Worth the Fee to Read It

There have been a fair number of hands wrung in public about poor voter turnout at all levels of government, lately, but nothing much done about improving the situation. It’s not my intention today to try and solve all the problems in politics in Canada within 1,200 words or so — talk about trying to boil the ocean! — but to focus on just one factor:

The disenfranchised see no point in voting

What do I mean, “the disenfranchised”? Well, simply put, if you conclude that (a) the system now only turns on leaders of parties — not even the party and the rest of its cadre of candidates, but simply X, Leader of Y —, (b) once elected, leaders see no responsibility to the electors to honour their commitments, (c) once elected, leaders see no reason to invest energy in persuading us that a course change is the reasoned thing to do but simply impose the change, (d) once elected, public opinion — unless loud and highly persistent — is brushed off as “the ravings of the uninformed who should leave such matters to their betters”, and (e) the system is now so complex that getting anything done within it is a matter for intermediaries, fixers, professional supplicants and courtiers, then (f) why bother with the charade of voting?

I had always been a dedicated citizen: studying the issues, paying attention to my local candidates, avoiding reflexive party voting, trying to cast a reasoned ballot. I have followed political matters between elections; I have belonged to multiple parties over my life (if only as a financial supporter).

Living outside of Canada twice, however, forced me to realize — years later — that whilst I lived in the United States and in the Netherlands, places where I was outside the political process (not being a citizen), that I didn’t actually miss much. Things unfolded in both countries exactly as they would have had I been able to get involved, and been involved. In other words, despite all the object lessons that one vote matters, whether these be in Florida in 2000 or in Vancouver-Quadra two weeks ago, the reality was that all it mattered for was “who got to win and who got to lose”. In terms of how the national landscapes unfold, it didn’t make a whit of difference.

So, too, here in Canada — in British Columbia — in the City of Vancouver. There is no reason to be “for” anything, for there is no result obtainable 99% of the time by being “against”. Whether one is choosing positively, or simply voting to “toss the bahstids out”, makes no difference. The system trundles on, unaffected.

See how the Harper Government has been co-opted by the “Ottawa consensus” of the civil service, the central provinces’ leaders and “conventional wisdom”. See how the Federal Liberals still fail to recognize that their day as the “Natural Governing Party” died ages ago — with John Turner — and that Chrétien was an aberration brought about by the last rebellion of the voters breaking up the Progressive Conservative coalition, not the attractions of Chrétien at all (or of Martin in succession, who no longer had a divided opposition to face off against). Enough said: the stately dance continues.

Then there’s the mess in British Columbia, where we have a left:right political rationalisation completed for generations, and therefore a sense of entitlement on the majority side (the “right”). Why not? — far too many people in BC would rather die than vote for “the left” (whatever that is, these days: it’s certainly not what they think it is) no matter how crooked, dismal, abysmal, arrogant, expensive, etc. the “right” becomes. Enough said: without the threat of discipline, politics will run amuck.

Or how about the City of Vancouver. Wardless — oh, how that helps the NPA hold power! — and with neither side needing to offer anything to anyone who lives here. Unless, of course, you’re a developer, in which case have at the city and put up more ugliness. This city deserves the low-life that is Sam the Sham, Mayor of all the “people that count”.

If there was any level of government that ought to have given an opportunity to have influence, it ought to be the one closest to home — the municipal. But none of us do. At the end of the day, a municipal ballot is a long list of candidates, and no more. No wonder people block vote by party — or, as do about two out of three, ignore the whole thing. There’s no point. Taxes will rise, services will be chopped, streets will stay in deplorable state, and “prestige” will be all that matters.

Our political leaders, by making this all about themselves over the years (perhaps a good “Kicking Liberal Ass for the Good of Canadian Politics” aimed at the likes of Senator Keith Davey, Warren Kinsella and the likes is in order, if only to let off steam for their tactics of debasement), has broken faith with the institutions of responsible government. Responsible to Parliament? Three-line whips for almost every vote, trained seal tactics in the House, message management outside of it and a “who gives a damn who the candidate is” towards the constituency MP have destroyed that responsibility, which is founded in, and survives via, backbench rebellion. Responsible to the citizens? Hardly: Jeffrey Simpson was right, we elect “Friendly Dictators”, regardless of majority status or party affiliation.

That’s why we’re not supposed to talk policy, but instead positions. Why we’re not supposed to criticize, but to trash opponents. Why there are emerging “affiliation tests” across the blogosphere, and a growing hostility and refusal to see one’s challengers over a course of action as your equal and worthy of consideration and respect even in disagreement.

The MSM has their part to play in turning everything to the simple story line of a horse-race, and backroom intrigue, of course, but we put up with it, don’t we? If you don’t like the way CTV or the CBC cover matters, turn the television off — and keep it off. But we won’t do it. We deserve the outcome, the way we act.

Meanwhile, the more rational amongst Canadian citizens have checked out. They spend their time on other matters. Increasingly, an election is given and “no one shows up”. This allows the more rabidly partisan to use ever-smaller numbers to “win” — and thus reinforce the politics of position and shouting as opposed to debate and consideration. The cycle intensifies.

Eventually democracy itself will be lost, if only from a lack of interest. But that is form finally catching up to function. Democracy as a function of the political mind-set was lost a long time ago.

I doubt many will actually miss it when it goes.

Yesterday, “Earth Hour” struck. The goal was to get everyone on this planet to turn off their lights and other optional electrical usage (televisions, computers, etc.) between 20.00 and 21.00 local time.

As an aide memoire to turn off lights in rooms not currently in use, to not leave appliances running purposelessly, etc., “Earth Hour” was a good idea. As a means of enforcing compliance through social suasion, however, it left a lot to be desired.

Unfortunately, this is part of a pattern we see more and more often these days: everyone must comply. It’s not enough any more to win over a significant minority, or even a majority: the result must now be total.

That is so perilously close to a return to (take your pick) Fascism, Naziism, Stalinism, Maoism, Khmer-Rougeism, etc. as to be frightening. (Yes, I know, every one of those “isms” is going to get someone’s back up. That’s another little “everyone must comply” of our twenty-first century society: “no one can upset me”. Get over it, and get over yourself.)

There are those, of course, who, in the face of societal pressure like this feel a deep need to rebel. So we had the converse, those who publicly announced they would (and no doubt did) “turn every light, every appliance on in the house”. Some of that is perhaps also motivated by a rejection of the whole panic-mongering syndrome that surrounds discussion of greenhouse gases, energy production, limits to supply, and other such issues. (Note that when it comes to anything — if I may be permitted “a convenient” shorthand here — raised in Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth the only debate seems to be “are you of the body (of those who accept this without criticism) or not?” To even question Gore’s claims at the margins is to be thrown into the same camp as the outright deniers, and those that welcome the possibility of the planet’s impairment.)

Well, I do not count myself in with the deniers (despite this past winter!) but neither do I accept all the claims holus-bolus. Science is a process, and every statement made comes with (when no attempt to deceive is in play) an implicit to the best of our knowledge to this point in time. I expect to be able to, for instance, accept the Stern Report, and accept the IPCC report, and still find that new data, experiment and analysis will yield changed conclusions. Those don’t mean the deniers were right; they just mean the process continued and the position is now refined.

