Canada needs word of common purpose
Oct 16, 2007 04:30 AM
James Travers
OTTAWA - Imagine a throne speech that sets Canada's direction instead of putting it on course for an election. Imagine, too, a prime minister boldly beginning a frank discussion on the challenges clouding a bright future.
How much would that change the words Governor General Michaëlle Jean speaks tonight for Stephen Harper? Dramatically.
Missing from the text and subtext would be the straw men that a smart prime minister props up for a dumbed-down government to knock flat. There would be no blather about draconian justice in a country that's safe and getting safer. No promise of populist tax cuts that do more for the ruling party than for prosperity. No roaring about Standing Up for Canada against imaginary, or wildly exaggerated, threats from Islam's lunatic fringe to the Arctic.
She would be silent because those worn Conservative themes are tangential to national success. Harper would instead put words in her mouth about those things that make the difference between leading and following the world pack – liveable, competitive cities, an education strategy and policies that don't look away from social shames. Most of all, he would make certain her speech frames this generation's existential test, its dirty thirties Depression, its world war.
Canada's head remains firmly buried in its tar sands and energy superpower ambitions as others surge past searching for innovation, sustainability and, yes, profit. A "new" government with a record as bad as the old is making common-cause with the worst polluters, minimizing persuasive scientific evidence and ignoring a watershed change in international consciousness.
Maintaining that cognitive disconnect is a struggle. Along with fast accumulating evidence of the gathering climatic storm, there's the compelling case that doing too little is more costly than doing what prudence demands. Even if all of that's ignored, it's impossible to miss the Nobel Peace Prize and its Canadian connections.
In recognizing Al Gore, as well our own scientists working in concert with the United Nations, the awards committee indirectly tipped its hat to another Canadian by making the world's environmental health synonymous with its security. For nearly 20 years the University of Toronto's Thomas Homer-Dixon has been exploring as well as warning about the fault lines linking the planet's stress to violence.
Homer-Dixon and the Nobel panel, but not successive federal governments, are on to something management consultants gratingly call a paradigm shift. Keeping the planet from spinning off its axis now requires a commitment that's different in kind and magnitude, one that's more about brainpower than firepower, one that willingly accepts limiting the pursuit of narrow advantage to improve the prospects of universal survival.
Such Nelson Mandela saintliness is unusual among politicians and hen's-teeth rare among minority political parties. Still, there are some obvious as well as oblique attractions to asking the country to coalesce around a just cause. The federal government is the trailer of the environment movement and it's long past time for it to take its rightful place behind the wheel. Just as urgently, federations as loose as Canada need a shared purpose as much as they need a common narrative.
That's the story the country needs to hear tonight, not another political yarn that twists through intrigue to end unhappily in another premature election.
http://www.thestar.com/columnists/article/267235
James Travers' national affairs column appears Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday
