Don Drummond
Don Drummond joined the federal Department of Finance upon completing his studies at Queen's University. During almost 23 years at Finance, he held a series of progressively more senior positions in the areas of economic analysis and forecasting, fiscal policy and tax policy. He joined the TD Bank in June 2000 as senior vice-president and chief economist.
Whither the Canadian economy?
Don Drummond July 24, 2006
What will Canada look like in the year 2020? To encourage a debate about the major challenges Canada will face in the coming decades, the Dominion Institute and the Toronto Star have invited 20 leading thinkers to write about an issue or event that they think could transform the country by 2020.
Manufacturing accounts for more than one-sixth of Canada's output and is a source of well-paying jobs. The industry has survived a number of transformational events — North American free trade, the lapsed Auto Pact and the end of import quotas in the textile and clothing industries.
Now China and other emerging Asian economies present new competition just as the Canadian dollar is soaring. Can Canada's industrial base prosper under these challenges or will it wither by 2020? Will manufacturing wages be driven down to the low levels some of our competitors pay?
The challenges of emerging competitors and the stronger dollar are most acute for Canada's manufacturing sector. That largely means Ontario and Quebec, where manufacturing accounts for about 21 per cent of total output, double the average in the other eight provinces.
On the surface, the economies of these two provinces — Ontario's in particular — appear to be in good shape. Only five countries have a higher standard of living than Ontario's and it lags only the United States among countries of equal or larger population. Quebec's standard of living is smack in the middle of the 30 developed economies in the Organization for Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Dig deeper and you find that, relative to 14 comparable U.S. states, Ontario and Quebec are at the bottom of the pile, according to Ontario's Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity. Ontario's real GDP per capita was $6,000 below the median in 2004 while Quebec had a $13,000 deficiency. The main culprit? Inferior productivity.
As if a 90-cent dollar and Canadian private-sector productivity of 79 per cent of the United States weren't worrying enough, there is a growing factory base in the southern United States where workers accept low wages with few benefits. Increasing the threat even more is that Canada's trade balance in manufactured goods with China has deteriorated by one per cent of GDP over the past decade. Chinese imports are no longer just T-shirts and simple toys. The strongest increases have come in machinery and mechanical goods.
Ontario's economy has been hardest hit, with an increased deficit with China of two per cent of Ontario's GDP, most of it in capital-intensive goods. Quebec's minor deterioration in its trade balance with China in manufactured products masks a significant deterioration in trade in other goods and with other countries. In order to improve efficiency, manufacturers have shed nine per cent of the sector's jobs in Ontario and 13 per cent in Quebec since November 2002. But that can't be the sole response.
Will the strong survive?
So should we throw up our hands in despair? Advanced economies have faced new competitiveness threats from an emerging economy before. The United Kingdom has been through this many times with former colonies, most notably the rise of the U.S. economic empire. Yet the U.K. economy is still one of the wealthiest in the world.
Japan went from 29 per cent of U.S. real per capita incomes in 1950 to exceeding the U.S. level by 1986, while producing one-quarter of all U.S. imports. Despite predictions, the U.S. did not cede its economic supremacy to Japan. Since the early 1990s, U.S. output per capita grew twice as fast as Japan's. In general, advanced economies have shifted away from goods toward services and picked niches where their productivity advantage is greatest. At the same time, rising incomes in the emerging economies have created demand for the goods and services of the wealthiest countries.
There is no guarantee this experience will hold true today. The emerging economies are speedily reaping the benefits of the capital and brains of the advanced economies. They are embracing free trade and foreign investment, providing incentives for leading-edge technologies and massively investing in education and infrastructure.
Since 1997, Korea, China and India have improved their productivity by 81, 67 and 46 per cent respectively. In the same period, Canada's productivity advanced only 11 per cent. Even the U.S. outpaced us at 17 per cent. Real per capita incomes have risen more than 500 per cent in China and more than doubled in India since 1980, but Canadian companies have not taken advantage of that through higher exports, despite the commodity price boom. All the emerging economies are aiming production at a pretty high rung on the value-added ladder, and some, like India, are formidable competitors in key service industries.
One option for Canada, between now and the year 2020, would be to allow emerging economies to use their huge surplus savings to purchase our assets while we use the proceeds to maintain our consumption standards. But surely we have greater aspirations than this. To stay at the top of the world economic order we need ample, well-paying jobs matched to strong output growth. An economy can only sustain high wages if it has strong productivity.
Invest for productivity
So how do we tackle this challenge and ensure Canada in 2020 has a robust and competitive economy? We first need to understand how increases in productivity occur. The conventional view is that productivity rises as firms and workers find smarter ways of doing things. But as a Statistics Canada study shows, less than half of productivity gains occur this way. The bulk of productivity growth comes from shifting market share toward more productive plants — existing or new. Over a decade, plant closures or downsizing eliminated two out of every five jobs in manufacturing in Canada. The more dynamic industries differ from declining ones by their investment in new productive capacity (e.g., plants, factories, infrastructure).
Internationally, productivity gains have come from combinations of greater trade liberalization, increased investment, better education, and above all, rapid change. But change can be uncomfortable and has a disproportionate impact on the least educated and least skilled. So while fostering change you also need support mechanisms for those most adversely affected.
How can we use these experiences to raise productivity in Canada and in particular its industrial base in Ontario and Quebec by the year 2020?
Canadian firms need to invest more, particularly in machinery and equipment, where our stock per hour worked is only 55 per cent of that in the U.S. This is an excellent time to do so, because the strong Canadian dollar has slashed the cost of imported capital. Governments need to cut capital taxes, which in Canada are the second highest of 35 countries studied by the C.D. Howe Institute. Ontario's tax burden is the second highest in the country, with its high corporate income tax rate, its large capital tax, high industrial and commercial property taxes and inclusion of capital in the retail sales tax base.
Quebec's is not far behind and will rise with the increase in its corporate income tax rate from 8.9 per cent last year to 11.9 per cent by 2009. Ontario and Quebec both need to reduce marginal personal income tax rates. At almost 50 per cent for high-income workers and effectively much higher for modest-income families, they dull the incentives to work, save and invest. Both governments have appropriately been increasing investment in education and infrastructure in recent years and need to continue.
With an aging population, a particular worry in Quebec because of its low birth rate, immigration will be the source of most labour force growth to the year 2020 and beyond. The provinces must work with the federal government to improve the economic benefits of immigration.
This needs to go beyond the recent focus on improved credential recognition and settlement services to include a more active search for potential immigrants whose skills are needed. Companies and individuals in Ontario need to devote more time and money to lifelong learning and training. Both provinces need to complete the adjustment to market pricing for electricity and encourage new supply to limit price increases.
Demographics and taxes
Ontario and Quebec each have specific challenges that need to be addressed to ensure prosperity in 2020.
The Ontario economy and its taxpayers are handicapped because the federal government extracts more in taxes from Ontario than it spends in the province. Statistics Canada estimates the net outflow was $18.2 billion in 2003. That's a fiscal drag of 3.7 per cent of Ontario's economy, whereas, excluding Alberta, the other provinces had a net federal fiscal injection of 3.9 per cent. Similarly, most U.S. states have a net fiscal injection from their federal government.
The point is not that federal governments should run deficits. Rather, it is to ponder how much redistribution the taxpayers of provinces with above-average incomes can finance when they need to be competitive not only with other jurisdictions in Canada, but with the rest of the world.
The current situation also makes it difficult for the Ontario government to finance, at competitive tax rates, the services its residents and businesses need. In 2005 Ontario received $1,235 per capita less in federal transfers than the median of all provinces. Its own revenues were right on the provincial median, but excluding resource revenues — where Ontario is disadvantaged by not having the commodity base some of the other provinces enjoy — own-source revenues were almost 10 per cent above the median thanks to a combination of fairly high tax rates and strong incomes. The balancing item was that Ontario spent $1,109 less than the provincial median, putting it in 10th or last place among provinces. Education was one of the components that ended up in that last-place standing, compromising the province's ability to meet its competitiveness challenges.
Quebec's particular fiscal challenge is its debt burden, which per capita is the second highest in Canada, and relative to income is among the highest in the world. The cost of financing that debt leaves Quebecers facing the second-highest tax burden in Canada and impedes public initiatives that could bolster productivity. The recent commitment to reduce the absolute level of the debt burden is to be commended.
Progress needs to be made soon, as Quebec's labour force could come to a standstill by 2020; its population has been growing at half the rate of the rest of Canada and the gap is even wider with the U.S. Quebec has no option to raise its already high personal and corporate income taxes, but it should examine raising the cost of some public services such as cutting subsidies to electricity and post-secondary education and raising some consumption taxes.
History suggests that advanced economies like Canada's not only survive but actually benefit from emerging competitors. That may be particularly difficult to pull off between now and 2020 in the case of Canada's industrial base in Ontario and Quebec. The key will be whether they can bolster their dismal records on productivity. Attention is being paid to this requirement, but the fire seems to be missing. Somebody had better light the match soon.
Link ...
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
Saturday, August 26, 2006
Canada 2020: part 4
Pierre Fortin
Pierre Fortin is a professor of economics at the Université du Québec à Montréal, and an associate of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Pierre Fortin is professor of economics at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), which he joined in 1988 after teaching at Université Laval and the Université de Montréal. In 1995 he was selected by the Quebec Association of Business Economists as "the most influential Quebec economist of the last decade." He is a past president of the Canadian Economics Association.
The baby boomers' tab
By Pierre Fortin, UQAM July 17, 2006
Just after the Second World War, from 1945 to 1960, there were about 28 births on average per 1,000 people in Canada: these were the children of the baby boom. But these baby boomers did not have many children of their own, and they did not have many grandchildren, either. By 1970, the birth rate in Canada had dropped to 17 births per 1,000 people. Since 2000, it has been hovering around 11 births per 1,000 Canadians.
