I am a family physician, in clinical practice for just over 36 years in rural B.C. As a professional reflex, I have a sensitivity towards the behaviour of others, and towards the impact of my own conduct.

While still in medical school, I learned that many of the most important influences on a person’s health derive not just from what doctors do, or even from the choices made by patients themselves, but from broad trends in the community—from the immediate neighbourhood right up to the planetary environment.

When I began my practice, however, the term “ecosystem” was unknown, and the term “environment” referred almost exclusively to a person’s immediate social or physical situation.

Today, thanks to global telecommunications and transportation, and especially the Internet and social media, our worldview has expanded greatly. As we humans have multiplied exponentially, we have learned that we can degrade the functional capacity of our planetary home, which in turn affects our survival.

In 1995, I helped to found the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment or CAPE. Our purpose was to scientifically examine the intimate inter-relationship between human and ecosystem health, and improve the former by addressing the latter. With 5,500 members, CAPE has become the environmental voice of the medical profession.

Today, however, I am here not as representative of CAPE or any other organization. I am speaking as just one person, and as a physician.

‘Structural pathology’

I want to address what one might call “structural pathology” in the governance system in Canada, which has led to the contention surrounding the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline project—which I have followed closely since its inception.

Your work as members of the Joint Review Panel is taking place in a social context. As a medical professional—with, I might add, extra training in psychotherapy—I would like to examine four diseased elements in this social context, and suggest remedies for them.

The first pathological element is historical.

Up until about 400 years ago, the land base subsumed within Canada was home to various peoples, originally from Asian roots, broadly connected by culture and race. They lived, like all our forebears once did, seeking survival in an unforgiving but also bountiful natural world.

Through a combination of force of arms, disease, mass immigration and various legalistic arrangements—including a genocidal strategy called the residential school system—the land base occupied by the original inhabitants of this country was progressively reduced, and their role in society was relentlessly marginalized. The small land base and the few prerogatives left to them thus have become critically important to their well-being.

In Salmon Arm, I have patients, neighbours and friends who are aboriginal, who embody the experiences I’ve just referred to, both in their physiology and in their psyches. Many First Nations communities, with similar individual and collective experiences, are in the path of the proposed pipeline.

Democracy distorted

The second element in this structural pathology is the electoral system. Elections to the House of Commons are based on the “first-past-the-post” system. The elected candidate just has to get one vote more than any other candidate—even if only a minority of citizens actually vote in the first place.

This kind of selection procedure, in a community with many disparate parts, is psychologically grossly inefficient. Especially in complex or conflictual situations, it generates a mixture of cynicism, despair and anger.

The third element in this structural pathology is the nature of the Prime Minister’s Office, or PMO.

In Britain, the PMO is surrounded by powerful committees and advisory bodies whose comments and decisions have a major influence on government decision-making and cannot be readily ignored.

In Canada, the PMO has vastly more political power. It has, in fact, absolute veto power over several hundred different government bodies.

More concentrated in Canada

Political power in the Canadian system is profoundly more centralized than it is in Britain, and far more than it is in the United States, with its system of “checks and balances.”

Frankly, if Stephen Harper doesn’t like your report, he can, and by every indication he will, shelve it.

This concentration of power in one element of Canada’s political structure, for whatever murky historical reason, is an invitation to social disaster. The illusion of “efficiency” in political decision-making is subverted by the opportunity for hardline autocracy.

In the 21st century, when my patients are being encouraged to take increasing responsibility for their lives, such a concentration of power is anachronistic and backward.

Corporate power

The final element in Canada’s structural pathology is the expansion of the influence of the “corporation,” a business model that uncouples personal responsibility from profit, and places dollar gains above all others.

It is significant that as I sit talking to you here the Enbridge consortium is applying to expand its Kitimat terminal from 11 to 16 oil tanks. What clearer demonstration of absolute confidence in an eventual approval could there possibly be?

Taken together, these elements create the pathological state that has directly lead to us being here today:

• The relentless marginalization of First Nations, with their intimate connection to the ecosystem;
• The electoral system, which readily generates non-representative governments;
• The huge concentration of political power in the Prime Minister’s Office; and
• The rise of corporate influence.

What is the cure?

The planet is overcrowded, heating up, and steadily depleted of its natural capital. But now we have a Prime Minister who is forcefully using the overwhelming dominance afforded his office, to try and reshape this country to his dated views.

Stephen Harper, according to recorded evidence, has longed to be able to exercise such intense power, and identifies with doing so now (several years ago he formally changed the phrase “federal government” to “the government of Stephen Harper”).

His own religious background suggests reasons for his overall orientation, but his willingness to mask his own renowned intensity behind a rigidly bland “persona” is a truer indication of his deep commitment to power.

This approach to governance, exercised by a Prime Minister and government elected by a minority of Canadians, has deepened the already strong alliance between the corporate sector and the government. The former, fixated on immediate and short-term financial profitability, is drawn to the latter, intent on maintaining its ascendancy, and vice versa.

The result, in a situation like the one we are addressing today, is growing social pathology. Frustration, anger, cynicism, depression and distrust of leadership are on the ascendancy, as noted in the Edelman Trust Barometer, released just before the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Four-way medicine needed

A patient of mine in his mid-twenties came to my office recently to say that he was deeply depressed and anxious, not about his love life, or his financial situation, but about the overheated, depleted future he was heading towards. He felt that the government in this country was acting now to make it worse for him and his young children later.