Still, it is as obvious as all get out that the winters of today are shorter than they were when I was a child, on average. The change in species availability (and I am no naturalist!) is staring me in the face. So, too, the summers being more intense. The finding, after all, wasn’t “universal and continuous warming in all places and at all times”. It was a general annual temperature rise in terms of the trend line, more pronounced as you look to the poles, which would, pace the models, lead to more intense weather systems. Seems about right from one man’s nearly fifty years of observed conditions, just as it is equally obvious to me that a point in time would come when cheap and easy-to-extract energy would decline as a component of our energy supplies, leaving us with tightened supply (hard-to-extract implies long lead times to get projects running, and lessened total outputs likely for the effort) and permanently higher costs involved for energy use. (You can say many things about the thousands of square kilometres of “oil sands” in Alberta, but “cheap and easy-to-extract” aren’t one of them, not matter how many oil-barrel equivalents they may represent.)

In other words, experience should be more than enough to motivate any thinking person not to be wasteful of energy. (Hair shirts are not required, just common sense.) You leave the kitchen for the evening, make sure things are turned off. You’re not using those outboard disc drives for your computer, power them down. Little things, all over, adding up. That makes the stance — from the point of view of rationality — of spending last night with all power consumption at maximum to counter “Earth Hour” really an irrational response.

Of course, if the point is not to play along with a totalitarian impulse, then that’s a potentially different story. Non-violent “disobedience” leads one into irrational acts that can add up to a reasoned path to change. My own view is, however, that “all lights blazing” wasn’t necessary to overcome the “everyone must comply” overtones in our society, at least yesterday.

Simply living normally — the only lights on were the ones that were needed, the only appliances on were the ones in use (or that must stay on, as with the refrigerator, to do their jobs) — was sufficient.

I must say that last night, in a brief glance out the windows, I didn’t notice a massive darkening of my neighbourhood. I suspect that many of my neighbours fall into the same camp I did: it was well on toward nine before I remembered that this was the day that had been set aside. This, mind you, with no less than thirty plus blog posts read earlier in the day highlighting it! But lives are busy these days, and time quickly slips by when work is at hand.

Having realised when it was, however, I can also say that I felt no impulse to rush and join “the crowd”. Saving power by day in British Columbia means offsetting the twenty-odd percent we import from Alberta and Montana, all produced via coal-fired generators. In the evening, however, we produce a power surplus, and it’s all hydro power. The water will fall over that dam regardless; spin the turbine, regardless. Giving up a post-Edison existence was therefore only going to make it possible to sell more power from our grid to other grid operations in Western North America; it wasn’t going to offset anything locally. (You might say, “well, but those sales offset GHG-producing producers elsewhere”, but much of the power moves by contract regardless of conditions, and that would only be true if we — Powerex, that is — priced BC power at a discount so as to win the business. One presumes, after all, that consumption might have dropped in the target markets as well?)

So I didn’t shut my remaining lights off, nor turn off my computer, last night. To be fair, I feel pretty good about that. Consumption had been minimized — which is in both my and our interests — but, at the same time, I had stood up to the totalitarian impulse surrounding this issue.

One can be greenish, in other words, without having to slavishly take up a position, and worry whether one choice or another is about to trigger the opprobrium of the crowd.

Those of us who have watched group-think descend since “9/11″, with its “those who are not with us are against us” Manichaean thinking at work, and who have watched a similar dualism infect any rational discussion of the environment on this planet, know full well that waiting until the other men of independent spirit are overcome to make a stand is to leave it too late. By then, one is the one albino monkey in a cage of brown monkeys. Ask any zookeeper: the albino is torn to shreds simply for being different.

For those of us who value liberty and the possibilities it creates, breaking up the dead hand of the crowd is essential. For, behind it (as history shows) someone will always emerge to use that crowd-think to impose their will on all of us.

Whether you went “lights out” yesterday or not, that’s the real issue at stake.

The annual cycle of Foundational Skills Assessments in BC Schools has just wrapped up, with all the usual yelling and screaming on open line radio that punctuates just about everything in this province. So let’s cut through the arguments right now:

The BC Teachers’ Federation is right: Not only don’t the FSAs test your child’s skills (but instead test some “generic” Grade 4 or 7 via-à-vis the curriculum expectations of the Ministry of Education) but they don’t need to be universally administered — as with international comparisons, a random sample would be just fine and do the same job.

The BC Government is misleading parents: A school which has poor FSA results, or whose FSA results fall, is supposed to be helped to come up to provincial norms. No resources, no monies, nothing but hot air comes from Victoria to any school. So the point of the FSAs — to improve the weak schools — that parents and voters expect, doesn’t happen.

The BC Government is inconsistent: It’s all right with everyone up to the Premier that the Fraser Institute should use the FSA results to stack-rank BC schools based on FSA results. That, evidently, is considered a help to parents. Never mind that the FSA results also correlate well to issues of rural resource bases vs urban ones, to socio-economic classes in school cachement areas, and the like: pass the word, “there is greener grass out there”. Meanwhile, stack-ranking the province’s hospitals based on the standardised metrics and reporting used in the Health Care “system” by the same Fraser Institute is socially unacceptable to this government: the names of the facilities can’t be used, because then people would expect change, and issues like the urban:rural resource divide, Health Authority funding vs the growth rate in their cachement areas, etc. mean that some facilities are never going to be able to compete for top ranking.

Schools systematically misinform parents: Yesterday on CKNW the President of the BCTF pointed out that any parent has the right, under the regulations surrounding FSAs, to put a request in writing to their child’s school and the school must excuse that child from the FSAs. No reason other than “I don’t want my child writing this” needs to be given. Instead of letting parents know what their options are, school administrations stress the mandatory nature of these tests, tell parents there are no options, and bully all but the tenacious few into submission. (After all, a larger base of students writing the test eliminates most of the probability of the school moving quickly up or down the league table based on the sample size: this is particularly important where special needs students, as a percentage of the total group writing, moves above a few percentage points.)

Classrooms are taken over by the FSAs: Parents want their child to do well; so do teachers (given all the misperceptions surrounding the FSAs). The net effect is that teachers dare not avoid using classroom time to prepare for the FSAs, and it is now common (it certainly was at my son’s school last year, where he was engaged in the Grade 7 FSAs) to have two weeks of class time turned over to “FSA Preparation”. Other parents tell similar tales. (The disconnect between the FSAs and reality is even stronger when you realize that my son was, as were many of his classmates, doing Grade 8 [or higher] work in one or more of the FSA-tested subjects — FSA testing ends up being tied at that school to age more than nominal grade, typical of multi-age, multi-grade classrooms. Of course, from the school’s point of view, all this was likely to manipulate its league-table standing higher.)

So, if the FSAs become nothing more or less than a way to lead to a report by a private sector think tank that intermixes private and public schools (making private look better) and allows denigration of teachers (look at the results!) with no recourse, why are we doing them?

If we really wanted to know whether the students were mastering the material, shouldn’t we have a curriculum-ending examination that is tied to what should have been mastered? If foundational skills are so important — and, actually, they are — shouldn’t we want to know at the end of each year that “little Johnny” can read, write and numerate to grade level, so that we can take action to bring him or her up to what he or she would need to succeed in the next grade level? Wouldn’t that actually require a high standard — say, a 70%+ pass level — and an individual education plan for each student? Wouldn’t that also suggest that we’d lose the idea of “grades” as “class cohorts” and instead think of them, subject by subject, as a way to indicate when the examination would take place?

Well, that would never do! Little Johnny couldn’t be socially promoted from one year to the next “to avoid bruising his fragile ego by separating him (or her) from his age group”. Never mind that we kill initiative in learning by holding each and every Little Johnny back in boredom in the subjects they have awakened an interest in. Never mind that we shovel him or her forward, unprepared, into the next classroom — and then terrorise him or her when the FSAs come around. Little Johnny, after all, knows that he (or she) doesn’t know. Children are not stupid about these matters. All of a sudden a moment of reckoning comes.

