Canada’s Keystone Pipeline Project: Al Gore’s “Big Bird”

It used to be easy for Republican politicians to warn that runaway government spending would destroy the American Dream and global progress too. Then, along came the awkward elections of 2010 and 2012, when the whole country started to take them seriously. Churchillian rhetoric found itself at war.

During his first debate with that appeaser in the White House, Romney announced with fatherly finality that he’d fire “Big Bird.” An illusion of children and a yellow body costume would have to be sacrificed.

In not asking anything from voters with any propensity to vote Republican, he trivialized his campaign and made fiscal probity a laughing matter.

Stopping the Keystone Project that proposes to transport crude oil from Alberta’s oil sands to under-utilized Texas refiners is the environment movement’s “Big Bird.” Opposing the project generates great visuals, but it offers no strategic value in the fight to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions.

On behalf of the young science of climate change, the project’s opponents ignore nearly three centuries of science on how economies work. They insist the globe’s health is at risk and then aim their guns at Canadian enterprise that won’t alter global prices or fossil fuel consumption, neither globally nor in the US.  They single out a high-cost producer of fossil fuels rather than the cheaper sources of oil that actually allow for excessive consumption.

They say politicians have to start acting globally, in concert, while lobbying the President to divide the continent’s energy market and, in effect, abrogate trade agreements with Canada. They say corporations are polluters and that the middle class is innocent, while complaining that their adversaries are ideological.

They tell Washington politicians to take extreme action against Canadian interests and Albertans who can’t vote and look the other way as US swing states undertake a “renaissance” in fossil development.

There is nothing wrong with playing politics to save the world or, for instance, just a piece of Western civilization. Al Gore and the chief strategists of the climate-change movement, however, appear no smarter or more sincere than Mitt Romney.

Ultimately, we’ve got to do something about entitlements, hard-faced Republicans insist. But first let’s cut off PBS. Ultimately, we have to put a significant price on carbon, Al Gore concedes in the Guardian. And first let’s threaten to burn Barack Obama in effigy if—after all the proper environmental reviews are complete—he doesn’t kill the Keystone pipeline project.

Cynicism doesn’t make climate change or public debt smaller problems. It can, however, crowd out constructive discussion and serious problem-solving.

Drummond and his plan are human too

There is no shelter for skeptics.

We want to believe that if a decision is going to hurt, there is no sane alternative. Nevertheless, we have no right to assume that the author of unpleasant advice is automatically smarter, more objective, and has more integrity than others.

The massive restraint program proposed by Donald Drummond offers an obvious duty to the print media, the guardians of calm discussion. One institution that shouldn’t be stampeded is the centrist Globe and Mail.

Profiling the author of such a grand-sounding document as “Public Services for Ontarians: A Path to Sustainability and Excellence” makes journalistic sense. However, it’s hard to think critically about someone who is perfect!

Jeremy Torobin, Drummond’s Globe biographer, didn’t quite create a god, but he certainly made me feel small.

Here’s the profile’s headline: “Parsimony, with a side of courage”

Here’s the lede: “. . . the former Toronto-Dominion Bank chief economist strolls into a restaurant looking every bit a monument to the austere financial discipline he preaches.”

Here’s Drummond’s first passion: “Getting to the bottom of vexing public-policy issues.”

Click on: http://investdb4.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/GAM.20120218.RBLUNCHDRUMMONDATL/GIStory/

Drummond is provided an entire page to tell us who he thinks he is and about the challenge he’s had fixing the second-biggest government in Canada:

           “No government in the world has ever done this before," he says.

"I'm calling for a revolutionizing, a radicalization, of virtually everything a government does, to make it focus on efficiency, not just in one area at a time, but simultaneously in virtually everything they do. It'll take unbelievable courage and unbelievable intelligence, and it'll take an unbelievable capacity at both the political level, and the bureaucratic level."

