Worth the Fee to Read It

Twenty years ago, I first came across the notion of megapolitical analysis in James Dale Davidson & Sir William Rees-Mogg’s book Blood in the Streets. A megapolitical analysis tries to get up above events and see the larger pattern that exists. Assuming you’ve done your analysis correctly, what you’re looking at is the structural situation.

An example may help. In the late 1800s, Western nations had the machine-gun (whose efficacy had been proven in the American Civil War and confirmed in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871) and other cultures did not. When the British, for instance, tired of raids by the Dervishes from Sudan into their Egyptian protectorate, they sent a single river gunship up the Nile. The Dervish leader assembled 10,000 of the famed “Whirling Dervishes” — owners of a feared technique for sword fighting that gave them the mobility of a sole fencer and the ability to defend each other that the ancient Roman phalanx structure had given the Legions. From the deck of the gun ship a machine-gunner opened fire — and kept firing. 10,000 Dervishes went a-whirling to their deaths. The British nursed their sunburns and that was that.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, therefore, offensive weaponry like the machine-gun would win the day over any pre-automatic weaponry. A megapolitician would have concluded that Africa and Asia were to experience their almost complete colonisation by Europeans — and they would have been right.

Compare that to 1979, when the former Soviet Union moved into Afghanistan, and discovered that 50,000,000 ruble MiGs could be shot out of the sky by a lone Pashtun or Taliban soldier with an AK-47. Today, the projection of force requires highly expensive weaponry and sophisticated command and communications structures; the defence can work cheaply and melt into the hills/bushes/jungle as needed. Today, a megapolitician would say, again with confidence, that the cost of projecting force against an enemy who only needs to wear you down to make you go away (and thus, win) means not only that colonisation is at an end, but also the ability to “settle” a restive periphery. Today we live with the raids; we can’t “go upstream and settle the matter”. (Yes, as Thomas P. M. Barnett pointed out in The Pentagon’s New Map, the US military has the ability to project force (almost uniquely today) and “smash” any region they choose to in a period of a few weeks — but they lack the ability to pacify it, to establish a new stable order, or to make the “smash” deliver the results they seek. Nor can anyone else. The best we can do is tie up those who would take the battle to us in their homes — but we can’t “win and go home”. To go home, we must admit defeat and leave, tail between our legs.

For the projection of force has become affordable and practical for anyone — and so the advantage is to the nimble defender who knows local ground.

Countries of small scale can be held together more easily than those of larger scale: it is easier to project the necessary force across a smaller distance, allowing efforts to be concentrated. As we saw with the end of the former Soviet Union — the last of the great European empires to “come apart” — the effects of different cultures spread across a large land mass and the difficulty in projecting power in a collapsing economy forced the Union apart. The resulting Russian Federation has been plagued by insurrectionist movements since — not to mention worries about losing Siberia to surreptitious Chinese migration (which reminds me deeply of the individual settlers dashing into the West Bank following the 1967 Six-Day War from Israel and planting themselves there: not government policy, but a “situation on the ground” being created by individuals that then leads to government action for a long time to come).

We sit here, in Canada, in the United States, in Australia, and we think “it can’t happen here”. But it will — two decades from now, I doubt any of these countries will have survived intact.

Holding a continental-scale country together is — as it was for the Roman Empire (and many other large human enterprises in history) — a challenge of maintaining growth. Technologies that speed transit times (to allow for sudden power projection: ask Louis Riel and his fellows if they expected the CPR to deliver the Militia quite so quickly and effectively!), and speed commerce; an economic engine for growth; access to affordable resources in growing amounts to deal with a growing population: these are the tools (others are analogues to them) to hold a large scale anything together.

Once the engine of economic growth falters, it must be restarted on a new and viable footing, or it decays into a period of milking the past and exploiting it for ever-more concentrated gain. Once new technologies that add speed and ease of movement cease to be invented — and cease to be invested in — those who would tear the territory apart have time to figure out how to deal with what is now a “static opponent”. Once resources are no longer easy to exploit or cheap to extract/purchase, every projection of power becomes an economic calculation (”do we really need to intervene here, or should we hope this problem solves itself and save what we have for another, worse situation?”). Eventually, increasing costs of energy, transport and materials, and the milking of a dead economic model, means that the battle goes to those who would impose an “iron hand” and “control waste”. Roman Senators give way to Emperors, who give way to a civil war for control of the seat of Augustus — until the Empire is no more (transformed into a religious state in the East, and sunk into the Dark Ages in the West). Long before, the ability to deal with issues at the periphery had meant just letting it go its own way.

Where we are today, of course, is well advanced into the decay of our economic engine that served us well from the 1770s through to 1973: industrial production. Today we offshore the production and focus on manipulating symbols: increased investment in legal trickery, tribunal “justice”, obscure financial instruments, mergers & acquisitions, downsizing and country-shifting to squeeze a little more lucre out of a stable enterprise … the list is long. That it has blown up into a huge balloon that must now wreak its destruction on what’s left of the middle class and productive enterprise is no surprise: indeed, as Schumpeter noted, it’s necessary to remove the old to create the new. A class of courtiers, fixers, manipulators and money men instead decided to establish a rentier culture, cream off the wealth for themselves, and not let their “cash cows” be displaced. (Chrysler, for instance, should have died in 1980; instead it has continued to destroy wealth and future prosperity for another 28 years.)

Add to this ever-more expensive energy — and its concomitant, food — a political class that meddles incessantly — and the stage is set for regional rebellion.

Eventually those that are constantly milked to keep the dying lands alive a little longer will say “enough”. Eventually the cities will decide the interior towns don’t matter. Eventually the three time zones from Ottawa to the Pacific shore will loom so large that the relationship will be seen as pseudo-colonial. A Newfoundland with wealth will ask why it does not reassume its former independent Dominion status. It will then take only the neo-Feudalists to arise and declare “order” over small territories and the splits become real.

Western Australia has nursed grudges and felt ignored and milked for nearly 80 years: now it is the sole part of the Australian economy that supports all the rest. Washington, Oregon and California find Washington unresponsive to their needs and far too far away — meanwhile the Inland Empire of Washington State can’t fathom those around Puget Sound (and the same, too, as you go down the coast: it is the same division you find in BC and Alaska). So when the fracturing begins, it will carry down deeply: a province or state might declare unilateral changes in its relationship to the nation, but it will take but a few months before it, too, starts to come apart at the seams. (To see some of the seam lines, read Joel Garreau’s The Nine Nations of North America.)

When the centre no longer holds, life, which has gotten harder and continues to do so, will suddenly get very much harder. Energy will be expensive; we won’t travel freely. We will be back to eating with the seasons and what is available locally. Democracy will likely fail, to be replaced by overt despots. The world will suddenly have 300+ … 400+ … 500+ “countries” (few of whom will worry about affording diplomats in very many places).

Megapolitically, all the things that consume us today in politics, sport, entertainment and scandal will seem very unimportant and very far away.

I take no joy in saying these things. But they should be discussed. Only by doing so do we hold onto Carroll Quigley’s hope, in The Evolution of Civilizations,, that once again we in the West will reinvent ourselves and prosper again. Waiting until the crisis is upon us will give up the one major advantage we still have — scale — to work to give new means and methods room to breathe.