Our educational system is designed to socially engineer children to fit into neat cubicles in life, and to lose the desire to question “why” things work (or don’t work) the way they do.

Yet parents yell and scream — in blog comments, on talk radio, in letters to the editor, and at PAC meetings in schools — that testing regimes are essential to knowing how their child is doing, and how their child’s school is doing. From the point of view of the educational bureaucracy, and the politicians it “serves”, this is all to the good. FSAs give the illusion of accountability and assessment — and distract parents’ minds from considering much of the “social values” content crammed into the curriculum that displaces real work in history, geography, the sciences, mathematics, literature, grammar, etc. A graduate of the BC school system often can’t spell in a consistent manner, can’t form a sentence that properly uses subordinate clauses, can’t read at much more than a Grade 7 level (yet they’re “university ready”), can’t do mathematics from first principles but instead only disgorges memorizes proofs, etc. — but they know their First Nations, they’ve had seven or eight years of drug and sex education, they’ve got their volunteer hours and they’ve had “green philosophy” jammed down their throats. Good to know we’re turning out people with the background they’ll need to achieve on the world stage, eh?

That’s what the quest for accountability through the FSAs has allowed to happen.

Randomly check, if you must, to assess foundational skills. That puts the Fraser Institute out of the school ranking game — the Minister of Health is right: there are other conditions that affect the results that we can’t overcome. Besides, half the institutions will be below the mid-point — that’s the nature of “averages” — and so the real reason for these tests being universal comes out.

They’re a club to use against the teachers. Parents, why do you allow this?

A day or two ago, a commenter on my “Hoist on their Petards” series on the Federal party leaders suggested that he disagreed with my “theory of government” and “what government is for”. Considering I hadn’t laid one out there, that was a surprising comment! Yet the reality is that each of us comes to the table with some idea of what the role of government ought to be.

This is, for instance, at the core of much of the sheer, unadulterated emotion that surrounds the party leaders. (I wanted to originally type “hatred” but thought better of it.)

If, for instance, you believe that fixing the ills of society is part of the role of government — that, indeed, this is the unique agency that can do so — then you are likely to have a visceral reaction against any politician who goes on the record as saying the role of government should be limited. Thus, we get the “Harper must be defeated” crowd seizing upon every passing day’s news to make their point: the Prime Minister has acted on his beliefs and chained (to some extent) the Federal Government’s ability to meddle in new program areas, any of which could qualify as an ill to be fixed. The belief then drives the reaction.

Some of my own beliefs, of course, leaked out there (just as they do in the rest of my political writing): I don’t believe that every issues requires government intervention, and thus am quite comfortable with the thought of limited government, even if those “ills” are not ameliorated.

It would nice, I suppose, to live in Galt’s Gulch (Ayn Rand’s depiction of a society of purely rational interactions between people in Atlas Shruged — she portrayed it as a situation where a laissez-faire society still protected the commonweal) but the philosopher in me is acutely aware that man is not a rational animal, but a rationalizing one. Far more accurate, then, is Jane Jacobs’ portrayal of the situation in her Systems of Survival, where she teases apart what she calls the “commercial code” (that which is closest to the libertarian ideal) and the “guardian code” (that of government as the guardian of all things). The real world, of course, is a constant tug-of-war between these two codes: even under the darkest days of Stalinism some elements of the commercial code were still in play, and, of course, a purely libertarian code has never been tried, despite the claims that it has.

In the real world, therefore, beyond the basics of a legal code, policing and military protection of the citizens, and a judicial system, it is necessary for government to intervene to deal with matters of the commons. There are many “tragedy of the commons” issues that sometimes require a little carefully focused regulation, or the creation of an apparently commercial yet mandatory system to intervene and redirect behaviour which is advantageous to the individual but destructive of society in general. Recent concerns over pollution, global warming and environmental destruction fall into this camp. Creating and requiring the use of a carbon credit system, or a carbon taxing system, and a set of regulations about discharge (for water, I particularly like the notion that your intake must be downstream from your outflow [now you figure out how clean you want to make it, and how]) are examples of a little guardianship over shared resources. So, too, does the concept of zoning: carried to the suburban extreme it becomes the agent of environmental and societal destruction, but it is appropriate to ensure a rendering plant or mini mill can’t be erected in my neighbour’s back yard on my residential street. These are two examples — there are others we can think of — that protect the commonweal and thus make for reasonable restrictions on free action in society.

Incidentally, to those who say in return that a purely commercial set of alternatives to work this out could be devised, I say “yes, rationally they could, but man is a rationalizing animal, always ready to find an excuse not to do the right thing for all of us if it inconveniences him personally”.

There are other kinds of intervention that may be more problematic. Do we, for instance, benefit from — or lose by — requirements for Canadian ownership of certain industries, Canadian content on our airwaves, and the like? If you believe, as I do, that there is value in Canadian identity, then actions to preserve a space for Canadians to shape that identity culturally make sense, although, as with many things, they ought not to take on a life of their own: we should periodically challenge them if only to ensure they are still a net benefit. This is the challenge of being a smallish nation (by numbers and economic clout) next door to a large and civilisationally-dominant one, where it is almost always easier to simply “buy their choices” than pay the premium for developing our own. But each such intervention in Canadians’ freedom to choose must be carefully examined. Other interventions include the public building of national infrastructure: it may be necessary, with our surfeit of near-empty geography, to give such infrastructure a boost into existence and early operation through the public sector, but, as growth takes over, moving these into the private sector then makes sense: the resulting institutions can stand on their own (and should, say I). Remember, the world’s largest railway is now Canadian National — and it is so via its choices to buy American lines from their former owners and use their expertise to improve the service offered on them.

There are other areas which are almost never (in my view) appropriate for government involvement. Those who believe in government as the saving grace of society will disagree with this position. We should not be creating and fostering dependency in the First Nations. We should not be building a national day care system. We should not be force-feeding “innovation” as a set of market distortions: those that can play the grant and loan application game get funding; those that play by commercial rules fall behind. My reasons are philosophic: the government that governs best does so by focusing its attentions. None of these are essential interventions: they are all in the “pet project” category.

And every one of these restricts Canadians’ choices, limits their horizons, eats into their possibilities, more than it does good. They are, in other words, a net loss — and always will be.

Finally, it is important to remember that we have also established, at the core of our governance, some key rules — we call them our Constitution. In there is a division of labour amongst our governments. It is therefore proper for each government to function only within its domains. Provinces with grand ambitions ought not to simply assume the Federal Government owes them the difference. The Federal Government, in its eternal quest to remain relevant to Canadians (after all, all the interesting things from a citizen’s point of view are municipal or provincial according to our Constitution), needs to avoid meddling in the affairs of the provinces. Will this mean some provinces might have better services than others? Yes. The whole point of provinces, at the end of the day, is to celebrate difference. This one believes in far more government: let it. This one chooses a more libertarian outlook: let it. Citizens will make their own choices about where to live based on their preferred balance between liberty and governance. This is as it should be: the commercial and guardian codes are always tipping out of balance in their engagement and overlap with one another, and no jurisdiction’s current approach remains “right” for long. Yet all can stay within one nation, with all the benefits that provides.

