Austerity, we have been told repeatedly by pundits and political leaders, is the defining issue in these uncertain times, the solution to our economic challenges.

We have been given fair warning that the next federal budget will be first about cuts – cuts to government even as we continue to cut taxes. We can expect the same from most provincial budgets.

This, we are told, is what must be done. Austerity is not simply the best way, the argument goes, but the only way, and not just for us but for our friends and allies. Canada has become the champion of austerity.

Politically, it is a pretty potent argument to make. It builds on our internationally recognized success in the 90s in balancing the budget and reducing debt (which unquestionably made us more resilient during the tough times that followed, though with equally undeniable costs to health and social programs, among other things). It draws on a powerful thread that runs through our history – one of pragmatism and frugality. It feeds off our growing disenchantment with government, but also the serious troubles we are seeing elsewhere, in Greece for example. And in this uncertain time, we are told that we have no choice. Austerity is the answer.

Opposition voices are reluctant to offer alternatives for fear of being seen as fiscally imprudent or as stuck in the past, defending “big government”.  And so, presented with no options, we come to believe that in fact there are none.

A good rule of thumb for public policy is that when we are told that there is no alternative, that usually means the opposite: that not only is there an alternative but it is probably one that we would prefer if it were offered.

We do indeed have choices – better choices. Of course we have to be prudent as we dig out of current deficits, partly a result of wise government action to mitigate the worst consequences of the global recession. But this is not the 1990s. Our situation is not dire. Canada is not Greece.

1) This is not the 90s and we are not Greece

Before the 1990s assault on the deficit, about one-third of every tax dollar was going to service the federal debt and dire warnings were circulating that Canada was at risk of hitting a debt wall and falling into 3rd world status with respect to global capital. So we cut.  But the thing is, the global economy was pretty strong and getting stronger. We were contracting; others were spending. As it turns out, economic growth – along with real sacrifice – was crucial in balancing the budget and exceeding all reduction targets. And it didn’t hurt that taxes then were higher.  So deficits turned to surpluses – more quickly than anyone expected – and those tax-fueled surpluses were quickly bringing down our debt.

Today, our level of debt is still the envy of others. But now the global economy is slowing and the future is less certain, less promising than in the 1990s; the recession lingers like a bad cold. Even here in Canada, and we have been pretty lucky, we continue to shed good jobs and, like everywhere else, our markets can expect to be battered by continued volatility. This is not the 1990s. Neither the fiscal urgency nor the economic conditions are the same.

And most important, we ought to understand how we got back into deficit and increasing debt in the first place, at least at the federal level. It was just a few years ago that we were running surpluses year after year. In the year that the current federal government took the reins, the surplus was at $16 billion. Clearly program spending was not putting us at risk. That surplus meant that we would have great resilience in the face of economic downturns – times when we inevitably spend more and lose revenue. It also meant that the federal government would be able to help the provinces, especially those hardest hit and that we would have fiscal room to manage the stresses of an aging population in a way that would be intergenerationally fair.

So what happened? Certainly part of the answer is that we are paying off the costs of stimulus spending made necessary during the recession. But that spending stopped – earlier than some would have hoped -  and so, even with moderate growth, we should be able to return to balance with a bit of prudence and without draconian measures.  If we want to.

But recession spending is not really the culprit. Our big problem is that our revenues as a percentage of GDP are far lower than they were in the 1990s, not just because of recession and slow recovery. In many respects our current and future fiscal challenges at the federal level are self-induced, the result of a succession of unaffordable tax cuts. Just think of the tens of billions annually taken out of our budgets since 2000 – and particularly more recently – in reduced income taxes, capital gains taxes, corporate taxes, and the GST, not to mention the long list of boutique tax “benefits” that amount to little more than tax cuts disproportionately benefiting those who need help least.

So our fiscal situation is not dire, at least not at the federal level.   We are still reaping the benefits from the 1990s decade of sacrifice, and the challenges we do have are largely self-inflicted.   And if we chose to get here, we can choose to get out.

2) Austerity is not fiscally prudent

Let me be clear that I share in the broad consensus that we must be fiscally prudent.   But let’s pause on what fiscal prudence really means: It means spending wisely, reducing waste, collecting sufficient taxes to pay for the public goods and services we want, and keeping debt coming down, at least during reasonably good times.

Of course there is always room to cut and we have important choices to make on our priorities.   I, for one, believe that we probably and understandably overbuilt our security apparatus after 9/11 and that in particular deserves a close look.

And make no mistake, the costly plan to build more prisons and penitentiaries – unjustified by the evidence – either increases our debt or diverts money from priority services such as health and education.

As for waste, it is probably time to look at the layers of bureaucratic control and oversight that make government less innovative and efficient – and arguably less accountable and transparent.   But as our Parliamentary Budget Officer repeatedly reminds us, the numbers here don’t add up; we will not balance the books on efficiencies and cuts to operating budgets.

Yes, government has become too central, authoritarian and remote from our everyday lives. We have a big job to do to close the gap between citizens and their governments. And there are no doubt savings to be had here.  But these are not primarily fiscal issues nor will austerity be the answer to our fiscal challenges.

Today’s austerity, however, is not primarily about fiscal prudence. If it were it wouldn’t be proceeding in tandem with large, unaffordable and unnecessary tax cuts for the most affluent among us.  These tax cuts make deeper program cuts inevitable.

The persistent emphasis on low taxes and cuts to services and public goods  looks more like ideology masquerading as fiscal common sense. In this light, austerity seems rather to be about cutting back the state and rolling out the free market agenda. Less public, more private; less collective, more individual.  It is, in other words, the fulfillment of the neoliberal counter-revolution rather than an economic plan for the future.

We know that some pretty smart economists, Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz for two, have taken on the austerity agenda and tax-cutting neoliberal ideology that underpins it. They argue that this is in fact the time for spending, the time for investments in education and infrastructure and for putting money in the hands of those in greatest need. They argue that the consequences of premature austerity could match what we saw in the 1930s, that in any case, this strategy will not yield the growth and opportunities we need. And, they add, it is also about time to stop the tax cuts and to start increasing taxes on those who can afford it. (And in the U.S., a growing number of rich Americans are calling on their government to raise their taxes.)

Frankly we don’t have to try to weave our way through the debates among economists to be worried about the consequences of austerity. A recent report from the (not-left-leaning) IMF has surveyed the international evidence and has concluded that government spending cuts do not, at least in the short-term, create jobs and growth but do create very significant costs to society, the economy and quality of life for the majority.

3) The consequences will fall most heavily on those who can bear them least

What does the IMF report tell us? The benefits of austerity cannot be seen but its negative consequences can, and these fall most heavily on the people who can bear them least. Specifically, the authors show that austerity, especially when it cannot be offset by significant lowering of interest, brings with it increases in unemployment  – particularly enduring unemployment -  suppression of wages for the majority, and deepening income inequality.

So, as we dig out, we ought to make sure that we are not stripping away the very tools necessary to withstand future shocks and to create jobs and opportunities now and for the future.  We ought to make sure that we are not hollowing out the country, allowing the erosion of those things that give meaning to our shared citizenship and that should be a source of comparative advantage going forward. And we ought to make sure that we are not undermining our ability to invest in those things that will make us stronger and greener for the future.

Austerity will take us down the wrong track.  It is not fiscally prudent.  It is not an economic plan so much as a surrender to the market.  And its costs will be heavy for the most vulnerable certainly, but for us all. So let’s reject the politics of inevitability and look at the choices we have and what the evidence tells us about what works best for the majority, not just for the few, and for the future, not just for now.