The cure for this disease is four-fold, in my opinion.

First, we must, as a nation, work out a respectful, mutually satisfactory relationship with Canada’s First Peoples—not destroy their culture by stealth.

Second, we must reform the electoral system to make it radically more representative.

Third, we must alter the power balance in the federal governance system so that one person cannot pre-empt democratic processes as Stephen Harper is now doing.

And fourth, we must rein in the overwhelming power and influence of the corporate sector.

Until we do these four things, our country is vulnerable to political, social and ecological upheaval that will retard our development as a nation, and likely offer ruin to the lives of future generations.

And it’s going to make my personal and professional life more difficult, as I minister to the anxiety and physical suffering of particularly the young people in my community.

I therefore personally pledge my energies and experience—here, today—to bringing about these changes, by whatever means possible.

I hope you will too.

And I also hope you will reject this flawed and destructive project, the inevitable result of such a flawed and destructive and pathological process.

Dr. R. Warren Bell MD is a doctor in Salmon Arm, BC. He gave this testimony on January 28, 2013 to the Joint Review Panel hearings on the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline in Kelowna. Dr. Bell is rural preceptor, Faculty of Medicine at UBC Salmon Arm; past founding president of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment; and president of WA:TER: Wetland Alliance: The Ecological Response.

While the national media pundits have been fantasizing about the possibility of a coalition between the remains of the Liberal party and Jack Layton’s frothy orange NDP, the Green party’s unexpected success in getting its leader Elizabeth May elected in Saanich North has opened up a juicy, sizzling, and wholly tantalizing new prospect.

How about a coalition between the Green party and the Liberals?

To my mind, this is entirely more possible than any talk of a merger between the Liberals and the New Democrats, two long-established parties with widely different philosophies and decades of animosity piled up between them.

But co-operation between the Greens and the Liberals is an entirely possible scenario.

It’s happened before

In 2008, West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast MP Blair Wilson briefly became Canada’s first Green MP after being ejected from the Liberal caucus and barred from renomination following allegations of election financing.

May needed to have at least one Green MP sitting in parliament to be included in the upcoming televised leadership debate. After examining Wilson’s election finances, May declared them legitimate, even though the Liberals thought him so beneath even their own questionable standard of ethics that they won’t allow him to return to their fold.

Politics, they say, is the Art of the Expedient. The trick worked for May: she was allowed into the leaders’ debate and made an impression; Wilson ran for the Greens but didn’t get elected. Justice works in mysterious ways.

Both are centre-right

Despite suggestions of NDP-Green similarities, there’s no love lost between them. In fact, they’re quite different. The NDP stretches from the far Left to slightly right of centre, while the Green party increasingly is becoming avowedly centre-right.

Greens and Liberals are much closer philosophically, as their erstwhile leader Stéphane Dion demonstrated. Perhaps he and not Wilson should have run as a Green? His life would have turned out much better than his present state of political exile.

In many ways, the Greens are a better expression of contemporary liberalism than the moribund and shrinking Liberal party. Greens label themselves as environmentally concerned, socially progressive, and fiscally conservative. Isn’t that pure liberalism?

Occupying the sweet spot

Politically, the Green party occupies a sweet spot in the centre of Canadian politics. It’s attractive to the new generation of voters now emerging from their teenage obsessions. It also appeals to the growing ranks of small-c conservative retirees who are becoming concerned about the kind of world they’re about to pass on to their grandchildren.

Despite the Liberal bravado about rebuilding the party, I don’t see much possibility of it happening. Rather than pouring money into a tainted and crumbling vessel, I believe that many Liberals are going to look to the Greens for their political rejuvenation.

Some right-wing Liberals will drift into the Conservative camp as Harper relaxes into his iron-clad political hegemony, and a very small number will find comfort with the NDP. But with the deep-seated animosity between Liberals and socialists, I don’t see much of the latter happening. Throwing their lot in with the Greens will be much more palatable.

Liberal MPs defect to Green?

How do I see this all playing out? I don’t foresee an official inter-party union, at least not at first. There’s too much egotistical pride in the Liberal camp for that. But if I were the leader of the Green party (an unlikely prospect!) I’d be making overtures to as many Liberal MPs as I could find who are disgruntled with their party’s leadership.

May has done it before, admittedly in an extreme case. But for today’s few dozen Liberal MPs, the prospect of being a big fish in a vibrant and growing Green pool could be tempting. Stepping away from the desperate attempts at renewing the Liberal cadaver into an untainted party whose energy is bubbling and youthful could be very refreshing.

It would take only a few Liberal MPs moving to the Greens to start a major trend. Perhaps then the Liberal hierarchy would realise that their once-dominant political dynasty is a train wreck that cannot be rebuilt, and that for any of the 34 elected Liberals, their path back to political power is clearly painted Green.

Losing Confidence
power, politics and the crisis in Canadian democracy

By Elizabeth May
McClelland & Stewart 2009
ISBN 978-0-7710-5760-1 (paper)
280 pages $21.00

Green Party of Canada leader Elizabeth May has written an interesting but ultimately politically disappointing book on the precarious and dysfunctional state of Canada’s parliamentary democracy.

Losing Confidence could be a useful lay-person’s guide to the undemocratic political games played in and around Canada’s parliament. But May provides no practical suggestions as to how this mess can be cleaned up and a genuine democracy established. She knows the rules, but fails to grapple with the nature of the game.

