Reinventing Canada

Deborah Coyne is a lawyer, activist and candidate in the next federal election in the Toronto-Danforth riding.

Your humble e-scribbler first met Deborah over a decade ago when she was constitutional advisor to the Government of Newfoundland and your scribe was, as Deborah once put it, "one of four young assistants". Young must be a relative term, because Deborah is only slightly older than yours truly.

Anyway...

She was energetic to the point of being manic at times but she was always incredibly thoughtful and though-provoking. Time has not reduced her energy, apparently.

In March, she delivered a speech in the University of Toronto lecture series, entitled "Reinventing Canada for the 21st century". It's a pretty wide-ranging commentary, running in the print version some 35 pages.

For example, take her summary of the current national political situation:

It is unfortunate that when citizens are willing to contribute so much to the future of the country, we have a federal government offering so little national leadership. We have a federal government that is in the business of putting the government out of business, transferring significant fiscal power away from the federal government to the provincial governments, and talking about what divides us rather than what unites us in moving forward.

Our national government, with some exceptions, continues to be consumed with petty politics, outdated ideologies, power plays to find the Holy Grail of a majority government, costly and useless opinion polls to gauge, not important matters, but merely the popularity of the government.

The preoccupation of our political class with manipulating power has discredited politics as a whole in this country, and must be abandoned if the values of democracy are to endure into the future. Our governments and political elites no longer seem to want or need publicly engaged citizens. The growth of the state into universal healthcare, public education, social security, portable pensions, immigrant settlement, and so forth means that too often we have sat back and wrongly taken for granted Medicare, employment insurance, public education, public pensions,
progressive taxation and the successful integration of the growing numbers of new Canadians. Public institutions seem to run on automatic pilot, with no need for our active engagement. Professional armed forces are available with no need for conscription.

Our leaders no longer appeal to a “public purpose”; only to the needs of customers, client-citizens. Some observers refer to this as an era of “personal democracy”. Conditioned as we are to be consumers, customers, shoppers, clients, we prefer to influence politics on our own terms.

The political party has thus been sidelined as an instrument of mass organization, despite attempts to “brand” itself to appeal to the individual “consumer”. In its place, we have a huge range of here-today gone tomorrow networked-based organizations, and celebrity-based populism.

Then there is this potent reminder that most provinces have higher trade betweens within Canada than there is internationally between Canada and other countries. The much-ballyhooed Council of the Federation has done nothing on this front of any consequence:

Until the path-breaking Alberta-British Columbia bilateral Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement in August 2006 (effective 2007), trucks used to have to unload their loads at the border and repack them according to the different regulations in the two provinces. Crossing to the state of Montana was easier. Now with the Alberta and British Columbia economies essentially open to each other, a gain of some $4.8 billion in national income is expected. Imagine what would happen if all provinces pursued open trade within Canada!

Speaking of the Council of the Federation, Deborah quotes Jeefrey Simpson's assessment. In light of recent events, it is amazing how perceptive this observation, from 2006, turned out to be:

At the same time as the federal government has weakened, the provincial and territorial leaders have increasingly organized themselves, most recently forming the Council of the Federation to try to arrogate to themselves more power. Journalist Jeffrey Simpson describes well how the annual meeting of premiers has "morphed into Canada’s equivalent of the Group of Eight Summit, with lavish banquets, superb entertainment, huge budgets, large retinues, security personnel everywhere, portentous and instantly forgotten communiqués and a ubiquitous aura of preening self-importance."

The speech is lengthy but it is well written and well worth taking the time to read.

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Council of Federation struggles to be relevant

The Council of the Federation, essentially the provincial premiers meeting as they always have, is trying to fend off criticism that its one day meeting in Toronto on energy and climate change was nothing more than an exercise in optics.

“I’ve got to say — to say that this is a photo-op, I have some trouble with that. I actually find the comment offensive,” said the meeting’s chair, Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams, when asked if the meeting was seen as a chance for the leaders to bolster their green images.

“If we wanted a photo-op we would be here in front of all the flags all together and smiling. I’m here today to indicate that the premiers are extremely concerned about this problem [climate change], they share that concern with the federal government and with the people of Canada, and we want to find solution.”

According to Williams, [Photo, right: CP, Adrian Wyld] this year's chair of the Council, the meeting served as an "awakening" and gave first ministers the chance to review a 30 page document on best practices to see what each province is doing to deal with climate change.

But as with Equalization, the premiers seem to have found some difficulty achieving any concensus except on the need for further talks. As the National Post reports, the premiers did not issue a climate change action plan as the federal government has done.

Instead, the premiers will work to develop a common energy and energy efficiency strategy, according to ctv.ca. Provinces will likely move individually in the absence of any consensus on a collective approach.

"We're not developing a climate-change plan here," Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams, who chaired the one-day session, said after the talks ended.

"What we're doing as a group of premiers is to try to make a contribution; to try to solve problems; to try to contribute to the national debate on what works and what doesn't work.

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Update: Two things. First, the picture is a new one of the Premier looking grumpy. Take as a n article of faith that every news shooter in the country will be looking for what will become the stock "Danny is grumpy" shot to illustrate future stories when...well...Danny is grumpy.

Second, the Globe story in the morning edition is headed "Climate change divides premiers". The lede sums up the problem for the Premiers:

Canada's premiers emerged divided yesterday over how to tackle climate change, with the leaders of British Columbia and Quebec pushing for a North American solution, Ontario pitching a plan that would be national in scope and Alberta rejecting both proposals.

Ok.

Well, realistically, how is that headline different from any headline ever written about any meeting of the Council of the Federation, let alone its predecessor meetings of premiers?

What doesn't divide the Premiers?

They can't even agree on how much money the federal government should give to the provinces through transfers like Equalization.