We need to have the debate – and the starting point cannot be some assumption about the inevitability of austerity. In fact, it ought not to be about big government versus small government. It ought to be focused on what will work to enhance the quality of life for most Canadians and what will make Canada more resilient for future generations.  It ought to be a debate about what challenges, what problems, most urgently cry out for our collective attention and action.  The preoccupation with austerity should not blind us to what really matters for our collective well-being.

I, for one, would propose that inequality, not austerity, be the defining issue for us now. Income inequality is growing fast in Canada and even the traditional deniers are coming on board. The gap is simply too big, the risks too high to ignore. Indeed, extreme inequality will continue to grow in an agenda dominated by austerity and tax cuts, an agenda that reduces our capacity for mutual aid and for collective solutions to our major challenges – our low productivity, climate change and environmental deterioration, and declining political participation.

Of course we ought to be fiscally prudent and that means asking of each cut and each expenditure, including every tax cut:  will this help reduce inequality or will it make things worse?

Let’s make inequality in all of its manifestations – child poverty, the reemergence of elderly poverty, the squeeze on working Canadians and students, and the excessive incomes at the top – a national priority.

We can afford the investments. We cannot afford to ignore the threat.

C10, the omnibus crime bill, passed third reading and is now over to the Senate for what is supposed to be sober second thought.  The vote could only have been a depressing anticlimax for the many Canadians who were fighting to stop or amend this legislation.  And the implacable inevitability of its passage must surely lead many to ask, ‘why bother, what’s the point?’

This question takes on added poignancy as we read with increasing frequency articles describing the relatively unconstrained power of the current majority government to do as it pleases, impervious to opposition voices or contrary evidence.  I was watching Jamie Watt on CBC explaining that Canadians were turning the page on the crime issue (and, for that matter, Kyoto) and so, the message goes, it’s time to get over it.

Well, maybe not.  Thankfully many are not willing to “get over it”. How heartening, for example,  to hear Leadnow.ca announce that they were simply regrouping for the next stage of their campaign for better justice policy.  So, here are some reasons not to turn the page, instead to continue the fight.

1) Those who spoke to Parliamentary Committees, wrote letters and op eds, called their MPs or took to the streets have made a difference.

All the opposition parties opposed this bill, rejected the smears that they were “soft on crime”, and focused on public safety rather than easy politics.  It has not always been so. And that means that the options are finally being put before Canadians, options for a Canada that is safer, not meaner.

Premiers, whatever their views on the bill, are demanding a more respectful federalism where they – who must administer the legislation once passed – should be engaged at the outset so that they can bring their views and experience to bear.  And several are arguing that they should not have to reallocate money – say from health and education – to pay for the costs of more incarceration and more prisons.

And through the efforts of dozens of organizations, many more Canadians are now paying attention.  And that can only be a good thing.

2) The process is not over.

Whatever one’s views of the senate and its reform, that institution has often played an important role in bringing a reflective, evidence-based perspective to bear on proposed laws.  Because the members do not face reelection,  they are in a good position to avoid the worst excesses of junk politics where pandering trumps the long-term interests of Canadians.

We know that there is a remarkable consensus among the experts here in Canada and more broadly that aspects of the proposed legislation will make things worse and will certainly divert money better spent on prevention, education, rehabilitation where possible, restoration and help to victims,  and the safe reintegration of offenders into the community.

Of course, we can all do the math.  A Conservative majority in the Senate  tells us that the bill will pass, yet again, with the same anticlimax we saw earlier this week.   But the Senate does have a job to do and there is definitely work to be done.  Let’s hear the evidence, the experts, the risks, the costs.

3) This legislation is transformative as it puts punishment and prison at the centre of our criminal justice system.

This has never been the Canadian approach; our balanced justice policies have always focused on safety and justice – and the best evidence of what works.  Such a change  in direction should never happen without a vigorous debate – a good fight.

That’s all the more important because as we have seen in the U.S., this punitive approach leads to more of the same. It feeds our fears and, when we see that we are no more safe, rather than reverse course we opt for even more imprisonment, even tougher sentences.  This beast, the more you feed it the hungrier it gets.

In the U.S., state after state is trying to reverse course but that is no easy task once you have built and filled all those prisons, once you have created a permanent underclass on the one hand and gated communities on the other.  We do not want to go that way.

4) In fighting this kind of legislation we are also fighting for a different kind of politics.

Who of us isn’t  sometimes afraid, especially for our kids, often angry and horrified at some of the terrible crimes we see on the news, and moved by the suffering of victims and their families.  And we know our own frailties, that we can confuse justice and revenge, that our anger can blot out the evidence, that we sometimes lash out and act against our own best interests.

Fighting against this punitive bill is fighting against a politics that exploits our frailties  rather than appealing to what is best in us.

5) And fighting against bad policy is good for the soul.

Here is the video of a recent talk I gave on taxes as a good thing. The talk was hosted by the Literary Review and TVO and sponsored by The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Ironically it is in the anti-tax U.S. that a conversation has erupted on taxes. Warren Buffett and a few other billionaires helped open the door, if only a crack, and President Obama has, finally, made taxing the rich a key means of funding his jobs plan. In the context of all that is happening now on Wall Street and beyond, these now seem like small and belated steps. Bigger things are in the air. But the conversation is now engaged and, judging from the reaction — accusations of class warfare, “no tax” pledges — tax is a proxy for these bigger things.

Here in Canada, no such conversation – only a few brave voices. We continue to reward politicians who avoid the issues – or promise more cuts. But without an honest conversation about tax, we won’t be able to face up to our challenges and we will sleepwalk towards a smaller, meaner Canada.

We ought not wait too long. We need that conversation here. We need it now.

For years, we Canadians have watched our neighbours take a much tougher anti-tax stance than anything we have known here. We saw that play out, almost unbelievably, in the recent extension of the Bush tax cuts in the face of trillion-dollar deficits. We were bewildered while watching the manufactured debt ceiling fight and the eleventh hour agreement to cut government – that is, services – by over a trillion dollars rather than say no to another tax cut for the country’s millionaires and billionaires. It was as though our neighbours, always able to reinvent themselves, were now stuck, with the same tune playing over and over again: Tax cuts are the magic cure for all that ails.

In the meantime, evidence to the contrary keeps mounting. Paul Krugman is keeping us informed of the human costs of the endless tax cutting in the U.S. where, in community after community, fire stations are privatized, streetlights dimmed, essential services choked. And all this without any evidence that the years of tax cutting delivered the promised benefits.

In Canada, we have traditionally had a more benign view of taxes. Like other northern countries, we have always understood that taxes are the price we pay for civilization and for a better future. While there are legitimate disputes regarding how much tax and of what sort we have generally accepted higher taxes as a way of funding public goods and services, redistributing income to avoid the worst excesses of inequality, and shaping the future to the extent we can.

But in Canadian politics another story has been unfolding. In the last federal election, all the parties seemed to be competing for the austerity and low tax crown. Apart from a minor skirmish on corporate taxes, nobody wanted to be seen as a tax and spender. In Toronto, the mayor won on the promise of tax cuts and an end to the gravy train (if it can ever be found). In the recent Ontario election, we heard our own version of no tax pledges. The Conservatives promised deep cuts. The Liberals promised no increases. And the NDP promised tax breaks for families and small businesses, offset somewhat by higher corporate taxes. Shortly before that, BC said no to the HST. And one wonders what precedent this tax referendum creates. Federally the government is continuing a decade of reduced taxes – even though we are still running deficits and even as the gap between the rich and the rest grows.

It has by now become a political truism that any politician would have to be nuts to propose tax increases to Canadians. But polling from both Environics and Ekos shows that Canadians, while averse to tax hikes, continue to value what our taxes buy. Then what’s the problem here?

The Last Free Lunch

The late-70s are a good place to start to understand this shift in attitudes. Then and throughout the eighties, neoliberalism – free market ideology – took full bloom in the aftermath of the serious economic stagnation of the time.

