The Polite Revolution
Perfecting the Canadian Dream
by John Ibbitson
McClelland & Stewart, 288 pp., $24.95
JOHN IBBITSON'S MESSAGE FOR CANADIAN social conservatives, and especially Christian conservatives, is chilling. I am sure Ibbitson does not have a fascist bone in his body, but those opposed to gay marriage, abortion, and who treasure the usual list of traditional family values are simply dismissed as not good Canadians.
His book wants to praise the liberals--and registered Liberals, for that matter--for bringing about a polite revolution by which Canada has been transformed from a backward dominion into a multicultural, urban, latent world power. The immigrant, the modern city dweller, and the moral progressives have done this despite the "backward-looking social intolerance" of "the desiccated remnant of Canada's colonial past."
In case you missed it, that was a description of Canadian conservatives. Ibbitson believes this very urban, multicultural, and morally licentious revolution may yet fulfill one of Canada's most ridiculous prognostications when, in 1904, Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier proclaimed that the 20th century would belong to Canada. Having missed that target, Ibbitson feels we have a good shot at the 21st century.
Many Americans may be startled to find Canada's polite revolution defined as the freedom to break the Sabbath and "smoke pot while watching an unrated movie during your same-sex honeymoon." If some American heartland conservatives imply that liberal Americans are not patriotic enough, liberals in Canada regard Canadian religious conservatives as the scourge of the land.
Why does Ibbitson kick these "value conservatives" so hard, except perhaps because they are a tiny minority? More young people are religiously conservative than older people, and immigrants themselves generally dislike the moral decay the author sees as solid evidence for Canadian progress. Canadian small town folks do not generally have racist attitudes towards newcomers, just less contact and less knowledge. Much of the wealth in Canada is still mined, pumped, and logged in rural areas, so it is not obvious why city folks should feel superior.
The irony is that Ibbitson actually wants to make an argument for (economic) conservative policy proposals in the core of this book, but apparently wants to make absolutely sure that no one mistakes him for a social conservative. He wishes that the Liberal party of Canada, which ruled Canada for most of the last decades--this is also the fault of those social conservatives whose values have made the Conservative party "its own worst enemy"--could adopt some conservative ideas and, in so doing, consolidate the revolution.
Ibbitson's partisan attitude is truly overdone. He calls Prime Minister Brian Mulroney "a failure," even though Mulroney negotiated the Canada-U.S. and North American Free Trade Agreements that financed Ibbitson's polite revolution. Ibbitson, who wrote before the current prime minister, Stephen Harper, won his minority government early in 2006, equates him with "radical ideologues in Alberta" and with giving away Canadian sovereignty to the United States. Another vignette of Canadian politics reveals itself. There is an open season on two more species beside Christian conservatives: Albertans, and those who do not dislike and distrust Americans. In contrast to Ibbitson's predictions about Harper, Canadians are now watching a very skilled and cautious new prime minister, while Ibbitson predicts Harper can never win in the cities. We will see.
If the reader is interested in gaining insight into what Canadian conservatives--even just economic conservatives--think, this is not the right book. Ibbitson only wants to apply some prescriptions without understanding conservative philosophy, or without explaining how Canadian politics must first create the conditions for conservative policies to be implemented. (To find out more about a bottom-up strategy for Canadian conservatism, there is a fascinating new book out by Tasha Kheiriddin and Adam Daifallah, Rescuing Canada's Right: Blueprint for a Conservative Revolution.)
The best part of Ibbitson's book is about policy fixes in areas where the Liberal party left a legacy of failure. Nothing much new here, but it provides a useful overview of the main themes. Often a libertarian in his proposals, Ibbitson nevertheless remains resistant to the logic of tax cuts fueling his revolution.
His first sound call is for the federal government to give back tax and governing powers to the provinces and to stop using regional subsidies, such as unemployment insurance, to reward inefficiency and corruption. The thing about modern Canada that gets the author very excited is the fact that it admits twice as many immigrants per capita as the United States. These dynamic folk go to the three big cities, drive Canada's urban renewal, and help it stave off the graying and depopulation threats facing most other Western democracies. He offers a good idea. In response to research that older immigrants coming in the 1980s are not doing as well economically as immigrants who came in the 1960s, bring them in young and train them in Canada.