This extraordinary flip-flop in the birth rate explains a number of key phenomena in our lives during the last 50 years. It will now have a determining influence on the economic and social change that we will witness during the coming decades, and certainly between now and 2020. As my colleague and friend David Foot of the University of Toronto likes to say: "Demographics explain two-thirds of just about anything!"
The Golden Age
The notable phenomenon of the years 1960 to 1980 was the mass entry of baby boomers into the workplace. The number of workers earning a salary and paying taxes grew at a breathtaking rate. The Welfare State experienced a rapid expansion. We successively implemented hospital insurance, health insurance, low-cost college and university education, social services, public pension plans, more generous old age pensions and employment benefits, etc. It was the Golden Age of social programs. Do you admire the politicians of the era - the Pearsons, Trudeaus, Douglases, Robartses, Lesages, etc. - for developing our great social programs? You are right in so doing, for they were great people. But remember that from a financial perspective, they had an easy time. Money was no problem. The huge addition to the tax revenue from the baby boomers was great food for their imagination.
The flip side
In the years to come, we are going to experience the flip side. Baby boomers born between 1945 and 1960 are today between 45 and 60 years old. In 2020, they will be 60 to 75 years old. Most of them will have begun their retirement. Just as they entered the job market en masse between 1960 and 1980, they will leave it in large numbers between now and 2025. They will hardly be doing any work and they will not be paying many taxes. (OK, the money they withdraw from their RRSPs will be taxable, but that really does not change the big picture.) The consequence is obvious: Our governments will be cash-strapped!
1) Less tax revenues
This year, 2006, 51% of Canada's total population are working. In 2020, when the baby boomers' departure will be underway, only 49% of the population will be working if the employment rates by age remain stable. The overall employment rate will thus have dropped 2 points from 51, the equivalent of a 4% drop. What will the impact be on the government tax revenues? Simply put, we can calculate how much tax revenue they would have lost today, in 2006, if the number of taxpayers had suddenly dropped by 4%. The ready answer is: Since Canadians will pay $500 billion in income and other taxes this year, our governments would have collected $20 billion less (4% of $500 billion). That's point No. 1.
2) More health-care spending
That's not all. The passage of this large group of baby boomers into their golden years will push the percentage of senior citizens 65 and older from 13% of the total population in 2006 to 18% in 2020. Now a senior citizen costs on average five times more in terms of health-care costs and social services compared to a younger adult. As a result, between now and 2020, there will be a 14% increase in annual provincial spending in health care and social services, this above and beyond the already extremely rapid increase in spending over the past several years (on average 7% per year since 2000).
Once again, a simple way to comprehend the financial import of this demographic shock is to calculate the impact of a 14% increase in provincial health-care and social-services spending in 2006. Given that total spending in these two areas will reach $112 billion this year, the 14% increase would add $16 billion to the pressure on provincial finances (14% of $112 billion). That's point No. 2.
3) More payments to seniors
Another government program that is going to suffer the effects of the aging baby-boomer population is federal payments to seniors, including the venerable "old-age pension" and the guaranteed income supplement for lower-income seniors. With 13% of the population now 65 or older, the federal government expects to spend $31 billion in payments to seniors in 2006. If this percentage were to suddenly jump 5 points to 18%, as is expected for 2020, Ottawa would have to come up with $12 billion more in 2006 (5/13 of $31 billion). That's point No. 3.
4) Possible savings
Will the aging of the Canadian population allow at least some savings? Yes, in the areas of children's benefits, child-care allowances and education funding. According to the average birthrate and immigration scenario put out by Statistics Canada, the relative weight of young people (0-19 years old) in the total population will drop by 13% between 2006 and 2020. School enrolment will decline accordingly. This will permit proportional reductions in federal children's benefits, and provincial education and day-care spending. In 2006, the combined value of all these expenditures on behalf of children and students is $79 billion. If these expenses dropped suddenly by 13%, governments would save $10 billion (13% of $79 billion). That's point No. 4.
Will the demographic transition threaten the viability of our public pension plans? No. To avoid any slips due to demographic shockwaves, the various levels of government proactively revised the structure of the Canada Pension Plan and the Régime des rentes du Québec some time ago. The general contribution rate was upped to 9.9% of insurable earnings in 2003. This rate will only need a slight increase to permit adequate financing for retirement income of baby boomers and their children for the foreseeable future.
The tab: $38 billion
Let's sum up. Baby boomers born between 1945 and 1960 are going to retire en masse but they will leave few children and grandchildren behind. Canada is thus going to undergo a major demographic transition. To highlight the financial consequences, I have presented a scenario that applied what may be the reality in the future to our current state of affairs. I have calculated the impact that demographic changes would have on public monies in Canada in 2006 if the age pyramid expected for 2020 suddenly applied today.
The result would be a marked deterioration of public finances. As we saw, tax revenues would drop by $20 billion; provincial spending in health and social services would increase by $16 billion; federal payments to seniors would rise by $12 billion; allowances for children, education spending and child-care spending could decrease by $10 billion. In total, if it were applied today, the age structure of 2020's population would make a hole of $38 billion in government budgets for 2006; this would be split about evenly between the federal government and the provinces. In other words, there would be a new kind of "fiscal imbalance," demographic in nature. But this time it will hit Ottawa as hard as the provinces. Even worse, after 2020 the problem will not disappear; it will in fact get bigger.
As of 2010, year after year, governments are going to see more and more disappointing tax revenues. The problem of health-care funding, which is already a hot issue today, will become absolutely dramatic as the baby boomers get older. Federal payments to seniors are going to see unprecedented growth. While provinces may realize some savings in education, these will only partially compensate for the drop in tax revenue and the explosion in health-care spending. As for pension plans, they will deal with the shock without too much difficulty.
Financially, governments have three options: go back into debt (the Japanese approach), cut or privatize public services (the U.S. approach) or raise taxes (the Swedish approach). Each government will choose the combination that best matches its political philosophy. But in Ottawa just as in the provinces, we cannot exclude the possibility of a new cycle of debt. A funding crisis could lead, more quickly than one might think, to a major transformation of our cherished health-care system. And we had better forget about major tax reductions for quite some time.
Growth and solidarity
Governments can implement two main kinds of policies to deal with the demographic shock: a policy of economic growth and a policy of intergenerational solidarity. They can accelerate economic growth in the usual ways: fight unemployment and poverty, support employment of older workers, accelerate the integration of immigrant workers and foster education, entrepreneurship, savings, investment, innovation and productivity. Stronger economic growth will reduce the effects of overall economic decline and tax-revenue losses due to the disappearance of the baby boomers.
Also, governments can try to protect new generations from debt, program spending cuts and tax hikes by convincing current generations to proactively share the tab. This policy of solidarity between generations would be based on the repayment of public debt. A reduction of debt financed by today's taxpayers will reduce interest charges paid by the taxpayers of tomorrow, who will therefore have more money to access the same level of public services as today, without being forced to overly add to their tax burden. To me it seems self-evident that after having treated themselves to a great party, baby boomers would want to not leave all the cleanup duties to their children.
Two governments in Canada have followed that path: the federal government and the government of Alberta. For several years now, each federal budget has set aside a sum to repay part of the debt. For its part, Edmonton has followed in Norway's footsteps and has actually finished reimbursing its debt through oil and gas royalties.
Other governments could follow their lead. Quebec, Manitoba and British Columbia could sell their electricity at market price rather than massively subsidizing consumption. As well as being ecological, such a move would free up money to repay provincial debt. There is an obvious political obstacle to overcome: it is difficult to take the gift of cheap electricity away from taxpayers who are so used to it. But the citizens of these provinces might just be convinced to pay more for their electricity if they believed that the monies earned would truly be used to an end that is dear to them: the future of their children.
Eyes wide open
Those who think the above analysis is unduly alarmist are wrong. The passage of baby boomers to old age is not weather forecasting. It is for certain. And the amount of the tab that they are going to leave us with is both large and unavoidable - at least for anyone who has not forgotten how to cross-multiply. Our task is one of lucidity and solidarity. We must recognize the problem, create solutions and share the cost in an equitable manner. There is only one acceptable way to face the future: with eyes wide open.
Link ...
Pierre Fortin is a professor of economics at the Université du Québec à Montréal, and an associate of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Pierre Fortin is professor of economics at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), which he joined in 1988 after teaching at Université Laval and the Université de Montréal. In 1995 he was selected by the Quebec Association of Business Economists as "the most influential Quebec economist of the last decade." He is a past president of the Canadian Economics Association.
The baby boomers' tab
By Pierre Fortin, UQAM July 17, 2006
Just after the Second World War, from 1945 to 1960, there were about 28 births on average per 1,000 people in Canada: these were the children of the baby boom. But these baby boomers did not have many children of their own, and they did not have many grandchildren, either. By 1970, the birth rate in Canada had dropped to 17 births per 1,000 people. Since 2000, it has been hovering around 11 births per 1,000 Canadians.
This extraordinary flip-flop in the birth rate explains a number of key phenomena in our lives during the last 50 years. It will now have a determining influence on the economic and social change that we will witness during the coming decades, and certainly between now and 2020. As my colleague and friend David Foot of the University of Toronto likes to say: "Demographics explain two-thirds of just about anything!"
The Golden Age
The notable phenomenon of the years 1960 to 1980 was the mass entry of baby boomers into the workplace. The number of workers earning a salary and paying taxes grew at a breathtaking rate. The Welfare State experienced a rapid expansion. We successively implemented hospital insurance, health insurance, low-cost college and university education, social services, public pension plans, more generous old age pensions and employment benefits, etc. It was the Golden Age of social programs. Do you admire the politicians of the era - the Pearsons, Trudeaus, Douglases, Robartses, Lesages, etc. - for developing our great social programs? You are right in so doing, for they were great people. But remember that from a financial perspective, they had an easy time. Money was no problem. The huge addition to the tax revenue from the baby boomers was great food for their imagination.