The solution, according to neoliberals, was to let the market do its work and get government out of the way. The best way to do that: cut off their revenues, cut taxes. As Milton Friedman, chief architect of this U.S, neoliberalism, liked to put it, when governments try to solve a problem they almost invariably make it worse. Progress would come not from our collective efforts to build a better society – there is no society, said Thatcher – but from pursuit of our individual interests in the market. So began three decades of an unrelenting assault on government.

No fancy theories here about how tax cuts automatically create jobs. The sales pitch was simple and it was perfect politics: tax cuts would be so beneficial to the economy that they would pay for themselves. Tax cuts are free – the last free lunch.

This notion that taxes are somehow separate from the services and goods they buy is now part of political culture. I am reminded of two images that capture the zero tax spirit of the Tea Party and the continuing search for a free lunch. The first is a now famous video of a Tea Partier holding a sign demanding that the government keep its hands off “my medicare”. More recently another protest photo shows a group of anti-taxers with a sign that reads “Cut Taxes, Not Defense”. Whether one favours “guns” or “butter”, taxes apparently have nothing to do with it.

Hugh MacKenzie, a research associate at the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives, has written for years about how this separation of taxes from the services they buy has distorted the conversation in Canada as well. One way that the idea of tax cuts as a free good is maintained is through the false promise that only waste and inefficiency will be cut. No politician, no party, favours waste and inefficiency and every government tries to reduce both – but tax cuts on the promise of ending the gravy train almost never find enough gravy.

The constant assault on government waste and the parliamentary time spent on the scandal of the day themselves have enduring costs; they erode the public’s trust in one of our most powerful tools for managing change and shaping the future – our own government.

Of course deference or blind trust is dangerous – governments must be kept in check by a vigilant citizenry, independent judiciary, and if we are lucky, effective media.

But the absence of trust is equally dangerous. It makes it hard for us to act in our own best interests. Most Canadians do know that the teachers and firefighters, the police and health care workers, the roads and bridges and traffic lights, the help when we are down or temporarily out of work, the child and elderly benefits we receive are all paid for through taxes. But, we are still reluctant to pay those taxes. We will always say no to taxes if we believe government is inefficient and wasteful or incompetent or worse.

We are falling into what game theorists call a social trap. Even when we know that cooperating with others would serve our collective interests, absent trust, we go off on our own. The absence of trust limits our ability to act collectively and imagine new possibilities. It takes the future away from us and hands it to “the market”. No trust. No taxes. Trapped.

This growing distrust is of course not just a result of concerns about waste or efficiency or even ethics – it is much bigger than that. Perhaps it is the result of the increasing centralization and remoteness of government. Perhaps it is the result of the explosion in access to information, the increased anonymity of urban life, all this nurtured in a culture of individualism and consumerism. Perhaps too it is a result of the increasing authoritarianism of government, especially after 9/11. But it is no doubt fueled dangerously by this almost constant assault on the very idea of government.

In the 80′s, governments knew that they had to reinvent themselves for the information age as problems seemed to be more complex, unfamiliar and conflictual, when the pace of change was accelerating, and citizens wanted greater ownership over their public services. This was a time when the talk in Ottawa, and Washington and London, for example, was less bureaucracy, fewer rules, more flexibility to tailor services to changing and diverse needs – and more steering, looking at the big emerging issues, and less rowing. This reinvention was not going to be easy or smooth.

In fact, it never happened. It ran crashing headlong into distrust and has never quite recovered. Mistrust of government and a preoccupation with waste led not only to cuts but also, and at the same time, to expensive layers of control and oversight that made government no more accountable or transparent but certainly more risk averse and inefficient and therefore less worthy of our trust – a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Greater transparency was supposed to be part of the solution but things haven’t worked out that way. In fact, our obsession with uncovering waste may blind us to the big issues. So, even as we know more than we could ever want about how officials spend on travel and hospitality, government seems more opaque than ever – with almost no debate, for example, on the cuts to the GST which took over $13 Billion annually out of government revenue, or almost no information on the costs of the Omnibus Crime Bill or how it is supposed to make us safer rather than just meaner. That is not real transparency. Trust continues to decline.

And so, next door, we see President Obama, in speech after speech, gamely trying to remind his listeners of government’s positive role in pursuing justice, security and prosperity. He is trying to break out of the trap and that is a tough road. We all know from our personal experience that trust is easier to break than to rebuild.

The Inequality Trap

As we cut taxes and make them less progressive, the costs of the free lunch accumulate. While the most obvious signs may be longer wait times, potholes, and crumbling bridges, more insidious and worrisome is the inevitable rise in inequality.

The Conference Board is the latest to sound the warning that inequality is on the rise here – and fast. As the British researcher Richard Wilkinson has documented, extreme inequality – in particular, the growing gap between a few very rich and the rest – is corrosive and costly. It diverts capital, stifles demand, deprives us of the talent we need – and erodes trust and undermines democracy. It also eventually turns us against each other – the gated community only a physical manifestation of a deeper divide.

Inequality feeds and is fed by divisive and fear based-politics, what the writer Benjamin DeMott calls “junk politics”, a politics which has contempt for evidence and experts, plays to both our fear and vanity, and divides us into hard and fast moral categories – villains and heroes, criminals and victims, hard-working tax payers and free-loaders, job creators and the rest.

When the middle rungs of the ladder disappear, when the gap between top and bottom becomes too great, feelings of superiority and inferiority almost inevitably follow. Many at the top come to believe that they deserve all they have, that they are the ones who create the jobs and keep the economy running. The very successful too often forget how much they owe to others, including earlier generations more ready than we to sacrifice and pay taxes. I have always been struck by how most of us believe in luck unless we become successful. Then luck suddenly has nothing to do with it. In extremely unequal societies the rich, believing that they truly are the job creators, will often exert all of their considerable influence in the fight against paying more taxes and they have been very successful.

At the other end, if the rungs of the ladder seem too far apart to climb, then those at the bottom will wonder why they should participate at all. If we think that others will exploit the system or consistently turn it to their advantage, if we believe the game is unfair, we will not want to play. If the game is rigged, why participate, why vote, why pay taxes?

In the fifties when Canadians were far more willing to pay taxes – and vote – most thought of themselves or at least their families as on the way up. With extreme inequality, aspiration is blunted and replaced by fatalistic grumbling or hopelessness and opting out – or acting out.

Choices For The Future

Perhaps of all the reasons that tax has become a four-letter word, this idea of blunted aspirations is key. The baby boomers, who still hold considerable sway, especially in government, seem today more interested in holding on to what they have than in building something new. And for the first time in generations, Canadians worry that the young will not have things as good as we did. Taxes are, among other things, an investment in the future. How much harder is that to sell when people believe they are managing personal and collective decline? Without aspiration, without hope, many will want to keep all they can for themselves and their families to get through the day.

Of course we are not there yet. Canada remains more equal than our neighbours and we still have extraordinary assets and great promise. Many provincial governments have resisted the call for more cuts. But we certainly cannot afford complacently to wait much longer as the bills for our free lunch pile up: growing inequality, sagging productivity, deteriorating environment. We cannot build a future out of desire for more of the same and in the same way. And we cannot build a future on the belief that it does not belong to us – that it belongs to the market.

For too long those of us in public policy have got it wrong. Even the most compassionate among us argued that we have to get the economy right first, that we would look at social and environmental issues later when we could “afford” to. But surely it’s now clear that we cannot get our economy right if we don’t treat society, democracy and environment as central. We cannot afford to do otherwise. We will not retake the future until we change the conversation and that has to begin with a commitment to greater equality and fairness, to jobs and opportunities for the many and not wealth for the few, to dignity for all those who fall out of the market in tough times or cannot get in through no fault of their own, and a concerted effort to combat poverty and its extraordinary costs to us all.

