Canada and the Comfortable Rut
As Canada approaches its 154th birthday, our country, as a sovereign state, is older than most countries in the world. But we have become like the young adult too comfortable living in the parent’s basement, full of promise, but never launching. Blessed by unfathomably rich resources, with one of the best-trained populations on the planet, civic peace, rich linguistic and cultural diversity, Canada remains the international family member that everybody likes, but nobody respects. We have settled into being a vanilla country, celebrating our gosh-shucks mediocrity as if it were a badge of honour.
It’s not.
Our military gets an A+ on only one thing: our service men and women, who are held in such high regard that our allies snap them up whenever possible. Otherwise, we expect our military to rely on 1980s equipment for which we are hard pressed to find spare parts. We send our troops into peacekeeping missions with our neighbour’s hardware. Our Air Force was excited to get some “new” fighters: Australian hand-me-downs. Our three rusty British submarines dare not leave port for fear of cracking open and drowning all on board. We have a handful of half-built new icebreakers, held together mostly by promises, and a blizzard of studies looking at buying new military equipment from allies and doubtfuls alike, so long as they let us make the wings and wheels here in Canada. Having grown up under the skirts of Britannia, we now shelter in the shadow of Uncle Sam, although we couldn’t say that out loud. I hate to admit it, but Trump was right about the freeloading.
Our energy policy still wrestles with yesterday’s issues, afraid of annoying voters in Alberta, who are actually much more progressive and sophisticated than Ottawa takes them for. Industrial policy? Agricultural policy? Seriously? Our railroads are more or less what they were in 1890, except we’ve replaced the choo choo trains with 1970s diesels, ripped up half the tracks and converted them to bike paths, selling the steel to cover operating losses. I could go on, but it’s depressing.
Sure, we’re blessed with mostly competent provincial and municipal governments who keep the wheels turning at a local level, world-class banks that are more than able to withstand all but the most catastrophic financial crises, and a pleasant and agreeable populace.
In terms of getting things done, even Stephen Harper’s grumpy, cantankerous, hidebound Tories look good by comparison. The current federal government is long on rhetoric and pronouncements, long on posing, but I’m really hard-pressed to think of anything that’s been done in the last six years that anyone outside Canada might have noticed. Platitudes, yes, progress, no. But I suppose that’s what you get when you pick a drama teacher as Prime Minister.
All the more depressing, the obvious alternative is no alternative at all. For all the wishful thinking of old, angry, white, anglos, the Tories are stuck with dinosaurs, needing them as a base of votes, but tainted by the smell of Donald Trump. The equally (but oppositely) doctrinaire New Democrats, bless them, remain strapped to their base of 1960s bra burners and peaceniks, unwilling to embrace a modern, business-friendly Nordic social democracy. And then we have the Bloc who make no bones about their ambivalence about the success of the Canadian experiment.
There are, fortunately, some hopeful candidates for actual leadership within the Natural Governing Party, in particular one who seems to display all the characteristics of great leadership. She’s gone eyeball to eyeball with the Americans, and stared them down (courteously, of course), and showed in several key portfolios that she understands that leadership is about courage, vision, and getting things done. And she has done so modestly, another key sign of great leadership.
And there are others.
Even if it’s summertime, if Justin wants to emulate his father and take a walk in the snow (https://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/trudeaus-third-walk-in-the-snow) , I’ll happily find some for him.