The flip side
In the years to come, we are going to experience the flip side. Baby boomers born between 1945 and 1960 are today between 45 and 60 years old. In 2020, they will be 60 to 75 years old. Most of them will have begun their retirement. Just as they entered the job market en masse between 1960 and 1980, they will leave it in large numbers between now and 2025. They will hardly be doing any work and they will not be paying many taxes. (OK, the money they withdraw from their RRSPs will be taxable, but that really does not change the big picture.) The consequence is obvious: Our governments will be cash-strapped!
1) Less tax revenues
This year, 2006, 51% of Canada's total population are working. In 2020, when the baby boomers' departure will be underway, only 49% of the population will be working if the employment rates by age remain stable. The overall employment rate will thus have dropped 2 points from 51, the equivalent of a 4% drop. What will the impact be on the government tax revenues? Simply put, we can calculate how much tax revenue they would have lost today, in 2006, if the number of taxpayers had suddenly dropped by 4%. The ready answer is: Since Canadians will pay $500 billion in income and other taxes this year, our governments would have collected $20 billion less (4% of $500 billion). That's point No. 1.
2) More health-care spending
That's not all. The passage of this large group of baby boomers into their golden years will push the percentage of senior citizens 65 and older from 13% of the total population in 2006 to 18% in 2020. Now a senior citizen costs on average five times more in terms of health-care costs and social services compared to a younger adult. As a result, between now and 2020, there will be a 14% increase in annual provincial spending in health care and social services, this above and beyond the already extremely rapid increase in spending over the past several years (on average 7% per year since 2000).
Once again, a simple way to comprehend the financial import of this demographic shock is to calculate the impact of a 14% increase in provincial health-care and social-services spending in 2006. Given that total spending in these two areas will reach $112 billion this year, the 14% increase would add $16 billion to the pressure on provincial finances (14% of $112 billion). That's point No. 2.
3) More payments to seniors
Another government program that is going to suffer the effects of the aging baby-boomer population is federal payments to seniors, including the venerable "old-age pension" and the guaranteed income supplement for lower-income seniors. With 13% of the population now 65 or older, the federal government expects to spend $31 billion in payments to seniors in 2006. If this percentage were to suddenly jump 5 points to 18%, as is expected for 2020, Ottawa would have to come up with $12 billion more in 2006 (5/13 of $31 billion). That's point No. 3.
4) Possible savings
Will the aging of the Canadian population allow at least some savings? Yes, in the areas of children's benefits, child-care allowances and education funding. According to the average birthrate and immigration scenario put out by Statistics Canada, the relative weight of young people (0-19 years old) in the total population will drop by 13% between 2006 and 2020. School enrolment will decline accordingly. This will permit proportional reductions in federal children's benefits, and provincial education and day-care spending. In 2006, the combined value of all these expenditures on behalf of children and students is $79 billion. If these expenses dropped suddenly by 13%, governments would save $10 billion (13% of $79 billion). That's point No. 4.
Will the demographic transition threaten the viability of our public pension plans? No. To avoid any slips due to demographic shockwaves, the various levels of government proactively revised the structure of the Canada Pension Plan and the Régime des rentes du Québec some time ago. The general contribution rate was upped to 9.9% of insurable earnings in 2003. This rate will only need a slight increase to permit adequate financing for retirement income of baby boomers and their children for the foreseeable future.
The tab: $38 billion
Let's sum up. Baby boomers born between 1945 and 1960 are going to retire en masse but they will leave few children and grandchildren behind. Canada is thus going to undergo a major demographic transition. To highlight the financial consequences, I have presented a scenario that applied what may be the reality in the future to our current state of affairs. I have calculated the impact that demographic changes would have on public monies in Canada in 2006 if the age pyramid expected for 2020 suddenly applied today.
The result would be a marked deterioration of public finances. As we saw, tax revenues would drop by $20 billion; provincial spending in health and social services would increase by $16 billion; federal payments to seniors would rise by $12 billion; allowances for children, education spending and child-care spending could decrease by $10 billion. In total, if it were applied today, the age structure of 2020's population would make a hole of $38 billion in government budgets for 2006; this would be split about evenly between the federal government and the provinces. In other words, there would be a new kind of "fiscal imbalance," demographic in nature. But this time it will hit Ottawa as hard as the provinces. Even worse, after 2020 the problem will not disappear; it will in fact get bigger.
As of 2010, year after year, governments are going to see more and more disappointing tax revenues. The problem of health-care funding, which is already a hot issue today, will become absolutely dramatic as the baby boomers get older. Federal payments to seniors are going to see unprecedented growth. While provinces may realize some savings in education, these will only partially compensate for the drop in tax revenue and the explosion in health-care spending. As for pension plans, they will deal with the shock without too much difficulty.
Financially, governments have three options: go back into debt (the Japanese approach), cut or privatize public services (the U.S. approach) or raise taxes (the Swedish approach). Each government will choose the combination that best matches its political philosophy. But in Ottawa just as in the provinces, we cannot exclude the possibility of a new cycle of debt. A funding crisis could lead, more quickly than one might think, to a major transformation of our cherished health-care system. And we had better forget about major tax reductions for quite some time.
Growth and solidarity
Governments can implement two main kinds of policies to deal with the demographic shock: a policy of economic growth and a policy of intergenerational solidarity. They can accelerate economic growth in the usual ways: fight unemployment and poverty, support employment of older workers, accelerate the integration of immigrant workers and foster education, entrepreneurship, savings, investment, innovation and productivity. Stronger economic growth will reduce the effects of overall economic decline and tax-revenue losses due to the disappearance of the baby boomers.
Also, governments can try to protect new generations from debt, program spending cuts and tax hikes by convincing current generations to proactively share the tab. This policy of solidarity between generations would be based on the repayment of public debt. A reduction of debt financed by today's taxpayers will reduce interest charges paid by the taxpayers of tomorrow, who will therefore have more money to access the same level of public services as today, without being forced to overly add to their tax burden. To me it seems self-evident that after having treated themselves to a great party, baby boomers would want to not leave all the cleanup duties to their children.
Two governments in Canada have followed that path: the federal government and the government of Alberta. For several years now, each federal budget has set aside a sum to repay part of the debt. For its part, Edmonton has followed in Norway's footsteps and has actually finished reimbursing its debt through oil and gas royalties.
Other governments could follow their lead. Quebec, Manitoba and British Columbia could sell their electricity at market price rather than massively subsidizing consumption. As well as being ecological, such a move would free up money to repay provincial debt. There is an obvious political obstacle to overcome: it is difficult to take the gift of cheap electricity away from taxpayers who are so used to it. But the citizens of these provinces might just be convinced to pay more for their electricity if they believed that the monies earned would truly be used to an end that is dear to them: the future of their children.
Eyes wide open
Those who think the above analysis is unduly alarmist are wrong. The passage of baby boomers to old age is not weather forecasting. It is for certain. And the amount of the tab that they are going to leave us with is both large and unavoidable - at least for anyone who has not forgotten how to cross-multiply. Our task is one of lucidity and solidarity. We must recognize the problem, create solutions and share the cost in an equitable manner. There is only one acceptable way to face the future: with eyes wide open.
Link ...
Thursday, August 24, 2006
Canada 2020: part 3
Daniel Stoffman
He has written for most of Canada's major magazines and has appeared as a guest on many television and radio programs, including Pamela Wallin Live, Canada AM, Diplomatic Immunity, Morningside and Sunday Morning. Daniel Stoffman is the co-author of Boom, Bust and Echo. His most recent book, Who Gets In: What's Wrong with Canada's Immigration Program and How to Fix It was a finalist for the Donner Prize and the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize.
San Paulo of the North: The effects of mass immigration on our cities
Daniel Stoffman July 7, 2006
It's 2020 and the days in Toronto when everyone used the public health care system are gone. So is the time when a majority of affluent, middle-class parents sent their kids to public schools.
In 2020, vast tracts of suburban slums occupy what used to be good farmland on the city's outskirts. Traffic congestion and air pollution are unbearable. Toronto's reputation as one of North America's most liveable cities is a distant memory. It's now known as the "the Sao Paulo of the north."
This dystopian vision of the future of Canada's largest city is hardly far-fetched. Toronto is already suffering severe growing pains, the result of the federal government's insistence on maintaining the world's largest per capita annual immigration intake — around 250,000 people a year, of whom about 43 per cent come to Toronto. That's more than 100,000 newcomers, year after year after year. It is impossible for any city to maintain its social and physical infrastructure in the face of such relentless population growth. By 2020, Greater Toronto's population will have ballooned from 5 million to 7 million — or even more if immigration levels are raised higher still.
Too much of a good thing
Every year Mercer Human Resource Consulting ranks world cities according to their livability. Vancouver always places at or near the top of the list while the other big Canadian cities are among the top 30. Most of the top-ranked cities are relatively small — places like Copenhagen (500,000) and Zurich (340,000).
None of the world's vast urban agglomerations of 10 million or more, such as Sao Paulo and Seoul, are rated by Mercer as desirable places to live. Smaller big cities are more liveable because their residents can enjoy the amenities of urban life without the congestion, crime and pollution associated with sprawling megalopolises.
Canada's livable cities are an unsung national asset. One of the things that makes them special is the presence of immigrants from all over the world who have contributed new energy and cultural diversity. But, in immigration as in everything else, too much of a good thing isn't better. Ottawa's policy of mass immigration, for which no reasonable explanation has ever been offered, risks irreparable damage to our cities.
Too much too fast
This policy of rapid urban growth is being implemented by Ottawa even though it has no jurisdiction over urban affairs, and even though the policy has never been stated explicitly. Yet the impact is already evident. Highway 401 across Toronto has become the busiest road in North America, the city can't find a place to put its garbage, and its public schools can't afford to provide the English instruction newly arrived children need.
In Vancouver, meanwhile, controversy rages over the British Columbia government's plan to expand the Port Mann bridge that links the rapidly growing Fraser Valley suburbs to the city.