Click on: www.globeinvestor.com/servlet/ArticleNews/story/GAM/20120218/RBLUNCHDRUMMONDATL

These words weren’t whispered in his ear by an obsequious flack from Premier McGuinty’s Office.

He acknowledges no compromises in his weighty report or any concern over the complexity of his 100-day assignment—essentially, doing to dozens of public organizations what Mitt Romney and his management consultants used to do for profit. He volunteers that even if Ontario revenues were high he’d still do 350 of his recommendations.

Only once does Drummond, the non-partisan analyst from Jean Chretien’s Camelot, patronize the locals. Referring to the problem of keeping up quality services, he asserts:

“. . . during the Mike Harris and Ernie Eves eras, Ontario's public service was rarely 'asked to flex its analytical muscles,' causing them to atrophy.

“As an aside, he warns a similar phenomenon is occurring in Stephen Harper's Ottawa and says the federal Conservatives would be wise to study Ontario's experience.

"The process of re-building that capacity is under way, but it is a long haul," he says.

Canada’s greatest political economist John Kenneth Galbraith once suggested that “no human being” can survive a career in banking. Drummond finally shatters that theory. After 10 years in banking and 23 years in the Department of Finance, with a public pension and a bank pension, Don Drummond is still boyish about Don Drummond.  

A boyish ego, however, doesn’t guarantee fresh thinking or the ability to stand outside the professionally cool opinions of the moment. Drummond’s report will make many losers angry. You may see courage in that. However, if you read it carefully you’ll also discover that it will make many powerful interests happy.

The sections on electricity services, for instance, suggest that 80 small municipal distributors be rationalized, presumably to save money. At the same time, Drummond concludes that the provincially owned electricity assets and agencies—85% of the electricity sector and the main drivers of future price increases—need, after years of presumably mediocre governance, a period of reflection.

“A degree of normalcy may very well be helpful for the sector to take stock and reflect on the status quo. Consequently, the Commission has a series of recommendations that are meant to balance the need for stability in the sector with the need to curb costs.”

Click on: www.fin.gov.on.ca/en/reformcommission/chapters/ch12.html#ch12-c

Torobin reports that Drummond didn’t sound like someone “eager to ride off into the sunset.” More likely, he’ll be a welcome and frequent presence as Ontario’s insiders manage this difficult decade.

99 Percenters should be equal when they vote

Now with a majority in Parliament, the Harper government looks serious about introducing legislation in the House of Commons to redress the under-representation of Canadians who live in the growing provinces of Canada and the over-representation of Canadians who continue to live in places that were relatively bigger in the past.

(Federal constituencies vary wildly by population—from as little as 34,000 people in tiny Prince Edward Island to more than 170,000 in the most populous district. Some ridings near Toronto have grown so fast over the past decade that they are 50 per cent or more over the national average. In other words, one vote in Markham has half the influence of a vote elsewhere.)

However, redress is a winning and losing business; it makes enemies and needs friends.

It’s not surprising but it’s reassuring that Canada’s most respected national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, remains willing to insist that only one principle should determine representation in the popular assembly of a democratic Canada:

“One person, one vote: It is democracy’s first law. In Canada, representation by population is supposed to give it life, with each constituency having a more or less equal number of electors. The Conservatives must stay true to their previously enunciated principle when they introduce legislation to enlarge the membership of the House of Commons.”

Click on: www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/editorials/conservatives-should-not-waver-on-rep-by-pop/article2207075/

“Conservatives should not waver on Rep-by-Pop” the Globe’s editorial insisted. What’s unsurprising and sad as well is that the Globe decided to beseech only Conservatives to honor this great liberal principle.

The Globe is a small-l liberal paper and was founded in 1844 by George Brown, Canada’s first great liberal reformer—a lifelong champion of the simple slogan: rep-by-pop. Yet, today, organized liberalism can’t be counted on to know its own mind on this basic democratic principle.

