. It feeds our fears and, when we see that we are no more safe, rather than reverse course we opt for even more imprisonment, even tougher sentences.  This beast, the more you feed it the hungrier it gets.

In the U.S., state after state is trying to reverse course but that is no easy task once you have built and filled all those prisons, once you have created a permanent underclass on the one hand and gated communities on the other.  We do not want to go that way.

4) In fighting this kind of legislation we are also fighting for a different kind of politics.

Who of us isn’t  sometimes afraid, especially for our kids, often angry and horrified at some of the terrible crimes we see on the news, and moved by the suffering of victims and their families.  And we know our own frailties, that we can confuse justice and revenge, that our anger can blot out the evidence, that we sometimes lash out and act against our own best interests.

Fighting against this punitive bill is fighting against a politics that exploits our frailties  rather than appealing to what is best in us.

5) And fighting against bad policy is good for the soul.

Anything but benign

With the parliamentary session coming to a close and summer getting ready to obliterate any residual interest in politics, this is pretty much our last chance before the fall to have a serious look at where our government proposes to take us over the next four years. We have seen the Speech From the Throne (SFT) and the first budget, and with few exceptions, it is all pretty much what we expected. The media have generally described the SFT and budget as workmanlike, safe, “ho-hum”. It is, the argument goes, no more nor less than what we were promised and pretty much what about 40 percent of us voted for: continued tax reductions, smaller government, and a focus on crime and security. Nothing to get worked up over, no risky or costly national projects, no meddling with cherished national programs such as medicare.

Opposition politicians are having trouble figuring out just how to push back: all the parties want to be and be seen as fiscally prudent; nobody is about to argue for big government or tax increases, except on the margins for corporate tax increases; and nobody will risk being seen as soft on crime.

In fact, the government’s unprecedented decision to forego debate on its SFT, breaking a tradition that dates back to before Confederation, got barely a whisper of attention. Budget bills were rushed through committee. Even the government’s fiercest critics seem more worried about what might be in store over the coming four years of Canada’s first majority Conservative government than they are about the proposals now before us.

But what is before us now is anything but benign. While the rest of government shrinks, our crime control and security establishment grows and with this so too do the authority and reach of government. In an agenda that promises less government interference in our private decisions we get government that is more present and intrusive than ever. All governments must attend to issues of security and every government has worked to prevent crime and reduce its economic and human costs, but never before has crime had the central place that it now holds. It was the issue that ate up the majority of the time of our parliamentarians before the election and the omnibus crime bill signals more of the same. Crime and punishment have become a – or, perhaps, the – defining issue of our government, and the tone — the unrelenting focus on punishment, expanding prison and police powers — represents a profound break from policies of all previous Canadian governments.

Another war we don’t need

The approach and many of its specific measures seem to draw their inspiration from the “war on crime” launched in the U.S. some four decades ago – just after the “war on poverty” but with much more enduring commitment. If that is the case, if that is the path we propose to follow, then what is happening here is about much more than crime and security. It is about our view of society, of human nature, of the future, and of the role of the state in shaping that future. It signals a new relationship between Canadians and their government. And before we go too far along that path, we ought to have a close look at what that view of the world looks like and what the consequences of its pursuit are for our safety, our society, and our democracy.

Of course there will be many who, against all the evidence and all the experts, say, hold on there, this government is simply responding to a real problem – rising crime, violence and threats to our security – and high time. Some will point to stories of horrible victimization, and suffering to which none of us is immune, and others will remind us of the Vancouver riots or other incidents that inevitably shake and confuse us. The human and financial costs of crime are profoundly real and deserve government attention always. But our approach ought to be guided by the best available evidence.

When the U.S. launched its war on crime, crime and violence were in fact on the rise, assassinations and riots were shaking American confidence, and more and more pundits were talking about a culture of violence. Some response was necessary. But even there and then, the decision to make crime an organizing theme and to focus on punishment was a political decision. Crime and violence were on the rise in Canada too and Canadian politicians of all stripes opted for a more balanced approach even in the face of public pressure, as we are inevitably influenced by what is going on to the south. Nobody would accuse Margaret Thatcher of being soft on anything, but she too resisted pressures to expand incarceration. Why? Because it’s too expensive and it doesn’t work.

It is even tougher to understand the current Canadian approach as it comes at a time when crime and its severity have been declining, year after year. While inevitably short of unanimity, there is a remarkable consensus among the experts. They would pretty much agree that we should continue to adjust our punishments, improve our interventions, learn from our mistakes, but that, on the whole, we are doing pretty well, there is no crime crisis and, most important, punitive approaches will just make things worse. So what is the war really all about?

The American model: from welfare to warfare

If we look at what happened in the U.S., a strong case can be made that this was part of the shift away from the elements of welfare state introduced through the “New Deal” and expanded through Johnson’s “Just Society”. Conservatives had long fought these welfare initiatives arguing that they contributed to moral laxity, sloth and dependency, and even crime. With growing public insecurity and pessimism about the future and declining trust in government, this view or some variant has been on the ascendancy. The war on crime offered an alternative basis for government authority: instead of promises of shared opportunity or social justice, a term now uttered by only wild-eyed lefties, instead of protection from the ravages of economic change and deteriorating environment, government offered something new. This new compact promised protection from bad things and bad people, from external threats to security and internal threats to safety, but more than this, it offered moral clarity and shared outrage. It may not not deliver on the protection but it certainly delivers on the outrage.

This change in tone is evident in the words of then President Nixon whose omnibus “safe streets” bill is often seen as the first strike in the war on crime. “Americans in the last decade,” he said, “were often told that the criminal was not responsible for his crimes against society, but that society was responsible. I totally disagree with this permissive philosophy.” That “last decade” was the sixties when criminal justice was guided by three imperatives: just punishment certainly, but also the collective interest in public safety, and the collective responsibility to reintegrate offenders into society. Punishment, rehabilitation and prevention – in some mix – was the old way. The new way, based on pessimism about the future and about people’s ability to change, emphasized individual responsibility over collective responsibility, punishment over prevention and rehabilitation, and order and control over individual freedom and civil liberties.

One of the most comprehensive assessments of the decades-long war that followed is Jonathan Simon’s Governing Through Crime, a devastating critique of American policy and, for us, perhaps a cautionary tale. Simon tells us that the policy not only drew on the fears of Americans, fears about crime, fears about the future, fears of “the other”, it validated and nurtured those fears. And, in so doing, created a self-perpetuating machine. Tough could never be tough enough. It wasn’t enough to take away an offender’s freedom, hard time had to become harder and longer. Any new incident, every grizzly crime begged for more intense punishment, more people in jail for longer. When crime continued to rise, that called for more of the same, redouble the punishments, build more prisons. That’s how policies that just about nobody believes make any sense – three strikes and you’re out, for example – become law. A self-perpetuating machine.

And the outcome of all this? According to Simon, this approach created a cycle of fear that has reshaped American life. Fear matters. It diminishes our quality of life, eats away at our freedom, and turns us away from others. It makes trust more difficult and without trust, even minimal solidarity becomes impossible. The gated community patrolled by private police has become the symbol, the architectural manifestation of fear, division and inequality.

A politics of fear

And it seems that here too fear of crime is high and rising especially among my generation of Canadians. What we know about crime is rarely based on systematic review of data. That’s not our job. We don’t have the time or training. What we know is drawn from our direct experience and from what we hear in the media and from our leaders. Little wonder that most of us believe that crime and violence are on the rise. That is what we naturally make of the media accounts, the endlessly repeated images and stories of the most horrible crimes, however rare, that stay in our minds and shape our perceptions. Even more important, what else are we to conclude when governments make crime the number one priority and continually remind us to be angry and afraid.

The traditional balanced approach to crime allowed our political leaders to take crime and fear seriously without feeding those fears. For decades criminologists and practitioners have tried to counter the myths about crime and punishment but this now seems a losing battle. Simply, fear trumps evidence. We are all more likely to hear, believe and remember information that confirms our biases. In her 1997 study of public opinion and perceptions of crime in the U.S., Katherine Beckett showed that fear of crime did not lead public policy, it was the other way around. Tough on criminals policy creates the perception that rising crime is a serious problem, that we ought to be afraid. And the inevitably escalating government action simply continues to feed those fears. Breaking the cycle is very hard. California’s current governor tried to pass bizarre legislation tying prison spending to education spending as something of an admission that he was helpless to do anything about the shift of scarce resources from health, education and welfare to prisons. His frustration is understandable – California spends 45% more on prisons than on higher education. This is not a path we want to follow.

And did the approach reduce crime and improve safety? A number of states are now proposing to modify or undo policies we are preparing to introduce, policies like mandatory minimum sentences, because they were seen to make things worse. Republican and Democratic voices are growing louder that the war language and approach are counter-productive. Asa Hutchinson, U.S. congressman, crime hawk, and former head of the U.S. drug enforcement agency, is now saying that we in Canada should avoid their mistakes, singling out often unfair mandatory minimum sentences and insufficient investment in preparing prisoners for reintegration. World leaders and increasing numbers of practitioners, judges and police, are asking for an end to the expensive war on drugs that has funded the expansion of organized crime, terrorism and exploitation but has done nothing to reduce drug use, crime or violence. Vincente Fox, former president of Mexico, now tells Time that he had it exactly wrong when he launched his war on drugs, which resulted only in greater violence and suffering.

This relentless war on crime has resulted not in safety but in mass imprisonment where warehousing and control replace rehabilitation and education. Prison inherits the consequences of our inattention to inequality and social injustice. Low level users, generally the poor, often the troubled, and always a racially skewed population, fill the prisons and become a permanent under-class. Sickness and suicide become the norm. Offenders leave worse off than when they arrived, creating ever greater risk to the public. In an unprecedented move, the U.S. Supreme Court recently stepped in and ordered thousands released from California prisons no longer able to contain the numbers of prisoners the war produced. Conditions are shocking, said the Court, who pointed to Canada’s balanced approach as a model of safety and human rights. Asa Hutchinson is right. We ought to learn from the experience of our neighbours. We ought also to learn from our own past successes.

The Challenge

Canada is not so deeply into this cycle of fear that we cannot avoid its worse excesses. Let’s be clear. Our system has always been pretty tough. We have consistently used prison more and had longer sentences than our European counterparts, and our sentencing laws have always tried to fit the punishment to the crime. But we have also always asked how best to administer punishment so that rehabilitation and the eventual reintegration of offenders are most likely. We all know that there are some types of crime where we do not have much success, but overall the success rate has been good and getting better. We have documented stories of lives turned around, here, for example, and here. Rehabilitation and reintegration – and increasingly restorative justice – are not about coddling; they are about the need to complement just punishment with a commitment to public safety and human rights.

Every war brings collateral damage and the casualties of this war are many. What we get is a more powerful, authoritarian and intrusive state, a more fearful and fragmented society, and a profound erosion of our freedom and the deepening of inequality. The issues are too big to pass in silence. Our political leaders may not want this debate so let us take up the challenge and insist that, when Parliament returns, our representatives scrutinize the omnibus bill with more rigour than they gave the government’s agenda this spring .

(edited for clarity)

The air is being filled with post-mortems, lessons learned from this extraordinary result, the Conservative majority, the reversal of fortunes, for now at least, of the NDP and Liberals, the disappearance of the Bloc and Quebecers’ decision to opt for a progressive, federalist party.  Now is probably too soon for meaningful reflection.

The Anybody But Conservative voices will probably not want to hear any talk about silver linings.  Just the same, there are some: Quebec dropping the Bloc and providing an unprecedented opportunity for progressive voices in Quebec and the rest of Canada to join forces, the possible progress that enhanced Aboriginal participation could bring, and the enduring benefits of a new generation of impressive and engaged citizens exemplified by Leadnow.

The Conservatives will be in no mood to hear about the challenges and responsibilities that come with majority.   Just the same, of course, there are some, not least the need to bring Canadians together, especially given how polarised we have become, and to govern for us all, across the diversity of our interests, values,  ideologies and lifestyle choices, and for the long-term health of Canada even as we seem so preoccupied with what is happening right now.

The NDP will not want to spoil their celebration by considering how much harder it may be to influence the agenda in the short-term.  Just the same, it will be, especially on issues such as inequality, the environment, aid, education and the arts, except perhaps through greater devolution which, ironically, could simply make a federal social democratic party increasingly irrelevant.  And quite a lot is riding on the NDP.

The Greens will not want to hear anything that might diminish their joy at having, finally and deservedly, a Parliamentary voice even as environment and climate change are a harder sell than ever and electoral reform, so vital to their prospects, no easier.

And the Liberals will need time to heal and deal with their internal divisions and difficult choices.

Progressives of the centre and to the left have a lot to ponder.  The temptation will be to point fingers at this party or that, this person or that – and of course some of this is necessary – but the best thing is to start with ourselves.  The energy of some young leaders stemmed the horrible decline in voting but the massive turnout never materialized.  We were either too satisfied or too indifferent. The politics of personal smear continued and intensified – and we just didn’t seem to get mad enough. Some defended the garbage as just part of the tough business of politics.  There has to be a better way.  We ought to get mad. We lost wonderful people from every party – and I do wonder why wonderful people would ever choose to run for any party in this climate of personal smears and negativity.  And too many of us put party ahead of purpose and fought for party standing more than for Canada, and that cannot be the way forward.

In the midst of all this I watched revellers in U.S. cities chanting and waving their fists celebrating the assassination and disposal of Osama Bin Laden, and the only somewhat milder Twitter celebrations here in Canada.  At the same time I was listening to a CBC interview of a woman who had lost her husband on 9/11 who had explained to her nine-year-old son that Osama Bin Laden had been shot in the head.  The son, she reported,  was worried, wondered why that had happened, asked why there had been no trial.  This boy who had lost his father was worried about rule of law while most of us were acting out our hate, anger and vengeance.  What happens to us when we turn ten?

Whatever else yesterday might mean, it is a reminder that we have an obligation to get involved, to stay involved, and to fight for the things we believe in, even when they may be hard sells, to reject the politics of cynicism and smear and wedge and hate and narrow partisanship, to rediscover the will to vote but more than this, for the long term, to participate with others across region and party in pursuit of our best sense of the public good, led by the youth for sure but including those of us of more advanced years.

Phillip Blond, the main architect of U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron’s “big society”, is coming to Canada this week.  The timing couldn’t be better as our political parties get set to offer up their competing versions of what ails us and how we might go forward together.

Blond is gaining a lot of attention with a blistering diagnosis of U.K. society that will, I think, resonate profoundly with many Canadians and tap into our growing sense that here too something needs changing and that our current politics are not up to the task. The ideas, laid out in speeches, articles, a new website and most recently Red Tory, a book named for a term invented right here in Canada, are getting picked up by conservative thinkers on both sides of the ocean and are being put into play by Cameron’s coalition government.  Blond’s wide-ranging work — part academic thesis, part political tract, part sermon — is in fact being embraced and vilified across the political spectrum.  It shows, for better or worse, that there is room in politics, even during elections, for big ideas.  But it also shows, I believe,  a troubling trend, a growing dependency on nostalgia as the inspiration for public policy.

First, what is the big idea at play here?  Society, they say, is broken.  The culprits:  the uninterrupted growth of the state, which now reaches into every aspect of our lives, becoming increasingly centralized,  authoritarian and remote;  free market capitalism that has given free rein to greed and to corporations with no loyalties to community or country; and the glorification of the individual and a narrow notion of freedom that has turned us into atomised consumers,  undermining our sense of responsibility to one another.   The results: rising inequality and plutocracy,  loss of community and mutuality, the hollowing out of civil society, and ultimately, the loss of meaning and civic virtue. This is Putnam on steroids.  We aren’t just bowling alone, we are helplessly alone in the face of an increasingly authoritarian state, greed-driven monopoly capitalism and a world of selfish competition.

Some of his solutions, though less clearly spelled out, will have resonance too – the importance of local initiative and control, voluntarism and social responsibility, cooperatives, mutuals, social enterprise, and other forms of association and community self-help.  All this has enormous appeal as it seems to be putting people and their relationships at the centre of things — where they belong.   Blond’s work is brimming with good and important ideas and we ought to be watching with great interest as the U.K. government implements at least some of them.  We are already seeing examples of social enterprise that show promise, and thinkers like Davies have set out ways to encourage mutuals and meaningful employee ownership.   We are also seeing examples of social entrepreneurship where citizens are taking control over issues that matter to them, not waiting for government.  And Blond’s understanding of the need to harness the market and regulate the corporate sector for the common good is a refreshing voice in a neoliberal world.