Lawrence Martin, in his column in this morning’s Globe and Mail, raised the notion that the economy is slipping into stagflation (I agree) and then that the Harper Government would “miss the revenue” it “gave up” through the GST rate cuts. He may well be right that the Conservatives will miss that revenue: goodness knows, they’ve acted far more like bloody Liberals than Conservatives in office, spending like drunken sailors with no clear purposes, no vision, emerging. But I profoundly disagree with the notion that underlies Martin’s thought, which is that the problem with stagflation is a lack of revenue with which to intervene in the economy to “right matters”.

Let’s state my thesis clearly: it’s not the Government’s money; it’s mine.

I am not an anarchist: there are proper functions for government and I have no objection to paying my taxes for them. Nor do I have an objection to government taking on a visionary capital investment programme — akin to Macdonald’s building of the Canadian Pacific, or Laurier’s building of the National Transcontinental — that leave us with a legacy of much-needed infrastructure.

I am, sorry to say, deeply opposed to what are in essence handout programmes that expend operating monies year after year without end: there may well be a need for one of these from time to time, but the case must be made — and the case to continue them must also be made. If I could but wave a magic wand and make one change in the country, it would be to automatically attach sunset provisions to each and every spending programme put forward at all levels of government, forcing politicians to pass them, again and again, in order to continue them. Many, I daresay, would fail to get support the third, fourth or fifth time around: new ideas would almost require the weeding out of old, stale efforts.

(Any programme that achieved 96% of its “total mandate”, for instance, qualifies as “stale”. Pareto’s Law states that the first 20% of the effort will produce 80% of the final results. Two “Pareto cycles” and 96% of the mandate is accomplished [80% + 80% of the residual 20%]. Everything after that plays to deeply diminished returns, and costs at least as much, if not more.)

So, Mr. Martin, if you’re worried about stagflation (the combination of declining economic activity with price inflation) — and I am; the Bank of Canada, with its two rate cuts this year, has practically guaranteed it — the issue is not “whether the government will regret limiting its revenues”. The issue is “what are they going to stop doing in order to find money for whatever programmes they think will ameliorate the pain of stagflation”.

Do we need, for instance, to be funding sports? Why? So that we can afford to play the “undetectable chemical athletic process” that international competitions are laced with? So Canada actually sends true amateurs — who are not people funded by the public purse to pursue medals but people who arrange their own funding to pursue their own excellence — and fails to come home with a bag-full of gold, silver and bronze? The world will not topple from its foundations because we don’t play the drug game with the Chinese, the Americans, the Russians, and all the rest.

Do we need to drop billions into Industry Canada and its affiliated agencies to dispense as largesse across the country? Do we need to turn people into courtiers for a dollop of money from the regional economic expansion agencies? Do we need to fund ever more police-state-like tribunals, status-granting agencies and their kin? I say: you want money, there’s lots of it hiding here. Shut them down and use the cash elsewhere.

Indeed, even on a good day 20¢ out of every $1.00 sent to Ottawa goes into paying the people who administer and deliver programmes. Every programme that is terminated outright — delivery stopped, delivery and administration and policy staff removed from the public payroll, money reclaimed from the relevant spending envelope — generates less spending on overhead. Turn that money back to those of us whose property it is and it’s worth $1.20 per dollar in our pockets.

After all, my overhead, and your overhead, to find ways to do these things (if they matter to us) is far, far less than 20%. Don’t believe me? Ask what the overhead for the child care payments is versus what the overhead would have been for “national day care”. (Check Québec’s experience to determine this.)

There are those, of course, who would say that some “vital interest” or other would be starved or left undone if this type of thinking became pervasive. Sorry, I’m not buying it. Take a look at old Hong Kong, with its 15% government take (compare that to the numbers on your tax return, since April 30 is but two days away!) — an incredibly prosperous community that, somehow, managed just fine (before the Peoples’ Republic regained control in 1997, at any rate). The old Hong Kong colonial government set priorities based on its means, which were kept low (short on resources that could be sold off to close the gap, they were acutely aware that money in the hands of Hong Kong’s citizens was the only economic asset the city had.

Of course, the notion that I might tend to my own affairs and have to be responsible for my own decisions scares so many people, who would prefer to be coddled, cradle-to-grave, no matter what the cost in lost opportunity. But here’s the thing: the standard of living in real terms — not the nominal terms of ever-less-valuable fiat currency systematically ruined by governments and central banks around the world — stopped growing in 1973, right when “stagflation” first reared its ugly head. If the long boom of 1982-2007 couldn’t deliver a real improvement in standards of living (for, remember, in 1973 most families were single-income, drove new vehicles that they paid for in three years or less, had mortgages of 25 year amortization or less, were eating better [more imported food, more and better cuts of meat] — compare that to today’s situation), then this next lengthy period of downturn will eat further into Canadian standards of living.

We will all be much poorer, in other words. Stop taking so much of our money!

Remember, those of you who say that without high taxation — and for the middle class no G-7 country hits its pocketbook harder than Canada, its provinces and municipalities do — no great visionary programmes to build the country or relieve suffering could be undertaken, that when Canada was a brand new nation it took on the building of a transcontinental rail line, on a Federal Government tax and tariff base that amounted to 3±1%! (Provinces barely had budgets compared to today: all those Section 92 responsibilities were provincial in large measure because the public looked after them themselves.)

So we can afford grand infrastructure. We can afford our social safety net, too (but we have to be willing to entertain some hard truths about its costs, and how we deal with demand in an era of restrained supply of funds). We simply need to make choices.

In the first paragraph I decried the Harper Government’s failure in this arena. To those who believe, as Tom Flanagan (judging from his piece in the Globe and Mail last fall), that triangulation to the left is how Conservative majorities will be elected, what Harper & Co. have done is not a failure, but a successful positioning for future power. The skirmishes erupting on various blogs between those who hold to “my party, right or wrong” and those who expected better from a Conservative Government indicate the depth of disagreement that is emerging around this.

So, let’s force the issue. My word to any politician who bangs on my (virtual) door? “We want you cut to 20% maximum. Now, do your job within that.” (The Netherlands has a system like this: on your tax return, if the total of all taxes paid to all levels of government, including VAT, plus fees and charges to all agencies, exceeds 67.5% of your income, you cap your tax so that you do not pay (in total) more than 67.5%. The number is horrendously high — which explains much about the Dutch economy’s structural issues — but the idea is sound.)

With such a cap, parties would be forced to campaign in one of two ways. First, to adjust the cap itself — which makes the “the Government graciously allows you to keep this much this year” crowd stand up and be counted. The second is to prioritise, focus, and make programmes work — because there isn’t enough to do otherwise.

The parties would start to differ on what they would do within a limit rather than being able to simply promise, promise, promise. All that extra money in the hands of Canadians would deal with stagflation — and provide resources for entrepreneurial activity to create a 21st century economy in this country “from the ground up”, not from the “successful grant application downward”.

Not that I’m religious, but even the Deity didn’t ask for a tithe beyond 10%. I’ll grant a transitional 20% as we have a nation of recovering addicts — people who think there really is “something for nothing” — who need to go through detox for a few years. But even at 20%, we’d finally fulfil Laurier’s “the twentieth century belongs to Canada”. A century late, perhaps, but certainly on a sustainable foundation (which depending on rising commodity prices due to supply shortfalls globally isn’t).