Amazingly, the local politicians who have to cope with the results never suggest that perhaps the immigration intake might be lowered from time to time, as was standard practice until the late 1980s. To listen to their silence, one would think the relentless influx of huge numbers of new residents was a natural phenomenon like the weather rather than a deliberate federal policy that easily could be changed.
Toronto magnet for immigrants
Ottawa might claim it is not to blame for unmanageable urban growth because it just lets the immigrants in — it doesn't tell them where to go. But this would be disingenuous, because the federal government knows that Toronto gets almost half of all immigrants while Vancouver gets 18 per cent and Montreal 12 per cent.
Many of those who settle elsewhere at first also eventually wind up in one of the three biggest cities. Attempts at dispersion are doomed, because immigrants want to live where the previous cohort of the same ethnicity are already established.
They also want to live in cities for the same reason Canadian-born people do — they are more likely to find jobs there.
The country most comparable to Canada is Australia.
Like Canada, it is an English-speaking Commonwealth nation settled in relatively recent history. Like Canada, it has an organized immigration program and has used immigration effectively to enhance population growth and increase the vigour and diversity of its major cities. Australia's current net migration rate (immigration minus emigration per 1,000 of population) is 3.85. Canada's is 5.85. Before the Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney increased immigration levels and made them permanent during the latter part of the 1980s, a policy continued by the Liberals under Jean Chrétien, Canada had an intake similar, on a per capita basis, to Australia's.
There is no reason why Canada should have far more immigration than any other country. Canada's existing population is younger than those of most other developed countries and its ratio of working-age people to retired ones is higher. If Canada reverted to its traditional, more moderate, immigration program, it could continue to enjoy the benefits of immigration while sparing its cities the problems of unmanageable growth.
Immigrants would benefit too.
Their economic performance has been in freefall over the past 15 years. Previously the number of new immigrants varied according to labour market needs. Sometimes it would be cut to give the newly arrived a chance to be absorbed successfully into the economy without intense competition from more new arrivals.
Not any more. An endless stream of newcomers arrives in the big cities with few options but to work in poorly paid jobs such as cleaning houses and driving taxis. Wages of these jobs are thus kept low and the occupants of them have little chance to get ahead.
Immigrant poverty worsens
Previously, poverty levels among immigrants were about the same as those of the Canadian-born. Now they are much worse. According to a report by the Canadian Council on Social Development, whereas the poverty level of those who arrived before 1986 was 19.7 per cent, or slightly lower than that of the Canadian-born, the poverty level of those who came after 1991 was an alarming 52.1 per cent, while that of people born in Canada remained unchanged at around 20 per cent.
If this trend is not reversed, Toronto and Vancouver will be home, by 2020, to an entrenched underclass living in slums. Because of gentrification and rising property values in the central cities, these slums will be located in the suburbs, requiring long commutes for those fortunate enough to have employment. Fan Yang, a reader of the Toronto Star, shrewdly analyzed the impact of federal immigration policy in a letter to that newspaper in 2003. He accused the federal government of "dumping more cheaply acquired labour into the domestic labour pool, regardless of whether there is a healthy demand. Businesses welcome that enthusiastically as they bear no direct cost of unemployed immigrants and only garner the rewards of lower labour costs."
Even skilled workers are doing poorly. According to the 2001 census, male immigrants with a university degree who came to Ontario in the late 1990s were earning after six to 10 years in Canada only 54 per cent of what native-born Canadians with similar qualifications in that province earned. Even the youngest and presumably most employable immigrants are doing worse than in the pre-Mulroney era of moderate immigration levels. Employment in the 25-44 age group fell from 75.7 per cent in 1981 to only 65.8 per cent in 2002. During the same period, employment of non-immigrants rose to 81.8 per cent from 74.6 per cent
Matching skills to jobs
Remarkably, immigrant labour market performance has declined during a time of increasing shortages of skilled workers. But as the above data suggest, just bringing in huge numbers of people doesn't solve skills shortages. Mexico has a worse skills shortage than Canada, yet it has no shortage of people. The trick is to match immigrants to jobs, and our current immigration program doesn't do that well. Luckily, Canada doesn't need to reinvent the wheel. It merely needs to emulate the solutions that Australia's more successful immigration program has already found, such as requiring the credentials of skilled immigrants to be approved before they come and imposing strict requirements for language skills.
Strain on health care
In addition to creating poverty, mismanaged immigration is weakening our public health care and education systems. By 2020, the huge baby boomer cohort of Canadians will be entering its stage of heaviest reliance on the health care system. The boomers will not tolerate interminable waits for hip replacements and cancer treatment.
As if the challenge of caring for impatient boomers weren't enough, the presence of millions of new immigrants will intensify the demands on the system. Many of the newcomers will be old, because Canada is the most generous country in allowing immigrants to sponsor elderly parents and grandparents. There is no chance that our health care system can survive in its current form given the demands on it from these demographic changes. As a result, by 2020 a full-fledged parallel private health care system will be in operation in the major immigrant-receiving cities, which are also where most of the boomers live. Private health care will be relied upon not just by the wealthy but also by much of the middle class as well.
ESL shortage hurts entire school system
A similar transformation will occur in education.
A report last January conducted for the Elementary Teachers of Toronto said teachers were spending the equivalent of one day a week trying to make up for the lack of English as a second language support for their immigrant students.
"The more time the regular classroom teacher is having to devote to ESL students … it detracts from the level of service we want for all of our students," union president Martin Long told the Globe and Mail.
In other words, the lack of support for ESL students is hurting all students. This is certainly not the fault of the immigrant children. It is the fault of rash and ill-conceived federal policy.
As a result, by 2020 most middle-class families will have abandoned the public system. This will be an unfortunate development, because the public schools are where immigrants and the Canadian-born get to know each other.
They are an important force for social cohesion.
Rather than reform a broken program, the Chrétien government preferred to appease ethnic organizations it hoped would rally support for the Liberal party. These organizations wanted easy entry to Canada for unskilled family members of existing immigrants.
Compressing wages
This policy was justified by absurd arguments, one of the most prevalent being that "immigrants do the jobs Canadians won't do." In fact, Canadian-born people always have and still do the most dangerous and dirty jobs such as mining and garbage collection. But they expect to be decently paid for their work.
The "jobs Canadians won't do" argument is a euphemism for saying Canada should use immigration to compress wages — a sure formula for exacerbating urban poverty.
A seemingly plausible argument for boosting the population of at least one Canadian city to 10 million or more would be that the truly great cities of the world are very big.
But London and Paris grew to their current size gradually over hundreds of years, and their greatness is the result of the wealth of the empires of which they were the capitals. You don't build London and Paris by adding millions of bodies over a short period of time. That's how you build Mumbai and Mexico City.
Ontario's environment commissioner, Gord Miller, issued a warning last year about what the future holds for Toronto, given current trends.
"The environmental impacts of this magnitude of growth … will compromise the quality of our lifestyle to a stage where it will be unrecognizable," he said.
"We already have trouble dealing with our waste right now … What about another four million tonnes a year? What about another four million cars?"
The new Conservative government's immigration minister, Monte Solberg, told a House of Commons committee in May that he was concerned about the "huge burden" high immigration levels place on our major cities. He thus became the first immigration minister in at least two decades to show any sensitivity to the impact of immigration policy on the urban environment.
Now it's the turn of local officials to abandon their ostrich-like refusal even to mention immigration when discussing urban growth. Perhaps they fear being branded "anti-immigrant" if they do. But Pierre Trudeau, in his last year as prime minister, cut immigration by 25 per cent, and no one called him anti-immigrant. In that case, good management trumped politics. It's an example the Conservative government would do well to follow.
Link ...
He has written for most of Canada's major magazines and has appeared as a guest on many television and radio programs, including Pamela Wallin Live, Canada AM, Diplomatic Immunity, Morningside and Sunday Morning. Daniel Stoffman is the co-author of Boom, Bust and Echo. His most recent book, Who Gets In: What's Wrong with Canada's Immigration Program and How to Fix It was a finalist for the Donner Prize and the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize.
San Paulo of the North: The effects of mass immigration on our cities
Daniel Stoffman July 7, 2006
It's 2020 and the days in Toronto when everyone used the public health care system are gone. So is the time when a majority of affluent, middle-class parents sent their kids to public schools.
In 2020, vast tracts of suburban slums occupy what used to be good farmland on the city's outskirts. Traffic congestion and air pollution are unbearable. Toronto's reputation as one of North America's most liveable cities is a distant memory. It's now known as the "the Sao Paulo of the north."
This dystopian vision of the future of Canada's largest city is hardly far-fetched. Toronto is already suffering severe growing pains, the result of the federal government's insistence on maintaining the world's largest per capita annual immigration intake — around 250,000 people a year, of whom about 43 per cent come to Toronto. That's more than 100,000 newcomers, year after year after year. It is impossible for any city to maintain its social and physical infrastructure in the face of such relentless population growth. By 2020, Greater Toronto's population will have ballooned from 5 million to 7 million — or even more if immigration levels are raised higher still.
Too much of a good thing
Every year Mercer Human Resource Consulting ranks world cities according to their livability. Vancouver always places at or near the top of the list while the other big Canadian cities are among the top 30. Most of the top-ranked cities are relatively small — places like Copenhagen (500,000) and Zurich (340,000).
None of the world's vast urban agglomerations of 10 million or more, such as Sao Paulo and Seoul, are rated by Mercer as desirable places to live. Smaller big cities are more liveable because their residents can enjoy the amenities of urban life without the congestion, crime and pollution associated with sprawling megalopolises.
Canada's livable cities are an unsung national asset. One of the things that makes them special is the presence of immigrants from all over the world who have contributed new energy and cultural diversity. But, in immigration as in everything else, too much of a good thing isn't better. Ottawa's policy of mass immigration, for which no reasonable explanation has ever been offered, risks irreparable damage to our cities.
