Читать книгу Fearful Symmetry - the Fall and Rise of Canada's Founding Values - Brian Lee Crowley - Страница 5

When November 15, 1976, rolled around and René Lévesque was declaring to rapturous applause in the Paul Sauvé Arena, “Je n’ai jamais été si fier d’être Québécois,” I was a parliamentary intern at the House of Commons. To a unilingual English-speaking kid from British Columbia, it was patently obvious that Quebec was where the action was. Something new and unprecedented was stirring there, and I desperately wanted both to understand it and be a part of it.

But how?

A few months later the answer became apparent when the interns took their annual trip to Quebec City to visit the National Assembly. This visit had two immediate effects on me. First, I was absolutely blown away by the vigour and eloquence of the ministers and backbenchers we met from the new government. The “projet de société” that, together with sovereignty, seemed to animate the PQ government was, to the eyes of a callow youth at any rate, unbelievably exciting and inspiring. Second, I learned that the new government had great plans to reform the province’s political institutions, and political institutions were actually something I knew something about.

On my return to Ottawa I asked Stanley Knowles, dean of the House of Commons and a towering authority on Canadian parliamentary procedure, to write me a letter to Quebec’s new minister of state for Parliamentary and Electoral Reform, Robert Burns, asking that he consider me for any jobs that might come open on his staff. Within a few days the phone was ringing and one of Burns’ top aides, André Larocque, was calling. “We don’t get many letters from Stanley Knowles,” he said.

I was in.

There was the little matter of not speaking a word of French, but it is amazing what you can do when you are motivated. As Wordsworth said of an earlier time of hope and excitement in another French-speaking land: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.” In my blissful state I threw myself into learning the French language with all the zeal of a convert. The deal I had made with Burns was that I would work part-time for him and study part time at Laval University. As my French got better and better, I went less and less to my classes. At the end of six months I was learning so much more at work than at the university that I stopped going altogether.

It wasn’t just mastering French that drove me. I wanted to be part of a new society that many of us thought we were creating, a French-speaking society committed to social justice that would make a break from the morally dubious English-speaking capitalism that had brought us Vietnam, Richard Nixon, energy crises, the CIA and so much more. And not only was Robert Burns a leading nationalist, he was also a famously left-wing trade union leader. He made René Lévesque so nervous that the new premier felt constrained to warn Burns that the new government was not going to adopt the “Cuban model” of economic and social development.

I pretty much went native.

But heart and head were not pulling together in harness, and as I grew older the head increasingly argued the heart into following its lead—especially as the heart began to have galling suspicions that it had been duped. It began with the nagging discomfort I felt with the dismissive contempt that met the legitimate aspirations of English-speakers and the unapologetic use of the state’s coercive powers to push English to the back of the bus.

It was at this point, as Andrew Coyne relates in the foreword, that I went off to do graduate studies at the London School of Economics. There I came to grips, metaphorically speaking, with F.A. Hayek, the Nobel Prize–winning economist who was one of the twentieth century’s most doughty defenders of liberal-capitalism. I wanted to prove him wrong; instead, the richness and breadth of his argument made me confront the shallowness of many of my own economic ideas. Scepticism about the benevolence of big government began to tinge my thinking.

Hard on the heels of my return to Canada came the era of big constitutional reform. I was a negotiator of both the Meech Lake and Charlottetown constitutional accords, and became ever more disturbed about the degree to which the country was tying itself in knots to accommodate Quebec when it was clear that Quebec’s demands were more and more obviously arguments of convenience designed to maximize their bargaining power under threat of referendums to break up the country.

A fifteen-year period ensued in which I set aside my preoccupation with Quebec and its place within Canada in favour of a different project: challenging Atlantic Canadians to reject the damage that had been wrought on them and their economy by decades of well-intentioned but deeply misguided policy, including by Ottawa. An intrepid band, of which I was a member, founded a think-tank, the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS) in Halifax, and we dug in for a long battle of attrition in the war of ideas. When we opened our doors, it was a courageous person indeed who was willing to say that, on balance, dependence on transfers from Ottawa had been a bad thing for the region. Today, that idea meets with widespread (but not universal!) acceptance, and we at AIMS had a major role to play in that evolution of attitudes.