But notwithstanding its merits, the approach, at least as I understand it, also presents real challenges and dangers.  Its radical localism, its vision of community control of key services, will depend on local capacity which is inevitably uneven,  on new funding models not yet fully developed, and on the willingness of communities to take on more responsibilities, which is not assured.   Most people are already stretched for time and many may not want to become “service managers”.  And, if the state uses these new models to justify deep cuts, localism could easily become compulsory volunteerism or what we usually call offloading. So, for example, voluntary firefighters are important and deserve our respect and support – but they also deserve the best of training and equipment and the support of professionals and they cannot be expected to do the whole job.   We know that community health care and social services are important but they cannot do it all.  They cannot take on research and science, health surveillance, infrastructure and procurement, redistribution, and the pooling of risk to ensure that everybody is covered for care.

Communities cannot do it all and society cannot be reduced to the sum of its communities.  How, in the face of radical localism, do we achieve any measure of trust and solidarity across communities?  Modern society depends on some measure of reciprocal responsibility and mutual accommodation with strangers as we seek solutions for shared problems that cannot be solved at the community level – climate change,  the degradation of our environment, poverty at home and globally.   Bond powerfully takes up the issue of rising inequality and he wants to “recapitalise the poor” so they can break out of their cycle of dependency.  But the risk of radical localism and a weakened state is the perpetuation of these inequalities and the privilege,  prejudice and distrust that come with them.

The radical emphasis on community, taken to its extreme, looks awfully like a desire to roll back modernity and return to the “big society” that never was.  For a country like Canada,  in particular, making local community the centre of action, however attractive, misses the realities of mobility, the growing desire for variety and appreciation of diversity.  It also offers little on the inevitable challenges of finding solidarity across dispersed and diverse communities.  We should welcome the commitment to rebuild a robust and independent civil society but not as a community alternative to the state or as a rejection of pluralism.   Here Blond’s approach looks awfully like other more traditional conservative anti-governmentalism steeped in nostalgia masquerading as policy.

Blond knows that he is vulnerable to such criticism but denies accusations of nostalgia with a simple, ‘the past WAS better than the present’.  But his romantic discussion of poverty before the rise of the social democratic state belies the point.  Bond argues that the state stripped away the self-organizing capacity of the poor, diminishing them and trapping them into dependency.  One gets a picture of bucolic medieval communities where church, charity and community ensured happy, well-adjusted poor, only to be undone by the heavy hand of the interventionist state.  But this isn’t history.   Missing from this picture is any sense of the vulnerabilities, of the expulsion of the undesirable, of the imprisonment of beggars, of child labour and workhouses, and the demeaning dependency on charity typically reserved for the “deserving poor”.  This is indeed nostalgia not memory,  not history — or, as historian Charles Maier put it, it is “history without guilt”, dangerous because it reflects a longing for a time that never was, a sense of loss for something we never had,  and therefore can blind us, in this case, to the limits of community and the important role the state has played in freeing the poor from misery and dependence.  The contribution of free education, universal access to health care, help in tough times, pensions, for starters, deserves more than passing mention that some good was done.  And surely these “intrusions” can’t be seen as having enslaved the poor.

And this brings us to the crux of what is most troubling about the “big society” – and that is Blond’s desire to rediscover the true Britishness that has been lost.  He equates this with civic virtue and the common good, a return to some shared idea of the noble life, and he finds this in the past – before the ravages of secularism, liberalism and multiculturalism and the cultural relativism they imply.  He is invoking a time when people knew right from wrong, took responsibility, were dutiful, when the elites had a sense of noblesse oblige, when communities had more control of their destinies.  Was there such a time?  Certainly not for women, or people who practiced minority religions, or no religion, or people who were different or despised.  No wonder Cameron declared multiculturalism a failure.  This is all a part of trying to roll back modernity – to what?  To whose “high culture”?

Certainly, it is useful to debate these issues, to make sure that multiculturalism does not degenerate into  islands of separate communities or a country bound together only by its diversity.  And that means for a country like Canada a significant investment in civil society.  It means state support for those diverse organizations that speak for the otherwise invisible, the marginalised and vulnerable, organizations like Egale, or the AFN and Elizabeth Fry and John Howard and the Civil Liberties Association.   It means support for local, national and international non-governmental organizations to do what government cannot do as well.  It also means encouraging new types of association that can push and prod government and hold it to account, associations that cut across our differences based on democratic values, human rights and a commitment to mutual aid and the peaceful resolution of conflict, associations that do not impose a single version of what it means to be Canadian but bring us together to hash out our best understanding of the common good and how to pursue it, associations that serve not  as a substitute for the state but as necessary ingredients to revitalising our democracy and our citizenship.

This post has been published in The Mark News as “The Democracy We Deserve”

As we watch events unfold in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, as the media chronicle acts of extraordinary courage in the face of grotesque brutality, I expect many of us –  inspired, hopeful, uncertain — are led to reflect on things here at home.  For me, at least, this has meant a recognition of our own very good fortune accompanied, at the same time, by worry about our increasingly enfeebled democracy and perhaps too some shame that we don’t seem able to muster the will to do anything about it.

A consensus is indeed emerging in much of the developed world that both our democracy and civil society are weaker today than, say, a decade ago.  Politics and public service are no longer honoured vocations – though they must be.  Citizens are less inclined to vote or to join political parties or to pay taxes.  Young people in particular have turned away from our conventional political institutions. Parties are in disarray trying to find ways to reconnect to voters.  The bonds of trust between citizen and government have come undone and the trust between us as citizens seems to be fraying as politics increasingly polarize and divide.

U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, heading a Conservative-Liberal Coalition, has pronounced his society “broken”:  too many people are excluded entirely from economic opportunity and political participation and a gaping chasm now exists between the government and the people.  Scholars and pundits worry increasingly about the depletion of social capital and the loss of “mutuality”.

While we may quibble about details and degree, thinkers across the political spectrum are writing and talking more and more about the risks of this deterioration and the possible remedies to it.  But while we might find convergence on the diagnosis, there is nothing close to consensus on the causes and remedies.

Some find the source of decay in the expansion of government into every aspect of our lives and the increasing centralization and bureaucratization that make government more and more remote from and inaccessible to us.  Even neoliberalism failed to deliver a smaller more accessible state; protecting the market, it turns out, is pretty expensive and quite intrusive.  So Australian John Keane has pronounced the death of representative democracy and the difficult birth of a new “monitory democracy” whose shape and capacity to deliver results is yet to be determined.

Some find the source in creeping authoritarianism, especially in the context of the “war on terrorism” and the expanding security state seeking to become omniscient and omnipresent.  Have a look at the recent piece by Linda McQuaig here and an older piece by Chris Selley here.

Others see the source in the unconstrained rise of individualism and consumerism, fed particularly by a neoliberal ideology that defines us – and treats us – entirely in terms of our self-interest, and views mutuality and interdependence as constraints to freedom.  In this frame, we become consumers and workers – not citizens.  Whatever one thinks of Cameron’s “Big Society” initiative, his concern that society is broken seems so much healthier than Margaret Thatcher’s pronouncement that there is no such thing as society, reflecting the dangerously atomised view of humanity that has prevailed ever since.  So republican theorists such as Michael Sandel now wonder, in the face of the hollowing out of civil society, how we might begin to rebuild a sense of the common good and the civic virtue necessary for its pursuit.

Yet others see the real problem as the intolerable growth of inequality over the last decades that has no equal since the twenties and thirties, before the great depression.  Then, as now, social trust and democracy were undermined as inevitably too was the capacity to develop a shared sense of the public good. So we now have thinkers as diverse as Francis Fukuyama and Bill Moyers worrying about plutocracy, and we are confronted every day by new evidence of how money shapes politics.