Too much too fast
This policy of rapid urban growth is being implemented by Ottawa even though it has no jurisdiction over urban affairs, and even though the policy has never been stated explicitly. Yet the impact is already evident. Highway 401 across Toronto has become the busiest road in North America, the city can't find a place to put its garbage, and its public schools can't afford to provide the English instruction newly arrived children need.
In Vancouver, meanwhile, controversy rages over the British Columbia government's plan to expand the Port Mann bridge that links the rapidly growing Fraser Valley suburbs to the city.
Amazingly, the local politicians who have to cope with the results never suggest that perhaps the immigration intake might be lowered from time to time, as was standard practice until the late 1980s. To listen to their silence, one would think the relentless influx of huge numbers of new residents was a natural phenomenon like the weather rather than a deliberate federal policy that easily could be changed.
Toronto magnet for immigrants
Ottawa might claim it is not to blame for unmanageable urban growth because it just lets the immigrants in — it doesn't tell them where to go. But this would be disingenuous, because the federal government knows that Toronto gets almost half of all immigrants while Vancouver gets 18 per cent and Montreal 12 per cent.
Many of those who settle elsewhere at first also eventually wind up in one of the three biggest cities. Attempts at dispersion are doomed, because immigrants want to live where the previous cohort of the same ethnicity are already established.
They also want to live in cities for the same reason Canadian-born people do — they are more likely to find jobs there.
The country most comparable to Canada is Australia.
Like Canada, it is an English-speaking Commonwealth nation settled in relatively recent history. Like Canada, it has an organized immigration program and has used immigration effectively to enhance population growth and increase the vigour and diversity of its major cities. Australia's current net migration rate (immigration minus emigration per 1,000 of population) is 3.85. Canada's is 5.85. Before the Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney increased immigration levels and made them permanent during the latter part of the 1980s, a policy continued by the Liberals under Jean Chrétien, Canada had an intake similar, on a per capita basis, to Australia's.
There is no reason why Canada should have far more immigration than any other country. Canada's existing population is younger than those of most other developed countries and its ratio of working-age people to retired ones is higher. If Canada reverted to its traditional, more moderate, immigration program, it could continue to enjoy the benefits of immigration while sparing its cities the problems of unmanageable growth.
Immigrants would benefit too.
Their economic performance has been in freefall over the past 15 years. Previously the number of new immigrants varied according to labour market needs. Sometimes it would be cut to give the newly arrived a chance to be absorbed successfully into the economy without intense competition from more new arrivals.
Not any more. An endless stream of newcomers arrives in the big cities with few options but to work in poorly paid jobs such as cleaning houses and driving taxis. Wages of these jobs are thus kept low and the occupants of them have little chance to get ahead.
Immigrant poverty worsens
Previously, poverty levels among immigrants were about the same as those of the Canadian-born. Now they are much worse. According to a report by the Canadian Council on Social Development, whereas the poverty level of those who arrived before 1986 was 19.7 per cent, or slightly lower than that of the Canadian-born, the poverty level of those who came after 1991 was an alarming 52.1 per cent, while that of people born in Canada remained unchanged at around 20 per cent.
If this trend is not reversed, Toronto and Vancouver will be home, by 2020, to an entrenched underclass living in slums. Because of gentrification and rising property values in the central cities, these slums will be located in the suburbs, requiring long commutes for those fortunate enough to have employment. Fan Yang, a reader of the Toronto Star, shrewdly analyzed the impact of federal immigration policy in a letter to that newspaper in 2003. He accused the federal government of "dumping more cheaply acquired labour into the domestic labour pool, regardless of whether there is a healthy demand. Businesses welcome that enthusiastically as they bear no direct cost of unemployed immigrants and only garner the rewards of lower labour costs."
Even skilled workers are doing poorly. According to the 2001 census, male immigrants with a university degree who came to Ontario in the late 1990s were earning after six to 10 years in Canada only 54 per cent of what native-born Canadians with similar qualifications in that province earned. Even the youngest and presumably most employable immigrants are doing worse than in the pre-Mulroney era of moderate immigration levels. Employment in the 25-44 age group fell from 75.7 per cent in 1981 to only 65.8 per cent in 2002. During the same period, employment of non-immigrants rose to 81.8 per cent from 74.6 per cent
Matching skills to jobs
Remarkably, immigrant labour market performance has declined during a time of increasing shortages of skilled workers. But as the above data suggest, just bringing in huge numbers of people doesn't solve skills shortages. Mexico has a worse skills shortage than Canada, yet it has no shortage of people. The trick is to match immigrants to jobs, and our current immigration program doesn't do that well. Luckily, Canada doesn't need to reinvent the wheel. It merely needs to emulate the solutions that Australia's more successful immigration program has already found, such as requiring the credentials of skilled immigrants to be approved before they come and imposing strict requirements for language skills.
Strain on health care
In addition to creating poverty, mismanaged immigration is weakening our public health care and education systems. By 2020, the huge baby boomer cohort of Canadians will be entering its stage of heaviest reliance on the health care system. The boomers will not tolerate interminable waits for hip replacements and cancer treatment.
As if the challenge of caring for impatient boomers weren't enough, the presence of millions of new immigrants will intensify the demands on the system. Many of the newcomers will be old, because Canada is the most generous country in allowing immigrants to sponsor elderly parents and grandparents. There is no chance that our health care system can survive in its current form given the demands on it from these demographic changes. As a result, by 2020 a full-fledged parallel private health care system will be in operation in the major immigrant-receiving cities, which are also where most of the boomers live. Private health care will be relied upon not just by the wealthy but also by much of the middle class as well.
ESL shortage hurts entire school system
A similar transformation will occur in education.
A report last January conducted for the Elementary Teachers of Toronto said teachers were spending the equivalent of one day a week trying to make up for the lack of English as a second language support for their immigrant students.
"The more time the regular classroom teacher is having to devote to ESL students … it detracts from the level of service we want for all of our students," union president Martin Long told the Globe and Mail.
In other words, the lack of support for ESL students is hurting all students. This is certainly not the fault of the immigrant children. It is the fault of rash and ill-conceived federal policy.
As a result, by 2020 most middle-class families will have abandoned the public system. This will be an unfortunate development, because the public schools are where immigrants and the Canadian-born get to know each other.
They are an important force for social cohesion.
Rather than reform a broken program, the Chrétien government preferred to appease ethnic organizations it hoped would rally support for the Liberal party. These organizations wanted easy entry to Canada for unskilled family members of existing immigrants.
Compressing wages
This policy was justified by absurd arguments, one of the most prevalent being that "immigrants do the jobs Canadians won't do." In fact, Canadian-born people always have and still do the most dangerous and dirty jobs such as mining and garbage collection. But they expect to be decently paid for their work.
The "jobs Canadians won't do" argument is a euphemism for saying Canada should use immigration to compress wages — a sure formula for exacerbating urban poverty.
A seemingly plausible argument for boosting the population of at least one Canadian city to 10 million or more would be that the truly great cities of the world are very big.
But London and Paris grew to their current size gradually over hundreds of years, and their greatness is the result of the wealth of the empires of which they were the capitals. You don't build London and Paris by adding millions of bodies over a short period of time. That's how you build Mumbai and Mexico City.
Ontario's environment commissioner, Gord Miller, issued a warning last year about what the future holds for Toronto, given current trends.
"The environmental impacts of this magnitude of growth … will compromise the quality of our lifestyle to a stage where it will be unrecognizable," he said.
"We already have trouble dealing with our waste right now … What about another four million tonnes a year? What about another four million cars?"
The new Conservative government's immigration minister, Monte Solberg, told a House of Commons committee in May that he was concerned about the "huge burden" high immigration levels place on our major cities. He thus became the first immigration minister in at least two decades to show any sensitivity to the impact of immigration policy on the urban environment.
Now it's the turn of local officials to abandon their ostrich-like refusal even to mention immigration when discussing urban growth. Perhaps they fear being branded "anti-immigrant" if they do. But Pierre Trudeau, in his last year as prime minister, cut immigration by 25 per cent, and no one called him anti-immigrant. In that case, good management trumped politics. It's an example the Conservative government would do well to follow.
Link ...
Canada 2020: part 2
Richard Hétu
Richard Hétu has been a correspondent of La Presse in New York since 1994. For years he has been passionate about United States politics and history. In 2002 he published La route de loudest (VLB). Under the title of correspondent, he explores the shortcomings of American society through personalities like Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan and George W. Bush, among others.
Canada under attack: Story of a foreseen terror
Richard Hétu
July 4, 2006
July 7, 2020
Since Sept. 11, 2001, reliable sources have been repeating the warning: Canada, like any other industrialized Western country, is not sheltered from a large-scale terrorist attack. And yet, for nearly 20 years we have been protected, day after day, by the grace of God, CSIS or luck.
Unfortunately, this state of affairs came to an end this afternoon in the Montreal metro.
What a contrast between the images of the planes smashing into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre and the ones from July 5, 2020! By the end of the evening, the web had started broadcasting the attack, caught on "smart video" by the public transit system: Absolutely nothing explosive, just the cold determination to kill in large numbers, in my hometown.
The new cameras in the Montreal metro didn't miss a thing, or almost. Installed after the Boston subway attacks, they scan every centimetre of the system — waiting areas, trains, tunnels and platforms — producing video images that are immediately transformed into digital data. This surveillance system, fruit of Québécois innovation, can detect, categorize and follow objects or people of interest according to user-defined specifications. In principle, it can receive real-time alerts and react proactively to threats. It is the very pinnacle of technology.
But will the video of the attack one day be shown on Canadian television? Tonight, broadcasters completely censored it, bending to the requests of authorities, who have promised to find and punish the person or people responsible for a leak that allowed a small-time blogger in Vermont, in the United States, to stream images of the attack over the internet. These made their way around the globe in seconds.
