“The Best Prime Minister Canada Never Had.” Why Change?

For some 30 years, a few of us were secretly warmed by the unique glory of having worked for Robert Lorne Stanfield: the man thoughtful Canadians came to recognize as “The Best Prime Minister Canada Never Had.”  

A harmless little gift that happens rarely in any ruthless business.

Canada carried on united. Stanfield’s special recognition costs taxpayers nothing and, being permanently hypothetical, can never disappoint. It affirmed the tolerance of Liberals for losers, and it didn’t influence the fate of his Progressive Conservative Party or dim the luminous stature of the word “Trudeau” — the name of the prime minister who beat RLS three times.

Recently, however, this enduring conceit became a cloud: a prize that floats around according to the whim of op-ed writers in Canada’s paper of settlement: The Globe and Mail. John Duffy seized ample space this summer to invite former one-term premier of Ontario and interim leader of the Liberal Party of Canada Bob Rae to “lay claim to the status of The Best Prime Minister Canada Never Had.”

Treacherous waters, John.

No respected voice in the Liberal Party — Canada’s most successful closet conservative institution — should steal our hard-earned prize and, then, offer it airily to one of his own.

Counterfactual histories, as you must know, only cause trouble for winners.Your Party won’t restore its dominion by tormenting vanquished Tories or by sideswiping other coast-to-coast failures, including New Democrat leaders: Tommy Douglas and Jack Layton.

Besides, Robert Stanfield never laid claim to this meager prize and would have been annoyed if one of his high-profile admirers had taken up space in the Globe to make the case. He would have much preferred that he or she had done a better job of singing his praises before his last election, rather than after he lost.

Seriously.

Unless an equitable, regionally sensitive, transparent process is put in place to award — or re-award — the title on a regular basis, the fairest thing to do is leave this empty prize with Stanfield. Please.

After all, unlike Bob Rae and other promising losers, Bob Stanfield actually won four majorities as premier of Nova Scotia, then won a national leadership convention, and, thereby, was the official leader of the opposition when he was defeated time and again by the greatest Liberal campaigner of the last 100 years.

Health service charges and customer empowerment

In a rather teasing but ham-fisted attempt to make healthcare user fees respectable, Canadian economics columnist Neil Reynolds evoked the words of Tommy Douglas, certainly the political father of universal public healthcare in Canada. Douglas once advised: “I think that there is value in having every family, and every individual, make some individual contribution . . .  I think it keeps the public aware of the cost and gives people a sense of personal responsibility. Even if we could finance (medicare) without a per capita tax, I personally would advise against it.” Reynolds concluded from this, “Mr. Douglas, the pragmatic socialist, was right. Free medical care lets people remain personally indifferent to costs, discourages thrift and encourages debt. Medicare needs Tommy Douglas memorial user fees.


Click on: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/tommy-douglas-the-pragmatic-socialist/article1806775/

OK, Douglas didn’t endorse a punitive user fee and didn’t suggest that in appearing to be “free,” health services would be heedlessly abused by patients. Nevertheless, Reynolds was right to raise Douglas’s statement in considering healthcare reform. There is a connection between making an individual contribution (paying something) and individual responsibility. Let’s suggest as well: when you pay even a nominal fee for a service, you may likely experience a heightened concern for its quality.


It's easy to feel abused under a regime of taxation without representation. It’s revolting. There are risks as well, however, in an exchange in which you claim a service for free. 


In Tommy Douglas’s vision, albeit of a less atomized society, the patient is an interested shareholder in a health service he or she owns as a citizen and taxpayer. It seems possible that a shareholder’s sense of empowerment could be enlivened by introducing some form of service charge.


Taxes are high today as well; democratic socialists of the past would be impressed. However, today millions of patients pay no income taxes. And taxpayers generally have no accurate idea what share of their taxes actually goes to public healthcare services. Those jurisdictions that levy a separate healthcare tax only use the separate tax to pay a fraction of the total healthcare budget. This, in practice, may have the unfortunate affect of bolstering the impression that healthcare is affordable—indeed, a bargain.


The financial costs of rising utilization rates for health services are expected to grow almost twice as fast as the cost pressures caused by our aging populations, as noted recently by The Canadian Health Services Research Foundation. Click on: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/time-to-lead/healthcare/stop-blaming-seniors-for-soaring-health-costs/article1793802/.


