BRYAN GEE/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
David McKinnon is a former Canadian diplomat who has been posted to New Delhi, Canberra, Bangkok and, most recently, Colombo, where he served as Canada’s high commissioner to Sri Lanka and the Maldives.
Canada has grown complacent.
Highly favourable geography and history have allowed us to coast on the hard work and sacrifice of previous generations for decades. The plain luck of occupying a resource-rich land mass next to a prosperous and generally benign (at least to us) superpower has certainly helped, too. And on the world stage, the liberal international order, which Canada had helped create, gave us influence without huge ongoing effort.
But the traditional assumptions about Canada’s security, prosperity and social cohesion no longer apply. The world is now both connected and fragmented. We may be nearing a point where proximity to the United States poses as many risks as benefits to us, as Donald Trump starkly reminded us with his threat to impose, on his first day in office, a 25-per-cent tariff on imports from Canada, which would have dire consequences for our economy. Meanwhile, threats to our sovereignty increase as new and newly assertive powers challenge an international order that they do not see as being in their interests and in which they often see Canada as a weak link. That order is now breaking down. Much of our privileged place in the world is gone, even if many Canadians do not realize this (resounding defeats in our 2010 and 2020 bids for a UN Security Council seat were a message for anyone listening).
What’s more, our complacency has dulled common understanding of what it means to be Canadian. Many of us now seem comfortable with the idea that Canada is the “first postnational state,” as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau once said. But without some shared sense of ourselves, how do we identify and advance our own national interests? How do we defend those interests when they are threatened by malign actors? This lack of appreciation of what we are safeguarding helps explain the troublingly indifferent response to recent revelations about foreign meddling in our democracy.
Multiple challenges at home threaten Canada’s ability to secure a place for ourselves and future generations. Data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), detailed in a report from The Fraser Institute, underscore our productivity problems – in recent years we have lost ground against key peer nations and our economy is expected to be the worst-performing per capita among 30 OECD countries until 2060. Compounding this weakness is a critical housing shortage and dysfunctional municipal leadership, unmanaged migration, a health care system in crisis, disarray in higher education and striking security weaknesses. Overlaying this are serious challenges to social cohesion as Canadians lose sight of what binds us together.
We are now arriving at the end of Canada’s age of exorbitant privilege. Amid all these existential threats, it’s time for some serious thinking about how we secure our future in a rapidly changing world that does not owe Canadians anything. That means rebooting Canada’s political and civic cultures – which begins with meaningful dialogue between Canadians and their leaders and thinkers about what made this country successful to this point, and how we should engage with our changing world moving ahead.
Canadians are regularly let down by a culture of political expediency that exists at all levels of government. Core to this is our highly centralized party and government structures (virtually unparalleled in other Westminster democracies) and the parochial nature of our political system. The result is a system that favours highly transactional political decisions that microtarget specific voters and niche communities, rather than furthering the broader national interest.
A stark example of our broken approach to policy making was the decision to dramatically increase immigration levels to maintain economic growth, which seemed like a seemingly painless way (as opposed to serious policy choices) to do so. Ultimately, it failed even at this, as modest headline economic growth masked declining per-capita incomes. It also enabled provinces to underfund higher education by relying on foreign students paying high fees without guaranteeing them quality education. It has had unintended consequences in areas such as productivity, national security and health care. And now, support for large-scale immigration is at risk as Canadians doubt government control over borders and question the ability of governments to meet existing housing, health and education needs.
Our culture of political expediency sees immigration and, by extension, foreign policy, through largely a vote-gathering lens, rather than through the national interest. Thankfully, Canadians have largely avoided xenophobic anti-immigrant populism to date, but that could change if we do not return to an approach that benefits all of Canada. If we discourage a thoughtfully targeted migration approach, we undermine the innovation needed for our success.
That diversity is central to our prosperity, so long as diversity is not seen simply as an end in itself. The advantage of diversity is in the varying knowledge and experiences that can be brought together to find creative, productive and enduring solutions to the challenges we face. But a diverse society still needs to achieve belonging, which comes from finding common ground – not from hype about what divides us.
It is crucial for a country to have some sense of community and national interest to understand what binds its citizens together, as well as celebrating what makes them individuals. In this context, Justin Trudeau’s comments to The New York Times shortly after becoming prime minister in 2015 are both telling and troubling: “There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada,” he claimed. “There are shared values – openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, to search for equality and justice. Those qualities are what make us the first postnational state.”
If our political leaders believe there is no core identity to Canada – only supposedly shared values that are so vague but also so fundamental to any successful society as to make them almost pointless – it is not a surprise that we have such a hard time identifying our national interests and taking steps to protect or advance them. Changing this easy way of thinking – easy in that it does not expect much of anyone – can be done through leadership and an engaged public that includes policy thinkers, non-government leaders and regular citizens interested in the future of their country.