Despite her disappointing lack of political analysis, this is undoubtedly Elizabeth May’s best book to date. Writing in a clear, well-researched, and readable style, May lays out just how far we are from having a genuine and functional democracy in Canada. Like Dorothy in Oz, she pulls aside the curtain to reveal the rottenness behind this country’s devious, pompous, outdated, and viciously fractious political system.

Increasingly powerful PMO

The first and possibly most useful chapter of Losing Confidence traces historically how the UK’s Westminster system of parliamentary democracy evolved into today’s political system, first by reigning in the power of the King, and then by raising the power of the people.

But a shift has taken place in all Westminster-style governments. Starting in Canada in 1968 with Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Prime Minister’s Offices (PMOs) have progressively taken over powers previously held in the Privy Council. Successive prime ministers and their immediate circles of advisors have clawed back all power from cabinet ministers and even the top ranks of the civil service, to become the country’s Sun King.

As a result, the notion of ministerial responsibility has been cast aside. MPs have been reduced to mere background hecklers in an increasingly-rancorous Question Period, while the independence of the civil service has been replaced by subservience to their political masters.

Other chapters of the book deal with the Americanisation of Canadian politics; free speech and the concentration of media; political interference by the RCMP; the decline in political participation; lobbyists and the political influence of money; proportional representation; and coalition governments. May backs up her views with well-researched references.

Plenty of insight but no solutions

Losing Confidence should be required reading for anyone with even flicker of a thought of running for office to become an MP—especially for those naïve Canadian Greens who think that getting even one Green Party MP elected will clear up the mess on Parliament Hill. Unfortunately, that includes May herself, soon to take her third run at getting elected.

Although she lays out clearly exactly what’s wrong with Canada’s parliamentary system, May’s thinking falls short in three vital aspects. First, her strategy for returning order to parliament is simplistic and ineffective; and second, while pointing her finger at elected politicians of other parties, she fails to realise that the same democratic deficit she describes in parliament, exists inside her own political party.

Finally, does Elizabeth May and the federal council of the Green Party of Canada really believe that getting one or two Green MPs elected to a dysfunctional parliament in a far-from democratic political system, will fundamentally alter the nature of Canadian politics? If they do, they are collectively dreaming in technicolour. Saving the Earth from the worst aspects of self-centred humanity will require more fundamental tactics.

Standing up by sitting down

Just how deficient May’s thinking departs from realpolitik is revealed by her secret weapon for restoring order in question period. Should she be elected, she will—wait for it!—sit down. In a recent interview with Island Tides, a BC Gulf Islands newspaper, May explained her strategy:

“My approach would be to have zero-tolerance for heckling. So, when it’s my turn to ask a question, if any MPs are yelling or interrupting, I plan to sit down. The Speaker of the House will probably realize that I am having trouble with the amount of noise round me and he’ll stand up and call for order. If he doesn’t I’ll miss my chance to ask a question. If I miss a couple of times, the media is bound to notice that I am practising something called zero-tolerance for heckling.”

Brilliant! Why didn’t anyone think of that before? More likely, May would be subject to the same ridicule that has become the norm in Question Period, as she herself so clearly describes in her book. She’d be laughed out of the House and ridiculed in the media. Reinventing democracy and restoring Canada’s parliament will require more fundamental tactics.

Just another political party

Green politics was supposed to be different. Instead of the centralised control by the party leader and his or her inner circle, Green parties were set up to offer a grassroots alternative to mainstream politics. But from the start, Canadian Green parties timidly adopted the same top-down, hierarchical structure as the existing conventional political parties.

As a result, apart from an early attempt at consensual decision-making, Canada’s Green parties have morphed into pale green imitations of the mainstream parties. They have drifted away from their grassroots green democratic ideology, making them easy takeover targets for disaffected Liberals, displaced populist Reform conservatives, and Red Tories.

May fits this right-wing, pale green pattern. By nature a conservative, in 1986 she worked as an environmental lawyer for Tom McMillan, Brian Mulroney’s Environment minister. Her endorsement of Liberal finance minister Ralph Goodale’s “greenest budget ever” in 2005 and her 2006 declaration of Brian Mulroney as “Canada’s greenest prime minister,” undermined her reputation as a purely grassroots environmentalist.

Her attempt in 2008 to anoint disgraced Liberal MP Blair Wilson as Canada’s first Green MP confirmed May as a politician who knows how to play the system and the media. She’s a political insider, not a reformer—and that’s the weakness of her book. It’s easy enough to point to what’s wrong, but to change a political system that is destroying the Earth takes more than saying: “Just elect me, and everything will be OK.”

Bioregional democratic structure

The fact that Elizabeth May is a political conservative and that some of her reformist tactics fall short of the mark, is not the main problem. I actually believe that May is an intelligent person who unfortunately is listening to the wrong advisors. There is no reason why conservatives should not be in the Green Party, as long as they can learn about and adopt green political values.

Unfortunately, green political philosophy is not being taught, discussed, or even practised in Canada’s Green parties. The talk is only of policy, as if by finding the right words sufficient people can be persuaded to vote Green. But policy without a strong philosophic foundation is simply empty rhetoric—isn’t that what is turning people away from joining political parties and even from voting?