Compared to those who would use government to enforce a particular view of economic life, or of social mores, upon the population, I side with liberty. Compared to pure libertarians, I recognise the imperfection of man (and his inherent imperfectibility) and recognise a need for some government. Add to this the notion that change should be made slowly and with a keen eye on our traditions — what makes us, us — and there you have my Tory political philosophy. Certainly not Conservative (although there is much common cause there), Green (but not to the point of Social Engineering), with the sense of social justice that is the old CCF strain in the NDP (prairie NDP, if you will) but tempered by always challenging guardianship. Not at all opportunistic as the Liberals tend to be, championing interventions for short-term reasons.

The current government has many failings, but, of all the parties on offer as they are today, it is the least worst option. That is my answer to my commenter of a few days ago.

Today, about 11.00 (PT), while sitting in a meeting at a client location, a frisson went through the office. “Snow!” This said with invective, phlegm in the voice, sheer unadulterated loathing, even from the ski fanatics in the mix.

Why has the attitude changed (other than that it’s been spring on the Wet Coast for a month now)? In large measure, because the amount of light — now more than darkness — the green things awakening and growing, the fact that most of us are walking around in light jackets or coatless also says it’s time to switch from winter mode to summer mode.

(My apologies to the rest of Canada. Spring shall come!)

And … with the calendar reaching for the end of March … Opening Day looms on the horizon.

I know, I know: the Boston Red Sox and the Oakland Athletics have already played the first game of the 2008 season, a few nights ago in Tokyo. (Is there no sense of tradition left? Those wanting to be at the first game of the new season for upward of a century trekked to Cincinnati to see the Reds enjoy the first tilt annually. Now the Lords of the Game treat tradition as dust, in the quest for ever more, ever more. Sigh.)

Yes, the game counts in the standings, and Boston has one game in the bank toward its title defence. Still, Opening Day hasn’t yet come — not really. But it’s almost here.

Back in 1977, when the Toronto Blue Jays took to the friendly confines of their jury-rigged baseball park in the south-west corner of Exhibition Stadium for their very first outing, and that first Chicago White Sox batter stepped into the box against the very first pitch to be delivered from the mound by this new team, snowflakes swirled around, too. How much we all enjoyed that day! — frozen to the bone, yes, and covered in one of Toronto’s regular early April reminders that winter looses its grip on the land not lightly and easily, but with a fight worthy of the return of the glaciers that covered this land a mere 12,000 years ago, but still, shouting joyfully for the first ever strike, the first ever out, the first ever half-inning played, the first hit … memories that will be carried forward and, with reverence, passed on, father to son, for years to come.

That is why time begins on Opening Day, each and every year. It is a division in the endless sweep of time: a point where before, and after, separate at a moment of anticipation and execution. Hope lives again. What true baseball fan hasn’t gone to the ball park on Opening Day expecting to see the first game of a 1.000 season? (Whether the old 154 game schedule, or the current 162 game one; whether in the purist single division format where all that mattered was first place at the end of it all or today’s wild cards, interleague games in the season and like, all of us share that hope as the initial wind-up begins and the first ball is fired at the plate.)

Even when we live far away from major league ball — even when the local team (a Single A club, here in Vancouver) won’t have its opening day for two more months yet — it doesn’t matter. (As June approaches, the same frissons of excitement get to come again, that’s all.) Opening Day is a signal that lazy, warm nights and the hot, blazing sun by day are coming. They signal that that eternal conundrum of baseball — that even the first place teams often lose four of every ten games, that the best batters barely hit their way on base cleanly a little more than three times out of ten, that this very hard game to play still, for all that, looks approachable and something anyone can do whether they’re eight, or sixty-eight, or any of the years on either side or in between — is about to begin.

Being a baseball fan is to acquaint oneself with loss, with defeat, with failure, and to still come away with hope.

For that is what the passing of the seasons also says. Winter, the time when defeat and despair can loom large: not one more time, out there, shovelling the walk; not another dark morning spent chipping ice from the windscreen; not another day spent at work, seeing only headlights and the dark coming and going! Late fall, with the mushy leaves underfoot, what, in my favourite of all haiku — Leaves falling / Lie on one another / The rain beats the rain — goes from colour and crispness to damp and chill, then bluster and wet, finally, as winter comes, quieting itself with snow replacing the endless dripping and occasional lashings of water from the sky. (And who, amongst fandom, has not huddled under an umbrella in mostly-deserted stands, watching the rain fall on the groundsheet laid down to protect the infield, and implored the clouds to part and dry up the rain so that the game may continue?) Even much of spring can be a struggle, as the battle between winter’s attempts to regain its footing and the possibility of good weather are fought for weeks at a time.

Still, and all, when the teams take the field, much of that fades away, and, whether through drizzle and chill or through one of those brilliant days of promise that spring can deliver, all cares fade, replaced with the question of whether today is our day, or theirs. Early in the season, there is little worry — so many games to come, so many chances await that a loss (or ten) does not loom too large. The intense caring of late August and September, as the race draws to its finish, is a long way off. Now is the time to enjoy the field, and what happens on it, purely for itself.

Once again the newspaper will have a column of box scores: for the fan who reads them, the theatre of the mind takes over, picturing plays not seen except in imagination, but now real for all of that. Once again the radio will be filled with the game — and radio, all sound and all imagination of the images before the announcer, is the best alternative to actually being at the park (and often a worthy adjunct to being in the seats as well). Television, with its inferior presentation of a game that requires broad vistas and minute attention to so many things going on at once, will also take its part (and again, without me: I’d rather imagine the game than deal with what is served up as “coverage”. Once again the calendar turns to those days a trip has been planned to a distant city, which includes a pair of seats purchased for the occasion (and sometimes, the whole point of going). A half-year of daily anticipation awaits.

We all have four calendars, whether we know it or not. There’s the one on the wall, of course, that says a new year begins on January 1. Then there’s an internal one, which starts each new year on a birthday, the marker of arriving as an individual in the world. A third one, never quite eliminated, anchors itself on the first day of the school year — for upward of two decades this starts a new cycle and the feeling that, in early September, it’s time to buckle down and “get to work” takes over for years to come.

Then there’s the fourth one, which takes shape this week. The one closest to our hearts and souls, fan or not, because it is tied, unlike any other sport, to the outdoor seasons of our life. Time truly does begin on Opening Day.

“With a dog, and a beer, and the umpire’s call, whaddya got? Let’s Play Ball!“

Two days ago, it was the turn of the Greens, NDP and Bloc; yesterday, the Liberals had their turn. Today, let’s complete the job, by looking at the Conservatives.

The situation for the Conservative Party may not seem as difficult, at first, as I have made the other parties’ situations out to be. They are the Government; they have a reasonable likelihood of continuing to be so. Even if we were to go into an election, they stand a reasonable chance at being returned to office (although not, perhaps, with a majority: Bloc fortunes at the moment seem solid enough to deny many marginal seats that might go Conservative in Québec, and Ontario, according to the polls (especially the Greater Toronto region) remains Liberal country. Without the extremely detailed polls taken by parties that allow seat-by-seat estimations, it is foolish to take any of the national polls — not even Nik Nanos’ work with its superior public track record through the last few tilts at the ballot box — as a seat count indicator. Still, the overall national numbers, and their regional breakdowns, don’t seem to support much of a shift in the seat count from the 2006 results.

Why Should the Conservatives Grow?

And why should growth for the Government have occurred, anyway? Canadians, mostly, don’t spend a lot of time on politics unless an election is on (and about half of us not even then!). For many of those who do vote, voting is a matter of habit: the elector has marked his or her ballot for the same party time after time. Growth in support, then, is more difficult than it looks.

But there are a few things Canadians don’t seem to put up with gladly. One is acting, in office, as though we are all stupid. The other is the sense of “no tomorrows”. Let me explain.