When praising his big cities, the author underestimates the growing crime rates, especially in property crimes and in some violent crimes. Greater Vancouver, for example, is suffering from epidemic levels of car theft. Gun crimes in Toronto are up. The author advances the myth that crime rates in Canada are falling, but the opposite is happening, as recent research has shown.
Ibbitson is bold and right about Canada's policies toward Native Peoples; they are wasteful and ineffective. What Native People need are more individual rights, including private property rights on Native Reserves, and fewer group rights. But Ibbitson's conclusion that the "ultimate solution to ending the aboriginal disadvantage within Canada might lie in integration--not as a matter of policy, but as a matter of destiny" is rather glib. What he means is that Native Peoples should leave the rural reserves and join the mixing throngs in the big cities. So far, too many Natives that do so end up on the streets.
He is also right about calling for major reforms in Canada's Communist-like health care system which prohibits private health care. The solution is to provide public health insurance, but allow both public and private healthcare to mix and compete. Liberal governments pandered to public phobias about American health care and never moved an inch. Now, provinces such as Alberta and Quebec have begun to take health care into their own hands, though Quebec depends on Ottawa's financial handouts.
Ibbitson rightly argues for breaking the public monopoly on Canadian universities, but he does not go far enough. Not only are Canadian public universities not reinvesting, they are also (at least in the social sciences) dependent on government research grants that pander to left-wing and politically correct research programs.
His last recommendations are on foreign and defense policy. After having hollowed out Canadian Forces from the 1980s onward, Ibbitson detected a "change of heart" in the last Liberal government when it promised to boost defense spending from $13 billion to $20 billion over five years. This was no change of heart but a desperate attempt by then-Prime Minister Paul Martin to steal yet another policy plank from the rising Stephen Harper. Anyhow, given Canada's economic size and its stake in world trade and peace, Canada's defense budget should really be in the neighborhood of $40 billion.
I have been around Canadian Forces personnel for many years, and only now do I detect a new bounce in their step and a sense of real progress towards rebuilding a force that can have a strong expeditionary capacity to operate alongside key allies such as the United States. For years, Canadians have been led down the garden paths of U.N. or other schemes of peace building that basically added nothing to Canadian national security. Ibbitson is still taken by the Liberal idea of a "Responsibility to Protect," another U.N. pledge for which the author wants to have one Canadian brigade ready at all times.
Why one brigade? What would that add? There is no explanation. Several pages later Ibbitson calls for a battalion. Fair enough; things military are not the author's forte. Yes, repressed peoples such as in North Korea and Zimbabwe need our help, but it won't come through the United Nations. The author is also oblivious to the mountains of evidence showing that traditional official development assistance does not work. He wants Canada to meet the European target of giving 0.7 percent of GDP to the Third World (it sits at 0.28 percent today). If there is no better accountability, the money would be wasted.
Thankfully, Ibbitson does not forget to note that anti-Americanism is getting out of hand in Canada, and is risking "a corrosive effect on Canada-U.S. relations." Bang on: He says the "danger is not that Canada will grow too close to the United States, but that we are growing too far apart." Sensible things are proposed, such as regulatory harmonization, less border controls, and more labor mobility. But this will take a much more proactive Canadian commitment than most Canadians realize.
Toward the end of the book, Ibbitson tries unconvincingly to kickstart some democratic reforms. He proposes proportional representation, but qualifies it so much that it falls flat. He wants more nonelected bodies, such as the Liberal-appointed Supreme Court, to make decisions that bypass self-serving political trends. The cure is worse than the disease. He wants to force immigrants to live outside Canada's big cities (what about their individual rights?), and he wants to institute compulsory voting. Yawn.
Alexander Moens is professor of political science at Simon Fraser University.