I believe it comes down to structure. Canadian Green parties must turn away from ‘top-down’ politics and reinvent themselves along bioregional lines. The hierarchy of power must be flattened and decision-making returned to the local regions. Bioregionalism makes for strong, self-sufficient, local economies—truly sustainable economies—that link to and protect environment and ecosystems.

I spoke to May about this recently, when she North Saanich in preparation for her moving here to run in Saanich North and the Islands in the next election. She did seem to understand the concept of bioregionalism, but her parachuting into this riding by decision of the federal Green council and her lack of response to my offer to discuss the idea of restructuring, do not fill me with hope.

Canadians may be losing confidence in their parliament, but unless she shows some real backbone and resolves the democratic deficit in her own Green party, deeper greens are going to lose confidence in Elizabeth May.

Transforming Power
from the personal to the political

By Judy Rebick
Penguin Canada 2009
ISBN 978-0-8020-2 (cloth) $75
ISBN 9780143169468 (paper) $24.00
256 pages

Book Review

Political activist Judy Rebick has written a visionary and inspiring book that suggests applied people-power can transform politics from an élitist, secretive, and corrupt process into an open, grassroots democracy that could radically and vigorously tackle the urgent issues of our time.

Her writing is highly-charged and visionary, but her focus on the politics of left-wing South American countries, with a few exceptions, glosses over the fact that Canadian political culture is different. Can western democracy be transformed, or are we just too affluent to change?

A prominent Canadian journalist, political activist, feminist, and writer, Rebick was born in Nevada, emigrating to Canada with her family when she was nine. President of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women from 1990 to 1993, she soon became the leading and very outspoken voice of the Canadian feminist movement.

CBC pinko feminist

Rebick co-hosted a political talk show on CBC Newsworld from 1994 to 1998, then a women’s discussion show until 2000. She helped launch the left-wing online publication rabble.ca in 2001, becoming its publisher from 2001 to 2005. She currently occupies the CAW–Sam Gindin Chair in Social Justice and Democracy at Ryerson University in Toronto.

I guess that makes her a card-carrying CBC pinko feminist, a category of journalist that drives Canada’s right-wing conservatives into apoplexy. I’m warming towards her already. Rebick’s background puts her on the leading edge of progressive Canadian politics, and her book is a refreshing glimpse of a possible way to defend and improve western democracy.

The book arose out of Rebick’s growing despair that by 2005, after decades of effort, the anti-globalisation movement had failed to counter the neo-liberal agenda, halt environmental degradation and global warming, or protect citizen’ rights against the increased emphasis on security following 9-11. She felt that the Left had lost its way.

South American activism

Rebick decided to look to South American politics to find a way forward. In January, 2006 she heard Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez speak in Caracas. At first, she thought he was a “crackpot,” but on meeting other South American activists when she returned to attend the 2006 World Social forum, she began to appreciate their new approach to politics.

South America had been hit by neo-liberalism “with the force of a tsunami,” she writes. The brutal dictatorships of the 1970s and 80s had been replaced by democratically-elected, left-leaning governments. In 1998, Hugo Chavez rose from humble origins to become Venezuelan president. Chavez used his country’s oil income to improve conditions for the poor and assist grassroots indigenous movements in other countries.

On December 21st and 22nd, 2001 millions of piqueteros took to the streets in Argentina’s major cities, especially Buenos Aires, forcing the government out of power after draconian neo-liberal policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund caused disastrous economic collapse.

Bolivia’s indigenous government

In 1999, after generations of racist suppression and exploitation, Bolivian workers and campesinos (70% of Bolivian are indigenous) decided to form the MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo), a political coalition to contest elections. MAS is not a classical political party — an important difference.

Lead by Evo Morales, MAS came a surprising second in Bolivia’s 2002 election. It won a majority in 2005, with Morales becoming only the second South American indigenous president in 500 years. MAS and the campesinos beat back a strong right-wing challenge in 2008 using only peaceful resistance. Morales won 64% support in a recall referendum.

Rebick became fascinated by Morales and Bolivian politics, meeting him and many of his ministers in La Paz in 2006. She was impressed by the “tremendous support he has from an amazingly well-organised and mobilised indigenous campesino movement,” and his non-violence.

Power to the people

The fundamental difference between conventional political culture and the new South American approach is its inclusivity. Political power is drawn from grassroots political organisations that empower individuals to become active within their own community, regionally, and nationally.

This ‘bottom-up’ democracy is the core thesis of Reick’s book. She shows how participatory budgeting, in which residents decide how to allocate part of a municipal or public budget, revitalised the City of Porto Alegre in Brazil, and here in Canada the Toronto Community Housing Association, whose community management plan is based on the same principles.

Rebick applies this fundamentally different approach to all aspects of personal and social relations, from feminism, racism, environmentalism and the Internet, to political leadership, community-building, First Nations, non-violence, the Green Economy, and political parties.

Can it happen here?

Although Rebick is enthusiastic about South American democracy to the point of being starry-eyed particularly about Evo Morales, she presents a powerful case for change. But one big question remains unanswered:

Can it happen here? Are enough Canadians prepared to step outside their comfortable, consumer role to involve themselves in community, regional, and national political processes? Can Canadians sweep aside the barriers that prevent full citizen participation in this élitist democracy?

Rebick thinks so. In an interview on CBC Radio’s The Q she spoke of already seeing “a bottom-up engagement of citizens, with people in their communities organising to solve problems themselves, and not always looking to government and complaining that government isn’t doing it.”