On their websites, Canadian news sources were forced to be content to tell the story in words and photos. Here are the facts, unendurable though they are:
Between 5:19 p.m. and 5:24 p.m., at the peak of the evening rush, five individuals wearing ball caps get up from their seats in five different trains all heading for Berri station, the busiest in the metro system. From a gym bag, each of them pulls out a portable spray gun, similar to the Canadian Model 5 tear gas ejector. Then turning around slowly, they spray a fast-acting nerve agent into the air.
The passengers do not know that the lethal gas, Tabun, can kill by inhalation or contact with skin within 20 minutes. It doesn't take them long, though, to realize they are the victims of a chemical or biological attack. How long this kind of threat has been talked about! In the packed trains, the cameras record panic spreading from face to face. However, these same cameras are unable to make out the features of the faces hidden under the terrorists' ball caps.
In each of the besieged trains, it is a matter of some 10 seconds between the start of the attack and the doors opening. The passengers' first move is not to subdue the terrorists, but to flee the gas-filled cars. The commandos follow them, gassing an increasing number of passengers in their wake.
It is roughly another 10 seconds between the doors opening and the terrorists being gunned down by police. Thanks to the smart video, the alert to the attack was set off the moment the terrorists brandished their spray guns. Nevertheless, over the course of the 20 to 25 seconds that followed, tens of hundreds of passengers would have inhaled the fruit-scented gas that paralyzes the respiratory system and causes the lungs to constrict.
In the wee hours of the morning, the number of victims is unknown and no one has yet taken credit for the attacks. One thing is certain, according to commentators who can't avoid the circumstantial cliché: Canada will never be the same. Knowing what happened to the United States after the attacks of Sept. 11, this is not particularly reassuring.
July 6, 2020
No one could accuse the Canadian authorities — municipal, provincial or federal — of not having taken the threat of chemical or biological terrorism seriously. After the VX Boston subway attack that left 197 dead and 461 wounded, they poured every effort into attack prevention and disaster management.
Thus, the different levels of government agreed on a specific strategy in the event of an attack — the Equinox Plan — which was put into effect yesterday. Hospital staff were mobilized to deal with the victims at specific facilities in seven major Montreal hospitals, as designated by the federal and provincial health ministries.
Ambulance crews, firefighters and other emergency staff — alerted at the same time as police and all wearing protective suits — arrived at Berri station shortly after the terrorists were gunned down. Thanks to their individual dosimeters, ambulance staff identified the type of gas used in the attack and recognized with consternation that there was nothing they could do for the majority of the victims.
Tabun, a gas created in 1937 and used by Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War, belongs to a group of toxic and infectious agents for which Canada no longer has a vaccine or antidote, says a Montreal newspaper, citing anonymous sources within the federal government. At a time when threats seem to evolve with the seasons — and biotechnological progress — Montreal hospitals do not deal with it any more.
Did the terrorists know? Conspiracy theorists were not the only ones to wonder this upon hearing the first count of the victims: 310 dead and only 15 wounded, a tally that attests to the superior quality of the gas. As in many Western countries, including the United States, France and the U.K., the makeup of antidote, antibiotic and vaccine stocks are government secrets in Canada. The vaccines to which the government has access or, more to the point, the vaccines or antidotes to which it does not have access in sufficient quantities – or at all any more – is information that terrorist networks would be eager to put to use.
This raises the question on many people's minds: could there be a traitor or traitors among us?
If there is paranoia, it is but one of the manifestations of the shock felt today from one end of Canada to the other. Sorrow, sympathy, patriotism and anger are also in the mix. On television and radio, in the newspapers and on the internet alike, politicians, experts, and citizens have expounded on the hateful and insidious nature of the attack.
"Despite advances in genetic invention, gas is still probably the most powerful and effective instrument of terror available," an expert says. Another opined: "The possession of these weapons gives terrorists the opportunity to blackmail the governments of small and large countries, to sow the seeds of hate and panic in the population in general." Yet another asked, "Why on earth does Canada not have an antidote to Tabun any more? Of all the neurotoxic agents, isn't it the easiest to make?"
In Ottawa and Quebec, opposition parties have demanded public inquiries into the makeup of strategic stocks of strategic health products. The issue is not only crucial in the event of a chemical or biological attack, but also in the possibility of a pandemic.
While Montreal and Quebec authorities wait for these inquiries to be carried out, they have attempted to reassure metro users by promising to introduce new "protective" measures. In particular, they have announced the installation of sophisticated detectors that can recognize weapons, plastic explosives and chemical, biological and radioactive products. Each subway turnstile should soon be monitored by one of these detectors. Employed in many North American subways — New York, Boston, Chicago and Toronto, among others — the system should cause no slow down of service, unless there is an alert.
The technology was available as of 2014, but it would require an attack before it made its appearance in the Montreal metro.
As for the cameras, they will continue to scan everything in their path, and not only the activities of potential criminals or terrorists. Ten years after their installation, it is rare that people raise concerns of privacy.
We live in a time where safety comes first.
July 7, 2020
We've been saying it non-stop since the attack: On July 5, 2020, the Canadian psyche received a devastating shock; its population, long accustomed to peace, now finds itself at war with an unknown enemy. Not only does responsibility for the attack go unclaimed, but also authorities, scorning the media's repeated requests, refuse to release any information on the terrorists killed in the subway.
Canadians of all types have certainly pointed the finger at radical Islamists, whether they've immigrated here or grown up among us. Neo-Nazi groups have gone further by burning down mosques in Montreal, Toronto and Calgary, among other cities.
Still today, authorities call for calm. Still today, the media shows restraint. Yet the coincidence is remarkable: the attack in the Montreal metro occurred one week after Canada's official refusal to recognize the new Islamic republic born out of the revolution in Saudi Arabia. In so doing, Ottawa followed in the footsteps of Washington, where the Republican administration is ready for action.
The Canadian psyche most definitely did receive a shock, but certain reflexes remain. Yesterday, a Toronto columnist wrote that the Tabun attack drove a final nail in the coffin of the Quebec separatist movement.
"The separatists want to create a country where the army would be abolished and replaced with a peace force. There is no more peace, not even in Quebec," he wrote.
It was to be expected.
This morning, commentators in the Republic of Quebec — the francophone ones, to be more accurate — reacted to this comment with irritation, indeed, indignation. Separatist or federalist, Quebec commentators were united in their condemnation of the Toronto journalist's lack of tact.
"If the Tabun attack calls an ideology into question, it isn't Quebec separatism, but rather Canadian multiculturalism," wrote one Montreal columnist, having already attributed the attack to radical Islam. "This ideology should have died the day Ontario renounced plans to institute Shariah law for family litigation. Alas, it still continues to serve as an argument for our fundamentalists."
July 8, 2020
After the shock and the mourning, here is the surprise. The Tabun attack wasn't linked to Sept. 11, 2001, as we had thought, but rather to March 20, 1995. Its perpetrators are presumed to be part of a religious organization more closely resembling the Aum Shinri Kyo sect, responsible for the Sarin attack in the Tokyo subway, than Al-Qaeda, sponsor of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.
The Canadian prime minister dropped this bomb this morning, at the same time announcing the arrest of the leaders of the Canadian sect, named "Supreme Victory," whose headquarters are located in the Eastern Townships in Quebec. Known for its apocalyptic prophecies, the organization has small offshoots in all Canadian provinces as well as in several U.S. states.
Like the suicide bombers, its disciples are representative of the ethnic diversity of North America. During the sect's last public declaration, less than a year ago, its leader, known as Victor I, predicted a series of spectacular events signalling the end of civilization. As usual, no one took it seriously.
Link ...
Richard Hétu has been a correspondent of La Presse in New York since 1994. For years he has been passionate about United States politics and history. In 2002 he published La route de loudest (VLB). Under the title of correspondent, he explores the shortcomings of American society through personalities like Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan and George W. Bush, among others.
Canada under attack: Story of a foreseen terror
Richard Hétu
July 4, 2006
July 7, 2020
Since Sept. 11, 2001, reliable sources have been repeating the warning: Canada, like any other industrialized Western country, is not sheltered from a large-scale terrorist attack. And yet, for nearly 20 years we have been protected, day after day, by the grace of God, CSIS or luck.
Unfortunately, this state of affairs came to an end this afternoon in the Montreal metro.
What a contrast between the images of the planes smashing into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre and the ones from July 5, 2020! By the end of the evening, the web had started broadcasting the attack, caught on "smart video" by the public transit system: Absolutely nothing explosive, just the cold determination to kill in large numbers, in my hometown.
The new cameras in the Montreal metro didn't miss a thing, or almost. Installed after the Boston subway attacks, they scan every centimetre of the system — waiting areas, trains, tunnels and platforms — producing video images that are immediately transformed into digital data. This surveillance system, fruit of Québécois innovation, can detect, categorize and follow objects or people of interest according to user-defined specifications. In principle, it can receive real-time alerts and react proactively to threats. It is the very pinnacle of technology.
But will the video of the attack one day be shown on Canadian television? Tonight, broadcasters completely censored it, bending to the requests of authorities, who have promised to find and punish the person or people responsible for a leak that allowed a small-time blogger in Vermont, in the United States, to stream images of the attack over the internet. These made their way around the globe in seconds.
On their websites, Canadian news sources were forced to be content to tell the story in words and photos. Here are the facts, unendurable though they are:
Between 5:19 p.m. and 5:24 p.m., at the peak of the evening rush, five individuals wearing ball caps get up from their seats in five different trains all heading for Berri station, the busiest in the metro system. From a gym bag, each of them pulls out a portable spray gun, similar to the Canadian Model 5 tear gas ejector. Then turning around slowly, they spray a fast-acting nerve agent into the air.