The Finance Minister’s recent blasts at Ontario and its government, for instance, are indicative of the strategy of making people feel stupid. It is, after all, only last fall that Ontarians trooped to their provincial polling places and re-elected the McGuinty Government, and quite solidly, too. There are good reasons to question the wisdom of that judgement — but the fact is that that was the judgement of the voters. (They may have made it for several reasons: John Tory’s failed campaign [plus lingering memories of the stench and decay left in the wake of the Harris and Eves Governments, not all of whose initiatives were good for the province and not all of whose legacy was on a firm footing]; Howard Hampton being at least one election past his best-before date with the electors; and a judgement, on the part of Ontario voters, that Conservative Government in Ottawa is likely to last and a desire to counter-balance it with an opposing Liberal Government in Queen’s Park [a traditional voting pattern in Ontario, supporting years of Liberals in Ottawa during the PC forty-two year dynasty — the Diefenbaker years and the Clark interregnum being less than 20% of the total — and the choice to vote Liberal and NDP when facing the Mulroney PCs in Ottawa, and the "Common Sense Revolution" PCs in Ontario when facing Chrétien's Liberals nationally].)

Whatever the reason, Ontario kept McGuinty in power: rabid, foam-at-the-mouth criticism on an on-going basis insults their intelligence. Is it any wonder there is still no headway being made in that province for the Conservative Party of Canada?

This sort of attack-dog approach has been a constant thread in the Harper régime, whether in public speeches or in the House. Not everything requires high dudgeon and indignation as its first, last and only recourse. Canadians expect a little more maturity from their Ministers and Government members — certainly more than they have been shown to date.

To his credit, in the House, the Prime Minister often comes across as more statesmanlike (certainly by comparison, and often genuinely so). One needn’t always like the message being given, but recognise at least that calm and even tones are a welcome reversal to debate form in an institution now reduced to petty tantrum, schoolyard bullying, the taunt of the day and other childish behaviour. So, too, the Prime Minister on those occasions where he speaks in public: less bluster by far than his opponents, more description and reasoning with the electorate.

Stephen Harper, of course, much like his opponent across the aisle, is well-known not to be a good “mass” people-person. He, too, is a character best served up in small settings, or on the radio: television is not his forte, and neither is the mass meeting, especially with an inability to control the outcome. This is standard introvert behaviour.

Harper has given in to the desire to protect himself from the fray, however, too much — and it is not a trait that is admired. There are reasons to have done so. As we have seen in the past two years, there are elements in the mass media who have prejudged the Harper Government and found it lacking for the mere crime of existing: from CBC reporters feeding questions to MPs to CTV’s general slant on the news, few days have gone by without a subtext of “ohmigod, what idiots Canadians were!”. The MSM, too, plays the contempt card in the face of the voter, more often than not. But, just as a Conservative in Toronto knows better than to expect The Toronto Star to suddenly turn generally supportive of his or her thoughts about things, the effect is often to neutralise the bias. This is why Conservative support has also remained stuck: not going up (because of the sense that the Government really is a one-man show brought about by the way Ministers are used as pit bull terriers and the obvious stand-off that exists between the Prime Minister and the normal interactions with the public and press that the role demands in the twenty-first century mobocratic “political consumer” economy) but not going down because of the obvious and blatant attempts to dismiss, smear, demean and deny the voter recognition for their choices, no matter how much it might disturb the salons of editors, columnists and newsreaders.

Until the Prime Minister opens up his Government, however, he will remain in this box. There were — and possibly are still (we are not privy to Conservative caucus meetings) — reasons to avoid public disruptions that cloud and confuse the on-going task of melding one party from the many strains that make up Conservatives in Canada. Mixing quasi-libertarians, social conservatives, traditional progressive conservatives and those who are tired of Central Canadian preoccupations and dominance of all issues into one coherent body that will stand up for each other rather than tear each other apart is a difficult task, and years of Liberal Government meant forming a Cabinet that needed (in many cases) guidance.

Still, two years on, some of the talent ought to be emerging, and not to attack, but to put forward policy and set the stage for future actions by the Government. This is important: Canadians do wonder if Harper would survive a leadership review by the party were another minority returned — and know he would face one if a coalition of opposing forces controlled the House even if the Conservatives returned with the largest number of seats (such a move would only take political calculation on the part of the Liberals and NDP, plus any Greens that might gain election). It is almost inevitable that continued minority governments will lead to at least informal but solid coalitions emerging. We’re not stupid, and expect it, and so we want to know what the Conservative team looks like, since a Conservative vote is not only for today’s government and leader, but for tomorrow’s potential one as well.

Until and unless Harper can “let go enough”, he and his Government remain stuck where they are, not quite able to command the result they have earned from the past two years’ governance, yet still able to block the emergence of their opponents — which means continued childishness and petulance, threat and submission, etc. Showing adult behaviour when facing little children would go a long way. Does the Prime Minister have it in him to trust the Canadian voter to make an adult decision?

If he does, and he changes his style and the style of his Government accordingly, he should find his long-sought majority.

Yesterday, in the first part of this article, we dealt with the Greens, NDP and Bloc. Today, let’s turn to the Liberals; tomorrow, the Conservatives.

Liberals Cannot Be Led By Reason Alone

In a front-page story this morning, The Globe and Mail discusses the difficulties the Liberals are facing in their Québec wing. “[Dion] has no instinct”, as Liza Frulla, the former Heritage Minister, put it. This may well be true — certainly Stéphane Dion’s shifts between threat, bluster and invective followed by abstentious quiet, his failures in Outremont and Desenthé-Missinippi-Churchill River with appointed candidates, and the general disarray portrayed by various caucus members in their press quotes and blogs over the last fifteen months do suggest a person who is trying, but not succeeding, at marshalling his party and preparing for the challenges of a general election. There are many — including Dion himself — who hold to the thought of “once Canadians get to know him, they will support him”. Alas, after all this time, there is the slight possibility that we have come to know him.

There is little question in my mind but that Dion is an intelligent man. Not only that, but his intelligence is that of academic success and reasoned argument. Those who believe we still need to get to know him base this, I believe, in large measure upon someone who no doubt shines in small settings, able to carry a scintillating conversation over dinner, or (en français) engage in the cut-and-riposte of laying out a position, then dealing with the questions that follow.

Some of the comments heard from Dion over this time — about having a team, listening to caucus and advisors, etc. — are, I believe, genuine. He does expect a reasoned discussion, and, through the processes of reason, a consensus to emerge, which all will then support.

Alas, this is politics, and, unlike another former professor turned cabinet minister before him, Pierre Trudeau, Dion lacks the capability to handle the other sides of politics: the reaching out and mobilising a crowd, the balance between passion about an issue and shrillness about it (in this, he shares the harsh light that also falls on Elizabeth May), and a sense of how to make people work with him and for him, especially people with their own power base, their own agendas and their own ambitions. (Effectively it was only John Turner whom Trudeau could not keep on side [what is it with Finance Ministers and unbridled ambition coupled with a sense of entitlement, whether this be Turner-Trudeau, Martin-Chrétien or Brown-Blair?].)

Whatever is missing remains missing, and is now unlikely to be discovered and put to work.

This says that it is not Dion’s fractured English that is at fault, or the forces of other leadership candidates refusing to do their jobs (in Québec, in particular) or any of the other common thoughts about him. He has, of course, run himself up the flagpole to flutter in the breeze by the policy of election avoidance followed under his leadership, especially in 2008, but most of that is from his attempts to act indignant in Question Period. Poseurs for the cameras are easily exposed in the harsh light of the kleigs as ingenuine: we sense that, whatever Dion is, this is simply an act.