The way ahead

Rebick sees encouraging signs, but admits that community activism is happening more in the USA than in Canada. Although her book succeeds in drawing attention to the South American experience, its unabashed enthusiasm seems like “pointing to the cows in the neighbour’s field.”

Grassroots support from individuals and local community organisations powered Barack Obama into the White House. Undoubtedly, his success could change Canadian politics to a degree. But would this be enough?

Rebick has taken the cause to the streets. She has set up a blog site to promote the book and act as a focus for something to happen. Her book tour included speaking in major Canadian cities, but I feel that more is needed. Perhaps kitchen table study groups using her book as the focus?

Whatever, the bottom line is that with Transforming Power, Judy Rebick has written a seminal book could be the key to transforming democracy.

Introduction to these reviews

Will Canadian politics simply be a continuation of the past, or have we gone through a political sea change that will result in a radically transformed and more polarised political landscape?

»Read the Introduction to this review»

In search of canadian political culture

By Nelson Wiseman
University of Toronto Press, 2008
ISBN: 9780774813884 (hardcover) $85
ISBN: 9780774813891 (paperback) $29.95
384 pages

»Read our review»

By Nelson Wiseman
University of Toronto Press, 2008
ISBN 9780774813884 (trade) $85
ISBN 9780774813891 (paper) $29.95
384 pages

Book Review

Nelson Wiseman’s view of Canadian politics rests on the conventional and the traditional. He searches for Canadian political culture by looking to the past in historical review, although he does add some more recent social survey data to strengthen the core of his thesis.

Wiseman sets out to prove is that if there is a specifically ‘Canadian’ political mode, it is expressed uniquely in each region, being formed from the interaction between the views of the existing local political élite and the social philosophy imported by each new wave of immigration.

While this may appear to be blindingly apparent to any observer, it would appear that Canada’s political historians have “not taken the trouble to compare Canada’s regional political cultures: they have been telling the story of Canada at large or that of a specific province,” Wiseman claims.

Well, duh…. What could those fellows have been thinking?

Two identifiable parts

The book falls into two parts, and would have benefitted by having them separated more clearly. The first five chapters deal with overarching theoretic concerns and is possibly more of interest to pol-sci students:

• frameworks and techniques of political science
• surveys and political culture
• constitutions and institutions as culture
• bi-culture, multi-culture, and aboriginal culture, and
• regional cultures.

In the last five chapters of the book, Wiseman gets down to regional politics, painting an historical tapestry showing how each wave of new immigrants impacted the political culture of the time. If you are looking for a socially-aware account of regional politics, here’s where Wiseman’s political insights become a useful guide for the fascinated but perplexed.

Five political regions

Wiseman divides Canada into five regional political cultures. These are:

• Atlantic — Maritime provinces: traditional
• Québéc — the politics of distinct society
• Ontario — archetypal English-Canadian
• Mid West — Manitoba, Saskatchewan: social democratic
• Far West — Alberta and BC: parvenu

Of these possible cultures, his Far West combo is the most unlikely. Do BC and Alberta really have much in common? Wiseman admits that they are an unlikely pair, being separated physically by the Rockies and differentiated by the ocean, the prairie, and immigration patterns.

The logic for harnessing (them) together lies in their common upstart character. These provinces brim with the possibility of advancement for their residents. This region, more than any other, has beckoned migrants from other parts of Canada with the prospect of entry into a charmed circle.

It’s a stretch, and he spends most of the chapter differentiating the two. But overall, the chapters on regional political cultures are possibly the most accessible and useful parts of the book for the lay reader.

Between two stools

Although his stated intent was to create a work understandable by both professional political scientists, students, and lay readers, Wiseman often seems to be addressing his attention towards his academic peers.

The book demands more than a passing knowledge of Canadian history, and Wiseman’s eclectic, somewhat stream-of-thought style doesn’t help matters. He tends to dive around between topics and periods, so much that often it’s difficult to remember exactly what he is addressing.

In attempting to satisfy two incompatible audiences, Wiseman’s book falls between two stools. It is not light reading; you have to be very interested in Canadian political history to get through it. But if you are fascinated by politics, Wiseman offers many useful political insights.

New political arena

For myself, the book disappoints in its focus on conventional party and electoral politics; its almost complete lack of recognition of the impact of neo-liberalism on all levels of government in all countries; and its failure to consider Canada’s place in the global struggle for democracy.

Political parties and electoral politics may be a public manifestation of political culture, but they are not its only aspect. The peace and then environment protest movements of the 1960s and ’70s gave birth to today’s proliferation of non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

Millions of people world-wide have stepped away from party politics to focus on the public arena. Greenpeace didn’t just find a way of using media to force industry to heel; it invented a new political arena.

Misses the mark

On this count, to my mind Nelson Wiseman has failed to fully describe contemporary Canadian political culture. It’s an erudite and insightful analysis of Canadian political history, but it does not achieve its aim.

By ignoring the political chasm that separates this from previous generations, he fails to advise those struggling for social and ecological justice on a planet on which human political culture is out of control.

Politics as an academic spectator sport will protect neither fragile ecosystems nor our fragile democracy. Both are under attack at this time, and it looks as though political science will not help save them.

Introduction

Will Canadian politics simply be a continuation of the past, or have we gone through a political sea change that will result in a radically transformed and more polarised political landscape?

