So 2023 is about to enter the pages of history, or its dustbin. And what can one say about such a year? Momentous as it was to some, as a quick scan of the birth notices or obituaries will confirm, it feels like one of those years of ominous quiet before the storm.
How can you say that, you may ask, when the Middle East exploded in early October? And my answer is that all years see some dramatic events. But while some are clear turning points, like 1942 or 1968, and others seem to be unimportant, like 1926 or 1955, still others give the troubling sense that serious problems are building toward a crisis that is yet to arrive.
I once horrified an editor who asked me to explain why the 2000 U.S. election was pivotal by saying it wasn’t. Not compared to, say, 1980. Or 1932. Or 1860. Or even 1920.
Sorry if there’s too much historian insider here. You may not have an opinion on 1926, and if not it’s OK. But I am writing about history so it’s a bit hard to avoid. And let me add some comprehensible detail on why 2023 is one of those years with trouble a-brewin’. Mostly I will discuss Canada. But it would be fatuous to bypass the global situation.
Out there in the world, the Russia-Ukraine war appears to be stalemated. But surely it will break one way or the other, with Ukraine terribly short of money and munitions and virtually the entire pre-war Russian military destroyed. China just made some of its most ominous noises about Taiwan and may well invade in the coming year. And the Middle East situation, already very violent, threatens to explode into regional or even global war including over the Gulf of Aden and those wretched Houthi.
Now for Canada. My Postmedia colleague Brian Lilley recently Xed, “The Trudeau government has to do something to fix this mess,” which I called about the most discouraging assessment possible. In fact, every significant file in Canada is a mess, from budgeting to inflation to immigration to housing to military procurement to their vaunted green initiatives to health care, foreign election meddling, and even public order. But nothing has yet collapsed into an overt crisis, of the sort that comes when, say, you can no longer sell foreign bonds.
Especially given the widespread dysfunction, a breakdown in one area is liable to send the dominoes tumbling. Imagine what an insolvent federal government would have to do on health care. (And need I mention that our “contribution” to maintaining transit for ships, including oil tankers, through the Suez Canal and past Yemen was three staff officers without hardware?) What would happen to the rickety finances of some provinces if the feds “hit the wall”?
There’s also the very real and growing sense of alienation among people who saw harsh crackdowns on COVID dissenters and protesters and the Freedom Convoy only to witness complicit indulgence of menacing pro-Hamas demonstrations. And the polarization of our politics, with the Liberals confined to a few densely populated urban areas and the Tories to the frustrated hinterland.
Now, can you think of one problem in Canada that is less serious today than it was a decade ago? Can you even think of one that has more or less stagnated instead of deteriorating?
The weird thing is that we might well end up looking back nostalgically on 2023 as the queasy calm before the appalling storm. We could end up saying, sure, we let things go from bad to worse on their predictable way to disaster, but at least the roof hadn’t yet fallen in, just a few long cracks on the ceiling with bits of plaster falling into the soup from time to time. Those were the days.
There is of course an alternative. I don’t want you staggering into the New Year in bleak despair. We could decide that we’re not going to put up with mediocre drift toward calamity, empty rhetoric, and fatuous gestures. In which regard I have to mention that another of my younger colleagues recently discovered the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy debate and was stunned at the calm intelligence with which the two discussed important policy differences.
You know you’re in trouble when you’re wishing we still had statesmen like Richard Nixon. But knowing you’re in trouble is the first step toward fixing it. So make a New Year’s list of resolutions, if you like, that contains five key policy areas and the things you won’t tolerate politicians doing and those you really want them to do.
If we can do so, in sufficient numbers, we might remember 2023 as the year we finally got fed up and demanded better policy.
Which would be historic in a good way.