Furthermore, our global influence comes from nurturing economic and social success and making serious investments in a secure Canada for future generations; it does not come from asserting our superior virtue or making the mistake of assuming that our past success is guaranteed to continue. Building a Canada that is prosperous, secure and successful will give us much greater influence on the world stage than any sound bite could. There is no better advertisement for our diversity as a people and our inclusiveness as a country than if we are as prosperous and secure as we are diverse and inclusive.
To do this, we need active, thoughtful and courageous leadership – not wedge politics pursued through virtue signalling or rage farming. This means honest discussion that seeks to build common ground. We each have multiple identities, and should celebrate that, but for the Canadian project to work long-term, we must work to understand the ties that bind us (or not), and a mission to pursue our shared goals and ideals together as Canadians.
We need fearless inquiry about who we are as a nation and how we got here, but a respect for facts and different views will still be key. Our broadly prosperous and tolerant society did not appear out of nowhere. Previous generations, whatever their mistakes, seem to have gotten a few things right to lay the groundwork for the Canada of today. Understanding what Canadians of earlier generations did right (and wrong) should inform our thinking, but their faults should not be our obsession. We should also learn from experiences around the world, of course, as we seek the right solutions for us.
Canada’s success and wealth goes beyond the advantages of our history and geography. They also came from visionary investments and innovations: the transcontinental railroads, insulin, free trade, the digital telephone switch, the Blackberry. Matching this on the social front was success through fits and starts in building an open, caring and largely tolerant society, one that’s able to accommodate two official languages, welcome would-be Canadians from around the world and look after those who are here.
We also need to protect what we value. With decades-long underinvestment in defence and security, we are long past the point where we can effectively patrol, let alone defend, the sovereignty of the world’s second-largest land mass from a range of threats. We need to make major investments on that front – but we need prosperity to pay for it.
So that’s the diagnosis. What’s the treatment?
Prosperity, security and social cohesion are interlinked. There are options for serious consultation involving both experts and interested members of the public. Whatever the mechanics, we need leadership and a willingness to hold open conversations about who we are, the profound challenges we face, what needs to change, and how we move forward together as Canadians.
Serious reform rarely comes from simply telling people what’s good for them. It’s time to talk to Canadians as adults who may have differing views to our own. Leadership is not about having all the answers but having the courage to engage in open and thoughtful consideration of options that may or may not fit one’s preconceptions.
This is about developing a common understanding of who we are, and what we should focus on to secure Canada’s prosperity and security, not to mention social cohesion.
Canada has a long tradition of white papers, independent reviews, and royal commissions that, in contrast to communications today, were expected to prompt public discourse and recommendations that were not preplanned. The interest of governments in public engagement on such issues has waned, presumably as message control has become paramount and technology has siloed us. What passes for consultation is typically engagement with preidentified “stakeholders.” A less charitable description could be “special interest groups” which, if they are the primary target of consultations, can make the development of good policy in the national interest difficult.
A government eyeing the future could announce independent reviews on the economy (and, perhaps, on social cohesion), security, and Canada’s place in the world. The intention would be to undertake a thoughtful review of the challenges facing Canada and the potential policy responses. To encourage cross-party engagement on these commissions and the related public discussion, the final reports could be planned for delivery beyond the next election, even as the public conversations in the process go on in the meantime. The recommendations produced could await consideration by a government early in its mandate.
A precedent for this was the Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada, a.k.a. the Macdonald Commission, established under the government of Pierre Trudeau in 1982 at a time of great political tension and economic challenge. Its report, issued in 1985 after the Liberals had been replaced in government by Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives, was quite different in key respects from what the first PM Trudeau’s government had envisioned. But even before the report, its work prompted widespread, serious discussion of the challenges and opportunities, and the potential policy options, facing a Canada at a crossroads.
The Macdonald Commission laid the groundwork for the Mulroney government to undertake major reforms of the economy, some of which the Progressive Conservatives had opposed in the 1984 election that it won (including free trade with the United States). The commission’s report enabled the new government to consider a range of policy options, not just the politically convenient ones, and to identify what made sense in the circumstances. Politics played a role, of course, but the report helped Mr. Mulroney’s government make tough decisions about where to spend its political capital. And while reforms such as free trade, privatization and the GST involved vigorous public debate, it can be argued that 20 years after the Macdonald report, Canada was a more prosperous and cohesive place than it had been at the start.
It is a sad commentary on the dearth of major Canadian policy innovation and nation building that has taken place in recent decades that we must go back 40 years for inspiration, but so it is.
Back to now. Profound change in the relatively comfortable and undemanding world in which Canada has prospered has been a long time coming, but events in recent years have catalyzed the shift, meaning many Canadians are only now beginning to realize how much has changed. Action is urgently needed. But it is hard to see it happen if we do not find some common ground to bring us together to address the challenges at hand.
We have done it before. We can do it again.