My own bias is that all these explanations have merit, that the task of revitalising our democracy is formidable and will involve, at least,  electoral and institutional reform, reinventing and opening up government, putting the brakes on the rise of the security state, and tackling the unsupportable growth in inequality.  But I fear that we are in something of a catch 22.  These changes won’t happen from the inside and it is not clear that we have the civic will or energy to drive them from the outside.

Aaron Wherry is running a terrific series on whether our Parliament matters and what we might do to make it matter more.  The short answer, I would propose,  is that it matters only as much as our Parliamentarians  actually want to achieve anything and only to the extent that they are willing to openly debate the big issues on our behalf.  It is fascinating and sort of horrifying to hear the complaints of some departing members of Parliament about how powerless and alienated they felt, unable to represent their constituents or to  escape the narrow confines of party discipline.  It seems that Parliament cannot find the courage to be relevant on its own.  While political parties may be losing their hold on Canadians, they continue to shape our democratic institutions.  And the gap between the government and the people simply continues to grow.

Preston Manning recently wrote an insightful piece on the limits of political parties and the importance of an independent civil society. Political parties, Manning says,  too easily become machines designed only for winning, more skilled at identifying and avoiding risk than at developing public policy.  Parties increasingly treat us not as citizens but as consumers.  It’s easier.  Rather than engaging us in honest but risky debates, they market themselves, pandering to our preferences, feeding our prejudices, and smearing their opponents.  Manning argues that grassroots social movements are key to getting unstuck.  They are, he says, an essential element of our “democratic infrastructure” and have been at the heart of most important social and political change here and throughout the world.  He has a point. Big change involves risk and difficult trade offs, exactly what governments prefer to avoid and political parties typically duck.

Put simply, we only get Parliament that matters if citizens force the issue.  Absent an engaged and independent civil society, we get the politics of banality and brutality, pretending that we can balance the books without real sacrifice, that climate change will right itself, that crime policies that have never worked anywhere will make us safer, and that there’s just not much we can do about growing inequality so why talk about it.  And here lies the Catch-22: Citizens become further disenchanted; elections and parties lose their hold.  And we stay stuck, unable even to begin to address the big issues.

Of course,  not all grassroots movements serve to strengthen democracy.  The Tea Party, for example, seems less a movement than a crowd of isolated individuals held together, if at all, by fear and resentment and a sterile notion of freedom that denies their responsibilities to one another.  Such movements inevitably divide the world into villains and victims, those in the light and those in the darkness, and, in so doing,  stifle debate and contrary information and undermine both democracy and civil society.

We in Canada don’t really have any equivalent to the Tea Party, notwithstanding a few pretenders here and there.  Our political culture – its traditions of pragmatism, civility, tolerance, peaceful resolution of conflict, and mutual aid – may inhibit the rise or at least spread of such anti-everything movements.  But here too we see signs of decline in civil society, in voting certainly, but in joining and engaging too.  Our voluntary sector seems weaker than in the past and more dependent on government.  Certainly we have our share of dedicated people joining together for a healthier, more equal and sustainable future but there hasn’t been the take-up we saw in previous decades for such public issues.  Public space has shrunk and many of us seem to have retreated into our private milieux.

So how do we break out?  Surely, sooner or later, we will say “enough”.  Surely, sooner or later, we will stop waiting for inspiration from a new political saviour.  Sooner or later, we will say we cannot simply stand and watch.  We are talking more these days about democracy.  We seem increasingly to understand that however fortunate we may be, we cannot afford to be complacent.  And, most important, some Canadians, often young Canadians, are getting involved, increasingly taking responsibility, not waiting for our political leaders or political parties, both locally and globally, independent of government, to do what they can to make things better.

But if we are to make our democracy stronger, we need new forms of association, new ways to engage citizens in defining the Canada they want and the options for getting there and for making our democracy work.   Any such grassroots initiatives will have to meet particular challenges in Canada: our diversity means we won’t find our answers by trying to impose a singular notion of what it means to be Canadian; our geography requires that we harness new technologies to complement traditional forms of engagement; and what we ask of citizens must recognize that, for many, time is squeezed and opportunities to participate are limited.   And if these new approaches are to elevate our democracy,  they  must lift us beyond our personal preferences, prejudices and resentments and engage us in addressing the real challenges we face together.  And that means that they must be built on a foundation of democratic values and a belief in the possibility of progress.  We will not find our path in nostalgia for the past, complacency about the present or cynicism about the future,

Leadnow.ca is a new initiative in democratic association designed to address precisely these concerns, drawing on the surprising energy of a few committed young Canadians, open to people from every region and sector, and offering a chance to chart the Canada they want, and to act in concert to pursue that agenda. It is creating opportunities across all regions and sectors to debate the moral choices, assess the evidence, and then work together to create change, to get the ideas that matter on the political agenda.  Leadnow.ca continues to see government as a force for good so long as an engaged citizenry pushes it to focus on the needs of Canadians and the future of Canada.

Their message: now is the time for citizens to lead.  Whether or not we find the will to get engaged, we will get the democracy we deserve.

I am reading Bob Rae’s fine book on Exporting Democracy and am experiencing profound feelings of alienation or maybe just superficial feelings of confusion.  In either case, this is not a review of the book except to say that it is thoughtful and nuanced, and particularly welcome at this time when we ought to be reaffirming that the world matters to Canada and figuring out how we can matter to the world.  It is definitely worth reading – but frankly it got me thinking about what we mean when we talk about exporting democracy, and why the idea has lost its lustre.   Certainly, the disastrous attempts to force democracy on others haven’t helped.  Nor has the conflation of democracy and neoliberal economic policy.  But I wonder too whether part of the problem is our inability to fix democracy here at home.  In any case, a commitment to exporting democracy deserves at least an equal commitment to revitalising our own.

These weeks, as we learn only after the fact of what went into the decision on the United Arab Emirates, as we are told about our future in Afghanistan without Parliamentary  debate, as we watch the Senate defeat in a surprise vote a bill on environmental  accountability – these weeks remind us pretty forcibly that our own democratic institutions are out of whack, that pathological partisanship and political gaming, no doubt always part of the show, have become the show.  When is the last time that our federal Parliament had a real debate, say about whether our deteriorating environment or a few hundred refugees pose the greater security threat, or how we ensure universal access to quality health care with our aging population, or how to reform the tax system so that it promotes both efficiency and equity and is intergenerationally fair?  You pick the issue.

The system didn’t just suddenly break in these last few weeks or even years.  We are witnessing the consequences of decades of neglect.   Let me say at the outset that the view from inside government can get pretty blinkered regardless of who is in charge.  In the rarefied capital air, when public officials are trying to speed up the slow machine, to get things done, to avoid gridlock, it becomes awfully easy to see democratic debate as costly and dangerous.  In the age of deference, not so very long ago, politicians and public servants were largely entrusted not only to pursue but to define the public good with occasional elections as the major report card on performance.  Much public good was indeed achieved.  Canada has done pretty well.   From inside the bubble (having lived inside) it became amazingly easy to justify opaqueness and spin for the larger good.  But we have learned that, in such a bubble, political interests too often trump the public good, majority interests trump minority concerns and, inevitably, government drifts further and further away from the citizens who own it.  I think back on many decisions where I was a player that would have been made better by engaging Canadians through Parliamentary debate or directly through meaningful consultations. In other cases, the decisions would likely not have changed but our democracy would have benefited from greater transparency and more open discussion.  Sometimes governments must choose unpopular paths – to protect minorities or the interests of future generations – but here too our democracy and political culture would benefit from greater transparency and open debate.

We talk about the “democratic deficit”.  We talk about institutional reform.  We talk about a new openness.  But nothing much happens.  We are stuck.  How often past mistakes of one Party are used to justify more of the same by another.  And instead of institutional reform, we get more bureaucracy, layers of added controls and oversight that increase the distance between Canadians and their government.  No wonder we are seeing  political disenchantment, disengagement and, it seems, a growing anger.  We are at an impasse.

