Worth the Fee to Read It

One of the things to like about the Conservative Party of Canada is its broad, shallow, “retail” donor base. One of the things to dislike about the CPC is exactly that same means of raising prodigious sums of money. Before you call me schizophrenic, stay with me for a moment and see why it is both a blessing and a curse.

“Money is the mother’s milk of politics.” It’s not, of course, that money plays any different a role in politics than it plays in any other field of human endeavour. Athletes need money to be free of working for any purpose other than their training, and to be able to afford to compete at the levels required for world competitiveness. Non-profits, in doing their work, need the funds to carry out their missions. Policy influence study groups need to be funded so as to pay the costs of researching and publishing their papers. Entrepreneurs need investors so as to be able to handle the start up period, when costs far outrun revenues and the newborn business is nurtured to health and potential prosperity. In all these cases, how the money comes in matters.

Have just a few funders, each of whom writes a large cheque, and you have an oligarchy (even if its members do not know the others) that, by virtue of its financial support and the weight of worry if it were lost in the future, have a significant voice in the direction of affairs in the endeavour they are funding. Have thousands of small funders, on the other hand, and those voices are stilled: the loss of a few dollars is not something that keeps the leadership of an organisation up at night, but the potential loss of hundreds of thousands all at once can cause a ready loss not only of sleep, but rationality, with worry.

What’s to Like: I said in the beginning that the broad donor base of the CPC was something to like. If I’m a donor to anything — a subscriber to start-up capital, a charitable subvention, or a political campaign — I want to know that my money will be used for the things I expect it to be used for. A broad donor base helps ensure this: the party can reasonably conclude that the record of accomplishments and policy options for the future that it puts “on the table” are what is being subscribed to with the donations. As a result, there is little reason not to stay the course, as it is the ebbs and flows of funds in their thousands of droplets that gives an indication of what the “political market” wants, as opposed to just a few voices with the undertone of “be reasonable, do it my way … or else”.

It can — and has been, many times — be objected that this reduces political participation to “consumer” behaviour rather than the involved interactions of being a citizen. Does it surprise you that we act as consumers? For most people of voting age, their entire life has been spent barraged and assaulted by the presumption that they ought to be consumers. That this message should have been internalised ought not to be a surprise. Nor should, in such a world, we be surprised that a political party “gets it” — and treats their donors in precisely the right way to trigger the “consumer” response mechanism.

What’s Not to Like: Alas, every upside does come with a downside. The downside of mass political donation rather than élite accommodation (lubricated by funds) is that there is no easy mechanism to say “hold on, guys, you’re on the wrong track”. The power brokers of old, after all, were steeped in the on-going conversation (both via the media and directly over lunches, drinks and social encounters) of other influencers in the land. High names in one sphere of endeavour — a Jeffrey Simpson, say, in print media — have their calls taken by another high name in another sphere — a Paul Demerais, say. Influence could thus be brought to bear on political parties to adjust their policy vectors — in ways “appropriate” to the large influencers, of course, but there was a path to make this happen.

This is the pattern that operates the Liberal Party, and operated the historical Progressive Conservative Party. Our New Democrats are less so, even despite the long-standing “union connections”. Greens, the Bloc and Reform/CA, on the other hand, were and are all resolutely “grassroots” driven — and it is this strain that influences the CPC today.

”Grassroots” Is a Mixed Blessing: Alas, a permanent policy “conversation” does not occur within parties. It is considered by one and all to be a source of “off message diversions”. Today the Greens, in public, do the best job, with their many Green bloggers linked via their party website, but even there’s a lot of self-policing going on. As a result, the “grassroots” becomes a means of taking over an EDA (riding association) or forcing a candidate upon a riding by weight of temporary numbers — and a source of funds. That’s it, tout court.

EDAs, in turn, are focused on getting their candidate elected at the next opportunity. A free-ranging policy discussion unfolding over months would “tear the association apart” (in the words of one EDA president) or “lose our focus on getting [the candidate] elected” (in the words of another). Yet, without these links back to the party itself, the money comes without its voice. There is the illusion of participation, but not the reality of it. “Turn out your troops for the ground war, keep us flush with cash … and otherwise know your place.” This seems to be the anthesis to the thesis of élite accommodation.

The “Chrétien Revolution”: The closing days of the Chrétien government, as we know, changed election financing in this country to make the micro-funder supreme. This is, on the whole, a good thing (although its impact on leadership selection and other aspects of party management has yet to be fully figured out): more of us can decide, month by month, who to reward and who to punish with our dollars. (The parties, on the other hand, will be working to get the vast majority of Canadians to stick a crowbar in their wallets in the first place. As with any other “consumer” situation, the by-far-largest share of the market is held by “not interested in what you’re offering”.)