Acting Leader of the Liberal Party Bob Rae stands for secure representation for Quebec, fair electoral reform nationally and, of course, for the 99 Percenters in his park. Rep-by-pop stands shoulder-to-shoulder with other (unrepresentative) considerations. There is, however, no room for more than one liberal principle in allocating House of Commons seats, in a demographically changing Canada.

Smaller provinces and Quebec can be protected with a minimum number of seats in the Commons and, as well, by regional representation the present and, hopefully, in a reformed and elected Senate someday.

Canadian federal institutions and parliamentary democracy serve several objectives: representing individuals, representing founding languages, and individual provinces, and protecting individual and minority rights. However, individual votes in national elections should all pretty well weigh the same.

Occupy Wall Street Movement—no elixir for big government advocates

Braving lashing rain, a full house of Toronto’s non-commercial elite—retired and active writers, broadcasters, academics, and public administrators—gathered at The Gardiner Museum last Wednesday to hear Canada’s highest ranking retired public servant, former Clerk of the Privy Council, Alex Himelfarb.

Something exciting, it was thought, might happen: his presentation was advanced as a thinking person’s war-cry:

“How did ‘taxes’ become a bad word?”

The brochure elaborates, “Was it our loss of trust in the government, in one another, or does it run even deeper: a loss of trust in the future? ‘When we believe progress is not possible, we live in the present, and we lose our commitment to tomorrow,” Himelfarb says.”

We were in for a bracing lecture.

Indeed, his introducer effused about the “bravery” of the presenter. However, Himelfarb quickly invited the entire room to relax. He would take sides—their side on almost every sighed cliché since the financial crisis of 2008.

He compared Canada favorably to “anti-tax” America. Apparently, Canadians—unlike Americans—are smart enough to understand Oliver Wendell Holmes’s observation that taxes are the price we pay for civilization.

He identified equity as the focus of his concern, repeating the phase “The very rich and the rest of us.”

(The demagogue hidden inside a very smart man who ghosted for politicians for 30 years must have got the best of him. In the version of his speech that was printed in The Globe and Mail, he dropped the two words “of us.” In the Globe, he asserted in closing, “All great change starts outside conventional politics and right now the ‘other 99 per cent’ are saying no to more of the same on Wall Street, in the oil sands and beyond.”)

Click on: www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/tax-isnt-a-four-letter-word/article2201690/

Himelfarb argues that neo-liberals (in particular, America’s Milton Friedman) corrupted public tolerance for taxes and support for positive government over the last thirty years and that unless this is challenged “we will sleep walk toward a smaller, meaner Canada.” In his remarks, he gives Friedman direct responsibility for the ridiculous winsome lie: “Tax cuts are free.”

Neo-liberals and neo-conservatives haven’t monopolized the public square over which Himelfarb helped govern for the last thirty years and are they are quite able to defending themselves, and their Nobel Laureate, Milton Friedman. However, there is much that Himelfarb said about the nature of today’s problems in public trust and public finances that ill-serves constructive debate.

Rather than talk about our civilization and how strong governments and a robust free markets can work better, rather than even demonstrate that there is a structural deficit that needs new taxes in Canada, he adds his voice to the inchoate protests in the park—modern government is hostage to the one-percenters and their extreme good fortune caused the perilous state of US public finances and stagnating middle-class incomes throughout the developed world.

The notion that stagnating middle class incomes is caused by right-wing governments and, therefore, can be reversed by ramping up taxes on one in a hundred and redistributing income via central governments is as fanciful as anything assigned to Milton Friedman.

The central problem of reconciling a more open and peaceful world economy with rising middle-class incomes in the most highly developed societies has not been solved by laissez faire right-wingers or interventionist leftists.

The middle classes are just too big to be bailed out by the state, whether the wealth of the top 1 percent is more heavily taxed or not. The middle classes and the lumpy new 99% are open to lies from either side of the ideological spectrum. And Himelfarb is on the mark when he calls out those who keep promising even further tax cuts to make up for stagnate incomes.