The age of deference is well past and that is completely for the good but its counterpoint of distrust and cynicism cannot be the answer.   Just as surely as deference breeds arrogance, cynicism breeds collective paralysis.  This serves only those who prefer paralysis to collective action or those who despite occasional pretense to populism have contempt for the democratic process.  The new populism we see developing to the South is profoundly undemocratic.  Giving up on the possibility of collective progress leads not to democracy making but to institution busting, not to open knowledge sharing and public education, essential to democracy, but to the denigration of knowledge and expertise and surrender to slogans and spin, and, despite the rhetoric, not to greater personal freedom,  except for the already rich and powerful.

Excluding us from the big debates is no longer on.  It won’t work and it shouldn’t.  Making citizen engagement work means profound change in how we make public decisions.  It is not about telling us what we want to hear.   Pretending that democracy is no more than polling majority sentiment and pandering to it is not the antidote to arrogance.  Glorifying our instincts, passions and preferences is just plain dangerous.    Addressing the democratic deficit will require an investment in open information and public education and the willingness to live with sometimes messy and uncertain process.  The flip side of enhancing democracy is enhancing citizenship; a healthy democracy depends on active citizenship through which we go beyond our personal preferences and biases and engage in shaping our collective response to the challenges before us.

This is partly about electoral reform, as hard as that has proved, and partly about institutional reform and we have seen some of the first modest stirrings across partisan lines.  It is partly about new tools, new technologies that create new possibilities for engagement, open government and networks of state and non-state actors.  It is also about greater civic and social equality without which democracy cannot flourish.  And it is about leadership  across all sectors.  If we are looking for the next big national project, why not revitalising our democracy.  What could be more important – and more difficult?  Export democracy?  Maybe.  Renew our own democracy?  For sure.

It used to be the left who were concerned about “elites”,  about the concentration of wealth, power and influence in the hands of a few.  The conversation here was about how to constrain that power, how to achieve greater social and civic equality,  how to make democracy work.  Over the last decades, the term and with it the pursuit of equality went into decline.

It seems, however, that “elites” is making a dramatic comeback, this time around from the right.  Although still pejorative, the term is not being used in the same way; the target is different and so is its purpose.    It is no longer focused on money  – wealth is a good thing in this view, a cause for admiration and aspiration at best, envy at worst.   So who are the elites that are getting all the new attention?  How has the term evolved and what does this tell us about contemporary politics?

Jeremy Weisberg, the editor of Slate, in his recent analysis of how the U.S. right were using the term, concluded that there were at least two targets, those who think they know what’s best for us and those who simply think they know best.  In other words, it is a way of dismissing their political opponents as social engineers and snobs.    It is taking on the liberal establishment, the politicians, the bureaucrats, and the largely urban intellectuals who support them,  the very ones who used to talk about leveling the playing field and pursuing some measure of justice and fairness.  In Canada, it is targeted against those who support the census and the long gun registry, for example,  who apparently often hail from Toronto.

It is, I suppose, in some ways, a repudiation of the idea of progress, the belief that rationality and knowledge would improve our collective well-being.  It is the extension of the view that government is more problem than solution.  So it is clearly not about equality in any sense of the word, not about closing the gap between rich and poor, nor about the civic equality upon which democracy depends.

At its worst, this new anti-elitism translates into disdain for the educated and worldly and, not surprisingly, has created huge controversies even within conservative ranks.  Conservative intellectual leaders increasingly wonder just where or whether they fit in.  This is disturbing and ironic given how education has been an important leveler in our society and how knowledge has helped constrain the arbitrariness of power.

It also seems hypocritical when it comes from the rich and powerful themselves.  Indeed, there is something distinctly unseemly about privileged and influential politicians talking disparagingly about the influence of these so-called elites.  That is not to say that we should not have a debate about the limits of government, or how best to ensure our freedom, only that this is not the way to do that. The accusation of elitism is in the end too often a political tactic, another slogan, an attack ad.   It  is at its core anti-democratic, not just because it inhibits civil discourse but because if it is about anything, it is about rotating the elites – out with the old guard, in with the new, just a new set of players deciding what’s best for us, a different set of snobs and engineers.   When our own government criticizes the “Toronto elites” what can they possibly mean other than that there has been a turning of the tables, the old elite is out and the new elite is in.

This pretend populism of slagging so-called elites is not about the concentration of wealth and power, nor is it about real people, ordinary or otherwise, in all of their diversity.   It may be about ideology.  It is certainly about politics.  But whatever its benefits for retail politics, it is destructive and dangerous.  It divides the world up in ways that diminish us all, turns us all into stereotypes,  the hard-working and hard-done-by taxpayer versus the bloated and out-of-touch inelligentsia, the plain-talking ordinary citizen versus the politically correct intellectual.   It makes compromise difficult, a sign of weakness, sleeping with the enemy.  It destroys the trust we place not only in government but in one another, trust that is essential if we are to achieve anything together.

It is dangerous because it not only feeds off anger, it fuels it and the despair that goes with it, and surely history has taught us how dangerous that particular combination can be.  The Tea Party and its paler Canadian versions reflect no coherent ideology; they are an expression of a growing anger more akin to nihilism than some libertarian utopia.

Rather than fuel and manipulate this anger for political gain, or, for that matter, rather than ridiculing it, it is time that we tried to understand  and rein it in.  Christopher Lasch, the late historian and social critic, reminds us that  the privileged among us, the so-called liberal elites, are in many respects the authors of this backlash and loss of trust.  Says Lasch, the privileged became increasingly disconnected from how the rest of us were living.  They were more and more mobile, less and less tied to geography, to physical space, more and more comfortable with theoretical models of what to do, bloodless models, where the individual was the object of analysis and where tradition, family, community, religion, moral discourse had no place. In this modern, or better, post-modern frame, immigrants too easily became economic units, communities became economic clusters, citizens no more than consumers, moral considerations only superstitions, distractions, and democracy a messy, dangerous and inconvenient thing.   Policy talk was no longer about moral choices but about economic imperatives, not about good and evil, but about pathologies and treatments.  And they invariably over-promised.

No wonder there’s a backlash.   The “liberal elite” had arguably lost its way, had become remote from real people living ordinary lives. The “new conservative elite” is certainly changing the game, shifting government from social and economic policy to security and punishment, focusing on what makes us afraid and angry rather than hopeful and generous. But like all “elites”, they too pretend to know what’s best for us. So, the anger grows and mutates into the destructive and divisive forces we are now seeing.

Culture wars and a turning of the tables are not the answers to what ails us.  The question Lasch was asking, the question we should all be asking, whether from the right or the left or somewhere between,  is whether our democracy can rise to the challenges before us, whether we can bring knowledge and moral discourse together in truly democratic institutions.  For Lasch the answer was to be found not in a changing of the guard but in the institutions and spirit of democracy, creating the opportunity for meaningful participation and having the faith that citizens could rise above their personal preferences  to engage with others of different views and experiences to confront the big moral challenges facing us.

He, like all champions of democracy, understood that this can only happen if we constrain the worst excesses of social inequality and if we create institutions where all citizens, including the so-called Toronto elites,  can come together as civic equals.  If only all the talk about elites were truly about pursuing equality and revitalising our democracy.

Here is the third installment of the extended conversation with Scott Payne on democracy and citizenship.

Now, you know that I am strongly in favour of the idea you have expressed that we need to close the gap between citizens and their government as a means of revitalizing our democracy. And I am also strongly in favour of most of the reforms you champion. But I think a one-sided approach to this issue that only focuses on reforming government is doomed to failure.

I mean, look, the way that government works, particularly in terms of our electoral system, is something that I wholly agree is in need of reform. But I think that we need to spend some time examining what we take ourselves to mean when we talk about citizenship itself.

In our interview on the revitalisation of democracy, you said two things that really stuck with me. First, you said that, “[c]itizens need not and increasingly do not wait for government leadership to get engaged.” I think that this is true. And let me take it one step further by saying that citizens must not wait for political leaders to get engaged. I’ll say more about this as I move ahead.

Thinkers from Alexis de Tocqueville, to Gabriel Almond and Sindney Verba, to Charles Murray have sketched out the necessary role that civil society, apart from the apparatus of the state, plays in underwriting the success of democracy. And I would offer that acting as a hub to the spokes of their thought is a robust notion of what it means for one to be a citizen in a particular instantiation of a democratic republic.

