Are you happy with how Canada is governed? If so, I might engage in unkind reflections on the quality of your information or judgement. But if not, let’s engage in fundamental reflections on the source of the problem.
In the hurly-burly of politics, and too much media coverage from a horse-race perspective, there’s a powerful temptation to focus on messaging or partisan leanings and beliefs. But since I’m writing on the Colonel By Day holiday, I want to take a longer, more contemplative perspective.
Starting with you scratching your head over “Colonel By Day” unless you live in Ottawa, née Bytown. Apparently Aug. 7 was “Regatta Day” in Newfoundland, “Terry Fox Day” in Manitoba, “Natal Day” in Nova Scotia and, speaking of dud messaging, “Saskatchewan Day” in, of all places, Saskatchewan, and “British Columbia Day” in, yup, B.C. At least in Vaughan, Ontario, it’s “Benjamin Vaughan” day.
Perhaps if we could pick a few things to celebrate in common we’d feel less demoralized. And speaking of things to celebrate, it’s “Simcoe Day” in Toronto, for John Graves Simcoe, under whom the 1793 “Act Against Slavery” made Upper Canada the first British colony to end the slave trade and also set slavery on the path to extinction.
So let’s think about government in terms of basic principles like “slavery is wrong,” and about policies that look to the long-run benefit of the polity, not the short-term advantage of our faction. And speaking of the long run, I’m astounded to realize it’s now a quarter-century since I amused myself and baffled onlookers and participants alike by asking various Canadian “Conservative” political figures what the state was doing that it simply should not do.
Not do differently, or foist on some other level of government. Just stop. Among the astounding range of its enterprises from the cosmic to the trivial, what was not a legitimate state function, or one ambition too many given how many pressing tasks it was fumbling comically, tragically or both.
I got to ask Preston Manning and Jean Charest on a panel in 1997, when both headed what the press seemed to think were “right-wing” parties, and they were less unable to answer the question than unable to understand it. (Only the socialist participant, Nelson Riis, had an answer: to abolish business-startup grants; see my Dec. 5, 1997, Ottawa Citizen column.) Nearly three years later I cornered would-be Republican presidential nominee George W. Bush in a New Hampshire high school auditorium, and despite having been a two-term “right-wing” governor of Texas he declared the question a startling novelty.
As two-term president he never thought of anything either. So who can?
Actually, a colleague suggested “not doing drag shows for kids.” Seems obvious. But will any politician even go out on that limb, let alone say the state should fund and require universal education but not deliver it? Or that it should not deliver health care? (Or even, in Canada and despite my rule about shuffling things about, that the feds should leave medicine to the provinces?)
Step right up. It’s wide open, for Pierre Poilievre, Jagmeet Singh, Justin Trudeau, professors, activists, journalists, and yes, you, the mere citizens. Should the state, at least, stop paying diversity, equity, and inclusion activists to misrepresent our history and ourselves as racist and vile? How about compulsory labelling on food? Anything? Anything at all?
In 19th-century Britain, the state took about 10 percent of GDP. There was no gun control and no compulsory schooling, yet they led the world in prosperity, culture, literacy, and military might. Then as government bloated up, promising “A land fit for heroes” and such guff, the UK slid into fractious mediocrity. Coincidence? Some say no.
Others say yes, including most publicly funded academics. So how about privatizing universities? Leaving most safety matters to common law, not statute or regulation… including carrying a buoyant, heaving line in your canoe?
Canada is astonishingly over-governed nowadays. And plenty of people, and politicians, growl about high taxes, excessive bureaucracy, and a passive public. But how many would in any way reduce the activities and ambitions that swell the public sector and demoralize citizens? What exactly, from the tragicomically vast panoply of programs designed not to protect our lives, liberties, and property, but to reshape our characters and make us healthy, wealthy, and wise no matter what vile dunces we may seem to be, would they eliminate?
Big or small, is there anything the state should stop attempting?
John Graves Simcoe thought so. He thought it should not make and enforce rules that held human beings in bondage like mere things, and acted resolutely on it. Can we today think of nothing that fails to increase prosperity despite its vaulting or petty ambition, or infringes the rights and dignity of free individuals?
If not, I found our problem.