And a bad one, for Dion (unlike Trudeau, or his mentor Chrétien) is unable to suspend his critical thinking and play the role with the wholeness needed to succeed. If we found ourselves wondering at Paul Martin’s use of the “Harper wants troops in Canadian cities” television spot during the 2006 election, we at least could blame his team for it trying to respond to their leader’s need to hold power; Chrétien we would have believed instantly as having designed the spot. But for Dion, we would wonder if it was just another case of the last advisor through the door having bent him in a new direction. This is what a tin ear for political life brings you.

Whether the Liberals decide to bite the bullet and dump Dion now to present a new leader for a 2009 election, or whether they go with him into the next election and, from the Opposition benches again, go through Leadership II afterward, is somewhat irrelevant, for the time has run out. A putsch — and there is little else to call it — would create even deeper fractures in a party already rent by nearly four decades of them. Lose with the new leader, lose with the existing one, the result will no doubt be the same. For the other missing link in Liberal fortunes is the one we might well have expected Dion to have done something about: policy.

Over the years, the Liberal Party has been quite proud of its “big tent”, able to attract both Progressive Conservatives, the odd Reform/Canadian Alliance soul, and New Democrats to join them. There is nothing particularly wrong with the notion of a party able to attract people from other parties: what difference is there, really, between you deciding to give up your existing party membership and take out membership in another, and an MP crossing the floor, save only that your act does not appear in television footage and in the front section of the newspaper as a result? But, starting with Trudeau, policy began to take a back seat. Other initiatives were responses; all that mattered was his constitutional obsession. Turner didn’t have a clear policy, until the opportunity to oppose the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement handed him one: once the 1988 election was lost, the party was again effectively policy-less. The Chrétien-era “Red Books” (aside from mostly being ignored once the election was over) were more policy grab-bags — a little of this, a dash of that — than anything focused and coherent, and the thing we remember his governments most for now (other than scandalous behaviour far beyond anything Dion and company have attempted to dredge up in this Parliament) is curing us of deficit spending and eating into the interest burden of the accumulated national debt, something that was forced on him and did not come out of the much-bally-hooed Livre Rouge. Martin, in turn, had no clear policy — instead, he had hundreds of them, all equally vital and important: in other words, still dipping into the pay-off and grab-bag method, but with no restraint on his words.

The Liberals, in other words, have fallen out of the habit of needing policy. At their Montréal Convention in 2006, they ignored the whole question and shunted it off the agenda: there was a leader to elect! In Liberal thinking, we will respond to the leader, and accept whatever dross and floss he pulls out of his bag of tricks.

This, apparently, is something Dion cannot do. He commissioned, instead, a proper policy review, one that has produced less than nothing in the public eye. As a result, his party is defined by a vacuum: all we have to work with is the acting we see in Question Period.

It is the combination of the core Liberal vote — those people for whom a party choice is not a question (all parties have such a core: where it is distributed across the country defines likely lower bounds for seats if all else fails) — and those who so despise Stephen Harper that Stéphane Dion could eviscerate live kittens at his desk in the Commons and it would not sway them to reconsider their support that hold Liberal polling numbers up today, and it is the complete and utter lack of a coherent vision and policy for consideration that keeps them low.

It takes more than reason to do this. People who opposed Dion’s leadership bid will not fully come on side simply in the name of party unity (this is why even amongst the Liberal blogging community, Jason Cherniak’s exhortations on Dion’s behalf for everyone to sit down, shut up and get on the team are laughed at and pooh-poohed). They commit their hearts to the new leader because the new leader sells them on his future vision.

Alas, “Dion is not a Salesman”. The Liberals are stuck. With it, Canadians are stuck, for a vibrant and coherent Opposition with a positive vision of their own makes for better government, too.

Tomorrow: a look at the Conservatives (who have their own set of issues).

A week has passed since the by-elections of March 17, and in a week Parliament will resume, with the four new MPs being presented in the centre aisle. Already, though, the drum beats of renewed bluff and bluster, storm and fury, and threat upon threat again takes up the airwaves and hectares of highly processed dead tree delivered daily at the door. All that noise — and the speculation of near immediate leadership change and policy change in one or more parties from the pundit gallery.

We return to the possibility of real governance in Canada facing multiple parties hoist high and fluttering in the breeze of their own rhetoric, leaks and ambitions. This faces the Harper Government no less so than those on the other side of the aisle, although it is, perhaps, working its way out differently within the ranks of the Conservatives. Leaving them to the end, then, let’s look at the others:

It Should Have Been “May is Not a Leader”, Perhaps?

After a year of Conservative advertising under the tag line “Dion is Not a Leader”, it would be difficult to use the line elsewhere, if only for fear of being copied. Yet there are numerous circles of thought in Canada today which coalesce around the following: “the Green Party would be worth a look-in were it not for Elizabeth May”.

Goodness knows May has done a number of strange things: having placed second, last time, in London North Centre (and second with a chance of taking the seat in future, not a “second to Bob Rae’s 59%” as in Toronto Centre last week), she has eschewed running there. She struck a bargain with Stéphane Dion (detrimental, certainly, to the Liberals in setting the Green Party up as a viable alternative to the local Liberal — a move that almost cost Joyce Murray her chance to parade next Monday, what with the 3:1 growth of Green votes, mostly from the Liberals, in Vancouver Quadra) to enable her to carry out a quixotic tilt against Peter MacKay in Central Nova, a seat closer to an inheritance than a contest. She could even have sought a seat in one of the four by-elections just held — one of the comments regularly heard in Quadra was “Dan Grice is doing well, but why didn’t May contest this seat: she’d have won and have made it to the Commons”. (Nothing against Grice, mind, simply a recognition that this was a likely opportunity to succeed and that the leader of the party didn’t take it.)

Then there’s the positions she has spoken on, far more Liberal-me-too than charting positive reasons to vote Green.

Come the next election, the battle will be over media time, and participation in the debate. May’s job since the election of 2006 has been to (a) create those positive reasons to look at her party so that (b) the demand to expose the party in the debates would be there (in the newsrooms as much as in the streets) and (c) get a Green into the Commons, much as Reform got Deborah Grey into the Commons. Even one seat makes a difference.

At a time when Canadian politics is showing the early signs of realignment (consider the sheer number of MPs crossing the floor — and winning re-election under their new colours! — this decade) the Green leader had, above all, the responsibility to become a viable destination for those seeking alternatives. In this she has failed.

Jack! Wishes Paul Martin Was Back

Do you recall when Jack Layton became NDP Leader in 2003? Since then, he’s been consistent: he has claimed, over and over again, that the Liberals have moved too far to the right, and that the New Democrats are their successor on the centre-left of Canadian politics. The NDP popular vote has risen in both the 2004 and again in the 2006 general elections. However, there is a huge difference to the NDP in facing a Conservative minority Government and facing a Liberal minority Government, one that Jack Layton has bet everything on — with little to show for it.

Layton’s strategy for the past two-plus years with the Liberals on his side of the aisle has been to try and convince Canadians that the Liberals are not needed. This is, of course, a welcome move from the Harper Government’s perspective: the squeezing of the middle term in the three-party equation by both ends potentially helps lead to a Conservative majority — and, if BC politics (where this squeeze occurred back in the 1950s) is anything to go by, such a squeeze would make the Conservatives the “natural party of government” and the NDP into the strong-yet-almost-never-good-enough “Permanent Opposition”.