However, it’s passing strange that an experienced pragmatist like Himelfarb would suggest that we need a new movement outside of conventional politics when the economic problems today so clear require compromise, collaboration and technical discipline—skills the existing machinery of modern democracy still have the capacity to deliver. It delivered political change in 2008 and it also rescued the world economy from possible collapse.

While the powerless sidewalks of Wall Street were the focus of world attention last week, the US Senate was left largely scot-free to block a job-creation package that would have relieved some of the hardship faced by millions.

War of 1812 made people mad but it didn’t make Canada

Middling-nation nationalists and their incumbent governments leap at opportunities to “celebrate” significant war anniversaries. Wars harden feelings and kill off collective options. Unlike elections, wars, at least from a distance, seem to settle things and flesh out national narratives.

The Government of Canada, with $30 million and a clutch of professional storytellers, is out to excite Canadians over the War of 1812-1814 between the US and its old belligerent—the British Empire and its northern colonial assets.

That war left Britain’s colonies intact and spent sufficient treasure and blood to close the angry wound between the UK and the US. It made British subjects in Upper and Lower Canada angry with their southern neighbor and more resolved to stick with the British Crown.

Pow! Canadian consciousness got its start.

While Canadians scorn the gross beautification of American history that permits Americans to constantly call America exceptional, they are every bit as accepting of a self-serving narrative of Canada’s birth and persistence as a separate nation.

In this age of nerve racking choices it’s not surprising that many find comfort, even virtue, in believing they are living within a firm coherent story. This temptation is too easily praised and too rarely challenged.

Yet, human history is also about how stories unravel and how people persist in re-opening their choices and discovering new ones. Our generation of Canadians shouldn’t feel less free now to think about our future choices simply because the British didn’t lose the War of 1812.

Along with the 1812 celebrations, the intention of Canada’s Heritage Minister James Moore to support organizations that support Canadian history and at the same time promote Canadian identity should be seen for what it is: a way to turn the real study of history into feel good propaganda. Canada’s future should stand or fall on what’s going on now; studying history should make us more intelligent decision-makers not more ardent nationalists.

Click on:  www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/history-goes-to-head-of-the-heritage-class/article2198082/

Jeffrey Simpson who confessed to not need fresh memories of a “stupid” war to appreciate Canada’s strengths or America’s shortcomings received a scolding by CP Champion of The Dorchester Review.

“Simpson claims to disdain “the cardboard version of history taught in Canada.” But if anything is made of “cardboard,” it is the Globe writer’s imagination. If he cannot see the origins of an independent Canada in the battlefields of 1812-14 after reading Alan Taylor’s The Civil War of 1812 (which Simpson calls “outstanding”), he should pick up a text on basic philosophy: specifically, the principle of potentiality. Just as a tree grows from an acorn, Canada grew from its colonial origins — but only because there was not an American takeover to cut it off.”

Click on: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/10/11/c-p-champion-the-war-of-1812-was-canadas-war-of-survival/

The problem in free societies is that potentialities keep happening.

The War of 1812 didn’t settle anything. A liberating and true history of Canada—to date—would also draw attention to the Annexation movements in both Upper and Lower Canada. It would note that John Abbott, Canada’s highly esteemed second Prime Minister, signed the Annexation manifesto of 1849. It might acknowledge that so-called loyal Ontario voted for complete free trade with the US in 1891, despite the existential warnings of Canada’s first Prime Minister, John A Macdonald.

Human societies worth studying are not like oak trees or even English gardens.

Michael Ignatieff: 9/11 and faith in the state

Michael Ignatieff has returned to academia after a battering experience as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. His exclusive essay on the consequences of 9/11 demonstrates that he’s no less an academic today—and no less a political wordsmith either.