In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam convincingly chronicled the deterioration of the social capital that civil society uses as one of its primary tools. There is, I think, evidence to suggest that our means of cultivating and utilizing social capital have failed to keep pace with the changes we have experienced in our modern lives and that re-evaluating both of our understanding of our very notions and embodied practice of citizenship is key plank in terms of redressing this trend.

By saying that I’m, not looking for ways of going back to the “good old days,” when citizenship really meant something and our social and community networks were at their height. This is wishful thinking insofar as there is no “going back” and a persistence in that illusion will only result in an avoidance of the challenges that lay in front of us.

Escapism is not the answer. Indeed if a going back was what was needed, then a re-evaluation of our understanding of citizenship would be wholly unnecessary. The answers would already be available to us.

And so, to tie all of this back to the discussion we’re having, I think that what we’re running up against is as much about apathy as it is about distrust. People are prone to knee-jerk and unhelpful levels of distrust because they are weighed down by a sense of apathy.

Citizens feel incapable of effecting the decisions that impact their lives and  therefore feel disconnected from those decisions, yes. But, that fecklessness itself is underwritten by a poverty in how we see and live the very role of citizens. And the poverty of that role has increasingly been utilized by our political leaders towards their own short sighted ends.

At the end of the day, we have to grapple with the fact that reckoning with this issue of revitalising democracy needs to find part of its location in citizens themselves. The answers cannot just be handed down by government. We as citizens have to work together to figure them out for ourselves. And we have to do so on our own terms because we want to see value in doing so, not because we’ve been told we need  to do so.

We need actual buy-in from our fellow citizens, which means that we need to ground our efforts in practical activities of citizenship. What I’m suggesting is an intellectual exercise, at least in part. But it is not simply a thought experiment with regards to our citizenship. It is both a re-evaluation of our citizenship and then a following re-application of that role; in ways that might be unexpected or potentially even unwanted by political leaders and government.

But above all, our vision of citizenship must have value and meaning for citizens themselves. And creating that vision in a country as diverse as Canada is, contrary our previous acknowledgment, asking quite a bit of ourselves.

Ultimately, a reformed and revitalised government needs to be met by an equally reformed and revitalised citizenry if we are to realize anything sustainable in closing the gap between each and actually renew our democracy.

ALEX HIMELFARB

Holy smoke Scott.  Yes, I have written elsewhere about our “bargain basement citizenship” and you’re absolutely right that the ideas of civic duty and citizenship are at least as important as any discussion of government reform.  I think the evidence on “social capital” is mixed. that is, I’m not sure we are really bowling alone, but the evidence is pretty clear that it matters, that participation with others in relationships of trust is key to our well-being, is the basis for defining public goods and is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for political engagement.  Nothing works unless most of us most of the time take responsibility for ourselves, for our families, for one another, our community, our country and beyond.

But, as you suggest, we can only scratch the surface here.  These questions get at our notions about human nature,  morality and democracy, too big for a blog.  Not long ago, Roger Cohen wrote that in this first decade of the 20th century, democracy has lost its lustre,  perhaps in part because of attempts to impose it on others militarily, perhaps because it was oversold.  I am inclined to think that the democracy problem is more that we have taken it for granted for too long, treating it as little more than or virtually synonymous with free market liberalism.  Even the notion of freedom so central to democracy has often been reduced to a notion of economic freedom and, more precisely, freedom from government.

Little wonder that we have seen an erosion of public space and, perhaps with it, public mindedness.  I agree with Putnam and Sandel and the many others arguing that it is past time that we start experimenting again with ways to instill democratic values, including a broader notion of freedom but also civic duty,  political participation and democratic discourse, essential to preserving that freedom.  How we do this in a way that makes sense today, however, is quite another thing.

As a starting point, one has to believe that this is in fact possible, that we are indeed capable of more than the selfish pursuit of our interests, that  we cannot be reduced to the “selfish gene” or even to  supposedly irrational animal impulses. Interests certainly matter and no doubt so does biology, and we can learn a lot from the behavioural economists who are exploring how to incent and “nudge” us to behave in the interests of the community and the longer term.  We need to be realistic about our frailties.  At the same time, we ought to reject any approach that reduces us to interests and instincts.  Here I am with philosopher Mary Midgley who makes a persuasive case that sociability, loyalty and altruism are every bit as human as the excessive individualism that dominates discourse today.

Education

In that context, then, I continue to believe that education, formal and informal, is key to the health of our democracy.  What happens in the schools is important and speaking personally I can say that our kids did not get much about civics, civic duty and citizenship when they were in school.  This was admittedly a long time ago now and hopefully things will be better for our granddaughter.  The devaluing of the arts and humanities in colleges and universities is also worrisome.  Of course colleges and universities are increasingly crucial to the economy but they are also a place where active citizenship is formed.  And our arts, heritage and amateur sports institutions are also key to linking us to our traditions and one another and, at their best,  help redefine our shared citizenship in changing times.  Sadly these institutions are usually badly neglected in periods of austerity, and in the current environment are often dangerously and depressingly dismissed as elitist.

In Canada, we have paid particular attention to linking people who might not otherwise find common cause, across our two languages, diverse traditions, and regional and social fault lines.  One could argue that our particular brand of pluralistic citizenship is extremely suited to the times.  It is a comparative advantage. But it cannot be taken for granted.  At various times in the past distinctly Canadian non-governmental initiatives arose to promote civic duty and common citizenship.   Katimavik was one such effort,  Exchanges Canada another.  Cadet programs and the Governor General’s Leadership initiatives and CUSO were all part of this spirit.  Immigrant welcoming and settlement programs too are part of this fabric.  So we would do well to ask how this patchwork is doing today, has it kept pace with new demands, does it help bridge our diversity.  All “newcomers”, immigrants and refugees of course but our kids too, have to be provided with a firm understanding of their rights and their civic duty, of the prerequisites for making our diversity work, rule of law, peaceful resolution of conflict, respect for the rights and dignity of others.  How are we doing?

Opportunities for engagement

Also key are our opportunities to engage with others, develop common understandings and the trust necessary to cooperate for common purpose.  It is out of such interaction that we develop a sense of the public good and develop the innovative means for its pursuit.  Here many worry about the erosion of public space, the depletion of “social capital”,  the privatisation of our everyday lives as we retreat into individual and family based entertainment and consumption.  Bo Rothstein, among others, has pretty persuasively demonstrated that societies with high levels of social trust also have high levels of well-being.  Here we stand to learn a lot from concrete experiments in the U.K. in getting people involved in solving community problems.

Perhaps the most important and effective “schools for citizenship” here in Canada have been voluntary organizations.  As I mentioned to you, a couple of decades back, we used to provide predictable, stable core funding to many of these organizations which allowed them to engage in advocacy for those too often excluded and also allowed them to nurture a strong sense of active citizenship.  Yes they partnered with government but as pretty autonomous players, as it should be.  Now these organizations are too often an extension of government, their funding dependent on the provision of defined services and their democratic role much diminished.  Revitalising an autonomous voluntary sector would go some distance to revaluing active citizenship.  Greater autonomy in the sector is also essential for true partnering with government.

We also ought not to underestimate the potential of social networks to foster civic engagement.  It is too easy to dismiss these virtual communities as transitory, what some have called “click engagement”.  We don’t know enough yet about their potential for turning these clicks into positive and sustained action. And we are only beginning to understand the role and uses of open systems.

Equality

But I am increasingly convinced that more important than all of this, in fact underlying all of this, is the issue of equality.  Richard Wilkinson, an expert on the social determinants of health,  is coming to Canada later this year to talk about The Spirit Level, his most recent work with co-author Kate Picket in which he compiles extensive and impressive comparative data that show that societies that are more equal are more successful as measured against almost all important criteria.  Too much inequality damages everybody and inhibits the development of relationships of trust.  The authors are not just talking about helping the poor here; they are arguing that the data show that virtually everybody benefits, everybody is better off in societies that are more equal.  The book is of course not without controversy and I will be blogging more on it soon but it has become the rage now in Europe and has apparently been embraced in the U.K.  by both the Prime Minister and the new leader of the Labour Opposition.  The work has managed to put the issue of equality back in play after years of neglect.  It encourages us to ask just how much inequality are we willing to tolerate.  And  it forces us to confront the costs to health and well-being of too much.