The problem Layton’s facing is, despite the reams of truth he dispenses — his party votes against the Government while the Liberals abstain and abstain; his party raises a non-confidence motion against the Government while the Liberals avoid anything so direct; his “Canada’s Effective Opposition” tag line reflects the reality of a Liberal party silenced by its loss, going through a leadership process, then never really settling down after the convention to the task of constructing its own policy positions — the message is fundamentally rejected by the Canadian people and the Canadian media. The media rejects it both because it comes from what, in their book, is generally considered “the filler at the end of the story” (the fundamental story being the horse race between the leading parties and the knifings and back-stabbing potentials within them), and because they know it’s irrelevant: Canadians are often followers of tradition and vote from habit more than from constant consideration of the issues.

Then, too, some elements of NDP policy — even those these are consistent with who the NDP are deep in their roots — don’t sit well with the public. “Out of Afghanistan” may sound noble to many ears, but even many of those (judging by call-in radio) who don’t support being there and don’t want to stay also don’t want to be seen to cut and run. There’s a constant sense that “Working” or “Ordinary Canadians” is code for people who earn less than me: that makes some of the notions on offer seem dangerous, especially since it’s those in that family income between $40,000 and $140,000 range that are feeling stressed, yet feel Jack Layton may be talking about them paying more to transfer to others.

Jack’s best days were when he faced off against Paul Martin, with his sense of entitlement, his wealth, his dithering “all over the mapism” to be exploited (especially in a minority situation), and with the fracture lines the Chrétien-Martin wars dug deep into the Liberal party. None of these face him now with the Harper Conservatives in government. He must either position the NDP squarely with positive attributes and reasons why voters should choose them on their merits, or he will find his party squeezed.

After all, only a few Canadians per hundred spend time thinking about politics between elections. All his actions in the House since 2006 will be dust in the wind once a general campaign is underway.

Anything to Say About the Bloc?

Well, frankly, no. First, I am no expert on Québec and can’t say one way or the other whether Bloc voters are tiring of the game of blocking action in Ottawa rather than being (potentially) a part of it. Second, if Duceppe wasn’t forced out after his dalliance with moving to the PQ (and dashing back to the Bloc within a week) then the post is his regardless of performance, for neither his caucus nor voters (in the three Québec by-elections of 2007) seem disposed to make him the issue.

Tomorrow: the Liberals and the Conservatives.

We don’t go out of our way to teach history. Such “history” as is taught today is really social studies: forcing the peoples of other times and places into a convenient matrix that reinforces current social norms. We’re neither interested in truly exploring other times, nor do we encourage the notion that maybe, in difference, there is something to be learned, nor the idea that perhaps to take this step forward, society also took a different step backward.

Know Where You Come From …

Western society today is anything but monolithic when it comes to religious belief — the Protestant revolution, scientism in the nineteenth century and a feeling of guilt surrounding autochthonous and immigrant communities saw to that — but the reality is that if you look back to 1000 CE you find, in the West, a compact, unified, Latin Catholic society. These are our ancestors: projects such as the combined National Geographic/IBM genographic project are demonstrating the concentration of genetic paths in Western society, not just in Europe but in the settler communities of the Americas, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. We — mostly — remain within our compact society to this day.

I bring up religion because of an experience I had in 1991. On the Côte d’Azur for the first time, my family and I made our way to a little Provençal hill village — Mougins — for a late lunch. After a fine meal on the square, we wandered across to the Church on the other side and pulled open the door. A millennium of must, dust, soot (from the candles) and the stink of people over the centuries rolled over us. (This is why I had come!)

The building was in the oldest style of Western architecture, when the West was first starting to set its own style. (This style — Romanesque — spread almost as wildfire across Europe in the space of a few decades.) This church betrayed both the recent occupation of the area by the forces of the Caliphate and the older Levantine Latin Orthodoxy that preceded the long transformation of the Western Church: it remained a “world cave” of the Levant, common to Orthodox, Monophysite and Nestorian Christians, Jews and the residual Samaritans, Muslims, Zoroastrians and Parsees, and the like, where the building is all interior (the outside merely creates the cave but is not really worthy of decoration, and windows are small, merely to allow a little light in, but not to illuminate the space). Yet the West can be seen: the ceiling was not rounded, to close the space in, but peaked and drew upward to the infinite; the interior designs drew the eye up; even in the stonework images of men, angels and the Lord appear, the graven images forbidden in the Levant and replaced by iconostases and geometric designs. This was a poor church, and had been from its creation — but it spoke to the birth of a new people. In only a century more, the foundations of generations-long projects to build soaring cathedrals would be laid.

Look how much is embedded in this simple description: comparative art and architecture, the sense of self of a people, theological history, style, substance and passion, comparisons to others who were not of this society, even though from one generation to the next, in this part of the world, Latin (as it evolved into Provençal, Savoyard and the language of the oc, then was taken over by the langue d’oil of French and the Italian dialect spoken there only 150 years ago was pushed out through centralized education) has never been lost: one generation has always understood the previous and the next. Yet the presumptions of Classical Rome in its Latin, of Levantine Orthodoxy in the Latin of, say, a St. Augustine or a St. Benedict, and of Western Mediaeval Latin are as different as night and day: each is part of a self-contained society.

For those of the Renaissance to throw away the learning of the High Mediaeval — that of our society — in favour of the works of Classical Rome simply because Cicero and his kin never said ego habeo factum and instead used feci was a ridiculous loss and rejection of self, especially since that assertion of the self and the worth of the person is part of what makes the West the West. But from then to now our society remains riven by currents of denying what it is, what makes it unique, valuable and (from time to time) great, and therefore why doing what is needful to preserve it rather than changing just anything and everything on a whim is wrong, and so the rear guard of those who would conserve the West — true Tories, one and all — against the leftward drift of liberalism continues.

… and Where You Are Going

So much political and economic writing — goodness knows, I’ve contributed my own share of it! — leaves the historical in the dust. Liberalism or leftism (at the time of the French Revolution the two would have been synonymous) is resolutely anti-historical: all that matters is the current situation, and there are no restraints other than the practical (not enough tolerance for debt “right now”, or too many other things pressing on us “right now”) placed on change.

Yet what that says is that we — and other peoples from other civilisations — are all fungible and malleable; that someone’s traditions are folklore and easily discarded. It is certainly true that individuals who emigrate and settle in the lands of a civilisation not their own by heritage can and do acculturate, often, after two or three generations, to the point where they have accepted their new home and its traditions not only as their own, but, in a peculiar sense, as their heritage. (It is what the French do with their process of educating future citizens, either in school or to prepare to take the citizenship test: one reaches a point where one can say, without irony, “Our ancestors, the Gauls”.)

Acculturation and blending in — the Diefenbakerian “unhyphenated Canadian” motif in our own national life — is one thing at an individual level. But, as George Grant, the Canadian Tory philosopher, noted, our love of the good, the true and the beautiful is rooted in love of self, of immediate family, of friends, of community, of nation … and thus of society. To reject the West and its traditions, then, is to demonstrate a lack of love for who you are. Philosophers have noted that you can have “love for the amorphous” (a “love of all humanity”, for instance), but only at the price of denying love for yourself as you are, love for friends and family, love for your community, etc.

To reach the amorphous, one must deny history. This is best done by removing it from serious study: burying it in scholastic detail where it is taught (universities), turning it into social studies (or removing it from the curriculum altogether) in the schools, treating questions of whether to preserve past buildings and existing inefficiencies in the urban fabric as an economic decision, etc. Thus we have our society as it exists today, with no concern for its past — or its future (witness that we have known since the 1970s [US President Carter was reviled for pointing it out!] that the days we are now coming into were inevitable, yet we continued to build as though tomorrow would not come).