Now, as the Liberals try to ramp up their micro-donor base with their Victory Fund, and the Conservative Fund keeps on massing its monies, and the New Democrats turn in substantial-enough performances at the cashbox, the second half of this revolution must be undertaken. In this, the burden will be on the donor. Part of this comes by demanding that gag laws and other anti-democratic initiatives be put to rest: parties no longer need protection, nor an exclusive field. Issues, indeed, are far closer to the future of politics than parties in a stream of minority governments! — and far more likely to engage that growing body of Canadians who can, but won’t, take part. The other part is that we must engage with EDAs and other structures and bring democratic discussion to them.

These considerations apply regardless of party — and just as much to issue-oriented groups as to classic political venues. To only give money — and not to bring your voice into the fray, somewhere — is to essentially allow those in charge to do as they please. After all, these days, there isn’t the restraint traditionally offered by the élites.

It’s our money: our voice comes with it. Only then will the synthesis of the new power arrangements be complete.

There are many in society who now hold to the idea that the world we have built is too complex to be “taken apart” and redesigned. They hold, as a result, that the best we can do is to make many small changes — small, so that if we make a poor choice, we can change away from it, and many, so that collectively these “add up” to redesigning the whole.

Add to this the concept that society can be perfected — or that the people in society can be perfected — and you get classical liberalism. Add to that the notion that experts know better than the common man or woman what needs to be done and how to do it, and you get modern liberalism, in its range of orientations from the socialist utopians through social democrats, through the power-and-influence band, to the social moulders and corporatists. In other words, today’s Republicans and Democrats in the USA, today’s Labour, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats in the UK, and today’s five parties in Canada…

Some of us disagree with the very notions of liberalism. As with Hippocrates, we begin with the principle “Above all, do no harm”: change should therefore be slow and careful (yet not wholly forestalled). Yet we stand with the people, believing them capable of understanding complex issues and making good choices about them if they are treated as competent adults rather than children to be babied by the nanny state mentality. Experts thus advise, they do not control. From the span of social order and justice (the original CCF) to the indigenous Canadian Tory, this span is currently but a fragment found (almost exclusively) in two of our parties. But it is there.

With that, let’s turn to the question of the purpose of government.

Those of us who are not liberal generally agree that the purpose of government is the provisioning of peace and order, and clarity around the rules of engagement — this is the element of justice expressed not as equality (the liberal idea) but as fairness (the same rules for all) — and the capitalisation of infrastructure needed but not yet a viable commercial investment. We may disagree on the span of items requiring infrastructure investment, and on the number of rules of engagement that may be required, but, unlike the liberals in our midst, we do not try to invoke change beyond these limits.

At the moment, for instance, it is necessary to rethink the fundamental piece of infrastructure that is our socio-economic model. This is based in (a) the uninterrupted flow of cheap energy (underlying the expectation of endless growth), (b) a disregard for locality of origin of products and services — communities, in other words, should not be encouraged to be sufficient unto themselves (globalisation), (c) a notion that despite obvious regional differences around a continental scale country one’s location should not matter (equalisation) and (d) a redistribution model for taxation expressed through the funding of many “programs” providing services (the nanny state model of extensive welfare provisioning). On these principles we have built sprawling suburbs with no attention to transportation infrastructure beyond roads, which are provided at a market discount relative to all other forms for people and goods movement, to take but one consequence.

When the environmentalists in our midst start to talk about global warming, carbon reduction, etc., it is the consequences of these fundamentals that they point to. Thus, whether we are dealing with the Gordon Campbell Government’s decision that British Columbia will have a carbon tax (to change usage patterns) and a carbon trading scheme, or the potential for their national equivalents being bruited about by various people supposedly in the know about Liberal Party policy plans, the solutions on offer are all designed to attack the consequences of the fundamental infrastructure of society that we have built.

How, for instance, retirement savings and provisioning is to be handled in a society that no longer grows at a rate sufficient to afford endless growth in nanny state activities is apparently left to the typical answer: “Oh, you’ll do it somehow”. Ayn Rand, in her novel Atlas Shrugged, showed how this was the underlying expectation of every initiative to throw sand in the gears to achieve “social purposes”. (What she failed to examine was the question of whether we needed a new fundamental infrastructure in the first place.)

Endless growth, you see, leads to endless demand. Only in a society which is fundamentally conceived of as as allowing initiative to flourish but which may not grow will our innovations overcome our limitations without setting off year-after-year redistribution of resources.