»Read the Introduction to this review»

Transforming Power
from the personal to the political

By Judy Rebick
Penguin Canada 2009
ISBN 978-0-8020-2 (cloth) $75
ISBN 9780143169468 (paper) $24.00
256 pages

» Read our review

Blood on razor wire—the shape of things to come?

Victoria, BC—It’s been troubling me for some time, but it took a favour to a friend to bring home to me what is happening. Since the events of September 11, 2001, there has been a slow but inexorable erosion of our democratic freedoms in the name of ‘protecting’ our security.

Our basic democratic right to travel freely is under attack. If we do not collectively resist, an Age of Razor Wire lies ahead.

That’s a fairly dramatic statement, so I’d better explain how I’ve come to think that way. I live in Victoria, on Vancouver Island, and I had driven to the BC Ferries terminal at Swartz Bay to pick up a friend. What I saw at there shocked me. It was a “wake-up” experience that, if I’m right, will be coming soon to a transportation terminal close to where you live.

I found that razor wire, steel fences and security cameras were being erected to monitor and control the movements of the hundreds of thousands of British Columbians and tourists that pass through the terminal each year. What’s wrong with that, you say? Let me explain.

Sweet little sea voyage

BC Ferries used to be a crown corporation owned by the provincial government until it was turned into a semi-private corporation whose principal and only shareholder is—guess who—the BC government.

For most British Columbians, riding a BC Ferry used to mean a break from the city, a sweet little sea voyage on probably the world’s cheapest, most scenic cruise line. (Of course, for laid-back Gulf Island dwellers, it also offered the exciting prospect of a night out on the town.)

But since the Liberal government turned BC Ferries loose and hired steely-eyed American David Hahn to run it, the relaxed atmosphere at ferry terminals has slowly given way to crowds and commercialisation. The new ferries are bigger and faster, lacking the grace of the older fleet. Ferry fares have risen to the point that Islanders are complaining.

Now, every person who travels on BC Ferries will come under video surveillance. The iron fist of security is reaching out to ‘protect’ us all. Nothing wrong with that, if indeed we are under attack. I live in a mainly peaceful society and certainly don’t want to live in fear of being blown up by a fanatical fundamentalist of any creed. But still, I was uneasy.

Just another bus terminal

The thing that struck me about the preparations for increased security is that Swartz Bay is not an international port of entry. It’s just an ordinary transportation hub, the marine equivalent of a bus terminal.

The new and ancient ferries that bustle and out of this main entry point for southern Vancouver Island serve ferry routes to other Southern Gulf Islands and the mainland. The Washington State Ferry that serves Anacortes arrives and departs from picturesque Sidney just a few kilometres south, and Black Ball Ferry’s Port Angeles run terminates in Victoria’s Inner Harbour. Canada’s western entry points are elsewhere—why the need to monitor the movement of travellers within Canada?

The hysteria that swept through the western world like a tsunami after 9-11 left in its wake rafts of hurriedly-written, essentially undemocratic anti-terrorism legislation. Stampeded by the threat of further attacks in other countries, governments and legislatures capitulated to fear.

Centuries of habeas corpus and Geneva conventions on war and torture were brushed aside. Security services were given free reign to find ways of protecting vulnerable infrastructure from attack, and of keeping policy-makers distant from citizen dissent—and the money flowed like water.

Marine Security Contribution Program

The Marine Security Contribution Program (MSCP) is just a small part of the billions of dollars that western nations, Canada included, are pouring into security programs. An 80% cost-shared contribution program totalling $115 million over five years, it’s available to marine facilities that submit an ISPS-code security plan. In June, 2006 the program was expanded to selected domestic ferry operators, including BC Ferries.

On January 13, 2009 the federal government announced up to $5.6 million for security hardening at 15 domestic ferry sites across British Columbia. BC Ferries would receive $81,800 for Victoria, $3.07 million for Nanaimo, and $2.4 million to harden its West Vancouver terminals.

But something more insidious than just an hysterical political over-reaction to the destruction of the World Trade Centre is propelling the western world’s security and control agenda. The Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) is a little-known but extremely far-reaching agreement between the three North American nations. By stealth, SPP has become the de facto government agenda for an integrated North America.

Security and Prosperity Partnership

The thrust for SPP in Canada was initiated by the CEOs of 150 mostly American-owned major Canadian corporations, via their Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE) in association with the US Council on Foreign Relations, corporate America’s foreign policy think-tank. The implications of the SPP for Canadian democracy are profound.

Negotiated in secret, the SPP was signed by presidents Bush and Fox for the USA and Mexico and prime minister Paul Martin for Canada, without any public input or discussion in the US House of Representatives or the Canadian parliament. It’s the corporate agenda for integrating North America into one tightly-controlled, security state to benefit the rich.

You may be under labouring under the mistaken belief that when we vote for an MP, the resulting government will fulfil its published party platform and govern in the best interests of Canada. You would be naïve if you assumed that this is reality. The SPP, the corporatist agenda, has been quietly adopted by the Canadian government as its own agenda.

Domestic monitoring and control

Although a major reason for the SPP is ostensibly to ensure that acts of terrorism do not interrupt the efficient and open flow of trade within an expanded North American union, many of its security provisions are aimed squarely at domestic monitoring and control of internal dissent.

That’s no surprise: the CEOs of Canada’s biggest corporations certainly don’t want a newly-impoverished citizenry protesting the extraordinarily huge salaries and bonuses that flow annually into their already-bulging pockets. The corporate class must be protected from the hoi polloi.