I’ve chosen the Canada I want to see, the BC I want to see, the Vancouver I want to see. Now: who wants my support? For the price tag of failing to ultimately come to grips with this is that people like me up and leave rather than pay, pay, pay. (After all, were I to go abroad again, it would be for the third — and last — time, and this time I would be looking to take out citizenship where I land.)

Where do you stand?

The Red Tory in me knows that there are times and places for Government to be the institution that mobilises resources for a large-scale common good. Most Government programmes, however, do not pass this test: they are simple transfers of wealth from the majority of us to a minority of us. These must go! — for choices will increasingly need to be made.

If there is one thing that the Chrétien, Martin and now Harper years have demonstrated, it is a singular lack of vision. Give Trudeau and Mulroney their due: both were fixated on what the business world calls “big hairy audacious goals”. Whether we have benefitted as a nation by these obsessions is not the subject for today. Both of these former Prime Ministers wanted to accomplish their goals; they subordinated much else to these (which means there is no shortage of real criticism possible for their years in power), and ultimately both finished as permanently unelectable despite their legions of adoring fans who to this day gladly defend them. (Proof of the assertion that Trudeau and Mulroney had visionary goals and drove toward them is that Clark, Turner and Campbell simply disappear from view, as those in the shadows often do.)

Chrétien (I must be in a charitable mood today) ran a government driven by reacting to events. The deficit and accumulated debt hit the point of unsustainability? Oh, well, I guess we’ll do something about it. Québec came within 0.5% of a referendum result to chart a course toward independence? Oh, well, I guess we’ll do something about it. So it went with Chrétien: a long list of promises, seldom kept, and a pattern of letting events unfold. His years in office were ultimately about le p’tit gars being in office.

Martin, too, suffered from “I’m here because I’m here” syndrome, typified by his penchant for everything being a top priority (and therefore nothing other than surviving at the top of the dung hill for another day was a priority). When he asked us, in his last election battle, to “Choose Your Canada”, we did. We wanted one with some sense of vision and purpose.

Alas, despite a good start — and a decent track record of “things done” — the Harper Government has also failed dismally to articulate a vision and a reason for its existence, beyond “it’s not the other guys”. I tend to support the Conservative Government, but not reflexively: I do believe we need (as a nation) to regenerate the Liberal Party after years of neglect and mismanagement under Trudeau, Turner, Chrétien, Martin and Dion. They must seriously rethink their purpose. Policy must be more than a book of line items: where is the overarching vision? What elements of our past must we now move away from; which should be the centrepiece of what is brought forward? None of this is being done; until it is, my view as an elector is “anyone but a Liberal”. Enough of tactics and expediency!

That, of course, is the message I would give Mr. Harper, too. “Enough of tactics and expediency!” I would, for instance, have hoped for a healthy dose of fiscal conservativism, grounded in the notion that tax monies are our monies, not “the Government’s”, and should be minimised to return them to their rightful owners. As with, for instance, the whole day care plan issue: “here’s money; you decide how best to use it” rather than “here’s your program and you’ll learn to love it”. (Even better, of course, would be “we’re cutting taxes here so that you can decide if day care is one of your priorities” — no money in, no cheque out — but it will take a very long time to wean Canadian lips from the teat of the State.)

We haven’t had a vision. We’ve had one tactical manoeuvre after another, designed to appeal to this or that, or to get a credit with some small voting bloc for this or that, but we haven’t had a vision.

Within the Conservative Party, of course, there are those with a vision. Some of these have visions I do not support; indeed, actively oppose. That’s all right, because national political parties capable of reaching Government must, of necessity, be big tents: there will be no shortage of people with whom to disagree, even abhor, from time to time. The question is “is this a side note to a vision of the party tout court, or is it what passes for the party’s vision in the absence of having laid one out”? Harper’s Government is perilously close to having its minority views substitute for a vision due to the lack of one.

Despite having had my dalliances over the years with other alternatives — and I do think that if the NDP were to get the stick out and acquire a real vision it might do well enough to actually contend for government rather than for “Best Opposer, 20xx” — I come back to my conservative roots and thus the Conservative Party in its various incarnations over the years because, often, their tactics in the absence of vision are closer to my own views than others. The lack of vision, however, rots this at its core. Expedient actions and tactical manoeuvres don’t add up to anything other than “return me to office” — and in the meantime burden Canada with yet more reasons not to get up off its collective ass, turn the idiot box off, and fend for itself.

We’re going to have to learn again how to do that. Big Government, big programmes, massive transfers are all creations of cheap energy. Cheap energy is going, going, gone, never to return. With its passing into history, the “big structures” it created: massive corporations, national-scale unions, and huge government bureaucracies, are all going to find themselves also headed toward the rubbish tip of history.

A Canadian Conservative Government of vision would be starting to position us for exactly that. It would dismantle programmes of little merit. It would transition us out of them in the way that the pending debacle of “national day care” would have immobilised the country’s wealth and future growth was transitioned away from: most people are much happier with their cheque than with a programme. Then a tax cut can clean up the cheques. Putting resources where they belong — generally as close to the coalface of decision-making as possible — is a sound application of the principle of subsidiarity.

So, too, getting out of the way of the provinces: our provinces should be laboratories for public policy. They ought not only to reflect local conditions and local affordability, they ought to be able to experiment with “what is enough” and “how to do this” in their own domains.

In the meantime, there are elements of national infrastructure in need of repair. A dependence upon road traffic must come to an end: we must invest in alternatives. A mass investment programme of that nature — to be done in a short period of time — is a proper use of government (and then you get out of the business as the economics of operation start to change).

A vision of a sustainable Canada whose prosperity is not based on incessant “growth” obtained by strip-mining the world’s affordable resources could very well be a vision for 21st century Conservativism. But it won’t happen if the Conservative Party doesn’t stop mucking about with tactical voting bloc slicing and marginal riding dicing and instead lay out an integrated vision.

Right now no party offers that sort of visionary umbrella and a set of integrated policy proposals to put meat on the vision’s bones. A free prediction: those that do so first will benefit greatly at the polls (and electoral turnout will jump upwards at that election).

You would change Canada so Canadians stop whingeing and waiting for “Government to do something”? You would make us a centre-right nation rather than a centre-left nation? Where’s the vision to rally the country around?

We are who we are because a string of leftist leaders did exactly that. One of them — Pearson — even did so through two minority governments, and “scandals” far more invasive to his agenda than anything being raised in Ottawa today. All it took was vision, and the courage to stake everything on selling that vision.

Do you have what it takes, Mr. Harper?

Yesterday, in accordance with practically everyone’s expectations and often their desires, the Bank of Canada lowered interest rates in this country by fifty basis points. The markets had certainly expected this move, for the exchange rate of the dollar barely moved (but then, it’s most tightly coupled with the price of oil these days, even if the US Senate thinks passing legislation that stop the US from importing half of the oil they do every day from Canada because they don’t like its oil sands source (and all the attendant ecological issues surrounding it) is a wise move. It’s not, of course — we are the Americans’ largest single source of petroleum; allowed to stand, fuel in the US would skyrocket to over US$5.00 per US gallon in the wake of rationing line-ups as in the 1970s. (Mind you, it would reset the NAFTA targets for minimum amount to export, something we might be thankful for a few years from now. But it won’t stand; it’s so destructively stupid that it won’t become law.)