User fees to abate these costs have been widely discredited. To make a real difference, they’d end up unfairly discouraging those with lower incomes. Nevertheless, as the area of greatest growth in costs, surely, the direct relationship between the doctor/prescriber and the prospective patient/client is critical to reform. Conceptually, some form of service charge should help prod both parties to act most efficiently and empower the patient to insist on quality service.


If Tommy Douglas’ reformers could stand up to a full-fledged doctor’s strike, surely, we can consider making  changes to the healthcare system we have inherited—and which, like to one he challenged, also claims to be a seamless virtuous whole. 

Iconic Canadians

One contemporary illustration of the consciously deferential Canadian living alongside the unconsciously laissez faire American is the growing use in Canada of the words “icon” and “iconic Canadian.”

If you search Google for “iconic Americans” you get about 1.7 million results. If you next search for “iconic Canadians” you get just over 1.3 million results. With a tenth the number of participants and fellow citizens to pick from, it seems we’re five to eight times more likely use the term. But distinctions, even big ones like that, don’t necessarily make Canada a better place.

Beyond its original religious meaning, an icon is an object of uncritical devotion. Surely, we owe it to ourselves to think twice before offering that kind of loyalty to any individual or list of eminent Canadians. We needn’t be hectored by iconographers or lash ourselves for our lax fervour.

The assignment of the adjective “iconic” to individuals, works of art, landscapes, and public and private corporations is pursued with great enthusiasm by numerous organizations, including the CBC and the Dominion Institute. (In a June press release, the institute’s Executive Director, Marc Chalifoux, complained, “Some of the most iconic figures of our country’s past are strangers to many of us, unrecognizable and underappreciated.”  Apparently, the problem isn’t choosing who to revere, it’s getting us to take note.)

Most of their choices are merely silly: the writer Pierre Berton, The Beaver as “an iconic Canadian history magazine,” and the Royal Canadian Air Farce as “an iconic Canadian Comedy Series.”  Charlie Pachter, the family estates of the Group of Seven, Tim Horton’s, the Hudson Bay Company, and Bombardier shareholders everywhere may benefit from the branding value of the adjective “iconic.” Such flattery is of little harm; we’re not ostracized for not being ardent fans.

In the political realm, however, assigning the adjective “iconic” to praiseworthy politicians and individual political creations bolsters the status quo and makes reasoned progress more difficult. Elevating John A. Macdonald, Pierre Trudeau, and Tommy Douglas to the commanding heights of “iconic Canadians”—lifting them above second thought, above the terms of normal debate—not only makes their times appear less interesting but it gives arbitrary advantage to one polished narrative of the past. (Macdonald was a Canadian visionary but his assessments were not flawless, for example, dismissing Abraham Lincoln as a “beast” that should be elected, if only for Canada’s sake.[1])

In politics, there is no such thing as a level playing field; what works fairly well now usually beats an idea that might work better. That conservative bias, however, needn’t be assisted by the mere assertion that the original architect was a great man and a nation-builder.  The word “iconic” confers an aura of permanence and perfection that can only make contemporary change that much harder to discuss.

One needn’t be an iconoclast to insist that there are further useful things to be said about healthcare, the delivery of electricity, and how we express ourselves in our constitution. Progress is still possible, in fact, because our earlier heroes were mortals—and we can find our own mortals to improve on their accomplishments.

Our most illustrious leaders invariably called themselves practical thinkers. Their works were borne of the options that were available to them at the time. For instance, there was no alternative capital market in Toronto to electrify Ontario in the 1900s without government ownership or public borrowing. So, Adam Beck created Ontario Hydro. Thanks to Pierre Trudeau’s ability to hold together nine premiers and Parliament, we have a new constitution with a Charter of Rights and Freedoms. However, that Constitution Act of 1982 also included an amending formula. Someday, hopefully, a new generation of leaders will successfully put it to use to do something about our constitution’s continuing anachronistic features. 

 The past itself— its advocates and beneficiaries—weighs heavily on how we choose to cope with the future. That burden needn’t be bronzed with icons.

[1] Gwyn, Richard, “John A: The Man Who Made Us”, Random House Canada, 2007, p. 242

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