Tuesday, November 07, 2017

What If Gerson Is Right? What If Government No Longer Works?



I can be pretty hard on Justin Trudeau. He does deserve credit for the good things he's done but that comes with responsibility for his lapses and willful failures. I prefer Trudeau by a country mile over the Tory party and their leadership, past and present, but that's still not enough to make me think the Liberal prime minister is doing a good job. He's not. He's doing a less worse job than I'm sure we would be getting from his Conservative adversary but that's about it.

Is it Trudeau's fault or is it a systemic failure of our politics? Probably it's some measure of both.

The final paragraph in Michael Gerson's op-ed in today's Washington Post resonates in my mind.

"It is quite possible that moderate conservatism and moderate liberalism are inadequate to explain and tame the convulsive economic and social changes of our time. Which places America’s future — uncertain, maybe unknowable — on the other side of an earthquake."


Could that hold true for Canada? Are moderate conservatism and moderate liberalism no longer adequate to the challenges that we face, "the convulsive economic and social changes of our time"? Is the future of Canada and generations to come consigned to uncertainty "on the other side of an earthquake"? In several ways that seems to be the case and that perception grows stronger with the passage of time as we see Canada, like every other nation, being overtaken by some rather dire events.

What can you say for a government in denial? Trudeau's government certainly fits that bill.  Take climate change, generally accepted as the gravest threat facing mankind.  As nations go, Canada has a much better than average chance of avoiding the very worst impacts. It's not that we're better or brighter or wiser. We're simply latitudinally blessed. We're more distant from the equator than most countries, the one with which we share a border in particular. Our land reaches further beyond the polar circle than most. We have a population density advantage. We have a natural resources advantage. So what is our government doing to ensure we maximize the benefit of our natural advantages to avert or reduce the impacts we will otherwise sustain?

A carbon tax. Really, that's it? A carbon tax. Is that the best they can do? Earlier this week I posted an item about Swedish bomb shelters. The Swedes have a network of 65,000 bomb shelters but they think they need more in this Age of Trump, enough to shelter an additional 3 million people. At first it sounded a bit funny, 65,000 bomb shelters. How many do you imagine our government built during the Cold War? A couple of dozen, maybe? But then humour gave way to wonder at the resolve the Swedish government must have had to build all those shelters in the first place. Plainly they recognized a peril and identified a response and, despite the magnitude, they went ahead and built 65,000 shelters.  Bravo Sweden.

Is the threat we're facing from climate change somehow less certain, less dire than the threat the Swedes perceived faced their people during the Cold War?  Yet little Sweden, about a third the size of our population, mustered the resources and resolve to tackle this Herculean chore. So what have we don't to address an even graver threat that remotely approaches what Sweden did to protect its citizens against Cold War threats? Obviously we haven't done much so far but what are we planning to do? Anything, nothing? No, not nothing, a carbon tax.

There is so much that can be done right now. We can assess what Canada will be like in 20, 30 and 40 years from now, new areas that may open up, low lying coastal areas that might have to be abandoned, populations displaced and needing relocation, especially in the north. We can evaluate what we may need by way of essential infrastructure, communications, transportation and power grids, that sort of thing. We can explore how the future may change ways we're governed and how we're organized and how we'll interact.   We should be identifying all of our options and opportunities and their relative merits.

These are indicative of what Gerson calls the "convulsive economic and social changes of our time" and yet it's becoming increasingly obvious that moderate liberalism and moderate conservatism are inadequate to rise to these challenges.

The worst part is that I suspect Trudeau and Scheer and Singh know they're not up to these challenges. They know that our political apparatus isn't sufficiently robust to meet our uncertain, unknowable future which could also leave us on the "other side of an earthquake."


6 comments:

Trailblazer said...

The world's major economies are at the mercy of the US of A.
None are going to initiate climate saving plans without the USA also doing so as it will put them at an economic disadvantage.
We have hope in that the USA is becoming somewhat irrelevant.
Perhaps it's a big game of chicken, who takes the big move to save the world and ;possibly lead by example?

TB

Toby said...

On the news last night there was a bit from Parliament of Sheer and crew firing shots at Trudeau over the Paradise Papers. Trudeau, of course, danced as well as he could. What Trudeau did not do is ask Sheer, did not ask Conservatives or the NDP if they were willing to help change the laws that allow the rich to avoid taxes. Sure, they can play the game but fix the problem? Not even going to try.

The Mound of Sound said...


TB, I suspect that if our moderate conservatives and moderate liberals can't dig us out from under neoliberalism then they don't offer us much reason to hope they'll come through on the big threats.

I have no confidence in Trudeau, a good measure less in Scheer and grave doubts about Singh. I would be less pessimistic if Trudeau had come through on electoral reform.

The Mound of Sound said...


Toby - Trudeau doesn't need the Tories or the New Dems to push through meaningful tax reform. He has a tightly whipped majority and he can shame plenty of support from the opposition benches on this one.

the salamander said...

.. well said ..
I see what's going on in the USA and what a disaster is unfolding and evolving.. expanding too. So I turn my eyes back here into Canada, hoping.to see we are differentiating ourselves in all ways. What I see instead is complete failure in leadership to do so. In fact instead of exemplars we find political animals willing to suppress science, biology, libraries, And at the same time heed the requests of Big Oil, Big Finance, Big Pharma and attempt to match American political ideology. We will have no chance in my view unless we radically overhaul our 'politics'. Of what exact use actually, is the CPC Party ? The Liberal Party? The NDP? In the context you described ? Are they all great disaster managers? Exemplars of wondrous foresight ? Are they even useful caretakers until someone else arrives to steer Canada into a murky future ?

Northern PoV said...

"Toby - Trudeau doesn't need the Tories or the New Dems to push through meaningful tax reform. He has a tightly whipped majority and he can shame plenty of support from the opposition benches on this one."

Ya think? We just saw the complete collapse of the Liberal tax fairness plan. So badly botched that it may be politically toxic for a generation.

The mistake they made was trying the piece-meal approach when an independent commission (like Pearson did) to examine the whole spectrum was required - esp in these days of willful ignorance.

If it gets rid of the bay street jerk who wants to privatize our public infrastructure - then that's a consolation prize.