50 basis points! The Bank of Canada almost never moves in chunks that large. The fear, of course, is for Central Canada, which they perceive as being in trouble. Which, I suppose, there’s some concern for. Mind you, a lot of that trouble can be laid directly at the feet of the US Department of Homeland Security and their asinine approach to cross-border commerce, and another chunk of it - a goodly one - at the speed and depth of the collapsing economy in the United States. With an insolvent banking system, even the debts of solid corporations get called, credit lines get cancelled, and business freezes up. There’s nothing this rate cut does to mitigate any of those causes of distress, but you wouldn’t know it for the cheering section’s noise.

What it does do across the country, of course, is pump a little more air into the leaking balloon that was the housing bubble, by lowering the cost of money. It also makes savings a pathetic choice, which will see even more free cash swept up into our own version of high-risk mortgage lending: yesterday, at a North Vancouver Starbucks, while I spent two hours using the WiFi for research before a meeting, no less than six transactions went on around me of younger couples putting their savings into one mortgage pool or another. Good luck with that.

Good heavens, VanCity (the “big bank” around here, even though it’s a credit union) already paid a higher interest rate on a particular type of ordinary savings account — not even a term deposit — than the previous Bank of Canada rate. That’s what it took to attract deposits, for without deposits there is no fractional reserve banking, no multiplication of money by lending it out five or six times on the strength on one deposit. In essence their rates to borrow had to stay higher than what they need to pay out to attract the base from which to work. Now that the Bank of Canada rate is 0.5% lower, will it move their rates? Or will the system stay right where it is — maybe even see lending rates rise to make ends meet and cover risk? — because liquidity is poor already?

Your guess is as good as mine. But, hey! What a feel good factor, eh?

Of course, this is precisely the wrong interest rate policy for Western Canada, whose economies continue to boil along, with shop windows filled with “Help Wanted” signs and ever-escalating real estate prices even if the transaction rate slowed a bit this winter. (How much of that is the normal winter slowdown no one’s saying: we’ve become used to the idea that each and every month should see “growth”.) In essence, a roaring fire in the West has just had another tanker truck or six of kerosene dumped on it.

What goes up, must eventually come down. Great differentials do not persist without fundamental reasons, and although resources have been a powerful reason for the health of the West that doesn’t keep housing stock high, high, high in the sky on its own, nor does it support the notion of minimum wage rates as “just a suggestion” (because no one will take a job for so little money with costs rising like mad). None of it, anywhere in this land, deals with food inflation, rocketing onward at 20-30% and with real shortages emerging in staples (tried to buy any white rice, other than the hyper-processed Minute Rice or Uncle Ben’s lately?), or fuel inflation (premium is about to hit $1.40/litre, and regular is at $1.27.6 this morning), or escalating taxes, or escalating utility costs…

We who live in Canada’s new economic engine need what the Australians have been getting: not rate reductions, but rate rises, to dampen down the fervour and create an updraft in the currency exchange rate to offset the commodity price increases driven by global demand and ever-shortening supply. Of course, Australia is lucky: it doesn’t have a Central Canada built on being branch plants part of a continental supply chain trading on a poor dollar exchange rate and never giving two hoots about productivity, about new markets or about “what happens if”. So, once again, we get to accelerate our upwave and really suffer in the following downdraft to make life good in the Toronto-Ottawa-Montréal axis.

Many years ago, in her Cities and the Wealth of Nations — and in her following works — Jane Jacobs pointed out the obvious: cities are the economic engines. Even the resource economies of the “Canadian Empty Quarter” (Saudi Arabian oil is mostly concentrated in a part of that country known as the “Empty Quarter”, a place big on non-renewable wealth and short on people) are centred in cities (although the wealth itself is “out in the country”): money is raised there, support services are found there, expertise is concentrated there, etc. As such, each city that actually creates economic value (some don’t: Ottawa and Washington DC obviously not, but even big cities like Atlanta can be very low value-add places) needs its own exchange rate. Big currency areas, in other words, punish the successful by amplifying the booms and busts, and reward the indigent by setting policy to ameliorate their failures to adapt and change.

I have for many years now held that the continental-scale countries will not hold together. As energy gets ever shorter in supply and more expensive, “big” becomes (in many cases) an expensive luxury. Local conditions begin to matter much more — and so the premium of not having a monetary and fiscal policy framework attuned to those local conditions eventually becomes too much to bear, and separation begins.

(It always amazes me that the drumbeat that the fast-growing European Union countries would “break the Euro apart” has not abated since the single European currency was put forward, yet the same argument applied to North America is laughed out of court. Yet we didn’t have money in this country unified until 1935 — before that, individual banks and corporations “created” banknotes, which traded against each other at premiums or discounts — and the US didn’t have it until 1913.)

Separation will begin here in the West one day because of Eastern economic mismanagement lashing the West one too many times. It won’t take another “National Energy Policy” to do it. Just stupid moves like lowering interest rates when they should have been raised to let the balloon down and restore a degree of equilibrium in conditions in different sectors of the economy. Eventually, when the West goes, the East can have a cheap dollar again, and we can have the strong dollar our economies will need and want.

Remember, when it happens out in the 2020s-2030s, that it isn’t coming out of the blue.

In the meantime, though, a lot more suffering in Canada has just been created. More risk will be taken on, with more losses as a result. More people living on fixed incomes will find their straits tightened, perhaps to the breaking point. More of the aware of the East will take their losses now, uproot themselves, and come West, increasing the pressure on housing here. (Have you see the number of Eastern licence plates circulating — both US and Canadian — around Vancouver neighbourhoods … and then the number of cars that sport them one day, and BC plates the next?) Nothing the Bank of Canada did yesterday will really help Ontario or Québec: their house prices are coming down regardless, and now their investment asset values will, too. Insolvency and liquidity will remain the hallmarks of the financial system.

Instead of debating this, we’ll spend the next few weeks playing the scandal game. Good-bye country, killed by bad policy and a lack of creativity in making basic economics entertaining.

We all know the used car salesman joke, right? “You can tell he’s lying: his lips are moving.” Those of us who have experienced what passes for legal life in a courtroom or at a deposition also know that the same joke can, far too often, be attached to barristers, although in their case it is more often a combination of questions akin to “have you stopped beating your wife: answer yes or no” and a focus on the twig to the exclusion of the tree, much less the forest.

Our politicians, too, are easily tarred with this brush, since on the one hand much of the huckstering of the run up to and actual campaigns for election is filled with the silky promises of the salesperson, and much of their interactions post election are those of lawyers taking each other on. In other words, “he must be lying: his lips are moving” easily gets attached to politicians as well.

Except here some of us experience a bifurcation most of the time. All those other politicians are so obviously “lyin’, cheatin’, slimy bahstids” that their entire prattling talk track isn’t worth even paying attention to; the ones from the party we support, on the other hand, are just doing their job under trying circumstances. No? Just read your way through any of the blog aggregators organised by party affiliation…

As someone who actually chooses to read what the better writers from all camps have to say, I’ve gotten used to filtering this bifurcated stream. Every camp has people who write well, argue well, make me think. That doesn’t easily change my own inclinations — my preference for one of the parties over the others doesn’t waver in the breeze that easily — but it does give me food for thought.

I, you might say, am someone who, were I ever to be nominated and elected, would not take the whip well. Annoying, a tendency to think for oneself, but there you are. For my primary loyalties lie with my political philosophy and not with a party line at all times, and any affiliation I might hold (I have held several over the years on both the so-called ‘right’ and the so-called ‘left’) is much more a matter of “common cause” than of ideological fervour, or even “my party right or wrong”.

