June 27, 2008
Richard Gwyn
Ever since he announced his "green shift" carbon tax a week ago, Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion gives the impression of walking, for the first time in his two years in the job, with a spring in his step.
While Prime Minister Stephen Harper has pronounced Dion's plan as "crazy," Canadians themselves don't appear to believe this.
Rather, Canadians seem to be ready to at least consider seriously a plan that would impose heavier taxes on them for the sake of combating climate change but with (depending on income) part or all of this coming back to them in the form of compensating tax cuts.
There may be another reason why Dion's scheme is going over better than all the political commentators anticipated. This is that it's a pan-Canadian program.
To a substantial extent, Canadian politics is no longer about Canadian politics. It's now largely about the politics of the provinces or regions, or about the politics of identity or ethnic groups.
National programs have just about vanished from our agenda. Thus, our national health-care program now consists of 10 provincial health-care programs.
So far as climate change is concerned we were, until Dion's announcement, well on our way to having 10 climate change programs, each designed to suit the interests of each province.
While media commentators have been extraordinarily slow to recognize this, in many respects Canada is no longer a nation-state in the common meaning of the term but is instead an ever more decentralized alliance of 10 provincial states.
What twigged my thoughts on this matter was a recent, and excellent, column in the National Post by Rudyard Griffiths, co-founder of the Dominion Institute.
Griffith's column was mournful and elegiac. Canada's "civic compact" is being dissolved. The federal government has "lost the momentum, if not the moral authority, to create the kinds of national programs and institutions that previous generations saw as essential to our sense of shared nationhood."
Griffiths attributes much of this to Ottawa's response to the particular challenge to Canadian nationhood posed by Quebec. By yielding to just about every Quebec demand for autonomy, it has enabled Quebec to "achieve sovereignty in everything but name."
He's absolutely right. But as Quebec has gone, so just about every province is now going. Today, the federal government functions as little more than a combination of a note-taking secretariat and an automatic teller machine.
Thus, not only does Ottawa now account for the smallest share of national spending by any central government in the world, but almost all of its considerable financial transfers to the provinces are non-conditional. This means they can be spent any which way by any province, in contrast to the U.S. and Australia where almost all such transfers are conditional or can only be spent on agreed objectives in agreed ways.
Even as a symbol of Canada's "shared nationhood," Ottawa is fading away. The new National Portrait Gallery, which will embody so much of national achievement and memory, is to be offered to whichever city will pay the most for it. That's good for the winning city, but why should anyone bother to visit a national capital where there's nothing for them to learn about their country and its history?
Griffiths ends by writing that, "The country is fast approaching a watershed."
I believe we're already near to coming out on that watershed's other side.
Except for one thing. In their at least cautiously approving initial response to Dion's "green shift" program, Canadians may be gearing themselves up to say out loud that they want to live, not in an agglomeration of statelets but in a country, in a national community, in a society of which the whole is larger than the sum of its parts.
http://www.thestar.com/World/Columnist/article/450056
Richard Gwyn
Ever since he announced his "green shift" carbon tax a week ago, Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion gives the impression of walking, for the first time in his two years in the job, with a spring in his step.
While Prime Minister Stephen Harper has pronounced Dion's plan as "crazy," Canadians themselves don't appear to believe this.
Rather, Canadians seem to be ready to at least consider seriously a plan that would impose heavier taxes on them for the sake of combating climate change but with (depending on income) part or all of this coming back to them in the form of compensating tax cuts.
There may be another reason why Dion's scheme is going over better than all the political commentators anticipated. This is that it's a pan-Canadian program.
To a substantial extent, Canadian politics is no longer about Canadian politics. It's now largely about the politics of the provinces or regions, or about the politics of identity or ethnic groups.
National programs have just about vanished from our agenda. Thus, our national health-care program now consists of 10 provincial health-care programs.
So far as climate change is concerned we were, until Dion's announcement, well on our way to having 10 climate change programs, each designed to suit the interests of each province.
While media commentators have been extraordinarily slow to recognize this, in many respects Canada is no longer a nation-state in the common meaning of the term but is instead an ever more decentralized alliance of 10 provincial states.
What twigged my thoughts on this matter was a recent, and excellent, column in the National Post by Rudyard Griffiths, co-founder of the Dominion Institute.
Griffith's column was mournful and elegiac. Canada's "civic compact" is being dissolved. The federal government has "lost the momentum, if not the moral authority, to create the kinds of national programs and institutions that previous generations saw as essential to our sense of shared nationhood."
Griffiths attributes much of this to Ottawa's response to the particular challenge to Canadian nationhood posed by Quebec. By yielding to just about every Quebec demand for autonomy, it has enabled Quebec to "achieve sovereignty in everything but name."
He's absolutely right. But as Quebec has gone, so just about every province is now going. Today, the federal government functions as little more than a combination of a note-taking secretariat and an automatic teller machine.
Thus, not only does Ottawa now account for the smallest share of national spending by any central government in the world, but almost all of its considerable financial transfers to the provinces are non-conditional. This means they can be spent any which way by any province, in contrast to the U.S. and Australia where almost all such transfers are conditional or can only be spent on agreed objectives in agreed ways.
Even as a symbol of Canada's "shared nationhood," Ottawa is fading away. The new National Portrait Gallery, which will embody so much of national achievement and memory, is to be offered to whichever city will pay the most for it. That's good for the winning city, but why should anyone bother to visit a national capital where there's nothing for them to learn about their country and its history?
Griffiths ends by writing that, "The country is fast approaching a watershed."
I believe we're already near to coming out on that watershed's other side.
Except for one thing. In their at least cautiously approving initial response to Dion's "green shift" program, Canadians may be gearing themselves up to say out loud that they want to live, not in an agglomeration of statelets but in a country, in a national community, in a society of which the whole is larger than the sum of its parts.
http://www.thestar.com/World/Columnist/article/450056