The passengers do not know that the lethal gas, Tabun, can kill by inhalation or contact with skin within 20 minutes. It doesn't take them long, though, to realize they are the victims of a chemical or biological attack. How long this kind of threat has been talked about! In the packed trains, the cameras record panic spreading from face to face. However, these same cameras are unable to make out the features of the faces hidden under the terrorists' ball caps.
In each of the besieged trains, it is a matter of some 10 seconds between the start of the attack and the doors opening. The passengers' first move is not to subdue the terrorists, but to flee the gas-filled cars. The commandos follow them, gassing an increasing number of passengers in their wake.
It is roughly another 10 seconds between the doors opening and the terrorists being gunned down by police. Thanks to the smart video, the alert to the attack was set off the moment the terrorists brandished their spray guns. Nevertheless, over the course of the 20 to 25 seconds that followed, tens of hundreds of passengers would have inhaled the fruit-scented gas that paralyzes the respiratory system and causes the lungs to constrict.
In the wee hours of the morning, the number of victims is unknown and no one has yet taken credit for the attacks. One thing is certain, according to commentators who can't avoid the circumstantial cliché: Canada will never be the same. Knowing what happened to the United States after the attacks of Sept. 11, this is not particularly reassuring.
July 6, 2020
No one could accuse the Canadian authorities — municipal, provincial or federal — of not having taken the threat of chemical or biological terrorism seriously. After the VX Boston subway attack that left 197 dead and 461 wounded, they poured every effort into attack prevention and disaster management.
Thus, the different levels of government agreed on a specific strategy in the event of an attack — the Equinox Plan — which was put into effect yesterday. Hospital staff were mobilized to deal with the victims at specific facilities in seven major Montreal hospitals, as designated by the federal and provincial health ministries.
Ambulance crews, firefighters and other emergency staff — alerted at the same time as police and all wearing protective suits — arrived at Berri station shortly after the terrorists were gunned down. Thanks to their individual dosimeters, ambulance staff identified the type of gas used in the attack and recognized with consternation that there was nothing they could do for the majority of the victims.
Tabun, a gas created in 1937 and used by Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War, belongs to a group of toxic and infectious agents for which Canada no longer has a vaccine or antidote, says a Montreal newspaper, citing anonymous sources within the federal government. At a time when threats seem to evolve with the seasons — and biotechnological progress — Montreal hospitals do not deal with it any more.
Did the terrorists know? Conspiracy theorists were not the only ones to wonder this upon hearing the first count of the victims: 310 dead and only 15 wounded, a tally that attests to the superior quality of the gas. As in many Western countries, including the United States, France and the U.K., the makeup of antidote, antibiotic and vaccine stocks are government secrets in Canada. The vaccines to which the government has access or, more to the point, the vaccines or antidotes to which it does not have access in sufficient quantities – or at all any more – is information that terrorist networks would be eager to put to use.
This raises the question on many people's minds: could there be a traitor or traitors among us?
If there is paranoia, it is but one of the manifestations of the shock felt today from one end of Canada to the other. Sorrow, sympathy, patriotism and anger are also in the mix. On television and radio, in the newspapers and on the internet alike, politicians, experts, and citizens have expounded on the hateful and insidious nature of the attack.
"Despite advances in genetic invention, gas is still probably the most powerful and effective instrument of terror available," an expert says. Another opined: "The possession of these weapons gives terrorists the opportunity to blackmail the governments of small and large countries, to sow the seeds of hate and panic in the population in general." Yet another asked, "Why on earth does Canada not have an antidote to Tabun any more? Of all the neurotoxic agents, isn't it the easiest to make?"
In Ottawa and Quebec, opposition parties have demanded public inquiries into the makeup of strategic stocks of strategic health products. The issue is not only crucial in the event of a chemical or biological attack, but also in the possibility of a pandemic.
While Montreal and Quebec authorities wait for these inquiries to be carried out, they have attempted to reassure metro users by promising to introduce new "protective" measures. In particular, they have announced the installation of sophisticated detectors that can recognize weapons, plastic explosives and chemical, biological and radioactive products. Each subway turnstile should soon be monitored by one of these detectors. Employed in many North American subways — New York, Boston, Chicago and Toronto, among others — the system should cause no slow down of service, unless there is an alert.
The technology was available as of 2014, but it would require an attack before it made its appearance in the Montreal metro.
As for the cameras, they will continue to scan everything in their path, and not only the activities of potential criminals or terrorists. Ten years after their installation, it is rare that people raise concerns of privacy.
We live in a time where safety comes first.
July 7, 2020
We've been saying it non-stop since the attack: On July 5, 2020, the Canadian psyche received a devastating shock; its population, long accustomed to peace, now finds itself at war with an unknown enemy. Not only does responsibility for the attack go unclaimed, but also authorities, scorning the media's repeated requests, refuse to release any information on the terrorists killed in the subway.
Canadians of all types have certainly pointed the finger at radical Islamists, whether they've immigrated here or grown up among us. Neo-Nazi groups have gone further by burning down mosques in Montreal, Toronto and Calgary, among other cities.
Still today, authorities call for calm. Still today, the media shows restraint. Yet the coincidence is remarkable: the attack in the Montreal metro occurred one week after Canada's official refusal to recognize the new Islamic republic born out of the revolution in Saudi Arabia. In so doing, Ottawa followed in the footsteps of Washington, where the Republican administration is ready for action.
The Canadian psyche most definitely did receive a shock, but certain reflexes remain. Yesterday, a Toronto columnist wrote that the Tabun attack drove a final nail in the coffin of the Quebec separatist movement.
"The separatists want to create a country where the army would be abolished and replaced with a peace force. There is no more peace, not even in Quebec," he wrote.
It was to be expected.
This morning, commentators in the Republic of Quebec — the francophone ones, to be more accurate — reacted to this comment with irritation, indeed, indignation. Separatist or federalist, Quebec commentators were united in their condemnation of the Toronto journalist's lack of tact.
"If the Tabun attack calls an ideology into question, it isn't Quebec separatism, but rather Canadian multiculturalism," wrote one Montreal columnist, having already attributed the attack to radical Islam. "This ideology should have died the day Ontario renounced plans to institute Shariah law for family litigation. Alas, it still continues to serve as an argument for our fundamentalists."
July 8, 2020
After the shock and the mourning, here is the surprise. The Tabun attack wasn't linked to Sept. 11, 2001, as we had thought, but rather to March 20, 1995. Its perpetrators are presumed to be part of a religious organization more closely resembling the Aum Shinri Kyo sect, responsible for the Sarin attack in the Tokyo subway, than Al-Qaeda, sponsor of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.
The Canadian prime minister dropped this bomb this morning, at the same time announcing the arrest of the leaders of the Canadian sect, named "Supreme Victory," whose headquarters are located in the Eastern Townships in Quebec. Known for its apocalyptic prophecies, the organization has small offshoots in all Canadian provinces as well as in several U.S. states.
Like the suicide bombers, its disciples are representative of the ethnic diversity of North America. During the sect's last public declaration, less than a year ago, its leader, known as Victor I, predicted a series of spectacular events signalling the end of civilization. As usual, no one took it seriously.
Link ...
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
2020: part 1
Here is the first in a series of essays concerning Canada in the year 2020.
The original essay, written by Andrew Cohen, can be found here.
Bio
Andrew CohenA former foreign editor and foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Post, he has also served as the national political correspondent for Saturday Night magazine and as a member of the editorial board of the Globe and Mail. Andrew Cohen, a writer and professor of journalism and international affairs at Carleton University, is the author of While Canada Slept: How We Lost Our Place in the World.
Imagining Canada's 153rd Birthday
Andrew Cohen
Ottawa, July 1, 2020 — On the 153rd anniversary of Confederation, Canada goes through the motions yet again. On Parliament Hill, the bells toll mournfully and the Maple Leaf hangs listlessly. Soldiers fire a 21-gun salute and Snowbirds fly overhead. Under sweltering skies, the prime minister still insists that Canada is "a young country," as he and his untutored predecessors have done since it really was a young country.
Thousands gather on the grass. They hear breathless politicians declare that Canada is the best country in the world, a boast once thought terribly un-Canadian, but lately as predictable as the national time signal. In the shadow of the Peace Tower, they watch entertainers of every ethnicity reflecting this diverse society. The show is as inclusive as Canada itself. Everyone must be represented — there was a minor scandal last year when Karen dancers from Burma were overlooked in the festivities — because peoples from around the globe are reserving rooms in Hotel Canada. All want a role in this spectacle, as if to confirm their arrival.
Troupe after troupe of new Canadians in traditional national costume march across the stage. Recalling national birthdays long past, there are some high-stepping Ukrainians, fiddlers from Quebec and throat-singers from Nunavut. But these are passé today. Now the headliners are drummers from Senegal and acrobats from Brunei. After a half-generation of open immigration, Canada is home to millions who have fled the drought and desertification that have turned parts of Africa and Asia into a netherworld and made the environment humanity's ruin. The land that God gave to Cain and Voltaire called "a few acres of snow" now looks like Shangri-la in a beleaguered world. No wonder Canada's birthday party goes on for three days, as if it were a Hindu wedding.
This is the new complexion of Canada: black, tan and yellow. Canadians are proud to call themselves the most moderate of people. Tolerance has become their vocation, a kind of raison d'être, and that seems to be the breadth of their ambition. In a fragmenting world spawning new countries as casually as Arctic glaciers crack and calve, they are happy to have survived as a nation for a century and a half — even if they're not sure what that means anymore.
No, this isn't your father's Canada. Nor is it the Canada of Sir John A. Macdonald, Mackenzie King, John Diefenbaker, Lester Pearson, Pierre Berton, Margaret Atwood, Michael Bliss, Douglas Coupland or Avril Lavigne. They would not recognize it, and few in this new country would recognize them. The nation roams around under a cloud of amnesia, as if nothing happened before yesterday. This summer holiday — what do they call it? This capital — what does it represent? This Parliament — what does it do? July 1 was once Canada Day (in prehistoric times, it was Dominion Day) and this was a national celebration. Ottawa was a national capital and Parliament was a national legislature.