All of this is rumbling through my head today in large measure as a result of the noise being raised about “In-and-Out”, the RCMP raid on Conservative Party headquarters, and Sunday’s ridiculous attempt at media management by the Conservative brain trust, who managed to create a new ostensive definition in the dictionary of image-driven words for the phrase it takes 40,000 inklings to make a clue, and they’re still working on their first inkling. As Sandy at Crux-of-the-Matter noted, it’s hardly rocket science to have a viable communications strategy, and it is, after all, supposed to be a core competency found in a political organisation.

Thanks to these “one brain cell” idiots, the hills are alive with the sound of thrust and counter-thrust. Already, under all the rhetoric and opining, any chance that the average citizen can ferret out the truth of matters and form a sound, reasoned judgement about what the actions of the Conservatives might mean, and whether this means that, despite wanting to vote Conservative, one should not. (There may also be those who prize chicanery above all else who would be deterred by all the smoke and flame from finding out that “here’s where I should reward such behaviour”, but I suspect their primary allegiances will remain with the thieves and liars they know: it’s a line of work where many years of success at successful manipulation to trade favours is not easily overcome.)

Instead, one more reason not to vote has been created. Rather than worry the issue through, I suspect far too many will just say “they’re all up to it”, throw up their hands and decide politics just doesn’t matter, because “no vote I cast will change anything”.

That, I am coming to believe, is the real purpose of all of this. If more and more casual electors can be driven from the field — “casual”, in this case, meaning “not obsessed by politics between elections and thus only pay attention when asked to vote” — the electoral battles come down to the faithful core.

Canada may, for instance, be easily seen as leaning more to the “activist” side of the ledger than the “libertarian” side — our belief in the efficacy of government to “solve things” as opposed to the uncertainly of individual initiative is strong — but when we overlay the traditional party map from “left” to “right” on this it is quite possible that “right activists” could win the day in many ridings if the “left activists” just stayed home, even though far more of this country’s “activism” is expressed “left of centre” than “right of centre”. Those who want what they see as “progress” can more easily be disheartened by the sense of “nothing making a difference” than those who want to implement one or another “turning back of the clock” moves.

Yes, I am left to wonder if all the apparent stupidity on display — from being quite so obvious about the money moves, to battling and taunting Elections Canada, to Sunday’s “selective press briefing”, to anything Peter van Loan has uttered in the past forty-eight hours — isn’t all very crafty, indeed.

Gerry Nichols lamented, this week, how the Conservative Party of Canada had failed “right libertarians” like himself. I, who am an old Red Tory and thus some sort of “centre-left libertarian nation-builder”, feel precisely the same way, but for different reasons.

But both of us ought to fit comfortably into the Conservative Party’s 17 principles. Would that a little fidelity to them would trump the endless tactical manoeuvring and the fine slicing and dicing of the ridings that passes for strategy these days.

For when one doesn’t want to associate with the practised liars and thieves, and one doesn’t believe in the “left activism” of the minor parties, and one finds oneself not at home in a “right activist” Reform II Conservative Party, and one doesn’t want to just fold up and ignore the nation’s future, where does one go?

Thank goodness for blogging. Perhaps posts such as these will give comfort to others who find themselves betrayed by the practice of barrister-trained used-car salesmen.

For I never forget that the plurality vote in this country remains for none of the above.

George Carlin, on his immortal Class Clown album from the 1970s, talks of the experience of being an adolescent boy having to go to Confession, and hoping to get the “right Father”: one would give you ages’-worth of pennance (”the four First Fridays, the five First Saturdays, a trip to Lourdes…”) and the other would understand (”that’s okay, man, tres Santa-Marias“). Five minutes later, the penitent would be back on the street ready for another week of fun and frolic.

Apparently the Conservative Party of Canada was hoping to draw Carlin’s “Father Rivera” yesterday with their “selective confession” to various members of the media.

Let me be clear about my own views on election spending. I like the current restrictions on contributions. They equalise the playing field somewhat — even minor parties ought to be able to find supporters who can kick in sufficient funds to play. At the same time, I’d lift the lid on spending. If you can out-raise all the other parties, you ought to be able to use the money. Finally, other people who wish to communicate on issues ought to be able to do so, with limits on how much spending they can do. (So this is hardly libertarian enough to suit, let’s say, a Gerry Nichols, but much more free than the current Canada Elections Act and related regulations allow for. In particular, if I want to spend money to support campaign messaging on how to spoil your ballot, I ought to be able to do so.)

So if the Conservative Party spent $19 million rather than $18 million in the 2006 election I am not particularly chuffed at the thought. In-and-out, after all, is a time-honoured practice used by all of the parties at one time or another. (I can’t stand the supercilious types who pretend they’re simon-pure on this, although, mind you, there’s no shortage of them. Needless to say, the Conservatives weren’t spending monies redirected to their party from Federal Sponsorship and Advertising contracts, either: their supporters contributed that money to be used to win an election fair and square.

Still, yesterday’s shenanigans — selective invitations, a semi-secret location, ducking into the fire stairs to escape questions — sent all the wrong images to the country. “If you act guilty, you must have something to feel guilty about.”

So, thanks to this ineptitude and stupidity (and I always recall that Robert A. Heinlein once said a number of different things that add up to stupidity is the only natural capital crime — even if you get to escape natural retribution for the first offence, not learning from your errors certainly qualifies for the aphorism’s intent!) the Conservative Party may well have given itself a serious, perhaps fatal wound, something none of the imagined bluff and bluster seen in Parliament from the Liberals has been able to do.

If this is evidence of Stephen Harper’s superior tactical political skills — Gerry Nichols, in a web-only column for the Globe & Mail this morning certainly seemed to hint that these exist — then yesterday represents the moral equivalent of slipping in public on a cow pattie at the Stampede ready to be trampled by a raging bull or three.

Everything now turns on just how turned off we have all become. Will Canadians become incensed and feel retribution is required, or have they heard so much dung being flung in the past few years that this gets chalked up as “just another gros enmerdement“? If it’s the second, the Harper Government gets its equivalent of Father Rivera’s Three Hail Marys and it’s back on the street ready to fight for the right to continue to govern, perhaps even with a majority. Or, if we get angry, does this mean we get to experience Stéphane Dion’s sterling leadership qualities?

For, in Canadians’ response, that is also part of the equation. Dumping the Liberals in 2006 wasn’t a matter of “paying any price” for a change: there were many who may not have liked what Harper’s positions were, but accepted that he had proven, in Opposition and in bringing his party together, that he was viable if given Government. Dumping the Conservatives in 2008 (or 2009) doesn’t come with quite so much surety.

It will be dreadfully noisy for the next few days. It might even cause the Opposition parties to suffer a collective spinal injection rather than spinal tap, and we’d be off to settle the matter in an election. Or this will be an on-going gut-rumble in Question Period until the summer recess, at which point quiet will resume.

I suspect the Canadian people are turned off, tuned out and hoping for quiet. We shall see what happens.

Once upon a time, almost all of our family lines weren’t here in North America. Of course, going back far enough — and anthropologists, climatologists and geologists believe we don’t need more than 12,000-14,000 years (17,000 at the outside and only for Alaska) to be able to say none of us were here. Human settlement of the Americas is just not that old.

