Canada’s loyal progressives

The iconoclasts in our public parks will not win Time Magazine’s award as news-maker of the year. Their ambitions are not as dangerous or as audacious as those building pro-democracy movements in Middle East autocracies. Further, it is not clear whether they wish to reform or undo the existing order, whether they will propel our politics forward—or back. 

Nevertheless, progressive, anti-establishment voices in Canada and the United States are getting greater attention. So far, in Canada, however, a sad pattern of mimicry and separation is repeating itself.

Young Canadian progressives haven’t missed a beat: their distress with the existing political and economic order matches American sentiments, sound bite for sound bite. They too have been taught recently to fear for their economic security and the survival of the planet.

It was a dare by the Vancouver magazine Adbusters that launched the OWS movement. (You’d probably have to live in mellow Vancouver, if not California, to imagine telling people in New York, Chicago, and Toronto to occupy park spaces from late September on through to “victory.” Napoleon certainly didn’t wait until the end of the summer of 1812 to get started for Moscow.)

The latest American symbols of discontent have infiltrated Canada’s political culture. “Vote mobs” are organized to excite university students to vote. The Liberal Party—the party of competence—now wants to be called a “movement” and may adopt the US primary system to pick a leader, bottom up. The New Democrats and everyone but CEOs and Stephen Harper now imagine Canadian society as 99% middle-class and 1% unconsciously rich.

The leadership that is striving to mobilize young activists, however, is often strikingly conventional. When the best of them reach 40, they’ll likely be wearing Order of Canada pins.

For example, read Gary Mason's report on the “whip smart” young drivers of the 60,000-member Leadnow.ca political action organization. Its co-founder, Jamie Biggar, has a perspective that is is inclusive and politely overwrought.

““I think there is a sense, particularly among young people, that a lot of the systems and institutions in our society are really broken,” Mr. Biggar told me. “And there is a deep desire, I think, to work not just on becoming more effective within the system we have today, but also starting to look at how we can make it better, how we can create a more equal society, how we can achieve deep sustainability.”

Click on: www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/british-columbia/gary_mason/building-a-progressive-voice-with-focus/article2250565/

Mason reports that this movement has modeled itself on the 5-million-strong MoveOn.org in the United States.

MoveOn.org, however, is more straightforward. Since its birth in 1998, it has campaigned against a Republican president and for a Democrat, Barack Obama. It has worked the two-party system with a vengeance; it’s not waiting for electoral reform. It recruits volunteers and registers voters year-round. It’s out to influence the outcome of national elections; it wants more progressives in Washington, where progressive issues are best advanced.

Instead of rediscovering Washington, as Canadian progressives did in the 60s and in the election of 2008, Leadnow.ca doggedly focuses on Ottawa.

On every objective from greater social justice to environmental sustainability, health to education reform, and environmental sustainability, it looks to Canada’s federal Parliament. It seems to want to get back to updating Jean Chretien 1990’s Throne Speeches.

                        Click on: http://leadnow.ca/declaration

They’re missing the mark. The two battlefields that should matter most for progressive Canadians are Canadian provinces and Washington. Ottawa is a cul-de-sac for great ideas. It’s a center of escapist politics, if not the capital of a conservative country. 

Progressives can make Canada a little more civilized. However, Canada’s Parliament can’t deliver any strategic gains for this continent—or for the globe. Big changes worthy of the rhetoric of the new radicals can, however, be secured through direct participation in American federal politics.

Will Canadian progressives ask again: can the Canadian Dream of the 19th century serve their dreams for the 21st?  

Taxing isn’t something nice people should be asked to do

British Columbia just did what Californians have been doing for years. Enough of them took up a crazy, irresponsible invitation to vote down an unpopular new tax that they were already paying—a tax vital to the interests of both those who want stronger government and those who want a more vibrant private sector.

Confusing his declining personal popularity with the people’s tolerance for the rules of representative government, former BC premier Gordon Campbell agreed that a simple majority of those voting in the pending referendum could vote down the Harmonized Sales Tax (HST). And just over half of the half of the voters that bothered to vote did exactly that.

In North America, even pure blind trouble-makers like to imagine they’re doing some good. So, the defeat of the 12% HST is claimed as a victory for direct democracy. This is an illusion. Making government for the people next to impossible only makes the people less powerful.

The game (designing taxes on a ballot) and the rules (treating less than thirty percent of eligible voters—and law-abiding taxpayers—as the voice of the people) have no merit. There isn’t a significant government on this continent that has won an absolute majority in a general election for a hundred years.  Taxes have been raised, wars fought, and life enhanced and lengthened for individuals by sticking with the rules of constitutional representative government. 

Commentators have suggested the outcome of the BC referendum was influenced by exceptional public anger. Gary Mason wrote in the Globe and Mail:

“Whether this victory for direct democracy emboldens voters across the country remains to be seen. We have certainly seen Canadians vent their anger and frustration at the ballot box before – the rise of the NDP and the annihilation of the Liberals in the last federal election is a good example of it. The Reform Party was a creation of protest politics. But the political culture in B.C. has always had a different personality and harder edge.

“British Columbia is also a community that, by and large, is bound by populist impulses that reject expert opinion,” Mr. Mitchell says. “That is a key element of the frontier politics that still, by and large, prevail in British Columbia.”

Click on: www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/british-columbia/gary_mason/hst-defeat-brings-back-harder-edge-of-bcs-protest-politics/article2144389/

Ontario Finance Minister Dwight Duncan said he didn’t expect the HST’s rejection in B.C. would hurt his party, noting: “I believe Ontarians have accepted our tax plan.”

Click on: www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/british-columbia/bc-politics/hst-could-become-political-lightning-rod-in-ontario/article2143576/

Inviting individuals to tailor their own taxes would not work anywhere. It’s condescending and dangerous for eastern Canadians to question the maturity of Californians or British Columbians. Both jurisdictions have been economic and democratic workhorses for both confederations.

Dwight Duncan is wise, as well as reflexively self-serving, to guess that Ontarians accept what he’s done—and leave it at that.