Only through learning history fully will we find our way out and prosper again.

We stand at the brink of a great change. It is not given to every generation to face a major shift; we are facing several piled one on top of the other. The times ahead will be confusing, difficult, and more than ever each of us will be called to keep our reason intact and to act virtuously.

The End of an Economic Model

Carroll Quigley, in The Evolution of Civilizations, speaks of what allows a civilization to avoid terminal decline. In it, he points out that the West has had three different economic models, the first two of which ran their course and ossified into a degenerate form that was taking Western civilization onto the path of decline, but which were wrenched out and into a new growth path, revitalizing our culture. The third, industrial capitalism, ran its course around the same time he wrote this book, and degenerated in the 1970s — a period, as John Ralston Saul noted in Voltaire’s Bastards, and The Unconscious Civilization, is an economic disruption akin to a low-grade depression. It was replaced by its degenerate form, which has ossified and forced the West again into decline, of finance capitalism, which is now being exposed as a web of treachery, scam and deceit, such as Karl Denninger has reported in his “Market Ticker” on a near-daily basis.

Finance capitalism has (as with many things) been neither an unalloyed evil nor an unalloyed good. It has led us into massive personal debt, an expectation of ever-rising asset values in the face of all experience, an implicit Marxism of bailout expectation (21.03.2008 posting, “Bailout Nation”, subscription required)as posted by Bill Fleckenstein at his Fleckenstein Capital blog, and as in his new book, Greenspan’s Bubbles: The Age of Ignorance at the Federal Reserve, or in the works of William Bonner (Financial Reckoning Day, Empire of Debt and Mobs, Messiahs and Markets, amongst others. We, in other words, have our backs against the wall, and expect someone else to pay to “make us whole”.

Is this not what someone like Garth Turner, MP (Lib.-Halton), has been warning of? Forget, for a moment, whether this is a story being “spun” for partisan advantage or not — even as a rowboat goes over the high waterfall and is in flight down to the rocks of the whirlpool below there will be those who tell the story in one way or another for a temporary advantage. Listen to the roar: around that bend, the water falls. We are on our way over the edge.

The End of Cheap Energy

Take a look at how we build cities: endless kilometres of sprawl over the countryside. As James Howard Kunstler noted in The Geography of Nowhere, Home from Nowhere, and The Long Emergency, we have built out a continental infrastructure that is wholly and completely based upon ubiquitous, cheap energy. Some locales may well do better than others if energy is less regularly available, less affordable, etc., as Kunstler noted in The City in Mind. None, though, will be untouched.

Canadians may not think much about energy availability: “aren’t we the great petro-power of the future?” Well, yes, we have substantial stocks of expensive-to-extract energy left. We needn’t — NAFTA claims aside — be left immobile and freezing in the dark for want of energy in a world where it is in decline. But it will not continue to be cheap. From Matthew Simmons, the West’s foremost oil economist, to Kenneth Deffeyes, leading petroleum geologist and expert on the question of peak supply conditions, to Paul Roberts, observers from all sides of the political spectrum conclude the same thing: we are experiencing the oil peak now. (Similar conclusions exist for natural gas, which is post-peak in North America.) In other words, from here on in, we are at supply limits that manifest themselves in two ways: rising prices as the available supply is matched, via the price mechanism, to the demand which, in exceeding it, is brought into conformance by raising the stakes and having some bidders choose not to play, and at a now-declining output, which reinforces this mechanism without let-up: a return to the supply shocks of 1973 and 1979, but this time without a “return to normal”.

The suburbs, the mall culture, the endless driving for everything, the not-in-my-backyard-ism of modern society: all of this is unaffordable. Ultimately, this cannot be patched (for instance, by allowing basement suites, granny flats, and adding transit services). We will need to make choices about where to concentrate — recall the interurban rail lines spreading out from cities, the “heavy streetcars” of their day, and how all development was within 300-400 m of a stop, the distance a person, loaded with bags, could handle on foot. Much of suburbia and exurbia will end up being abandoned, and mined for resources: this will be the slum clearance of 2030-2050 and beyond.

The End of the Pax Americana

Although I may, with ease, recall the fear of annihilation that pervaded the early 1960s, what with the building of the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the like, we have in fact, whether in North America, in Western Europe or in the Antipodes, benefitted immensely from the long “peace” of the Cold War and the post-Soviet Union collapse period of the 1990s and early 2000s. American predominance, and its projection of power (there are nearly 800 American bases overseas, and the United States is the only world power able to project itself within days in force anywhere on the planet), has allowed the rest of the West to “coast”.

This is coming to an end as well. We in the West — Canadians, Australians, British, French, etc. — have, of course, been called upon to act on the ground in recent years in multiple theatres. That is because, as Thomas P. M. Barnett pointed out in The Pentagon’s New Map, military capabilities today fall into two classes: those that can quickly dispatch an enemy, and those that, over a long period of time, pacify the conquered, settle it, restore civil order, train their replacements, etc. (much as with Canada’s role in Kandahar). Most countries can afford only one military, and this is the one that is chosen; a very few can aspire to the one that can conquer a theatre half-way around the planet in a few days.

But a military capable of bringing relative peace to the planet depends on mass logistics, chief amongst which are cheap energy and sound government finances. The United States — as with the rest of us — is losing the first, and does not have the second. They have not gone through the wrenching adjustments needed to ground public finance into the realm of the affordable — an exercise Canadians will again have to go through as this combination of effects bears its weight upon government revenues and expenditures (at the same time that the demographic transition of the baby boomer generation hitting prime medical-care years hits) — and as Washington’s failing financial regime finally comes to grips with reality (either through the destruction of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency, sanity reigning in Congress and the White House, or both) the US’s forward presence and massive fleet and air force capabilities that lead to effective global policing will end. As with Britain (when it went through its successive waves of retreat from the world in the face of its “imperial overstretch”, as Paul Kennedy dubbed it in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers a decade ago, so, too, America.

Couple that with the fact that, in the twenty-first century, the advantage is to the defender, not the attacker, as outlined in the megapolitical analyses of James Dale Davidson and Sir William Rees-Mogg, Blood in the Streets and The Great Reckoning (two books whose investment advice was only spottily correct but whose historical and megapolitical analyses were prescient). This does not just mean that jihadis and terrorists can run amok, and that suicide bombers will be a fact of life. It means that there will be thrust and counter-thrust as the eternal game of great power jockeying takes place — and that continental-scale countries will ultimately fall apart.

What to Do?

In the one sense, there is little “to do”, other than at the personal level. We may yet create a fourth method of economic vitality — the West is near unique in its ability to do this, historically — but in the span of our lifetimes we must live through the unsettling of society brought about by the choices we made as a society in the twentieth century. Personally, one can choose to live more locally, and more lightly, upon the land — the only sane answer to $200 … $300 … $400 per barrel oil (and similar increases in petrol, natural gas, and electricity prices) is to equip oneself to use far less of it, both directly and indirectly in the food and product choices that one makes. If the potential for violence is increasing, one can move to areas of lower potential for it.

But the world we grew up in, and that the promise of our RRSPs, our investments, and our governments, is coming to an end. It will be a time of great turmoil and disruption, and of reinvention, simultaneously.

There is one thing you can be sure of, though: no one currently in a leading role in politics has any answers for this. The future will come from new leaders, willing to see the world as it is and not through ideologically-blinkered eyes. As, of course, will it come to those who shed these blinders personally, as well.