So we are immigrants, and, granting the First Nations their pride of place (I’m not sure how many years of continued residence are required to make someone autochthonous, but the majority of us are measured in decades to a few centuries, not in millennia, so let’s just call the First Nations “here long enough” and be done with it) as the original peoples of this continent, only the oldest of European lines and settlements have been here long enough to possibly be verging on the “native” by historical terms — a St. John’s, say, or a Québec, or an Annapolis Royal, or, south of the border, a St-Augustine or Jamestown (the only two settlements approaching the same age as the Canadian ones). [Please leave L'Anse-aux-Meadows and Roanoke Island out of the discussion: continuity matters.]

Those of us born here — especially those of us of blood lines that go back a few generations in this land — have nowhere else to call home, of course. This shows up the dreadful ambiguity of the whole “immigrant” versus “native” discussion: it all depends on timescale. To my mind, one key question is the culture which is built. The Québec profond of the pur laine is certainly an indigenous culture now — but when precisely did it become so, as opposed to just a settler colony? So, too, the original culture of Southern Ontario — still seen in its Clear Grit southwestern and hardscrabble Tory eastern forms (alas, as George Grant noted, the Golden Horseshoe in the middle gave that culture up in the 1950s) — once American settlers with a Celtic overlay from UK & Irish immigration, but now a culture (and an accent) found nowhere else. Add the Acadians, the Newfoundlanders, and a host of others to the list … this is the Canada we know.

Since 1966 Canadian immigration policy first changed to be open to the whole world, and not just Europeans, Americans and other British settler colonies, and then, starting first with the Mulroney Government and as extended and modified through the Chrétien, Martin and now Harper years, a means of doing two radically dissimilar things: extended family reunification, and attracting skilled people to this country using a points-based system that is being increasingly copied around the world today. This has changed the face, and culture, of Canada in its major urban centres.

Having grown up in Toronto while it changed from being a pseudo-Victorian outpost of the Orange Order to what UNESCO called “the world’s most multi-cultural city”, and now living in Vancouver, which has cities in its regional fabric that are majority immigrant communities, I must say that I am not only used to the glorious mosaic that this can create, but find places without it a tad on the boring side. (Perhaps this is why, in the United States, I prefer New York, and why in Europe I prefer London, and found Sydney in Australia quite congenial: they “felt like home”.) We are richer for this mix, added to the mosaic of indigenous cultures that were Canada already.

The Harper Government’s latest Immigration changes come with the good and the bad. The good part is that the Ministerial discretion being sought is designed to allow us to capture the specific types of skilled people currently in demand in Canada and accelerate their applications up the queue and into the country. This is a good thing. We do not want to become, as the United States with its Homeland Security attitudes and anti-skilled worker (consider the restrictions on H-1B visas [and the mandated H-4 status for spouses that exclude them from even unpaid volunteer work] currently in effect) approaches has, a country headed into (in the words of The Economist) an “Idiotocracy”. Nor do we want to lose the best available immigrants to other countries: these are a key part of our future prosperity. If you want a comfortable retirement, you should be pro-immigrant.

Which, when it comes to skilled immigrants and immediate family members, I am. I am less so in the other part of the category: extended family reunification. Here’s why.

In the nineteenth century, when immigrants came to this country, landing in either Halifax or Montréal and riding the Intercolonial, the Grand Trunk or the Canadian Pacific to their new homes, it was effectively a one-way trip. Almost none of them would ever go back to their ancestral homes. Other family members — brothers, sisters, parents, cousins, etc. — were accessible by slow and infrequent mailings at best. (In my own grandfather’s case, an infant immigrant in 1912, it was the last time he would have contact with his own elder brother or father or any other extended family member until World War II took him to the UK and he was able to use a leave to go to Scotland and research lost relatives.) The decision to emigrate was the decision to start a new life.

Today, of course, cheap air travel has made the world much smaller. (I have one friend, himself a childhood immigrant to Canada, whose parents make an annual trip back to their ancestral community to visit “the other part of the family”. We are fortunate to live in this brief period when the remaining cheap energy makes it easy to travel in this way.) One needn’t make a one-way trip: it is possible to return for weddings, funerals, even births, and still live in a new land. (As I learned myself last fall, travelling across this country — 4,492 km by road, or a little farther than the distance overland from London, England to Baghdad, Iraq — we can go for the dying and funeral of a family member and think nothing of the distances involved when travelling domestically: Vancouver to Toronto is nothing; London to Baghdad would be a great journey, indeed.)

As a result, extended family reunification ought to be a very secondary goal of our immigration policy, indeed. Often, these extended family members do not end up contributing much to Canada relatively speaking: we end up (a mutual pact of ignorance) putting them in a language and cultural ghetto of compatriots “from the old country”. Yet often this has been the implicit priority of our immigration system. The Harper Government is right to try and change it.

What is just plain awful about the proposed changes, of course, is the further concentration of power in the centre that it brings with it. I can accept that this time for a while, I believe, but I am not happy about it. (I’d much rather an honest accounting of what we need to do on the immigration file.)

Finally, there’s the missing element. The professional and learned societies, and the provincial licensing boards, need to be informed in no uncertain terms that if they are unprepared to move speedily and expeditiously to (a) recognise the credentials an immigrant brings, (b) handle such upgrading in as minimal a manner as is required [i.e. individual requirements, not wholesale credential re-acquisition], (c) license these immigrants to practice their professions, and (d) accept them into the field of practice [i.e. hospital privileges, join the firm, recognise tenure, etc.] then the Government will modify the terms of their Charters to “make it so”. It is perverse in the extreme that we work to acquire the best possible new Canadians only to introduce them to the joys of late night taxi driving and other forms of work that do not allow them to use the credentials and skills that gave them the points to come to Canada in the first place.

We need our immigrants: we need them to augment our own workforce, and to continue to build Canadian prosperity. We should want them to add to the tapestry that is Canadian culture, joining in and enriching it. We don’t need to turn the immigrant into a pauper. We also don’t need to eat into our own social services by creating an immigrant underclass through poor prospects and poor subsequent selections.

Perhaps if the Liberals were talking like that I’d be more inclined to see their huffery and puffery about the Immigration provisions as real, as opposed to simple posturing for votes.

The saliva drools on page after page written by media personalities and bloggers alike. Regardless of faction, the motif is the same: let’s go to the polls, now!

Well, yes, let’s do. But be careful what you wish for. You might get it.

All sides, of course, see an advantage in going now. The Conservatives believe the most recent set of charges laid by the RCMP in the ever-dragging sponsorship matter will remind everyone that the Liberals are not to be trusted — and they’re happy (as the Prime Minister himself noted in a speech) to go to the polls over their planned changes to our Immigration practices. The Liberals believe that this week’s raid by the RCMP on behalf of Elections Canada at Conservative Party headquarters shows the Conservatives to be at least equally corrupt, and that they will have the better of the Immigration issue in any event.

Ah, but is a vote in the NDP’s interest? Or the Bloc’s? For the Conservatives tied their own hands — I do think it would be a suicidal move to plead the need for an election given their legislation mandating a fixed election date (are you regretting this now, Mr. Harper?, because you ought to be) — and the Liberals need support. Despite both the posturing of Stéphane Dion and other Liberal consigiliere of both front bench and back room whisper, the Liberals cannot, on their own, do anything. They will need to bring the other Opposition parties along with them — at least one if the Government fails to whip itself for the vote, and both of them, in force, if the three-line whip is in place.

