Canada: Falling apart together

Rick McGinnis:

At the core of Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson’s new book Breaking Point: The New Big Shifts Putting Canada at Risk is a simple truth that doesn’t get repeated enough.

“Canada is not a love story,” they write. “It is a marriage of convenience, a survival strategy conceived a century and a half ago for a collection of colonies that were determined to protect their autonomy from America’s Manifest Destiny. Since the first grand bargain of Confederation, Ottawa and the provinces have lurched about like awkward dance partners, stumbling over obstacles and arguing endlessly over who should take the lead. The result is a nation held together not by a shared vision but by barely managed tensions.”

And now, in the aftermath of ten years of Justin Trudeau’s federal Liberals, the COVID lockdowns, and under pressure from a suddenly hostile America under Donald Trump, those tensions are reaching a crisis point. “Canada has survived on compromise, inertia, and a stubborn refusal to confront its contradictions,” they write.

Up front they put much of the blame on Justin Trudeau, whose decade in power “became synonymous with higher costs, diminished prospects, and a government increasingly disconnected from the realities of everyday Canadians.” It was, according to them, the beginning of the end of the so-called Laurentian consensus that has governed Canada for well over a century, which they confidently predicted in their 2013 book The Big Shift: The Seismic Change in Canadian Politics, Business, and Culture and What it Means for Our Future.

Boiled down to the essentials, the Trudeau years left us with massive national debt, let our military degrade even further, ignored or exacerbated critical issues such as housing and immigration, ramped up the political and demographic divisions in the country and added the alienation of the western provinces to the longstanding problem that is Quebec nationalism.

“This growing political divide is shaping the nation’s future,” they write. “The federal government can continue pretending Western grievances can be ignored, bur the anger is not going away. The question is whether Canada’s political establishment will finally take the West seriously or continue to gamble that Alberta and Saskatchewan’s patience will never truly run out. That gamble would be risky in the extreme.”

Much of the fallout from Justin Trudeau’s decade was the product of a political vision that Ibbitson and Bricker describe as shifting the Liberal Party of Canada to the left of the NDP instead of its customary centrist positions (a shift fully embraced by the prime minister, and one that ended up taking Jagmeet Singh and the NDP to near-extinction in the last election). But it wasn’t unprecedented, and all that Western alienation has built up over decades, thanks to programs like the National Energy Policy, a legacy of the rule of Justin’s father, Pierre Trudeau.

In hindsight it’s become clear with time that the first Trudeau, despite his immense self-regard, wasn’t nearly as smart as we thought he was. The second Trudeau, by contrast, had poorer judgment than his worst critics imagined.

Breaking Point does a fine job of listing all the calamities threatening the country’s future, but the authors are generous with potential solutions. They begin by stating that “we must face this simple truth: Canada is a resource-based economy pretending to be something else.” This is obvious to anyone objectively analyzing the country’s potential from the outside, and it used to be common knowledge here until a couple of generations ago.

“Our elites, especially the Laurentian elites in Central Canada,” the authors write “treat the resource economy as something of an embarrassment, still chasing the fantasy of a green-tech utopia. And our national identity has faded into something vague and performative, flickering like a radio signal just out of range. Postnational, some call it.”

Bricker and Ibbitson insist that we need to get government “out of the way” and stop managing the economy. It should be easier to lay a pipeline, start a business, build housing, train young people for jobs that exist, reform the Senate, reboot the CBC, let First Nations communities manage themselves, and even end the system of transfer payments that take money from Western provinces and give it – disproportionately – to Quebec. But even if some theoretical government was moved to enact any of these policies in earnest, they would have to overcome generations of Canadian fondness for in-depth regulation and federally favoured monopoly.

My favorite prescription is moving select federal departments, their staff and ministers out of Ottawa to where their policies have effects. So, Parks Canada to Jasper or Banff, natural resources to Calgary, agriculture to Winnipeg, fisheries to Halifax, Northern and Arctic affairs to a territorial capital like Yellowknife or Iqaluit and the environment to Kelowna.

My favorite, though – mostly because it sounds so much like something I’d suggest in one of the satire columns I write here after a federal election – is that “it would offer an entirely new and refreshing perspective if the Canada Counsil for the Arts and the rest of the Heritage Department were situated in Saskatoon.” The outrage to this would be so broadly comic that I’m certain Bricker and Ibbitson aren’t at all serious about this whole idea.

(I’m actually sure this is a joke because everyone knows the most natural place to send the Department of Agriculture would be Saskatoon, while the Canada Council would be most at home in Winnipeg. Outside of Quebec, I can’t think of a place in Canada with more government-subsidized arts organizations.)

There are stretches where the authors reveal their own biases. Bricker, the CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs and a former staffer in Brian Mulroney’s government, and Ibbitson, a journalist who worked for the Ottawa Citizen, the National Post and the Globe & Mail, give a recap of Mark Carney’s selection as director of the Bank of England by stating that it “helped that he projected good looks and a certain charisma – he was dubbed ‘the George Clooney of finance’ in the British press.” Only a pollster and a journalist would imagine Carney as a dynamic finance hunk.

They spend several pages talking about the steep decline of legacy media in Canada and insist that instead of subsidizing them with government money and the Online News Act’s fund, extracted from aggregators and search engines like Google, we should offer tax breaks for subscribing to embattled papers like the Globe, the Calgary Herald and Le Journal de Montreal, and news sites like the Tyee, the Hub “or, yes, even Rebel News.”

“Let readers and viewers choose where to flow the funds needed to sustain journalism. Let the market decide.” Unsurprisingly, they can’t imagine that the market has been judging the worth of legacy media for a generation and deciding how much they want to pay for the biased source that flatters their worldview.

We have arrived, they write, at “A Crisis of Crises” where “the cracks threaten to tear us apart: between regions, between generations, between Indigenous and settler peoples, between new arrivals and native-born. The worst possibility is that Trump is right: that Canada doesn’t make sense anymore, that we have lost collective trust in our country and in each other, that we have lost identity, lost affordability, lost even sovereignty. As each crack appears and worsens, the whole structure feels unsteady; the very possibility of Canada becomes uncertain.”

In response they reach into the CanCon playlist and produce a lyric from Leonard Cohen: “There is a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.” Which is all very inspirational but I can quote Cohen just as easily: “Destroy another fetus now / We don’t like children anyhow / I’ve seen the future, baby / It is murder.”

Bricker and Ibbitson prescribe a long list of programs, demanding plenty of changes and lots of money spent, and state that “what we need is the will to sacrifice what we must to create the best possible Canada.” They admit that Canada “has always been a hard country to hold together: more improvised than inspired, more negotiated than created. We were never united.” It’s possible we are no longer able to fight the gravity of this simple truth and that Cohen is right about the future.

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