Take government paperwork. I spend, depending on the quarter, six to eight times the time and energy handling regulations and reporting requirements for my tiny company as I do on managing that company. That is utterly ridiculous: were I to have the money to retire today, I would shut the company’s doors immediately. Why contribute one more minute of my life to bureaucracy, practically none of which benefits me? Yet the real losers from that decision would be other productive people who today can engage me on solving their problems — and to whom I would be unavailable at any price. Stagnation would replace change. Multiply that attitude, and whole communities lose their spark and die to subsist on the dole of government programs, all of which suck more life out of them than initiative would do, and which demand more money and more bureaucratic “feeding” as time goes on. The weeds take over the garden and starve the plants of life.

That is what a carbon tax would do. Forget the rhetoric of “revenue neutrality”: how can it be? Who pays, and when, changes from today — the burden is shifted. Worse, it is shifted into places we have consciously and deliberately disadvantaged by limiting their options already — and there is, despite the speechifying of politicians and experts, no real set of choices for the automobile and truck dependent far-flung villages and towns, and suburbs, of the Canadian landscape. We at one time had alternatives which we systematically starved into extinction. They no longer exist. Nor — under our current laws — will they easily come back.

Meanwhile, since no existing taxes are outright discontinued — all proponents of the social engineering that is carbon taxation merely diddle rates rather than make it impossible to collect further taxes of other types — these will soon become revenue accretive (to pay for more programs demanded to “relieve the suffering” brought about by the destruction of value in motor-dependent communities by this tax). This isn’t just sand in the gears of the economy, as one writer has put it: these are a means to outright stop innovation that isn’t part of an “approved path”. “Grind to a stop, we will.”

You can kiss your savings for retirement good-bye, then.

Let’s stop diddling around the edges. The disease is liberalism and the infrastructure it built of an economic model requiring endless growth. To “do no harm” these days we must detox our society, so to speak: we must wean it from dependency back to self-sufficiency, and wipe out taxes and programmes left, right and centre rather than add to the pile.

The end of cheap energy will take care of most of the issues with carbon emission. Going beyond that into changing what we tax to influence behaviour must start with what we stop doing and stop demanding those of us who create economic results must do. Otherwise we will starve ourselves — and, two decades hence, see if that wasn’t a highly accurate statement of our impoverishment under the weight of a state we can’t afford without the endless growth model cheap energy provided — instead of free up the initiative space and resources needed to change our fundamentals.

Sometimes the Tory advances basic change with many follow-on effects to correct a path that has gone fundamentally wrong. This is one of those times. For without such a diagnosis, this patient won’t make it.

First, detox the junkie (don’t give him or her a place to shoot the drugs into their body “under supervision”). All three Insite studies show that that medical principle holds despite the promotion of “harm mitigation”. So, too, we must detox the junkie that is the body public, whose answer to all questions is “what’s the Government doing?”

Don’t expect me to support you, Mr. Campbell, in next year’s election, unless you get cracking on what should have come with your carbon tax. As for M. Dion, I’d expect you to get the picture, too — except you’ve spent your entire working life with your lips firmly coupled to the public teat. Take your carbon tax proposal and go away.

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?

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.

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.

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!“

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.

The blogosphere is an interesting space from a political point of view, for it is highly unlikely that anyone would write about matters political who didn’t have some internal drive or passion toward it. What this means is that we are far more likely to find partisans online — both as writers and as readers/commenters — than we are in the broader public.

Writers, of course, write because they want to be read. So they look to join blogrolls and communities. These help bring new readers their way. But they often come with a price: one of converging upon the general view of that community. Add a few overt partisans to that mix, and slowly that community will become almost a reflexive mouthpiece for one party or another.

For those with active or independent minds, such communities can seem a straight-jacket.

Moreover, no community exists in isolation. The community itself will have a site, and feeds, which must be managed. Perhaps this effort is donated as a labour of love, but, more likely, it must be funded, by donations or by advertising. The net effect is that the community has a vested interest in reinforcing itself around its sources of income. How expulsions from the community can then occur isn’t hard to see.

I don’t — and have never — belonged to such a community. The reason for this is that I believe, deeply, that we should decide each issue on its merits. This can lead us into conflict with those who subscribe to the community’s position, “right or wrong”.

As an example of this, take the recent issue of Dan McTeague, MP, and his RESP tax deduction private member’s bill. Perhaps this is a worthy measure (I don’t happen to think so; I prefer simpler tax systems, and this is yet another complexity) but fundamentally my opposition to it stems from the bill’s disregard of Parliamentary tradition. Tradition matters to me: while it does change, it should change by express deliberation and consideration of what is being given up, not backed into in a fit of partisan excitement. I believe the Speaker erred in allowing this bill to proceed: while he might have been able to find no explicit restriction upon which to hang a denial of a bill like this which is all about restriction of revenue planned for in the budget, our tradition is that it is the budget which is voted up or down, and that such a measure should have been an amendment to the budget itself.