For the Bloc, of course, the issue is simple. Are they ready to take enough seats? If they are, they can vote as they please; if they are not, they will keep this Parliament running. (Note, please, that I did not say they would topple the Government if they’re ready: they will determine which outcome — maintain current practices or make the proposed changes — better serves their interests (which are expressed as les intérêts du Québec, naturellement. It may well be that they find the proposed changes as something they can make show as “another victory”.)

So ignore the Her Majesty’s Prime Minister and the Leader of Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition. Instead, cast your gaze firmly upon the Hon. Jack Layton, leader of the New Democrats. What is in his interest here?

Recent polling data suggested, for instance, that the Liberals were making gains in two places the NDP needs to have strong three-way races to win seats: British Columbia and Ontario. Going into electoral battle against such a surge (were it to be maintained to voting day) would not serve the NDP well. On the other hand, voting with the Government means the NDP would also be aiding and abetting the implementation of the budget, something they voted against. A difficult situation, indeed!

Frankly, if there’s a party that needs the economy to weaken further, it is probably the NDP. A downturn would take some of the heat off any environmentalist trends — work and money concerns usually override more abstract causes (as any student of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs would know) — and given the lack of clear Liberal policy the NDP would have the opportunity to stake out a “citizens’ economic platform” in contradistinction to both of the larger parties. Just as the Conservatives would like to go into an election now — before tougher and more turbulent times come — even if it meant another minority as the outcome, so, too, the NDP are probably better served by waiting, both on the Green flank and on the “green” flank, so to speak.

Then, too, with both the Conservatives and the Liberals flinging mud and splattered head to toe with it, there will be those voters who are ready to say “a pox on both your houses” and take their custom elsewhere. On the other hand, given the House schedule, there will be few additional opportunities to vote non-confidence in the Spring session. That puts the Government in control of the agenda over the summer, and a gear-up period in the Fall sitting before confidence motions are again on the order paper. So do you go now, or hope you can build momentum quickly come late September?

Layton’s challenge, of course, is the usual one: gaining attention. This is a double-edged sword: to get attention, he generally must be somewhat outrageous (the joys of sound-bite media), yet that makes him seem to be reacting rather than offering a well-thought-out alternative (or just shouting to be heard at worst). It’s why, for instance, you seldom see him in the newspaper or on the news: the bully-bites offered up from both the Conservative and Liberal benches, and the presumption that Dion is master of the House’s fate (something he, alone, is no more capable of controlling than is the Prime Minister) means that Dion’s threats to topple are taken seriously instead of being challenged as reason suggests they should be.

There’s little question but that we are not being well-served by our current Parliament. It is well past its best-before date, and should be, as with Fortunado in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado, bricked up in the dungeon and seen no more. But here is the question, will Layton take up Montressor’s bricks, mortar and trowel and do the deed?

It may serve the NDP better to wait, but the dangers in that course of action say to me that Jack Layton’s moment to risk all has come. When the carnival comes and the vote is pressed, it is time to press the brick home and lead us to the polls.

That is, of course, if the Liberals deign to even show up to vote (in numbers more than a handful).

This morning’s news was full of cheer: evidently, unlike everywhere else in the world, Canadians are not experiencing rising price inflation.

You could have fooled me. Petrol is at $1.26.4 per litre for regular, a new high mark. Two grapefruits yesterday totalled to $8.00, up about 25% from the last trip to the organic food store. If things are getting cheaper or holding their price I’m not seeing it.

The radio announcer doing the business news segment on CKNW ended with the comment that “yes, Western Canada is seeing some price increases but the economy’s not doing so well in Ontario — anyway, the Bank of Canada will drop 50 basis points next Tuesday and that’ll fix that”.

Absolute bull, that last bit. Not about the interest rate cut — I fully expect the Bank of Canada to do the wrong thing and lower rates — but about the “that’ll fix that” sentiment. (As for Western Canada, well, I guess we can just see our prices continue to rocket upward, too much loose credit chasing too few goods of quality.)

This is how the United States slid down its rathole. This is how the United Kingdom slid down its one. This is why China has separated into two economies — something that could easily lead to internal friction and a split in the country. Everywhere in the world that you see economies in trouble today, you see price inflation coupled with insolvency.

The last thing you do for either of these is lower interest rates.

So, if lowering interest rates is on the table, the question that comes to mind is “why?”. The answer is simple: it bails out the financial institutions (which these days are fund managers, brokerage firms and mortgage lenders quite as much as banks). The trouble is — again, as the United States has shown — lowering rates at best buys a few weeks before the next wave of trouble hits.

Make sure you’re clear on that: lowering rates is akin to handing out large bags of drugs to junkies.

Canadians often sneer at Americans for “living beyond their means” but we’ve been up to exactly the same schtick. After all, there’s no way for houses to sell at prices that take 70% of a two income family to make the payment — this a 40 year amortization on the lowest possible down payment — without being “beyond your means”.

The British used to call installments “the never-never plan”. Well, “never” has arrived — and it wants its due.

The reality is that our pride in governments stopping the deficits and retiring part of our debt has been counterbalanced by corporations taking on massive debt to go private (it’s BCE that bears the $40 billion plus of debt, something that makes that company a very fragile reed indeed), and individuals taking on massive debt which they judge by the costs of servicing, not the amount that’s being racked up. (Meanwhile governments are throwing numbers around like they’re going out of style — BC’s announced new programmes galore, mostly to “be paid for by other levels of government”; Vancouver’s hiding its property tax increase this year by subsidising it with the savings from last year’s city-initiated civic workers’ job action — and the Feds have emptied the cupboard. In other words, everyone is now positioned to slide back into deficit spending, jam a crowbar in the citizen’s wallet and savings to get much more money, or both.)

Did I say “savings”? Damned little of that left in the economy — the national savings rate is so close to zero it would barely fog a mirror, were the savings rate a breath of life. That, of course, is what it is: future life. Put nothing away, and where does the investment come from for new work, new opportunities?

Oh, yes. I forgot. We seem to think that’s government’s job, too. Of course, they’re short of anywhere to produce it from (and long on promises).

Let’s be very clear. The United States has made its bed. It is going down to a much lower standard of living. The adjustments there will take years. On the way they will fight it tooth and nail — they’ll “Japan” their monetary policy all the way down to 0% if they have to (that, over in the land of the Rising Sun, has led to an 18 year [and counting] deflation, where all the government spending in the world — Japan’s debt went from best in the G-7 to worst by quite a bit — couldn’t get the economy moving again), and that still won’t save the US financial sector from insolvency. They’ll throw up protectionist move after protectionist move, abrogate the terms of treaties, demand special treatment “or else”, and it still won’t create American jobs. Eventually they will pull back from the world, unable to afford their military. Even then, the adjustment won’t be over.

Why on earth would we want to follow them? Simply because they live next door, we have relatives there, we vacation there? Wouldn’t we be far better off to deal with our own issues and keep Canada economically healthy?

Keeping us healthy means the Central Canadian manufacturing base needs to change from being a branch plant, continentalist entity to one that produces products for sale globally. It means letting the companies with weak management go under if necessary. It means the ones that are owned by failing companies in the US need to be sold to better leaders here, or die with their parents. This adjustment will be hard, but it is needed.

Out West, we need to start building local companies. There’s more to life than resource extraction. Local firms and public sector agencies need to buy from other local firms.