So even on these questions government has a role, not to own the issue but to create the environment in which citizenship might flourish,  through policies that reduce inequality and  through  political leadership, maybe a different kind of leadership that inspires engagement and creates avenues for it, that values and seeks to bridge our diversity, that tries to link our private troubles to the big public issues.  I might add, however, none of this will happen if we don’t at the same time strengthen our public institutions, not least our parliament and public service, and make voting count for more than it has.  Full circle.

What do the Omar Khadr case, the census controversy and taxes all have in common?  All, I think, in one way or another, tell us something about the value of our common citizenship. With citizenship, as with most things, we get what we pay for.  It seems today we are being asked to pay less and, no surprise, we are being offered less.  Is that what we really want?

Let’s start with the census and the decision on the long form.  We are being told that because some of us don’t like the intrusiveness of the long form of the census it is going to be made voluntary.  We have seen from the outcry that the information loss is big and worrisome but, no, citizens will not be asked to make this concession on behalf of the public good.  Indeed, apart from the universal requirement to obey the law, we Canadians have few explicit citizenship duties or responsibilities.  We are asked to make few sacrifices.  We have no compulsory service, no compulsory voting, as many other countries do.  Certainly, every day, some Canadians are making sacrifices on our behalf, but most of us are required to pay little for the rights and privileges of citizenship. We ask of Canadians pretty much two things – pay your taxes and fill out your census.

How in the world did we get to the point that filling out the long form census is just too much to ask?  I frankly cannot remember if I, personally,  have ever had to do the long form.  I’m old enough that I probably did and I hate forms enough that I may have blocked it from memory – but it simply cannot be too great a price to pay for being a Canadian citizen and helping to ensure that all citizens share in its benefits.  And my guess – the majority of Canadians would agree,  even if, like me, they hate the questions.

Which brings me to taxes.  How in the world did we get to the point that taxes are only seen as a burden from which to be relieved rather than a responsibility, a duty  of citizenship – to safeguard our country and its values, manage the social and environmental commons,  ensure that all citizens have access to essential services, and try as best we can to pass on to future generations a country at least as strong and healthy as the one we inherited?  The conventional wisdom here is that talking about taxes is political suicide.  Who likes paying taxes?  Well, I wonder if a sustained dialogue on taxes and tax mix might not produce some surprises, at least over time.  Would Canadians really oppose a “tax on pollution’?  Just how low do corporate taxes have to be?  And are those of us who benefit most and consume most willing to pay a bit more? After all, we are asked for so little in payment for our citizenship.

The census fiasco will put at risk the most vulnerable and our ability to measure and respond to their needs.  Successive tax cuts for just about a decade make it harder to ensure universal access to essential services and address deepening inequality.  In other words, the sense of social citizenship that arose in the seventies and eighties is at risk.  Of course some Canadians welcome this, celebrate the shift from public to private, from social responsibility to self-reliance.  But even those who have the thinnest notion of our common citizenship ought to be worried about the case of Omar Khadr.

Lawrence Martin and Andre Pratte have pretty much said it all.  Bottom line: it doesn’t matter for the purposes of this discussion if he is guilty or innocent, a victim deserving of our sympathy or a villain worthy only of our contempt.  What matters here is that  basic rights, the legal rights of one of our citizens, are being denied.  These legal rights are about protecting us and our liberty from the intrusive and coercive power of the state.  We are all in trouble here – wherever we sit on the political continuum – if any one of our citizens is denied the right of a fair and just process when their liberty is at stake.  When this happens, the value of our common citizenship is diminished.   It has been said that the measure of a society is in how it treats its most vulnerable.  To this I would add that an equally important but more difficult measure is in how it treats its most despised or reviled. Who knows who’s next?

Martin cries “shame” in his piece because polls say that most of us don’t care about Khadr.    I am not prepared to believe that the polls give us anything more than a superficial snapshot on issues of such moral and emotional complexity.   I am not ready to concede, as some have, that we have become so fragmented, so atomized, that we prefer such a thin and fragile notion of citizenship.   On the other hand, when I put together the pieces I realize that I haven’t set out a very attractive political agenda:  “Bring Khadr home.” “Let’s Raise Taxes’”  “Give the Carbon Tax a Chance.”  “Give Me Back My Long Form Census Questionnaire.”  Not the stuff of a political campaign.   It’s undoubtedly a tough sell, but wouldn’t it be nice to have a leader fight to enhance the value and meaning of our common citizenship, recognizing that we get what we pay for?

Progressivism, most would agree, is an elusive concept. This is a large part of its charm – it doesn’t generate pre-packaged solutions, has to be made concrete based on evidence in specific circumstances, and has the elasticity that these fragmented, changing and often discontinuous times demand.  In that sense, we do know what progressivism is not: it is not a simplifying paradigm, an ideology that provides ready-made answers to every political or policy question, however comforting such certainty may be in turbulent times. But what is it that holds this elusive and probably diverse set of beliefs together?

First and foremost, for me at least, it is a belief in the possibility of progress, a hearkening back to the age of enlightenment.  This is not a given in these times that Margaret Wente has described as “the age of the blow up”,  when nobody seems to know what to do about the increasingly frequent and complex global crises we are facing.  As we watch the deeply conflicting positions of the G20 on how to harness global finance for human well-being, for example,  we can easily understand why hopefulness often invites cynical rejoinders.    But the belief in the possibility of progress does not come with guarantees nor dies it mean blindness to human frailty.  And this is not just about whether one is an optimist or a pessimist – there’s plenty of room along that continuum – but a recognition that what we do individually and collectively matters, that we have the capacity to make things better.  Hope, then, could be considered the first principle of progressivism whether that reflects a positive view of humans or simply an understanding that it’s the only orientation that gives us a shot at progress.

Second, it is premised on the active engagement of people in defining progress and acting individually and collectively in its pursuit.   Matthew Taylor explains that engagement means more than voting based on our individual preferences which are seldom a useful guide for public policy.   If we simply follow our preferences, he says,  we will too often ask for Swedish-style services at American-style rates of taxation.  Our preferences are generally a reflection of our biography and current circumstances, not an orientation to the future or to others.  Engagement, however, means getting involved in understanding the ethical choices one’s country faces for the future.  It means getting informed and re-learning the skills of democratic argument.  It means, too, understanding how our behaviour, our personal decisions, matter.  So we will have to be ready to change, for example to be less wasteful and more self-reliant and resilient.  And it means that we need to be more deliberately conscious of the consequences of our actions on others and to push to its fullest the human capacity for coöperation and mutual aid.  So, progressives understand that the quality of our democracy and citizens’ attachment to it are crucially important and believe that government can be a force for good especially if built on democratic engagement.

Third,  progressivism promotes empathy or what one American philosopher called “sympathetic introspection” to capture the idea that we can indeed learn to put ourselves in the shoes of others because despite our differences we share a common humanity:  we share human sentiments; we may learn to laugh at different things but we all laugh. Through empathy we become more self-aware, more comfortable with diversity in all of its forms, and readier to understand that our autonomy is tied up in our social relationships, that self and other are inseparable.  An expanded empathy takes us beyond others in our family and community and asks us to try to live in the skin even of distant strangers.  It is the prerequisite for coöperation and peaceful resolution of conflict. It is at the heart of what Taylor and others before him call “universalism” – the notion that all people everywhere are deserving of dignity.

OK, I know this is not a recipe or guide for particular social policies or a particular political platform  – more on this in future posts – but is more about an attitude, an orientation to politics, a new politics based on some pretty old ideas – a belief in the possibility of progress; engaged and informed citizens; and expanded empathy.

A friend responded to my previous blog on the culture wars and the silence of centrist and centre-left politicians on moral issues.  His view has significant merit: he argues that many “social liberals”  believe that they effectively won the “culture war” when Canada patriated the Constitution with a new Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  This was itself an act of great moral courage and leadership, and we have seen the transformative effects on Canadian society and on the relationship between citizen and state.