The future will need a more innovative Canada, a more productive Canada, a more confident Canada – but none of that will happen without a more just and equal Canada.

Breaking Out

We have to be smart about taxes and we will all have to carry some of the burden. The consensus among economists was that cutting the GST was a mistake and the majority of them would also defend the HST. And sooner or later we are going to have to put a price on carbon to share the costs of a new economic and energy paradigm. But a good place to start is to ask the rich to step up. When it comes to taxes, it is smart to be progressive, to ask the rich to pay a bit more for that lunch that none of us is getting for free, and to ask those who do greatest damage to the commons to pay more for its preservation.

There is no systematic evidence that tax cuts are the road to economic growth or that tax cuts to corporations or the rich produce jobs. Our love affair with low taxes is based on unproved assumptions about the benefits and no accounting of the costs.

It is time to make some hard choices about the Canada we want, about what services we see as essential, about how much inequality we are prepared to tolerate, about our willingness to take back the future.

Already we seem to be tiring of the fairytale. Voter turnout is a sign that we are not inspired by the leadership we are getting.

What we are seeing right now in the U.S. and spreading to Canada is quite remarkable. People, mostly young, but also across the generations have decided not to wait for their politicians to lead. All great change starts outside of conventional politics and now the “other 99 percent” are saying no to more of the same on Wall Street, at the Tar Sands, and beyond. They are saying that the economy and the environment are being wrecked by a powerful few and it is not right that the rest have to pay the freight – and they are demanding better.

Some critics are wondering aloud what specifically the other 99% want, but they are not writing a political platform. They are telling stories of people left out, of debts too big to handle, of lost jobs, bad jobs and stagnant incomes, of family hardship and no helping hand. They are saying a lot of things. That maybe we have it all wrong. That they no longer believe the promises.

No one knows where all this will all go and what its impact will be except that it creates an opportunity, overdue, to change the conversation. Much will depend on leaders across every sector of our society joining that conversation.

We always get more from our political leaders when we demand more, including, I suppose, more taxes. And we always get the government we deserve and the future we are willing to make and pay for.

Notes prepared for an address at the Gardiner Museum, October 12, 2011. The event was organized by The Literary Review of Canada and by TVO (watch a video excerpt here). It was sponsored by Canadian Centre for Policy Alternative. A shorter version appeared in the Globe and Mail here.

Anything but benign

With the parliamentary session coming to a close and summer getting ready to obliterate any residual interest in politics, this is pretty much our last chance before the fall to have a serious look at where our government proposes to take us over the next four years. We have seen the Speech From the Throne (SFT) and the first budget, and with few exceptions, it is all pretty much what we expected. The media have generally described the SFT and budget as workmanlike, safe, “ho-hum”. It is, the argument goes, no more nor less than what we were promised and pretty much what about 40 percent of us voted for: continued tax reductions, smaller government, and a focus on crime and security. Nothing to get worked up over, no risky or costly national projects, no meddling with cherished national programs such as medicare.

Opposition politicians are having trouble figuring out just how to push back: all the parties want to be and be seen as fiscally prudent; nobody is about to argue for big government or tax increases, except on the margins for corporate tax increases; and nobody will risk being seen as soft on crime.

In fact, the government’s unprecedented decision to forego debate on its SFT, breaking a tradition that dates back to before Confederation, got barely a whisper of attention. Budget bills were rushed through committee. Even the government’s fiercest critics seem more worried about what might be in store over the coming four years of Canada’s first majority Conservative government than they are about the proposals now before us.

But what is before us now is anything but benign. While the rest of government shrinks, our crime control and security establishment grows and with this so too do the authority and reach of government. In an agenda that promises less government interference in our private decisions we get government that is more present and intrusive than ever. All governments must attend to issues of security and every government has worked to prevent crime and reduce its economic and human costs, but never before has crime had the central place that it now holds. It was the issue that ate up the majority of the time of our parliamentarians before the election and the omnibus crime bill signals more of the same. Crime and punishment have become a – or, perhaps, the – defining issue of our government, and the tone — the unrelenting focus on punishment, expanding prison and police powers — represents a profound break from policies of all previous Canadian governments.

Another war we don’t need

The approach and many of its specific measures seem to draw their inspiration from the “war on crime” launched in the U.S. some four decades ago – just after the “war on poverty” but with much more enduring commitment. If that is the case, if that is the path we propose to follow, then what is happening here is about much more than crime and security. It is about our view of society, of human nature, of the future, and of the role of the state in shaping that future. It signals a new relationship between Canadians and their government. And before we go too far along that path, we ought to have a close look at what that view of the world looks like and what the consequences of its pursuit are for our safety, our society, and our democracy.

Of course there will be many who, against all the evidence and all the experts, say, hold on there, this government is simply responding to a real problem – rising crime, violence and threats to our security – and high time. Some will point to stories of horrible victimization, and suffering to which none of us is immune, and others will remind us of the Vancouver riots or other incidents that inevitably shake and confuse us. The human and financial costs of crime are profoundly real and deserve government attention always. But our approach ought to be guided by the best available evidence.

When the U.S. launched its war on crime, crime and violence were in fact on the rise, assassinations and riots were shaking American confidence, and more and more pundits were talking about a culture of violence. Some response was necessary. But even there and then, the decision to make crime an organizing theme and to focus on punishment was a political decision. Crime and violence were on the rise in Canada too and Canadian politicians of all stripes opted for a more balanced approach even in the face of public pressure, as we are inevitably influenced by what is going on to the south. Nobody would accuse Margaret Thatcher of being soft on anything, but she too resisted pressures to expand incarceration. Why? Because it’s too expensive and it doesn’t work.

It is even tougher to understand the current Canadian approach as it comes at a time when crime and its severity have been declining, year after year. While inevitably short of unanimity, there is a remarkable consensus among the experts. They would pretty much agree that we should continue to adjust our punishments, improve our interventions, learn from our mistakes, but that, on the whole, we are doing pretty well, there is no crime crisis and, most important, punitive approaches will just make things worse. So what is the war really all about?

The American model: from welfare to warfare

If we look at what happened in the U.S., a strong case can be made that this was part of the shift away from the elements of welfare state introduced through the “New Deal” and expanded through Johnson’s “Just Society”. Conservatives had long fought these welfare initiatives arguing that they contributed to moral laxity, sloth and dependency, and even crime. With growing public insecurity and pessimism about the future and declining trust in government, this view or some variant has been on the ascendancy. The war on crime offered an alternative basis for government authority: instead of promises of shared opportunity or social justice, a term now uttered by only wild-eyed lefties, instead of protection from the ravages of economic change and deteriorating environment, government offered something new. This new compact promised protection from bad things and bad people, from external threats to security and internal threats to safety, but more than this, it offered moral clarity and shared outrage. It may not not deliver on the protection but it certainly delivers on the outrage.

This change in tone is evident in the words of then President Nixon whose omnibus “safe streets” bill is often seen as the first strike in the war on crime. “Americans in the last decade,” he said, “were often told that the criminal was not responsible for his crimes against society, but that society was responsible. I totally disagree with this permissive philosophy.” That “last decade” was the sixties when criminal justice was guided by three imperatives: just punishment certainly, but also the collective interest in public safety, and the collective responsibility to reintegrate offenders into society. Punishment, rehabilitation and prevention – in some mix – was the old way. The new way, based on pessimism about the future and about people’s ability to change, emphasized individual responsibility over collective responsibility, punishment over prevention and rehabilitation, and order and control over individual freedom and civil liberties.

