Why Does Politics Matter?

Politics matters. Ideas matter. Democracy matters, because all of us need to be able to make a difference. This book is about all three—politics, ideas, and democracy. The chapters that follow are about ideas—ideas that work. As outrageous as it sounds, coming from one, politics is too important to leave just to politicians. That’s where you come in. You, the Canadian citizen, or someone who is on the way to becoming one. Canada is your country. Democracy should ensure that you are engaged and involved in setting the course for your country. You should feel right at the centre of the political process but, all too often, you feel pushed aside. You’re told that politics doesn’t really matter. That message is often delivered by politicians closely linked with the corporate elite. At the heart of their message is, keeping you out of politics creates more space for them. Power has been slipping away from Canadians. Have you noticed? I remember the optimism of Canadian politics years ago—we could build together and were proud of it. We built health-care systems for all, the best affordable housing in the world, great education systems for our kids, railways and public transit systems, communities where quality of life was second to none. But now, we feel all that slipping away. Even as communities across Canada are showing the way with creative local solutions, grabbing every opportunity that comes within their grasp, our federal government has cynically slipped into the role of naysayer.

For at least ten years, we’ve been told we cannot build and innovate anymore because we have no financial capacity to do so. As we turn away, discouraged, from voting, from participating, from building together, the vacuum that’s created allows powerful elites to be free to negotiate cozy deals behind closed doors, deals that often cost Canadians their livelihood. They want to sell off our public resources without your knowledge. There is a growing CEO atmosphere around government these days with the direction of the country being directed from Bay Street boardrooms, well away from pesky questioners. Powerful interests want to spend your money on astoundingly expensive projects such as the Star Wars missile defence program. And the fewer opportunities that Canadians are given to have meaningful input, the easier it is for the corporate elite to proceed, maximizing their bottom line in the process.

There’s another reason why so many people come to believe that politics doesn’t matter. Sociologists call it “feeling alienated,” left outside, as though there is nothing that we can do about the problems we face. It’s sad. I’ve met Canadians across the country who refer to Ottawa, not as a place, but as a bad idea. These folks think that government, with its complex processes and shenanigans, doesn’t represent them, or speak for them, or act on their behalf. The federal sponsorship scandal and other debacles have only served to rub more salt in the wounds. Our confidence is further shaken when governments act to dismantle public services or social programs that people have come to rely on. But think about it—shouldn’t this alienation be driving us to become more involved in politics, not less? People should be working with their neighbours, their co-workers, and with others who share their concerns, coming together to make sure their voices are heard, their interests protected, and their ideas and concerns treated seriously.

For two decades at least, corporate think tanks and the politicians who promote their messages have been telling Canadians, essentially, that citizens do not matter in the political process because they lack the capacity to build the country of their dreams. This feeds a sense of alienation. With every election, it seems, fewer people turn out to vote. That’s just as well from the point of view of the corporate players. According to them, the country we dream of is possible only if we leave the decision-making to the private sector.

They promise prosperity but then dismantle the public sector for corporate profit, at heavy cost to all. It’s time to build again. I’m a typical Canadian in that I’ve always loved building. Canadians are builders. But year after year, we’ve been taking apart what we built: medicare, affordable housing, industrial strategies, and public power systems. The past ten years have been all about tax cuts. These years have focused on privatizing our public services and on empowering the corporations through trade deals that handcuff citizens wanting to build better communities. I intend to show in this book that we can once more build to achieve a new prosperity for Canadians, even a prosperity for those corporations that have been maximizing their success when people are poor.

In the world of 9/11, SARS, mad cow disease, tsunamis, hurricanes, aids, famine, and grinding poverty, the need for collective action has been brought into sharp relief. We can almost see the faces of those courageous nurses, volunteers, caregivers, and peacemakers.

With the SARS health crises of 2003, Canadians recognized the need and value of public services and the taxes that pay for them. Let’s face it: our taxes pay for nurses on SARS wards, for our soldiers on peacekeeping and peacemaking missions, for forest-fire fighters, for childcare workers, and much more. As the American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes said a century ago, “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.” Or, as my disarmingly insightful wife, Olivia Chow, put it so clearly on national tv (as she provided commentary on a CTV panel), “Taxes are what we put on the table, to do the things we want to do in common.”

When the government removes itself from public housing and the private sector fails to provide affordable housing, the poor end up homeless, living on the street. This is hardly the time to advocate less government.

I have always found it interesting that no politician who is caught up in this corporate drift when referring to the military proclaims: “We should privatize or do more with less.” Why, then, do these same people say we should privatize and cut health care, education, or environmental protection? It’s because corporations want it that way, and their powerful influences have permeated government much too extensively.

The end result has been to teach Canadians to expect less. Do not expect solutions now for cities, for long-term or home care, for child care, or for assisting the people afflicted by desperate poverty and disease around the world. Lower your expectations, you Canadians. Abandon your dreamy, idealistic ways, your optimism, your capacity to construct the future you wish for your communities or elsewhere in the world. What a sad and demoralizing message it has been. No wonder people do not want to be associated with politics at all and stay home when voting time comes.

That explains why so many Canadians have turned to alternative ways of challenging the way things are by building what they believe in. Community organizations, nongovernmental organizations, movements of citizens have sprung up related to peace, the environment, sovereignty, health care, human rights, education, worker safety and salaries, international development assistance, equality.

These groups, said General Romeo Dallaire, as he spoke to journalists working for free speech in the fall of 2003, are the places where hope for the future resides. It’s called “civil society,” society outside the traditional governmental/electoral processes, and it is rising up. I’m not the only one to have said that “a new superpower is emerging”—people in communities around the world, connecting in novel ways, exercising their aspirations in positive initiatives locally and globally. These are the builders of the future. Let’s become part of that process, and turn politics on its head. When Canadians get up in the morning, we turn on the tap, and without thinking about it, we expect safe, clean water to come out. That water is treated and delivered by public-sector workers toiling away for a public utility. We flush the toilet, and without thinking about it, we expect the sewage to disappear and be properly treated by yet another publicly owned utility. We drive to work on public highways or ride there on public transit. Our children go to public schools. In most of Canada, the electricity that powers our workplaces and our homes has been generated and delivered to us by a public utility. In the rest of the country, our power is publicly regulated. We expect police officers to maintain law and order. We expect firefighters to protect our communities.

If we need health care, we expect doctors and nurses to minister to us in public hospitals. All these services (and hundreds of others) are provided to us in one way or another by our government. What’s really unthinkable is that we would ever want to do without public services. But our governments are now selling them off to private companies or creating cozy-sounding “public-private partnerships” (P3s). Can that be good?

Fortunately, the message that private multinational corporations bring us closer to the divine has worn a little thin. The past two decades have been the Era of Corporate Corruption, aptly demonstrated in the United States by Enron and WorldCom, and in Italy by Parmalat, and by so many others. For those who still believe that corporations are reliable and trustworthy, every week brings a new tale of CEOs raking in multi-million-dollar salaries, while their corporations lose money and lay off workers—Nortel is the most insidious example because it’s ostensibly a Canadian company—plus pension-fund rip-offs, insider trading, “cooked” accounting books, and profits diverted to offshore tax havens.