Step by small step, imperceptibly, like frogs slowly being boiled in a kettle of water, we innocent and unsuspecting North Americans are being subjected to increased state and private surveillance. What’s wrong with that, you say? Nothing to fear if you haven’t done anything wrong? Well, that’s OK if the state plays fair. But Big Brother may not be on your side.

Just as in Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother has a benign face. He has come to ‘protect’ us—but who is Big Brother, or more to the point, who are his authorised agents? Under what authority do they operate, to whom do they report, and who is monitoring their activities? Are they all public servants, or do they work for private corporations? We need to know.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

To balance the need for security with people’s democratic rights, the answers to these questions must be clearly spelled out. But they are not. The problem with all this ‘improved’ domestic security is two-fold: Who is defining what constitutes a ‘threat’ to our individual and collective security? And an ancient question: Who is monitoring the monitors?

Nobody likes drug warfare erupting on our streets, and the call for a police crackdown on gang violence is a legitimate one. But when we see RCMP officers testifying on oath in direct contradiction of cellphone video evidence; or when yet another person is Tasered to death by police, the result can only be an increasing public distrust of the agents of authority.

The ’hardening‘ of a ferry terminal was a chilling reminder to me of the fragility of our civil rights. We are entering a time in which economic resources are becoming more scarce, and the gap between rich and poor is steadily growing. Let us hope that the greed of the corporate class does not drag us all into the darkness of an Age of Razor Wire.

Wake up, froggies! The water’s beginning to boil! Hop out! Hop out!

Book Review If you’re wondering why every recent prime minister starts behaving like an autocrat once in office, it’s because Canada and the UK have both moved to a Court system of government, explains University of Moncton public administration professor Donald Savoie in this illuminating and insightful book.

It’s not exactly light reading, but Savoie’s book is the best available explanation of the state of our nation today, and why so many of Her Majesty’s subjects are being turned off by Canada’s federal politicians, who have come to dominate a politicised civil service.

A book with such a long title may not be your preferred literary cup of English Breakfast, but Savoie’s thorough discourse will enlighten anyone trying to make sense of the failure of the recent coalition, or the élitist, arrogant behaviour of Stephen Harper and his princely prime-ministerial predecessors.

Westminster-Whitehall model

The delicate relationship between Westminster and Whitehall, the centre of Britain’s civil service in London, slowly evolved over the almost eight centuries following King John of England’s acquiescence to the magna carta in 1215. This foundational act of western democracy ended the divine right of monarchs to unilaterally decide the affairs of state.

Until the early 1970s, Canada’s parliamentary system followed the Westminster-Whitehall model of governance, which recognised a clear distinction between the government in parliament and the civil service. The notion of ministerial responsibility and the accountability of government to parliament both rest on this crucial division of players.

An ideal civil service, according to sociologist and political scientist Max Weber, would deal with all citizens equally without regard to their position or wealth, according to a set of defined rules. Politicians would set policy after receiving impartial advice from their civil servants, who would then devise and efficiently administer suitable public programs.

No more shiny-suited bureaucrats

But the rise of neo-conservative politicians such as Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the USA; the growing power of trans-national corporations bent on creating and satisfying individualistic consumerism that now dominate a globalised market; plus the growing complexity of government in a technological environment, ended what some observers have considered to be the Golden Age of Canadian civil servitude, which some believe was the two decades after WWII.

By degrees, the top échelons of the civil service adopted the attitudes and characteristics of their political and corporate masters. Not longer dedicated, self-effacing, moderately-paid, impartial career civil servants wearing sensible suits with pants worn shiny by long use, today’s Deputy Ministers are highly-paid and often very public players focussed primarily on doing whatever is needed to further their own highly-mobile careers.

Primarily, this means protecting their minister from parliamentary pratfalls, and cobbling together highly-visible programs designed to achieve whatever policies the party is power currently prefers.

Concentration of power

One result has been a growing gap between the Ottawa-based, upper management of the civil service and their provincial line managers and program staff. Even more important, the erosion of the Whitehall civil service model has been accompanied by an increasing concentration of power into the hands of the leadership of the major political parties.

Power has flowed to the party leaders mainly through the concentration of corporate media ownership, which focusses only on Question Period plus whatever stories of government corruption by civil servants or politicians it can root out from behind the veil of government secrecy.

Add to this the increasing complexity of government budgeting, with programs spread horizontally between many ministries and agencies or tucked into a bewildering number of budgetary envelopes, and the result is a witches brew of confusion that leaves Opposition MPs incapable of holding to account any government, minister, program, or civil servant.

Our latest Sun King

If you’ve stuck with this so far, good for you. Savoie takes almost 350 pages to explain it all. The bottom line is that starting with Trudeau in the ’70s, each Canadian prime minister, empowered by a very top-down, hierarchical, Canada Elections Act, has become the latest Sun King.

Instead of parliament being the highest authority, political power is now concentrated in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) in both the UK and Canada. Not even cabinet ministers have any real sway once the prime minister has decided on a course of action after consulting his advisors.

The strangest aspect of this is that Canadian and British citizens do not actually vote for this powerful person, who in effect rules their respective country. By tradition, the prime minister is the leader of the political party that won the most seats in a general election. Only party members choose their leader, and sometimes even that convention is bypassed.