One of the most comprehensive assessments of the decades-long war that followed is Jonathan Simon’s Governing Through Crime, a devastating critique of American policy and, for us, perhaps a cautionary tale. Simon tells us that the policy not only drew on the fears of Americans, fears about crime, fears about the future, fears of “the other”, it validated and nurtured those fears. And, in so doing, created a self-perpetuating machine. Tough could never be tough enough. It wasn’t enough to take away an offender’s freedom, hard time had to become harder and longer. Any new incident, every grizzly crime begged for more intense punishment, more people in jail for longer. When crime continued to rise, that called for more of the same, redouble the punishments, build more prisons. That’s how policies that just about nobody believes make any sense – three strikes and you’re out, for example – become law. A self-perpetuating machine.

And the outcome of all this? According to Simon, this approach created a cycle of fear that has reshaped American life. Fear matters. It diminishes our quality of life, eats away at our freedom, and turns us away from others. It makes trust more difficult and without trust, even minimal solidarity becomes impossible. The gated community patrolled by private police has become the symbol, the architectural manifestation of fear, division and inequality.

A politics of fear

And it seems that here too fear of crime is high and rising especially among my generation of Canadians. What we know about crime is rarely based on systematic review of data. That’s not our job. We don’t have the time or training. What we know is drawn from our direct experience and from what we hear in the media and from our leaders. Little wonder that most of us believe that crime and violence are on the rise. That is what we naturally make of the media accounts, the endlessly repeated images and stories of the most horrible crimes, however rare, that stay in our minds and shape our perceptions. Even more important, what else are we to conclude when governments make crime the number one priority and continually remind us to be angry and afraid.

The traditional balanced approach to crime allowed our political leaders to take crime and fear seriously without feeding those fears. For decades criminologists and practitioners have tried to counter the myths about crime and punishment but this now seems a losing battle. Simply, fear trumps evidence. We are all more likely to hear, believe and remember information that confirms our biases. In her 1997 study of public opinion and perceptions of crime in the U.S., Katherine Beckett showed that fear of crime did not lead public policy, it was the other way around. Tough on criminals policy creates the perception that rising crime is a serious problem, that we ought to be afraid. And the inevitably escalating government action simply continues to feed those fears. Breaking the cycle is very hard. California’s current governor tried to pass bizarre legislation tying prison spending to education spending as something of an admission that he was helpless to do anything about the shift of scarce resources from health, education and welfare to prisons. His frustration is understandable – California spends 45% more on prisons than on higher education. This is not a path we want to follow.

And did the approach reduce crime and improve safety? A number of states are now proposing to modify or undo policies we are preparing to introduce, policies like mandatory minimum sentences, because they were seen to make things worse. Republican and Democratic voices are growing louder that the war language and approach are counter-productive. Asa Hutchinson, U.S. congressman, crime hawk, and former head of the U.S. drug enforcement agency, is now saying that we in Canada should avoid their mistakes, singling out often unfair mandatory minimum sentences and insufficient investment in preparing prisoners for reintegration. World leaders and increasing numbers of practitioners, judges and police, are asking for an end to the expensive war on drugs that has funded the expansion of organized crime, terrorism and exploitation but has done nothing to reduce drug use, crime or violence. Vincente Fox, former president of Mexico, now tells Time that he had it exactly wrong when he launched his war on drugs, which resulted only in greater violence and suffering.

This relentless war on crime has resulted not in safety but in mass imprisonment where warehousing and control replace rehabilitation and education. Prison inherits the consequences of our inattention to inequality and social injustice. Low level users, generally the poor, often the troubled, and always a racially skewed population, fill the prisons and become a permanent under-class. Sickness and suicide become the norm. Offenders leave worse off than when they arrived, creating ever greater risk to the public. In an unprecedented move, the U.S. Supreme Court recently stepped in and ordered thousands released from California prisons no longer able to contain the numbers of prisoners the war produced. Conditions are shocking, said the Court, who pointed to Canada’s balanced approach as a model of safety and human rights. Asa Hutchinson is right. We ought to learn from the experience of our neighbours. We ought also to learn from our own past successes.

The Challenge

Canada is not so deeply into this cycle of fear that we cannot avoid its worse excesses. Let’s be clear. Our system has always been pretty tough. We have consistently used prison more and had longer sentences than our European counterparts, and our sentencing laws have always tried to fit the punishment to the crime. But we have also always asked how best to administer punishment so that rehabilitation and the eventual reintegration of offenders are most likely. We all know that there are some types of crime where we do not have much success, but overall the success rate has been good and getting better. We have documented stories of lives turned around, here, for example, and here. Rehabilitation and reintegration – and increasingly restorative justice – are not about coddling; they are about the need to complement just punishment with a commitment to public safety and human rights.

Every war brings collateral damage and the casualties of this war are many. What we get is a more powerful, authoritarian and intrusive state, a more fearful and fragmented society, and a profound erosion of our freedom and the deepening of inequality. The issues are too big to pass in silence. Our political leaders may not want this debate so let us take up the challenge and insist that, when Parliament returns, our representatives scrutinize the omnibus bill with more rigour than they gave the government’s agenda this spring .

(edited for clarity)

Canada’s new Parliament is poised to reshape Canada’s criminal justice system and, in significant ways, Canada itself.   Within 100 sitting days of its resumption Parliament will pass an omnibus “tough on criminals” bill that represents the biggest change to our justice system in recent memory.  But these changes are coming with disturbingly little controversy or opposition.  They are not part of some so-called hidden agenda.  This is what most or at least many Canadians voted for and, among those who did not, few seem much worried.  Political opposition has been muted.  Who wants to be seen as soft on crime, soft on criminals, concerned about inmates?  Whether through our active support or our indifferent silence we are all participating in a watershed moment for Canada without so much as a tough conversation.  And it matters, it matters for our safety and it matters for the kind of country we are becoming.  Surely one key test of any society is how we treat the most vulnerable and, even more particularly, the most despised.  Justice policies offer a glimpse into the soul of a nation.

Before getting to the substance, let me admit that a very significant part of my public service career was spent in the justice sector, in what was then the Ministry of the Solicitor General (now Public Safety), the Justice Department and the National Parole Board. Let me add that in all the time I worked on these issues I never met an official, elected or unelected, who was “soft on crime”, not ever, not once. We had of course many debates, many disagreements, but without exception those charged with policy and practice cared about victims and their families, wanted to prevent crime when they could and reduce its economic and human costs when the could not. Policies and practice were guided by three imperatives: public safety – what does the evidence tell us about what works to make our homes and streets safe; freedom – how to ensure a measured response that protects our civil liberties and constrains the state and holds it accountable when our freedom is at stake; and justice – what is a just, that is, proportionate and humane punishment, when a citizen is found guilty of a crime.  These are difficult questions and can rub up against each other but, on balance, we have done pretty well.  Of course the system must adapt to changing times and new knowledge, but rates of crime and violence have been falling for about three decades.  That does not permit complacency but nor does it suggest that need for a fundamental change of direction.

So, where are we now headed?  And why?

As in any Omnibus legislation, the Bill contains some good things, some bad things, some very bad things, and some things that need clarification.  And all of this deserves debate.  The National Post did a pretty thorough and balanced review of the elements which I won’t try to reproduce here.  But the direction of these proposals, on top of legislation passed in the previous session, is clear:  more focus on punishment, greater use of prison as a penalty, increased police powers, and fewer protections of our privacy and civil liberties.  Mandatory minimum sentences will increase prison time not only for sexual predators but for those convicted of growing a few marijuana plants.  Even as police discretion is increased, the discretion of judges will be further constrained, making it harder for them to fit the penalty to the circumstances, to address aggravating and mitigating factors.  House arrest will be off-limits even for some property offences.  Young Offenders provisions will be toughened up. Pardons will be more difficult to get.  Surveillance of our internet activity will be easier and without warrant, and preventive detention of those we fear might commit terrorist acts will continue with the process to determine its use to be secret and therefore outside public scrutiny.