Less often discussed are the political consequences.  First, those on the right became increasingly frustrated that moral issues were taken out of the political realm and instead given over to the courts in the framework of the Charter.  Second, it meant that social liberals lost moral muscle.   This is the great irony of the profound moral victory that the Charter  represents.  The Court got new muscle but the  social liberal parties stopped providing the kind of leadership that gave us the Charter.  Rather than debating the big moral questions, they increasingly tried to avoid reopening these debates, preferring to rely on, and at worst hide behind,  the courts.    Of course it is enormously important that fundamental rights are safeguarded in the Constitution and by the Courts.   But our legislators cannot abandon the field.  Political leadership and civilized debate remain crucial for the health of our political culture and society.

Same-sex marriage provides an instructive example of a relatively  positive relationship between the courts and the legislature.  While politicians for many years did not want to take on this issue,  gays and lesbians were able to voice their views through the courts. That is important. Minorities must have avenues that do not depend solely on majority politics. Access to the courts is crucial. Court decisions forced government to take on the issue.  The government of the day decided not to appeal but rather to recognize same-sex marriage in law.   A strong case can be made that the statutory recognition of same-sex marriage was  also important – even if it is a pretty safe guess that the Court was going in that direction sooner or later.  First, it meant a serious discussion in which Canadians, including those who wished to hold to the traditional definition of marriage, could voice their views. These issues are never resolved once and for all; they never go away.  They deserve to be debated.    Second, it meant that our elected representatives could discuss how best to safeguard other values such as freedom of religion and do their best to make those safeguards part of the solution.  Third, it meant that our elected officials had to declare themselves – that is show moral leadership – on an issue that each knew was highly contentious.  And most important, it made clear that this was a decision of principle, a political and policy statement of what kind of country our legislators want.  Surely politics rises highest when it deals with issues that arouse our passions and for which there is no easy consensus.

All this to say that just as “conservative” politicians have put morality back into politics, social liberals must retrieve their moral muscle too. They cannot abandon the terrain or try to close off debate but rather have to re-engage in a way that respects those with different views, seeks common ground but does not shrink from the responsibility of moral leadership, of taking principled stands even when doing so is politically difficult.

Values and preferences are learned.  Leadership matters.

UPDATE:  Interesting post by John Geddes on the Supreme Court and Charles McVety.

Susan Riley adds a valuable perspective on the current war about who started the culture war in Canada.  A case can be made, I think, that we Canadians are massively ambivalent about how much moral content we want in our politics.   We have prided ourselves on the pragmatism of our politics.  Our politicians, especially when two “big tent” parties dominated the scene,  prefered to run on issues of competence and integrity rather than on competing visions of the good;  mostly they stayed away from deeply divisive issues such as abortion or capital punishment or same-sex marriage unless forced upon them.  These were left to the courts and the gradual evolution of Canadian culture. When these big debates did occur, they poked at the seams of our fragile federation and highlighted the profound differences in values that reflect equally profound differences in experience and circumstance across our vast country.  We are understandably nervous about values debates and especially debates infused with high moral content.

At the same time, many of us are tired of our current version of politics that seems more stagecraft than statecraft, a game about winning rather than a discourse about purpose.  Many are looking for more – more relevance, more courage, more moral content.  Politics is always about winning but,  at its best,  it is also about our collective pursuit of the good and  politicians cannot forever avoid trying to define what that might mean.  Indeed, the rise of “conservative politics” in North America  may be at least partly  due to the right’s willingness to take on issues of meaning and purpose beyond our material interests.

In careful ways, the Canadian political right has reintroduced moral issues and social values into the political arena.  It is “the right” that talks about family values, about tough punishment for those who do harm and about caring for their victims, about choice and about liberty.  And, in Canada at least,  it quietly voices its antagonism for abortion.  Politically, they have been the loudest voice on these issues.   It is time that the other parties started to talk about values again, including moral values.

But, in Canada,  parties of the centre or centre-left have avoided a positive moral and values discourse opting instead for a focus on the economy where their track record is surprisingly good.  Over the past decades they have been the ones who have championed fiscal prudence, no doubt because they care about government, its resiliency and capacity to pursue the public good.  They are also the ones who believe in investment in people, tools and infrastructure, all essential to the global knowledge economy.  But “it’s the economy stupid” takes you only so far – it is  time that centrist and progressive politicians staked out the moral ground.

If centrist parties talk about these values at all, they tend to do so in reaction to the right, with little respect for the deeply held views of their supporters and, thus, the “culture wars” and wedge politics.   There is another way,  a positive instead of reactive approach that chooses principle over polarization, that refuses to demonize those with whom we disagree, that rejects false dichotomies however comforting and salable they seem.

Such an approach would understand that the family, in its diverse forms and shapes, is the building block of society and that we all lose if we don’t find ways to help the family help its members, especially as Canada’s population ages.   Such an approach would understand that parents are and must be responsible for raising their children and parental choice is crucial in a society as diverse as ours but also that choice is impossible for most of us absent key public infrastructure and that the best of families need help from time to time.  This approach would understand that crime must be punished justly, that justice should be restorative but that we should not allow fear or anger to blind us to proportionality and to what works to make us safer.  This approach would understand that pro-choice goes hand in hand with family planning and personal responsibility.  And at its foundation it would understand that human dignity requires a commitment to both liberty and equality and that liberty can only truly be experienced within a healthy political community and society,  that  self and other, individual and community are inseparable.  Such an approach would put human dignity at the centre because dignity itself is a social idea that draws its strength from the twin values of liberty and the inherent equality of all people.

That doesn’t mean the simplifying rhetoric of wedge politics, its tendency to polarize and demonize  and,  as “culture wars”  implies, to  leave no room for common ground.  Instead, it means we need  a willingness not only to take on the moral dimensions of public policy but to do so in all of their complexity – even as we know that this is the harder road.

We need a real discussion on religious freedom and our common citizenship.  Quebec gave us a good launch with the Bouchard-Taylor Report.  Here is a valuable addition.  It also always helps to go back to basics.

Some of our best pundits have been asking why we in Canada are not having the kinds of national policy debates we need.  We know the challenges and risks but we are not talking about them publicly.

We do of course have some important think tanks of the right, left and centre (too few and often struggling for resources)  and many Canadian scholars and researchers are working on the big issues – the power of international financial markets,  the social and health implications of demographic change, religion and public policy, the adequacy of our public institutions and the role of government. But researchers and policy makers don’t seem to be talking to each other and when they do they seem often to be talking different languages.

Perhaps Kim Campbell was right if impolitic when she said, in the midst of her election campaign, that election campaigns are no time for talking about policy.  This is particularly problematic when minority governments and opposition parties are in perpetual campaign mode, giving us government that is all politics all the time.  And so,  instead of big debates, we get slogans and slinging . But the problem goes beyond minority politics.  Big policy issues are complex:  their resolution requires, as somebody once said, ” the courage to be boring”, neither simplifying the complicated nor obfuscating the simple.  In the competition for public attention, complexity is often the loser.  So, while  Canada has excellent political commentators and analysts, their voices are often lost in the media preoccupation with spectacle and scandal.   Perhaps too in Canada we have some distrust of big vision and big debates because we have learned how divisive they can be and we prefer not to poke at the seams ,  and all the more so when distrust of government prevails.

The absence of big debates does not mean that big changes are not happening. But to the extent that they are happening, they are happening without us – the consequence of drift or deception or some combination.  Not so long ago John Meisel referred to us as a “public enterprise” country, a country that trusted government,  believed in collective enterprise and sharing of risk.  Is that how we would describe ourselves today?  Big change is happening.

How much better it would be, within the degrees of our freedom, to participate in shaping that change or at least having the opportunity to participate in the discussion.   This may just be the moment.   Interesting to see normally reticent former finance officials entering the fray trying to force a real debate on the role of government and our willingness to pay for it.  Interesting to see so many Canadians react to the prorogation, perhaps a symptom of a deeper concern.  It looks like those with an interest in public policy have an opportunity to push the discussion – and a responsibility to do so.

We see  other hopeful signs – new public policy schools and centres are popping up across the country, university leaders are getting engaged in the big debates, some of our best magazines are creating more space and new approaches to tackling the issues that matter and reaching new audiences, online media are exploiting the possibilities of the internet to provide a new agora.   The Centre for Global Challenges seeks to be part of this policy renewal – international, interdisciplinary and intergenerational, thickening the public discourse and strengthening the dialogue between practitioners and scholars.