Parliamentary reform needed

There’s lately been much focus and activity around election reform, with referenda on some form of proportional representation taking place so far in two Canadian provinces. Here in British Columbia, we are getting a second kick at the proportional representation can this year.

After reading professor Savoie’s thought-provoking work, I’m now more convinced than ever that we are not going to see improved democracy in Canada or the UK until we have both electoral and parliamentary reform.

The future of Canadian democracy demands no less than that.

Court Government and the Collapse of Accountability in Canada and the United Kingdom

By Donald J. Savoie
University of Toronto Press, 2008
ISBN 978-0-8020-2 (cloth) $75
ISBN 978-0-8020-4 (paper) $35

Canada’s rivers and coastal ecosystems threatened by proposed protection change, says Ecojustice lawyer Will Amos

Ottawa — An environmental time bomb that could put all of Canada’s recreational rivers and coastal regions under threat of resort or energy development has been quietly tucked into the 2009 budget legislation.

Proposed amendments to the federal Navigable Waters Protection Act threaten the long-standing public right to navigation, including the right to recreational navigation, stated a news release issued recently by the University of Ottawa’s Ecojustice environmental law clinic.

“The proposed changes jeopardize access to waterways and reduce environmental protection by granting discretion to the Transport Minister to bypass the approval process for potentially harmful projects,” said Ecojustice lawyer Will Amos. Ecojustice and others believe that the proposed amendments were included without proper public consultation.

Environmental assessment excluded

Harper’s Conservatives wants to amend the Navigable Waters Protection Act, which dates back to 1882, to give the federal Transport Minister the ability to excuse whole classes of project from the need for approvals or environmental assessments, removing any environmental protection.

This could impact popular areas used for sea kayaking, fishing, river paddling and whitewater kayaking, Amos wrote in a report to outdoor equipment retailer Mountain Equipment Co-op.

But the environmental implications of this covert attempt at gutting Canada’s environmental laws could spoil even more that popular fishing holes or active whitewater kayak river runs. Already, BC premier Gordon Campbell is aligning with the government’s anti-environment thrust.

Entire BC coastline at risk

A line in the BC government’s recent throne speech supported the thrust: “A unified major project review process will speed up job creation in mining, energy, resort development and other areas,” it stated.

Campbell later suggested that the Act’s environmental protection should be scrapped because it was… well, old. “Don’t hold up 21st-century investment and jobs because of a 19th-century piece of legislation,” he pleaded. Is there an expiry date on environmental law?

If Harper’s amendments are passed by a compliant Liberal opposition, all of Canada’s rivers and coasts will be at risk. Major heavy oil and Liquid Natural Gas terminals are planned for west coast, which would bring huge oil and LNG tankers into Canada’s vital coastal marine ecosystems.

Liberal support?

Will the Liberal’s declared intent to support the Harper budget at any cost put them at loggerheads with Canada’s environmental movement?

If so, Michael Ignatieff’s chances of becoming Canada’s net prime minister would be drastically reduced, and the Liberal’s environmental record while in government would be hauled out for public inspection.

That’s something that Michael Ignatieff may not want to have happen. He must deal with this environmental time bomb immediately, or face the consequences. Dion’s Green Shift may have failed, but Canada’s environmentalists — and Harper’s Conservatives — have a long memory.

They don’t seem to like each other: Israel’s President Shimon Peres congratulates Likud party leader Benjamin Netanyahu

Jerusalem — Whether you like the outcome or not, the results of Israel’s 18th national election demonstrate that proportional representation can better reflect a country’s politics than Canada’s ancient voting system.

Following an election in which Israel’s two major parties both failed to win an outright majority, the ultra-right-wing Yisrael Beteinu party now holds the balance of power in the country’s 120-seat Knesset.

Israel’s centrist Kadima party lead by former Foreign Minister Tipi Livni won 28 seats in the country’s 18th national election, just one more than former prime minister Bejamin Netanyahu’s conservative Likud party.

But a visceral and some say, fascist appeal by Liberman that played to Israeli anger at continuing rocket attacks by Hamas from inside Gaza, and attempts to remove settlements in the formerly Palestinian West Bank, gave his small party a 15-seat ticket to the cabinet table.

A deeply divided country

I’m certainly not one to feel happy about the results of this election, and according to this observer, neither is Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel is a deeply divided country, and its governments on average last only two years. They are often bizarre, patched-together coalitions between unlikely bedfellows; most don’t survive the full four-year term.

But that’s not my point. The majority of Israelis supported their country’s recent armed excursion into Gaza, and want to continue to harass and destroy the democratically-elected but anti-Zionist Hamas.

Where in Canada, an inconclusive election would still allow the leader of the party with the most seats in parliament to govern the country as if he or she had an overall majority, clearly this cannot happen in Israel.

Proportional representation

The distribution of seats under its closed party-list proportional representation system means that Israeli voters choose a list, not a candidate. Each party is allocated seats in proportion to the number of votes, using a ranking order of candidates provided by the party.

With a low electoral threshold of only 2%, small parties can easily win representation in the Knesset. Perhaps the resulting patchwork is too cacophonous for polite Canadans, but that’s not the point either.

Without the safety-valve of many voices in parliament, I suggest that Israeli politics would be even more divisive — if that’s at all possible. The country would simply fly apart, with even more disastrous results.

Proportional representation is being successfully used in most democratic countries. Canada, the USA, and Britain are today’s democratic laggards.

It’s time we brought our politics in line with a multi-party world.