What’s wrong with this, many will ask.  For one thing, the evidence and the experts are pretty much in agreement that this will not make us safer.  These kinds of policies, mandatory minimum sentences for example, have proved to be expensive but without any measurable contribution to safety.  Quite the contrary, and these are not the views of bleeding hearts, soft on crime. Most of these experts here and elsewhere know that some people belong in prison because justice demands it and that some need to be there because they present a continuing danger. In fact, Canada uses prison as a punishment far more than our European counterparts.  But we have also learned – from the evidence and from our experience – that prison can harden those who would have been better diverted from the system in the first instance and that overlong sentences can lose those who might otherwise have been successfully integrated into their communities as law-abiding citizens.  We have learned  that a preoccupation with punishment can easily divert us from doing what actually makes us safer.  And, in its way most troubling, these policies make for a meaner Canada.

For another thing, we know that the preservation of our freedoms, our privacy, our civil liberties requires strong constraints on government’s ability to interfere with those freedoms – that is what warrants are all about, and fair and open trials.   That means that if we want to live in a free and democratic society we have to be ready to live with the inevitable risk that entails – and in our pretty safe country, with our balanced crime policies, that has been relatively little to ask.   How is it that we are so muted as our  civil liberties are undermined?  Why is it that we seem more worked up about the risks of government intervention in commerce than we do with its interference in our fundamental freedoms?

For yet another thing, these policies cost money, lots of money.  Imprisonment is expensive.  And that means less money for those things that might have made us truly safer – prevention, education, rehabilitation.  In many respects the dollar we spend on social policy is non-discretionary.  The only question is what proportion do we choose to spend on avoiding problems through, say, addressing the unsupportable and growing level of inequality in Canada and what proportion do we spend on the back end, especially prison, to deal, in part at least, with the consequences of inequality and our inattention to it.  Getting tough on crime often means getting tough on the poor, the troubled, and the excluded.  In Canada, the consequences of these policies fall most heavily on aboriginal people.  In 2007/08 in Saskatchewan, for example, aboriginal people constituted 11% of the population but 81% of new admissions to prison.

The consequences of a preoccupation with punishment can be insidious.  For example,  in the U.S. some years back, The Atlantic ran a series on the “prison industrial complex” setting out the long-term consequences of expansive prison building, when prisons become a major tool of regional economic development, in effect turning incarceration into an economic good.   More and more communities come to depend economically on their local jail or prison.  Any attempts to reverse course and possibly close prisons must, then,  contend with the inevitable opposition from communities afraid of losing the source of their livelihood.  How can this not make us lose sight of the human implications of ever more reliance on jails and prisons?

And let me repeat,  most troubling of all, this turn to “tough on criminals”  makes Canada a meaner – not safer – place.  And how depressingly ironic that we have chosen this direction just when the U.S. Supreme Court has ordered thousands of California prisoners released after decades of prison overuse due to policies similar to those we are introducing here.  This Court decision makes reference to Canada as a model because we have avoided the over-reliance on prisons  – and the cruel and unusual conditions that seem automatically to follow – without sacrifice to public safety.  But that was then.  What has happened?  Why?

Our greater openness to these “tough on criminals” policies and the reluctance of the opposition to take them on may reflect a more profound debasing of our politics, what the American critic Benjamin DeMott  has called “Junk Politics”.  In his articles and books, DeMott is not calling for more civility, politer politics; he doesn’t mind a good fight, it seems.   His concern with contemporary politics is bigger than that; it resides in its refusal to lead citizens to higher ground, to challenge us, to inspire us to find our better selves.  Instead, he says, it  panders to our worst sentiments,  personalises everything, derides experts and evidence, tells us that we are great as we are, that we have every right to feel morally superior.  It divides the world up into good and bad, black and white.  Nuance kills.  This world, to paraphrase sociologist Orrin Klapp, is destructively divided up into heroes – “hard-working, law-abiding tax payers”; villains – criminals, terrorists and would-be terrorists; and fools – all the elites and so-called experts who are soft on crime and soft on terror.  This view gives not much space to the idea of redemption or, for that matter, to compassion, and brooks no debate on what the evidence might tell us or about the costs of punishment.

So what is the answer?  For those who think they are choosing safety, ask for the evidence and the costs and risks.  For those grateful that the Bill is not even worse, do not wait to get engaged.  This tough on criminals beast just gets hungrier the more we feed it.  As if to remove all doubt, the Ontario Conservative opposition just proposed that we introduce chain gangs and proudly puts punishment at the centre of its policies.  And for those who wonder what’s the point,  the Government has a majority, there is nothing we can do, how do we change the conversation if we won’t engage.  Our silence, for whatever our reason, is part of the problem.

And in the end, in the name of safety, we are less safe.  In the name of democracy, we are less free.  And in our refusal to have the debate, to move beyond our prejudices, our fears, our anger, we make Canada a meaner and smaller place.

The air is being filled with post-mortems, lessons learned from this extraordinary result, the Conservative majority, the reversal of fortunes, for now at least, of the NDP and Liberals, the disappearance of the Bloc and Quebecers’ decision to opt for a progressive, federalist party.  Now is probably too soon for meaningful reflection.

The Anybody But Conservative voices will probably not want to hear any talk about silver linings.  Just the same, there are some: Quebec dropping the Bloc and providing an unprecedented opportunity for progressive voices in Quebec and the rest of Canada to join forces, the possible progress that enhanced Aboriginal participation could bring, and the enduring benefits of a new generation of impressive and engaged citizens exemplified by Leadnow.

The Conservatives will be in no mood to hear about the challenges and responsibilities that come with majority.   Just the same, of course, there are some, not least the need to bring Canadians together, especially given how polarised we have become, and to govern for us all, across the diversity of our interests, values,  ideologies and lifestyle choices, and for the long-term health of Canada even as we seem so preoccupied with what is happening right now.

The NDP will not want to spoil their celebration by considering how much harder it may be to influence the agenda in the short-term.  Just the same, it will be, especially on issues such as inequality, the environment, aid, education and the arts, except perhaps through greater devolution which, ironically, could simply make a federal social democratic party increasingly irrelevant.  And quite a lot is riding on the NDP.

The Greens will not want to hear anything that might diminish their joy at having, finally and deservedly, a Parliamentary voice even as environment and climate change are a harder sell than ever and electoral reform, so vital to their prospects, no easier.

And the Liberals will need time to heal and deal with their internal divisions and difficult choices.

Progressives of the centre and to the left have a lot to ponder.  The temptation will be to point fingers at this party or that, this person or that – and of course some of this is necessary – but the best thing is to start with ourselves.  The energy of some young leaders stemmed the horrible decline in voting but the massive turnout never materialized.  We were either too satisfied or too indifferent. The politics of personal smear continued and intensified – and we just didn’t seem to get mad enough. Some defended the garbage as just part of the tough business of politics.  There has to be a better way.  We ought to get mad. We lost wonderful people from every party – and I do wonder why wonderful people would ever choose to run for any party in this climate of personal smears and negativity.  And too many of us put party ahead of purpose and fought for party standing more than for Canada, and that cannot be the way forward.

In the midst of all this I watched revellers in U.S. cities chanting and waving their fists celebrating the assassination and disposal of Osama Bin Laden, and the only somewhat milder Twitter celebrations here in Canada.  At the same time I was listening to a CBC interview of a woman who had lost her husband on 9/11 who had explained to her nine-year-old son that Osama Bin Laden had been shot in the head.  The son, she reported,  was worried, wondered why that had happened, asked why there had been no trial.  This boy who had lost his father was worried about rule of law while most of us were acting out our hate, anger and vengeance.  What happens to us when we turn ten?