Click on: www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/americas/september-11/michael-ignatieff-911-and-the-age-of-sovereign-failure/article2160153/

He scorns the illusions and mistakes of a decade. His prose soars with eagles. It’s very hard, however, to figure out amongst all the game scurrying for cover below which exactly is his prey. The title offered by The Globe and Mail, “9/11 and the Age of Sovereign Failure,” is grand but fairly straightforward. His angle on what’s gone wrong, however, is anything but.

Ignatieff’s prize first sentence declares:

“One of the tasks we ask government to perform is to think the unthinkable.”

That’s possible, of course; the modern nation-state has the human resources to image anything. However, his complaint about 9/11 is brutally specific: on facing terrorist threats, Western governments (especially the US) should have been “not just hoping for the best but planning for the worst.”

Ignatieff concludes, “A sovereign failed that morning.” He seems to imagine that every morning the president and his busy court should stop dealing with the problems at hand and ask, “What conceivably could go wrong today?”

Then, he gets adult and offers a grace note for all of us:

“We have learned to live with that, to accept that there are 'black swans' – events so unthinkable that no one can prepare for them. So we accept a new vulnerability. But there is no hiding the childlike disappointment inside us all. Our idea of the sovereign included a child's expectation that it would keep us safe. We have had to grow up.”

But his child wakes. The Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina, the economic crisis of 2008, the debt-ceiling debate, the sovereign debt crisis in Europe—along with 9/11—all constitute sovereign failures and betrayals of the people’s trust:

“When you line these failures up in a row, one following the other, it is no surprise that people have lost faith in government everywhere, but especially in the United States.”

Faith, he insists, must be restored. Here, he’s a tad ambitious, combining the illusions of his resilient child and the perfectionist standards of a tenured outsider:

“Sovereigns matter. And rebuilding their legitimacy, their capacity and their competence is the political task that matters most.

“Competent doesn’t mean bigger. It may even mean smaller, nimbler, more digital, less bureaucratic and more responsive in the face of the ceaseless ingenuity of greed. But whatever form sovereign government takes in the future, it has to mean government that prepares for the worst and regulates to protect the public from greed, violence and environmental ruin.”

Ignatieff’s nimble Leviathan isn’t granted a blank check:

“If terror challenges democracy, the answer is more democracy, not less, more accountability and openness, not less.”

Ignatieff says he doesn’t care what form his state should take. So, he doesn’t try to explain how more nimble airport security and less bureaucratic-enhanced interrogation protocols will keep us safe, our faith alive and our consciences clear. He doesn’t reconcile how an all-knowing regulatory regime will allow businesses to make necessary business mistakes or how the savvy regulator will not be seduced in the process of regulating the animal spirits of others.

A Liberal critic can demand that government be on top of everything and not our master. But a liberal scholar ought to try to explain how we can be free and grant any-sized government sufficient power to keep our person, our property, and our economy perfectly safe.

Anyway, if officials and politicians were sure that what they were doing would always look "competent" the next day, nobody would need the elaborate machinery and checks and balances of Ignatieff's more perfect state.

He concludes by suggesting there are forces lurking in the US primaries in the grip of an “ideological fantasy,” imagining that America doesn’t need a competent sovereign. According to Ignatieff’s opening proposition, everything must be possible, even the idea of Rotary Republicans living in the wild making up their own rules. However, his essay and his concluding sentence are equally fantastical:

“And until they [sovereigns] stop failing us, we will not be safe, and our prosperity will not be secure.”

Faith in government goes hand in hand with too much faith generally. Before 9/11, we saw too much trust in all centers of power. American leaders in banking, in business, in defense, in intelligence, in accounting, in Congress, in the White House, and in the Federal Reserve all trusted that the others were competent and, together, that they were “masters of the universe.” Those illusions hurt millions of less proud, less powerful people.

However, the way ahead is not to try to construct a flawless state, but to get on with the grinding business of making improvements, punishing wrong-doing, and rewarding talent.