Does this then make me a Government supporter (as in last Thursday’s Ways & Means vote, which included an explicit repeal of the previously-passed RESP provision)? Obviously, yes, but as someone who shared an issue, not someone even who is necessarily doing it for the same reasons (the Government’s stated reasoning is that this would threaten the stability of the budget to remain out of deficit, which is also a truth, but only if no move is made to accommodate the new provision as a choice; the Government did not choose to challenge the affront to Parliamentary tradition, as it ought to have done).

Men and women of good will and engaged, active mind can disagree with one another without any sound and fury at all. My fellow writer — and one whom I respect deeply — Werner Patels, the author of Ideas and Issues, supported the RESP provision. Promoting post-secondary education and tax relief are also things I support; we disagree as to the methods to accomplish these (to some extent), and we obviously disagree about the value of hewing to Parliamentary tradition and the Canadian methods of responsible government. But we can share these, even commenting on each other’s writing, and the voice is never raised.

Compare that to the partisan! Both the Liblogs (the self-identified Liberal Party supporters) and the Blogging Tories (the self-identified Conservative Party supporters) wrote reams on this whole tale — opposed to each other, naturally — and both echoing the sound and fury occurring in the House. Here there was no cross-engagement, just a closed world encountering another closed world.

Most Canadians, as well, although they might vote for the same party again and again, do not identify themselves with one enough to actually sign up and become a member of a riding association, or be a regular financial supporter. (I have done the second, but for three different parties at various times Federally, and for three different parties Provincially, sometimes for years at a time.) One can share a great deal with a party and its policies — motivations might differ, but the direction is roughly aligned — and thus feel that supplying them with either the mother’s milk of labour or of cash makes sense. Parties, too, do not operate for free: in the words of the old Spanish proverb, “take what you want, and pay for it”.

Still, those of you who have followed my writings here and elsewhere know well that I prize the independent candidate, the person who will stand against both their riding and their party when needed. In other words, I value independent thinking and a willingness to trust that I, the citizen, will engage when we differ rather than simply shout you down unthinkingly, and try to encourage it. This is the legacy of Chuck Cadman’s last term as an Independent MP representing Surrey North; the thought of electing more such is why I support STV as a voting mechanism (there are times to consider changing traditional practice, and this is one of them, as I have argued earlier this month.

In the recent past it has been necessary to support the new Conservative Party. Canada needs more than one party of government. Much of my writing in the past month has criticized the Liberal Party, but not with the intent to say “Conservatives right; Liberals wrong”: it is because it is clear to me that the tearing apart of the old Progressive Conservative coalition during the second Mulroney Government has also deeply crippled and hollowed-out the Liberal Party, to the point where it is adrift. (In other words, the Chrétien years represented a period in which they didn’t need to be competitive and the inter-necine warfare that replaced external competition broke that party, too.) I have chosen to write about the Liberals rather than promote a new alternative in large measure because Canadians are deeply small-c conservative when it comes to parties: refreshing a known name gives that party a leg up, at least for a few decades.

But I have also — via the comments on my piece yesterday about how Toryism (which is not at all the core of the Conservative Party) and Greenism (if I can be permitted this abysmal neologism) are a natural pairing with many congruences over issues — been made to realise (thanks to my readers) that it is time for me to look more closely at whether I ought to be stepping forward more clearly for new alternatives in the Canadian political landscape, and broadening my public support where helpful. This may lead me to eschew the money side of politics for a while — the NDP’s insistence that one is simultaneously a member of both the Federal and Provincial parties simultaneously simply by being a donor drove me from continued support, for instance (although we needed and continue to need an ability to alternate parties in BC — and here the NDP is the Opposition — I ultimately could not stand with Layton’s Federal NDP), and I simply will not, any longer, give blanket support to any party that ties me down in this way. But the pen (or the pixels) still await.

I had said, earlier, that I might not vote in tomorrow’s by-election here in Vancouver-Quadra. On that score I have changed my mind. I shall vote. I believe that at this juncture I have managed to find enough commonality on issues to feel I am voting “for” rather than “against”. To that end, I shall, tomorrow, cast my ballot for Dan Grice, and hope that it is enough to push him past the other candidates to take his place on March 31 in the House, as the Green Party’s Deborah Grey.

Periodically, there comes a point where the Augean Stables of Canadian politics need a good cleaning. We have been there for a long time now. The Bloc and Reform were false starts. May this one turn out to be better.