Canada—where fed-up Malcolm Gladwell will go to relax?

Malcolm Gladwell’s success as a Canadian-born, best-selling, Manhattan author and regular New Yorker writer is celebrated in Canada. He can get Americans to buy new ideas and has coined popular explanations (“Tipping Point” and “Blink”) for change and success in American society—polemical skills Canadians don’t expect to see very often in fellow Canadians. He has made us proud.

Nevertheless, his melodramatic and teasing rationale for coming home is embarrassing.

Ian Bailey, while introducing his weekend Globe and Mail interview with Gladwell, highlighted that Gladwell would discuss his new book on the uses and abuses of power, the Occupy movement and “what might make him grab his Canadian passport and head back home for good.” 

Wow. What would drive a such a winner to take refuge in Canada? Here’s what we’re told:

           “You point out that most of politics is tweaking. Do you see that changing?

“Increasingly now, there are these situations where something more is demanded. I don't know whether you can tweak your way out of the euro. I think maybe you have to blow up the euro and that demands a very different mindset. It may have been that was a completely misbegotten experiment, and that it will cost all of Europe in the end and maybe something radical is demanded. And the health-care system in America, I think, is so ill at the moment. I think it, too, needs to be blown up. I don't think it can be tweaked.

“Despite health-care reform?

“Yeah, I actually think health-care reform was too timid. So there are a handful of areas where problems are so intractable that I think, maybe, you need some more revolutionary vision. We have gone beyond the realm of the tweaker who is at least someone who gets things done.

“Where do you see that going?

“I don't know. I see myself taking my Canadian passport and coming home.”

Click on: www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/books/malcolm-gladwell-says-the-occupy-movement-needs-to-get-more-machiavellian/article2258841/page2/

It’s easy to be a big thinker: you get excited; you tell us that we should blow up the euro or the biggest healthcare regime in the world; you scan the channels for news that the revolution is happening; by Friday, you lose patience—and, without blinking, head back to Canada.  

America is full of losers, but not as many quitters.

What is Canada’s appeal? Is its genius simply not stirring up radical ideas in the first place? Allowing quitters and patriots to console one another?

Maybe, Gladwell’s motives are deeper, profoundly pessimistic and quintessentially Canadian. He maybe genuinely believes that America is ungovernable and on the edge of collapse. (There’s a sentiment that won’t get him thrown out of any of the top parlors in Toronto.) However, leaving Toronto readers with the idea that he’d come home to feel safe is delusional.  

A few New Yorkers and many Torontonians share a vain proposition: they can side-step the mess on their continent. They think of their cities as island civilizations—diversified globally and with plenty of brands of their own. In truth, at their best, both cities are indebted to and dependent on the vitality and wisdom of the mainland—and its system of popular government.

Not having the vote in next year’s American showdown simply makes it easier to sit on your hands in Toronto.

10% of an excellent idea: selling 10% of Toronto Hydro

You want to expose pure-blind dogma in American politics? Just ask a campaigning Republican to accept any increase in taxes, for any reason. In Canada, you ask a self-identified progressive or a social democrat to support privatizing a public asset.

Mayor Rob Ford of Toronto—probably the most timid backlash politician on the continent—is reported to be thinking hard about asking Toronto’s Council to agree to sell 10% of its electricity utility, Toronto Hydro. The proceeds could reduce the city’s future debt charges for new capital projects or temporarily relieve financial pressures on core services.

So far, the mayor’s critics are only squirming. Councillor Mike Layton called the proposal a “Band-Aid to stop the bleeding.”

Click on: www.nationalpost.com/news/Mayor+looks+selling10+Toronto+Hydro/5606392/story.html

Since the city is definitely bleeding financially, that tired Band-Aid allusion isn’t really that damning.

For those who favor new investments in needed public transit, who also want to keep public libraries open and read books, the strategy of selling assets that needn’t be public ought to be embraced, not tolerated in puny bits.

Selling Toronto Hydro at a good price is 100% a good idea, and should be pursued as such. Rather than raise possibly $150 million for temporary relief, why not raise $1.5 billion by selling the entire company—and do some real good?

If the province of Ontario’s transfer tax regime still stands in the way of selling more than 10%, then the mayor, with a majority of Council, ought to lobby Premier McGuinty. After all, a democratic government would be finding a solution to its own problems, and providing a precedent that the debt-ridden province of Ontario may end up having to consider as well.

The old arguments against wholesale privatization are unpersuasive.

Public ownership doesn’t protect customers. Toronto Hydro’s customers are jealously protected now, and will continue to be, by the Ontario Energy Board. That regulatory body also regulates Toronto’s other—private—utility, Enbridge Gas. The private gas company and the public electricity company have, over decades, received comparable customer satisfaction reports.

Dividend payments from publicly owned Toronto Hydro are nothing more than hidden taxes on Torontonians and can be replaced by more equitable and transparent sources of revenue.

Furthermore, a mayor and 44 councillors who are elected independently and answer separately to their separate wards cannot provide rigorous accountable share-holder oversight. It is wasteful vanity for 45 politicians to imagine that they can stop being professional politicians and run a billion dollar business strictly according to business principles. 

The left has had a lot of fun ridiculing Rob Ford’s elusive “gravy train.” Fair enough. Reducing waste in government will not be enough to restore Toronto’s financial capacity to keep up with changing times. So, other things will have to be tried: rather than only raising taxes, why not get out of businesses that no longer need to be the business of government?