Whatever else yesterday might mean, it is a reminder that we have an obligation to get involved, to stay involved, and to fight for the things we believe in, even when they may be hard sells, to reject the politics of cynicism and smear and wedge and hate and narrow partisanship, to rediscover the will to vote but more than this, for the long term, to participate with others across region and party in pursuit of our best sense of the public good, led by the youth for sure but including those of us of more advanced years.

Phillip Blond, the main architect of U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron’s “big society”, is coming to Canada this week.  The timing couldn’t be better as our political parties get set to offer up their competing versions of what ails us and how we might go forward together.

Blond is gaining a lot of attention with a blistering diagnosis of U.K. society that will, I think, resonate profoundly with many Canadians and tap into our growing sense that here too something needs changing and that our current politics are not up to the task. The ideas, laid out in speeches, articles, a new website and most recently Red Tory, a book named for a term invented right here in Canada, are getting picked up by conservative thinkers on both sides of the ocean and are being put into play by Cameron’s coalition government.  Blond’s wide-ranging work — part academic thesis, part political tract, part sermon — is in fact being embraced and vilified across the political spectrum.  It shows, for better or worse, that there is room in politics, even during elections, for big ideas.  But it also shows, I believe,  a troubling trend, a growing dependency on nostalgia as the inspiration for public policy.

First, what is the big idea at play here?  Society, they say, is broken.  The culprits:  the uninterrupted growth of the state, which now reaches into every aspect of our lives, becoming increasingly centralized,  authoritarian and remote;  free market capitalism that has given free rein to greed and to corporations with no loyalties to community or country; and the glorification of the individual and a narrow notion of freedom that has turned us into atomised consumers,  undermining our sense of responsibility to one another.   The results: rising inequality and plutocracy,  loss of community and mutuality, the hollowing out of civil society, and ultimately, the loss of meaning and civic virtue. This is Putnam on steroids.  We aren’t just bowling alone, we are helplessly alone in the face of an increasingly authoritarian state, greed-driven monopoly capitalism and a world of selfish competition.

Some of his solutions, though less clearly spelled out, will have resonance too – the importance of local initiative and control, voluntarism and social responsibility, cooperatives, mutuals, social enterprise, and other forms of association and community self-help.  All this has enormous appeal as it seems to be putting people and their relationships at the centre of things — where they belong.   Blond’s work is brimming with good and important ideas and we ought to be watching with great interest as the U.K. government implements at least some of them.  We are already seeing examples of social enterprise that show promise, and thinkers like Davies have set out ways to encourage mutuals and meaningful employee ownership.   We are also seeing examples of social entrepreneurship where citizens are taking control over issues that matter to them, not waiting for government.  And Blond’s understanding of the need to harness the market and regulate the corporate sector for the common good is a refreshing voice in a neoliberal world.

But notwithstanding its merits, the approach, at least as I understand it, also presents real challenges and dangers.  Its radical localism, its vision of community control of key services, will depend on local capacity which is inevitably uneven,  on new funding models not yet fully developed, and on the willingness of communities to take on more responsibilities, which is not assured.   Most people are already stretched for time and many may not want to become “service managers”.  And, if the state uses these new models to justify deep cuts, localism could easily become compulsory volunteerism or what we usually call offloading. So, for example, voluntary firefighters are important and deserve our respect and support – but they also deserve the best of training and equipment and the support of professionals and they cannot be expected to do the whole job.   We know that community health care and social services are important but they cannot do it all.  They cannot take on research and science, health surveillance, infrastructure and procurement, redistribution, and the pooling of risk to ensure that everybody is covered for care.

Communities cannot do it all and society cannot be reduced to the sum of its communities.  How, in the face of radical localism, do we achieve any measure of trust and solidarity across communities?  Modern society depends on some measure of reciprocal responsibility and mutual accommodation with strangers as we seek solutions for shared problems that cannot be solved at the community level – climate change,  the degradation of our environment, poverty at home and globally.   Bond powerfully takes up the issue of rising inequality and he wants to “recapitalise the poor” so they can break out of their cycle of dependency.  But the risk of radical localism and a weakened state is the perpetuation of these inequalities and the privilege,  prejudice and distrust that come with them.

The radical emphasis on community, taken to its extreme, looks awfully like a desire to roll back modernity and return to the “big society” that never was.  For a country like Canada,  in particular, making local community the centre of action, however attractive, misses the realities of mobility, the growing desire for variety and appreciation of diversity.  It also offers little on the inevitable challenges of finding solidarity across dispersed and diverse communities.  We should welcome the commitment to rebuild a robust and independent civil society but not as a community alternative to the state or as a rejection of pluralism.   Here Blond’s approach looks awfully like other more traditional conservative anti-governmentalism steeped in nostalgia masquerading as policy.

Blond knows that he is vulnerable to such criticism but denies accusations of nostalgia with a simple, ‘the past WAS better than the present’.  But his romantic discussion of poverty before the rise of the social democratic state belies the point.  Bond argues that the state stripped away the self-organizing capacity of the poor, diminishing them and trapping them into dependency.  One gets a picture of bucolic medieval communities where church, charity and community ensured happy, well-adjusted poor, only to be undone by the heavy hand of the interventionist state.  But this isn’t history.   Missing from this picture is any sense of the vulnerabilities, of the expulsion of the undesirable, of the imprisonment of beggars, of child labour and workhouses, and the demeaning dependency on charity typically reserved for the “deserving poor”.  This is indeed nostalgia not memory,  not history — or, as historian Charles Maier put it, it is “history without guilt”, dangerous because it reflects a longing for a time that never was, a sense of loss for something we never had,  and therefore can blind us, in this case, to the limits of community and the important role the state has played in freeing the poor from misery and dependence.  The contribution of free education, universal access to health care, help in tough times, pensions, for starters, deserves more than passing mention that some good was done.  And surely these “intrusions” can’t be seen as having enslaved the poor.

And this brings us to the crux of what is most troubling about the “big society” – and that is Blond’s desire to rediscover the true Britishness that has been lost.  He equates this with civic virtue and the common good, a return to some shared idea of the noble life, and he finds this in the past – before the ravages of secularism, liberalism and multiculturalism and the cultural relativism they imply.  He is invoking a time when people knew right from wrong, took responsibility, were dutiful, when the elites had a sense of noblesse oblige, when communities had more control of their destinies.  Was there such a time?  Certainly not for women, or people who practiced minority religions, or no religion, or people who were different or despised.  No wonder Cameron declared multiculturalism a failure.  This is all a part of trying to roll back modernity – to what?  To whose “high culture”?

Certainly, it is useful to debate these issues, to make sure that multiculturalism does not degenerate into  islands of separate communities or a country bound together only by its diversity.  And that means for a country like Canada a significant investment in civil society.  It means state support for those diverse organizations that speak for the otherwise invisible, the marginalised and vulnerable, organizations like Egale, or the AFN and Elizabeth Fry and John Howard and the Civil Liberties Association.   It means support for local, national and international non-governmental organizations to do what government cannot do as well.  It also means encouraging new types of association that can push and prod government and hold it to account, associations that cut across our differences based on democratic values, human rights and a commitment to mutual aid and the peaceful resolution of conflict, associations that do not impose a single version of what it means to be Canadian but bring us together to hash out our best understanding of the common good and how to pursue it, associations that serve not  as a substitute for the state but as necessary ingredients to revitalising our democracy and our citizenship.

This post has been published in The Mark News as “The Democracy We Deserve”

As we watch events unfold in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, as the media chronicle acts of extraordinary courage in the face of grotesque brutality, I expect many of us –  inspired, hopeful, uncertain — are led to reflect on things here at home.  For me, at least, this has meant a recognition of our own very good fortune accompanied, at the same time, by worry about our increasingly enfeebled democracy and perhaps too some shame that we don’t seem able to muster the will to do anything about it.