All of this needs to be supported by a good savings rate, to finance our own growth in the future. (You want a greener Canada? It requires investment. You want an employed Canada? It requires investment. Enough said.) Lowering interest rates effectively says “saving your money is worthless; go spend it”.

The gas needs to be bled out of the housing market — certain markets (South Coast BC, Golden Horseshoe Ontario, etc.) need to come down. The way to do that is to raise interest rates, squeezing out the speculators. Start by holding the line, at least, then gentle increments so that there’s time to adjust.

Or we can go right behind our American neighbours and hit the failure point. Average resale prices in real estate are down 49% in Los Angeles, for instance. Want to see your million dollar 80-year-old bungalow on Vancouver’s West Side, or your half-a-million postage stamp condo halved in value? It’s only worth what someone will buy it for — not what the mortgage amount is. Push the speculation to its limit, when the financial institutions here become insolvent, too, and that’s exactly what will happen.

So who is talking about this? As far as I’m concerned, this is far more important than whether Cadman was bribed, Mulroney made off, ad money moved in and out of riding associations, Bernier suffers from indelicate tongue or Dion is about to be toppled. It’s far more important than whether or not an election may or may not be forced upon us.

Instead, we’ll get a neophyte Governor of the Bank of Canada who’ll probably destroy us all by cutting rates. But boy! Will it make the financiers happy!

Whatever made me think that stability and order in monetary affairs was the point of a central bank? Foolish me.

Sauve qui peut.

Back East, in Ottawa, Mounties visit the Albert Street offices of the Conservative Party of Canada, ostensibly to collect such evidence as might be available in support of a complaint issued by Elections Canada. Unsurprisingly, the media are there; so is a video crew working for the Liberal Party.

Is “In and Out” — Jason Cherniak’s favourite subject, these past two days — the scandal to tar and taint the Government when nothing else so far has stuck? (The Government has done more damage to itself — the musings of our Foreign Affairs Minister, L’Hon. Maxime Bernier, come immediately to mind — than the Opposition has to it.) I don’t know. What I do know is that I think three things:

If “In and Out” isn’t illegal, it’s damn close to the edge, at least for my tolerance of it. Politics is group morality in action: what the law (suitably interpreted) might allow to slide by, good moral reasoning should not. From my comfortable chair this day in Vancouver, it looks to me as though the moral line was crossed. What that means, of course, is that the Conservatives are just as untrustworthy as the Liberals have already proven themselves to be, both tapping the public trough for party benefit.

When Everyone’s a Crook-of-sorts, It’s No Longer Relevant, at least when making selections between parties on the basis of trust, accountability and honesty. Allegations and to spare exist to show that “in and out” is hardly a Conservative Party invention: apparently the meme was in the air in most of the parties and in various geographies across this land. I didn’t vote for the Conservatives in 2006 (although I was mightily glad to see the Liberals dispatched into Opposition for a rebuilding and rethinking that they have yet to undertake), and one of the reasons then was that I didn’t think they were any better than the Liberals at keeping their hands to themselves. The pursuit of power over principle will always “justify” any action thought to bring power closer regardless of how close to the edge of moral and legal limit it skates.

Only the Partisan Minority Cares, in Any Event, for Jane and Joe Citizen could care less. When it comes to crimes against the Canadian people, the “making irrelevant” of politics that our parties have undertaken — and accomplished — should rank near, if not at, the top. Blogging Tories and Libloggers, Media columnists and editorialists and personalities, that’s who cares these days. Not many others.

Hmmm … the sky is lightening to the south west. Perhaps the clouds will lift for a while. Of course, that’ll take the temperature from under normal for spring back to full on wintry chill. Perhaps another latté…

Meanwhile, over in Victoria, the Board of BC Ferries — a corporation organized as would be any other publicly-traded joint-stock corporation, except that there is only one shareholder (Her Majesty in Right of the Province of British Columbia) — gave itself a 60% pay rise yesterday. That’s base pay for the indignity of having to sit on a corporate board; meeting attendance fees are extra. This consumed the provincial Question Period yesterday, but, of course, the real question — can the Crown simply remove ministerial oversight (a Crown Corporation) at will and not complete the task, selling off its ownership stake? — wasn’t brought up at all. No, the Opposition called for the Minister of Transportation to step in and roll the increase back, and the Minister claimed to have “expressed his displeasure” to the Board. As he did, no doubt, to the Translink Board for its self-pocket-lining moves (oh, my mistake, there taking the Board away from community control and making them Ministerial lackeys was a “good move”).

But, of course, it’s poor service and rapidly rising fares that consume those citizens who use the ferries regularly, just as it’s poor service and rapidly rising fares that consume those citizens who travel on buses and the Sky Train system.

BC’s media, of course, wasn’t going to put the effort in to sorting this out that they did to reporting on the RCMP’s actions in Ottawa, mind. Can’t go against the Government, you know. Thank goodness Gordon Campbell and crew don’t have a central bank at their disposal, because the subservience they receive from the media in this province would otherwise allow them to complete the Zimbabweanisation of Canada’s west coast without further worries about how to pay for it.

My word, there goes two cars driving with their headlights on (not just the standard daytime running lights). It’s not that dark out there…

As for the City of Vancouver, there is little to be said. Yes, the rolling wonder-wit, Hizzoner the Mayor, will face a challenger for his party’s nomination; Sam Sullivan’s bag of tricks will no doubt see Peter Ladner off without even breaking a sweat. (Will he, as in the documentary Citizen Sam, then put his foot on Ladner’s throat and press for daring to take his poor results as Mayor on?) The same bag of tricks will no doubt dispatch whomever surfaces as the Vision Vancouver candidate — that is, if COPE doesn’t split the vote and elect Sam in a landslide.

The City, of course, continues to do everything and thus nothing; to (under Sam’s leadership in Council) block real debate. The NPA councillors, one of whom is running against the man, continue to vote as sheep. (Remember, the NPA has, with Sam himself, a margin of one: six-five votes would convert into five-six if even one sheep decided to make his own record.)

It could be a nice country, province and city, couldn’t it, if it wasn’t ground down by the likes of these.

I’ve said all along that what I am is a Tory — which doesn’t make me a Conservative, despite the inability of headline writes to ever note the difference. The smell arising from the dung heaps of Parliament Hill, Victoria’s Inner Harbour and 453 West 12th Avenue, Vancouver disgusts me. Since, in all locations, all parties present are complicit in what’s going on, there is effectively no possibility of change on the horizon.

So, Liberals, topple the Harper Government — or not. It makes no difference. We’ll have an election sometime, and little will be changed (if anything) as a result. Just as Campbell’s gang will be re-elected again in Victoria (and Sullivan in Vancouver) on the backs of supporters who, Huey Long style, would prefer to be robbed blind rather than consider sending them a “get packing” message.

As for me, another latté, and more watching the clouds scud by. I just can’t get wound up today about any of it. It gets easier each day to ignore them.

Perhaps that’s the real future: neighbourhoods that just ignore the lot of them and work to make things work (possibly even better) on a scale more appropriate to the efforts of individual human beings. Certainly it’s hard to have a world-circling ego when your platform is a few houses on a street.

The one thing my MP, my MLA and my current mayor and councillors can count on is that, when they deign to ask, I will be voting against. For none of them personally nor by affiliation deserves to be returned again to suck at the public teat.