A series of fortuitous events then occurred, which, like a catalyst in a science experiment, caused this book to begin to precipitate out of these diverse experiences.

Probably the first such event came in 2004, when I was still a columinist for La Presse in Montreal. The editor-in-chief, André Pratte, invited me to participate in a joint La Presse/Radio Canada conference in Montreal on the Quebec model of social and economic development. Tasked with presenting a talk on whether Quebec could afford the “Quebec Model,” I laid the groundwork for much of what became Chapter 7. The next event was an invitation I received from Mackenzie King Visiting Professor Randall Morck to come and give the Canada Seminar at Harvard in November 2005. While the talk was ostensibly to be about what I had learned about regional policy during my time at AIMS, the prestige of the institution and the catholicity of tastes of the audience made me want to avoid a parochial talk. It was in my ruminations over what to say to the Harvard audience that the idea crystallized of the decades-long bidding war between Quebec and Ottawa for the loyalty of Quebeckers, an idea which forms a crucial part of the architecture of this book. EI, regional development policy, vast transfers to the provinces, massive pseudo-work, all of the themes in which I had been immersed within the region, now fit within a larger vision of how Canada had evolved over the last fifty years.

Michael Ignatieff, whom I already knew and respected, was a sympathetic member of the audience and was struck by both the bidding war concept as well as by the analysis of how long-term dependence had harmed the Atlantic-Canadian economy. Now that he has moved on to other responsibilities, I hope that he still remembers his initial enthusiasm for these ideas.

An invitation from my friend, UPEI Dean of Arts Richard Kurial, added fuel to the fire. Richard asked me to take part in a debate at the Institute for Public Administration of Canada’s annual conference in Charlottetown in August 2006. On the other side of the debate was the redoubtable Nancy Riche of the Canadian Labour Congress, and we had it out on the theme of the role of trade unions in the public sector in Canada. I’ll leave it to others to decide who got the better of the argument. The important thing to note is that the reflections that the preparations for this debate triggered form a large part of Chapter 6.

The next catalyst was another invitation from another friend, Kevin Lynch. Kevin had just been made clerk of the Privy Council by our new prime minister, Stephen Harper. Kevin was hosting a retreat for his new flock of deputy ministers at the old Ottawa City Hall, and he asked me to come and be on a panel about the chief economic challenges facing the country. I had recently been mulling over the demographic challenges facing Canada, and was particularly struck by the impact the coming labour shortages were already having on Atlantic Canada, traditionally the highest unemployment region in Canada, and so Kevin’s invitation spurred me to put those first impressions into a more developed narrative. That story was later woven into this book, chiefly in Chapter 1.

My talk to the federal deputies was quickly followed by an invitation from Rob Wright, the deputy minister of finance, to come to Ottawa as the Clifford Clark Visiting Economist at Finance Canada. The Clifford Clark is a very prestigious and unusual post in Ottawa—the only way to describe it is as the one-man in-house think-tank and policy gadfly in the Department of Finance. The incumbent holds the rank of an assistant deputy minister, participates as a full member in the Executive Committee that makes all decisions at the officials’ level, and gets to choose the policy areas in which he will play that gadfly role within the department and the government more generally. Given how I got there, and given the importance I was increasingly attaching to the transformative effects of population aging and labour shortages, I decided to make those my chief areas of interest. The second half of this book was largely conceived during this time.

I was blessed during my tenure at Finance to have the ready, and even enthusiastic, support of many incredibly knowledgeable colleagues who helped me think through many of the population change issues, both by supplying me data and by giving me the benefit of their own thoughts. Because being associated with this book in any way will likely not be a career-advancing move in Ottawa, I won’t refer by name to the many people who gave to me so generously of their time and thoughts, but they know who they are and I want them to know I will never be able to thank them enough.

Because population change is one of those deep and far-reaching social and economic shifts that are actually quite foreseeable, I met little resistance within the department when I pressed on them the case for a more vigorous response from the federal government to the changes on the horizon. Much of the great work we did internally, however, has still not seen the light of day. Thereby hangs a tale that, alas, my oath of secrecy prevents me from telling in all its gory detail.