A consensus is indeed emerging in much of the developed world that both our democracy and civil society are weaker today than, say, a decade ago.  Politics and public service are no longer honoured vocations – though they must be.  Citizens are less inclined to vote or to join political parties or to pay taxes.  Young people in particular have turned away from our conventional political institutions. Parties are in disarray trying to find ways to reconnect to voters.  The bonds of trust between citizen and government have come undone and the trust between us as citizens seems to be fraying as politics increasingly polarize and divide.

U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, heading a Conservative-Liberal Coalition, has pronounced his society “broken”:  too many people are excluded entirely from economic opportunity and political participation and a gaping chasm now exists between the government and the people.  Scholars and pundits worry increasingly about the depletion of social capital and the loss of “mutuality”.

While we may quibble about details and degree, thinkers across the political spectrum are writing and talking more and more about the risks of this deterioration and the possible remedies to it.  But while we might find convergence on the diagnosis, there is nothing close to consensus on the causes and remedies.

Some find the source of decay in the expansion of government into every aspect of our lives and the increasing centralization and bureaucratization that make government more and more remote from and inaccessible to us.  Even neoliberalism failed to deliver a smaller more accessible state; protecting the market, it turns out, is pretty expensive and quite intrusive.  So Australian John Keane has pronounced the death of representative democracy and the difficult birth of a new “monitory democracy” whose shape and capacity to deliver results is yet to be determined.

Some find the source in creeping authoritarianism, especially in the context of the “war on terrorism” and the expanding security state seeking to become omniscient and omnipresent.  Have a look at the recent piece by Linda McQuaig here and an older piece by Chris Selley here.

Others see the source in the unconstrained rise of individualism and consumerism, fed particularly by a neoliberal ideology that defines us – and treats us – entirely in terms of our self-interest, and views mutuality and interdependence as constraints to freedom.  In this frame, we become consumers and workers – not citizens.  Whatever one thinks of Cameron’s “Big Society” initiative, his concern that society is broken seems so much healthier than Margaret Thatcher’s pronouncement that there is no such thing as society, reflecting the dangerously atomised view of humanity that has prevailed ever since.  So republican theorists such as Michael Sandel now wonder, in the face of the hollowing out of civil society, how we might begin to rebuild a sense of the common good and the civic virtue necessary for its pursuit.

Yet others see the real problem as the intolerable growth of inequality over the last decades that has no equal since the twenties and thirties, before the great depression.  Then, as now, social trust and democracy were undermined as inevitably too was the capacity to develop a shared sense of the public good. So we now have thinkers as diverse as Francis Fukuyama and Bill Moyers worrying about plutocracy, and we are confronted every day by new evidence of how money shapes politics.

My own bias is that all these explanations have merit, that the task of revitalising our democracy is formidable and will involve, at least,  electoral and institutional reform, reinventing and opening up government, putting the brakes on the rise of the security state, and tackling the unsupportable growth in inequality.  But I fear that we are in something of a catch 22.  These changes won’t happen from the inside and it is not clear that we have the civic will or energy to drive them from the outside.

Aaron Wherry is running a terrific series on whether our Parliament matters and what we might do to make it matter more.  The short answer, I would propose,  is that it matters only as much as our Parliamentarians  actually want to achieve anything and only to the extent that they are willing to openly debate the big issues on our behalf.  It is fascinating and sort of horrifying to hear the complaints of some departing members of Parliament about how powerless and alienated they felt, unable to represent their constituents or to  escape the narrow confines of party discipline.  It seems that Parliament cannot find the courage to be relevant on its own.  While political parties may be losing their hold on Canadians, they continue to shape our democratic institutions.  And the gap between the government and the people simply continues to grow.

Preston Manning recently wrote an insightful piece on the limits of political parties and the importance of an independent civil society. Political parties, Manning says,  too easily become machines designed only for winning, more skilled at identifying and avoiding risk than at developing public policy.  Parties increasingly treat us not as citizens but as consumers.  It’s easier.  Rather than engaging us in honest but risky debates, they market themselves, pandering to our preferences, feeding our prejudices, and smearing their opponents.  Manning argues that grassroots social movements are key to getting unstuck.  They are, he says, an essential element of our “democratic infrastructure” and have been at the heart of most important social and political change here and throughout the world.  He has a point. Big change involves risk and difficult trade offs, exactly what governments prefer to avoid and political parties typically duck.

Put simply, we only get Parliament that matters if citizens force the issue.  Absent an engaged and independent civil society, we get the politics of banality and brutality, pretending that we can balance the books without real sacrifice, that climate change will right itself, that crime policies that have never worked anywhere will make us safer, and that there’s just not much we can do about growing inequality so why talk about it.  And here lies the Catch-22: Citizens become further disenchanted; elections and parties lose their hold.  And we stay stuck, unable even to begin to address the big issues.

Of course,  not all grassroots movements serve to strengthen democracy.  The Tea Party, for example, seems less a movement than a crowd of isolated individuals held together, if at all, by fear and resentment and a sterile notion of freedom that denies their responsibilities to one another.  Such movements inevitably divide the world into villains and victims, those in the light and those in the darkness, and, in so doing,  stifle debate and contrary information and undermine both democracy and civil society.

We in Canada don’t really have any equivalent to the Tea Party, notwithstanding a few pretenders here and there.  Our political culture – its traditions of pragmatism, civility, tolerance, peaceful resolution of conflict, and mutual aid – may inhibit the rise or at least spread of such anti-everything movements.  But here too we see signs of decline in civil society, in voting certainly, but in joining and engaging too.  Our voluntary sector seems weaker than in the past and more dependent on government.  Certainly we have our share of dedicated people joining together for a healthier, more equal and sustainable future but there hasn’t been the take-up we saw in previous decades for such public issues.  Public space has shrunk and many of us seem to have retreated into our private milieux.

So how do we break out?  Surely, sooner or later, we will say “enough”.  Surely, sooner or later, we will stop waiting for inspiration from a new political saviour.  Sooner or later, we will say we cannot simply stand and watch.  We are talking more these days about democracy.  We seem increasingly to understand that however fortunate we may be, we cannot afford to be complacent.  And, most important, some Canadians, often young Canadians, are getting involved, increasingly taking responsibility, not waiting for our political leaders or political parties, both locally and globally, independent of government, to do what they can to make things better.

But if we are to make our democracy stronger, we need new forms of association, new ways to engage citizens in defining the Canada they want and the options for getting there and for making our democracy work.   Any such grassroots initiatives will have to meet particular challenges in Canada: our diversity means we won’t find our answers by trying to impose a singular notion of what it means to be Canadian; our geography requires that we harness new technologies to complement traditional forms of engagement; and what we ask of citizens must recognize that, for many, time is squeezed and opportunities to participate are limited.   And if these new approaches are to elevate our democracy,  they  must lift us beyond our personal preferences, prejudices and resentments and engage us in addressing the real challenges we face together.  And that means that they must be built on a foundation of democratic values and a belief in the possibility of progress.  We will not find our path in nostalgia for the past, complacency about the present or cynicism about the future,

Leadnow.ca is a new initiative in democratic association designed to address precisely these concerns, drawing on the surprising energy of a few committed young Canadians, open to people from every region and sector, and offering a chance to chart the Canada they want, and to act in concert to pursue that agenda. It is creating opportunities across all regions and sectors to debate the moral choices, assess the evidence, and then work together to create change, to get the ideas that matter on the political agenda.  Leadnow.ca continues to see government as a force for good so long as an engaged citizenry pushes it to focus on the needs of Canadians and the future of Canada.

Their message: now is the time for citizens to lead.  Whether or not we find the will to get engaged, we will get the democracy we deserve.