As the year ends in Canadian politics, a truly great national debate is raging across the country - a debate that will define us for a generation. The issue risks ripping apart families - old versus young, men versus women. And yet, if we can get the solution right, it will position Canada for true greatness as a country.
I am talking, of course, about whether to get rid of the penny.
Back when I was a competitive debater (many eons ago) and we were training novices on how to debate, we would drop lots of different rules on them. One of the well-known rules known everywhere other than amongst talking heads and politicians was don't bring up Hitler or the Nazis in any debate unless the topic was actually Nazis or Hitler.
Another rule we used to put to them was when selecting debating cases, make the case about something at least somewhat meaningful and interesting. The example we used to always (always!) use of cases to never run was "this house would get rid of the penny." Our point in using the example was while there are arguments on both sides (and therefore it is "debatable"), at the end of the day, it is so meaningless and unimportant that after an hour of tossing the issue around, the judge is almost certain to conclude "who cares" and thus if you decided to run the case, you will lose every time unless your opponent brings up Nazis or Hitler as an argument to maintain the penny.
When I think back to the year that was in Canadian politics, is there an issue that sums up Canadian politics better than getting rid of the penny?
Who. Cares.
Not to be overly negative but 2010 was defined at the federal level, to me at least, by what a waste the whole year was politically. We spent lots of hot air talking about the tiniest of issues for what seems in retrospect like no real reason.
The political parties are essentially exactly where they were 12 months ago. Politics aside, none of the parties can claim - at least not honestly or seriously - that they have moved any policy files forward in a principled way. So politically 2010 was a draw and policy wise, I'm not sure what it was all about.
The year started with prorogation - the shutting down of Parliament for what seemed at the time, and certainly in retrospect, no good reason. Inside Ottawa went wild for weeks talking about inside Ottawa issues. A trend had been started.
The census - oh, sweet census, how I miss thee. If I was running a Canadian magazine that gave out an "inanimate object of the year" award, the census form would be my winner for 2010 (with Harper's cabinet as a close second). It became the story of the summer and while we are worse off because of the Harper decision on the census, both Harper's decision to scrap the census and the at-times-over-the-top reaction to the decision was remarkable mostly because of how little it was about. Harper scrapped the mandatory long-form census because of a tiny intrusion into people's privacy. Some critics blew it up into the biggest travesty in the history of over-the-top travesties because they had nothing else to talk about.
It was of course far from unique this year.
Potash has replaced the beaver, decent beer and hockey as our national symbol. We are a strategic nation and no resource is more strategic in keeping the price of food unnecessarily high for poor people across the globe than our potash and over our collective dead body will the Australians take over our already foreign-owned Potash Corp. Hooray for us! I can only hope Santa leaves a big bowl of potash under the tree for me next week - I hear if you wash your hair with potash for a month you become 20 per cent more strategic!
But enough with substance.
When is there going to be an election? What does it mean for an election? Have we had an election yet and I slept through it?
Small gyrations in polls. Every day, it feels, another poll and another pollster who has to justify another $50,000 from another media organization by explaining why there was a really significant 3 percent shift in South-Central Ontario since the last $50,000 poll they did and what it means for whether we will have an election this year.
Those two topics - election timing and the closely related day's polls - are the dominant story of 2010. A quick Infomart search found that 1.2 billion stories were written in 2010 speculating about election timing or analyzing largely meaningless polls (rounded to the closest billion). In a hypothetical world where you banned discussion of election timing and there were no public opinion polls, political Ottawa might actually have to talk about substance. What a frightening bizarro world that would be.
Maclean's covers were also big stories in 2010. Maclean's made all of Canada's Parliament really sad in 2010 in one of the only issues that every single member of Parliament agreed on. Not to be outdone, Toronto city council will vote to "disassociate" itself from Maclean's at their next meeting - I knew Ken Whyte was taking direction for the last year from Toronto city hall so finally breaking the close association is probably the right thing to do for all concerned.
So the media spent a lot of time talking about the media - from Maclean's to Kory to the CBC. It's great fun, and it's hard to blame them given how uninteresting so much of the rest of our politics is for weeks at a time.
It's not that big things aren't going on in Canada - there are of course huge issues facing our country. It's just hard to make an argument that federal politics in 2010 were in any way connected to them on most days.
But since I would never want to be accused of being a pessimist, at least we can soon live in a world without the Canadian penny!