Suffice it to say, that the thing that struck me most forcibly on my arrival in Ottawa was the extent to which the federal government was mesmerized (and I use the word advisedly) by the provinces, and particularly the province of Quebec. Everything that Ottawa could or should do was weighed and measured by how it would influence or shape relations with the provinces, as if there was nothing more to the country than these peculiar quaint relics of colonial history and Victorian politics and technology. And the consequences of the uneven effects of population aging on different provinces, and particularly on Quebec, was just something that Ottawa was not willing to shine a spotlight on. The circle was neatly closed between my early fascination with Quebec and my more recent preoccupation with what an aging population means for Canada.

The most unexpected tributary of this book was the one that turned out to be the closest to me. No one can think about the great issues of population change without being struck by their intimate connection with the great life decisions of individuals, and most notably the decisions about marriage and family.

While I was off hobnobbing in Ottawa, my long-time partner, Shelley, was home in Halifax, running our restaurant and café, the Queen of Cups and the Queen of Cups Too. We missed each other terribly even though I was home on weekends, and I quickly began to realize that I couldn’t think about Marriage and Family on a grand scale without also thinking about marriage and family for myself, and the critical things I had to say about the decisions Canadians had made in this regard over the past few decades applied just as much to me as to anyone else. I asked Shelley to marry me in February 2008, and we are about to celebrate our first anniversary as this book is being prepared for the printer in June of 2009. My only regret is that it took me so long to get around to it; my great joy is that Shelley would have me in spite of everything.

There are many other people who deserve my thanks for the part they played in making this book come to life.

Sean Speer is certainly one of the most important. Sean, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Ottawa, is one of the brightest intellectual lights of his generation and it has been my privilege to have him as my researcher. “Researcher” doesn’t really cover the extent of the partnership I enjoyed with Sean on this project, however, for it would really be more accurate to say that it was a close collaboration. I came to depend on Sean a very great deal and he not only never let me down, he consistently exceeded my expectations. Every reference was meticulously chased down and documented. Every idea was exhaustively debated. Every possible source turned upside down and shaken vigorously to extract the gems within. I know that in a few years Sean will be the one writing the books and I will be looking on admiringly.

My publisher, Key Porter, has made the painful process of creation as smooth as could be hoped for. Executive editor Jonathan Schmidt worked with me on the manuscript and forced me to raise my literary game. Marketing manager Daniel Rondeau and consultant Pat Cairns threw themselves enthusiastically into plans to get people actually to buy the book. Wendy Thomas was my able copy-editor; designer Sonya V. Thursby did great work on the cover and interior. Editor-in-chief Linda Pruessen was the one who saw the potential in my idea and first brought me into the Key Porter fold, in large part I suspect because of the recommendation of my friend, fellow author and best man, Patrick Luciani.

Few people deserve more thanks than my colleagues at AIMS. They patiently endured my absence for almost two years while I was on loan to Finance Canada, and then supported me when I came back with writing lust in my eye and holed up with my computer for months on end. They never complained and indeed made sure that I was left alone, deflecting many importunate requests for my time and attention. In particular I want to thank the three key staffers, Charles Cirtwill, Barbara Pike, and Bobby O’Keefe, as well as the board of directors and especially the chairman, John Irving, for their unfailing backing.

An awful lot of people were strong-armed by me into reading some or all of the manuscript, which they all did with alacrity and good grace. They include: Tom Flanagan, William Johnson, Janet Ajzenstat, Alan Beattie, William Gairdner, Barbara Kay, Doug Allen, Andrea Mrozek, Rebecca Walberg, John Richards, John Weissenberger, Angela Tu-Weissenberger, Brian Flemming, David Frum, Martin Masse, Daniel Dufort, Jack Granatstein, Brian Ferguson, Jason Clemens, Peter White, Richard Bastien, David MacKinnon, Drew Bethune, Paula Minnikin, and Robin Neill. Their comments, which were copious but always constructive, allowed me to avoid a lot of mistakes while tightening the argument and strengthening its defences.

Much that is good in this book is due to the kind assistance of the many friends and colleagues I have mentioned here; and while I would love to be able to blame them, the truth is that all errors, of whatever kind, are attributable solely to me.