There is no "national" anymore because there is no nation, at least not as we knew it. In 2020, Canada is a country in little more than name. It has taken the 19th-century idea of the nation-state and turned it on its head; Canada is now a collection of many nations (its ethnic minorities) who know only their own past, and many states (its provinces) that know only their own interests. For many who have come here, Canada is a country of convenience. It offers security and anonymity and asks for conformity and equanimity. People take rooms in this grand hotel, as the novelist Yann Martel once put it, with little knowledge of — or attachment to — the place itself. In a rootless world of shifting loyalty and no fixed address, Canada is just another comfort station on the road to somewhere else.
The federal government is an antique notion in the era of sub-governments and supra-governments. Canada's provinces have turned into princely states like those of British India, governed by pashas who have the powers of minor monarchs. Within these kingdoms are city-states. "National," an anachronistic term, now competes with "provincial" and "municipal" at home and "international" abroad.
So, Canada Day is now called People's Day, a celebration of our great mingling of races from the corners of the earth. The Parliament of Canada is no longer a supreme body of lawmakers but a jumped-up town council of superannuated time-servers taking up space in that grand pile on the Ottawa River. The House of Commons has had little to do since the federal government transferred its remaining powers to the provinces some 10 years ago. No wonder Ottawa is only a symbol these days. It is overshadowed by the real centres of power in post-confederation Canada — Vancouver, Edmonton, Toronto and Montreal — which drew the country's best minds from Ottawa, as Pierre Elliott Trudeau had warned long ago. In happier times, a travel writer compared Ottawa to Cetinje, the capital of Montenegro up to 1918. Now, with cruel irony, it is Cetinje that has reclaimed its imperial glory as the seat of a renewed Montenegro, while Ottawa has become a backwater in a diminished Canada.
What we have here is a virtual country. In the 500-nation universe, Canada is an area code and an e-mail address. Yes, it is still fantastically rich, awash in petrodollars, endowed with mountains, forests, minerals and unfathomable space between three great oceans. Its biggest export is water and it is more expensive than oil. But today, 153 years after it was created, a visitor from the past might wonder what the country is celebrating. After all, what is Canada, anyway?
Physically, it may be hard to tell the difference between the country in 2006 and 2020. It will surprise many to learn that Canada still includes Quebec, despite all those bond-traders and currency speculators who thought otherwise and lost money. With all of Quebec's new powers, the sovereigntists shrewdly concluded that independence would be unnecessary, even redundant. After all, with federalism like this, who needs sovereignty?
But there is indeed a new Canada, and it is the product of twin forces that had been at work for some time. Contemporary historians have come to call them "the great migration" and "the quiet devolution."
The "great migration" was a byword for the greatest influx of immigrants Canada had ever known. By 2010, the country's political parties were treating immigration as an auction, bidding against each other for ethnic voters in urban Canada to raise the quotas of immigrants from 250,000 to 500,000 a year. There was a sound economic reason (a shortage of unskilled labour) and a moral reason (boatloads of refugees were washing up on our shores, just as they were in Spain, Malta and Sicily). As global warming began to wreak havoc around 2012, a suddenly popular Green party formed the government in Ottawa. The United Nations began to pressure empty, enormous Canada to ease the refugee crisis. By opening the country's borders, politicians could feel that they'd helped the world, as well as themselves.
Of course, immigration has benefited Canada. Even with a low birth rate the population grew from 33 million in 2007 to 38 million in 2012 and to 45 million in 2018. Within two years, Statistics Canada predicts there will be 50 million Canadians. Fifty million! Finally, in size, Canada is the nation that Sir Wilfrid Laurier imagined a century ago.
While the influx has made the country's big cities even bigger (Toronto's population is now 11 million, served by high-speed rail service and three airports), it has developed regions like northern Ontario, where Sudbury, Sault Ste. Marie, Thunder Bay and North Bay are flourishing. Down East, immigrants have remade Saint John, Moncton and Halifax. They have also made things interesting. Oh, how things have changed in old Anglo-Saxon Canada. You can now eat pad thai in Red Deer and chapatis in Estevan.
For the most part, Canada has taken a laissez-faire view of its new arrivals. Multiculturalism is a kind of narcissism for Canadians. We are in love with it and the image it gives us around the world. We look down at old Europe for its difficulty in integrating immigrants of different cultures, spawning ghettos in lily-white Stockholm, Amsterdam and Oslo.
Still, as immigration has brought Canada prosperity, it has also brought ambiguity. No one has taught these new Canadians much about their new country, its past, its triumphs, its myths. In Canada, where the provinces are responsible for education, no one teaches Canadian history anymore. Captured by the canons of political correctness, schools celebrate multiculturalism as an end in itself, failing to teach the superiority of civic nationalism over ethnic nationalism. In the voiceless country, no one speaks for Canada anymore. East Indians, Pakistanis and Chinese come here and live their lives happily in Hindi, Urdu and Mandarin. Sadly, they import their prejudices and struggles, too, which often find violent expression in grim urban corridors.
But as the country changed you couldn't talk about this. The public campaign to persuade immigrants to adopt our mores and accept our rules was attacked as chauvinistic, even racist. Over time we diminished our citizenship, offering it freely and asking little in return. We became more interested in rights than responsibilities. The truth was that few Canadians of the last generation shared very much with each other, and even fewer have known what it means to be Canadian. No one has told them. It begged a variation of the biblical question: What hath a country if it gaineth the world but loseth its soul? If Canada was becoming more cosmopolitan, it was also becoming less cohesive.
While the wave of immigrants was flooding across our borders, the provinces were re-asserting themselves. They demanded more powers — and they got them. This is the other part of the re-making of Canada. There was a time Confederation represented a division of powers between governments. Once the province of the province was the province; now the province of the province is the nation, for that is how they see themselves. The quiet devolution has created swaggering potentates presiding over wealthy fiefdoms, especially Alberta, which continually threatened to leave. This happened subtly, through administrative agreements, when no one was looking. It was the natural outcome of decades of whining and petitioning. True, it had been going on since the 1960s, but the system always assumed an intergovernmental negotiation, not unilateral disarmament.
In 2014, the centre collapsed. The provinces already had spending power, taxing power, and their own pensions and social programs. They were choosing their immigrants and even running their own foreign policies. Indeed, for more than a decade they had embassies — no one bothered with the fiction of calling them "tourist offices" or "cultural legations" anymore — in international capitals. When the government allowed Quebec to send a representative to UNESCO, the province soon asked the same for the World Health Organization, the Human Rights Council and the International Labour Organization. As usual, what Quebec got, all provinces got. Now a once-influential country speaks to the world not with a single, eloquent voice, but in a contradictory and confusing cacophony.
When the provinces started raising their own armies — the last great federal preserve — the game was over. Ottawa handed the provinces monetary policy and divided up its military assets. The centre had nothing but the post office and the Parliament Buildings, now a Victorian architectural curiosity for Chinese tourists.
All along, of course, the accommodationists said this was the price of unity. Quebec was still in, wasn't it? Alberta and Newfoundland, with their oil wealth, had not left us, had they? We had chanted the hymn of unity for so long that it had become a mantra, blinding us from seeing our purpose as a nation. In the name of unity, we abandoned the symbols of our nationhood, allowed the provinces a free hand in the world, stopped teaching history, shared no collective ideas and promoted no great project beyond diversity itself. Oh, we were a good country, but not a great one.
Now, in 2020, we look around in despair. In the voiceless country, there is no one left to recall its past, no one left to celebrate its principles, and no one left to speak its name.
The original essay, written by Andrew Cohen, can be found here.
Bio
Andrew CohenA former foreign editor and foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Post, he has also served as the national political correspondent for Saturday Night magazine and as a member of the editorial board of the Globe and Mail. Andrew Cohen, a writer and professor of journalism and international affairs at Carleton University, is the author of While Canada Slept: How We Lost Our Place in the World.
Imagining Canada's 153rd Birthday
Andrew Cohen
Ottawa, July 1, 2020 — On the 153rd anniversary of Confederation, Canada goes through the motions yet again. On Parliament Hill, the bells toll mournfully and the Maple Leaf hangs listlessly. Soldiers fire a 21-gun salute and Snowbirds fly overhead. Under sweltering skies, the prime minister still insists that Canada is "a young country," as he and his untutored predecessors have done since it really was a young country.
Thousands gather on the grass. They hear breathless politicians declare that Canada is the best country in the world, a boast once thought terribly un-Canadian, but lately as predictable as the national time signal. In the shadow of the Peace Tower, they watch entertainers of every ethnicity reflecting this diverse society. The show is as inclusive as Canada itself. Everyone must be represented — there was a minor scandal last year when Karen dancers from Burma were overlooked in the festivities — because peoples from around the globe are reserving rooms in Hotel Canada. All want a role in this spectacle, as if to confirm their arrival.
Troupe after troupe of new Canadians in traditional national costume march across the stage. Recalling national birthdays long past, there are some high-stepping Ukrainians, fiddlers from Quebec and throat-singers from Nunavut. But these are passé today. Now the headliners are drummers from Senegal and acrobats from Brunei. After a half-generation of open immigration, Canada is home to millions who have fled the drought and desertification that have turned parts of Africa and Asia into a netherworld and made the environment humanity's ruin. The land that God gave to Cain and Voltaire called "a few acres of snow" now looks like Shangri-la in a beleaguered world. No wonder Canada's birthday party goes on for three days, as if it were a Hindu wedding.
This is the new complexion of Canada: black, tan and yellow. Canadians are proud to call themselves the most moderate of people. Tolerance has become their vocation, a kind of raison d'être, and that seems to be the breadth of their ambition. In a fragmenting world spawning new countries as casually as Arctic glaciers crack and calve, they are happy to have survived as a nation for a century and a half — even if they're not sure what that means anymore.
No, this isn't your father's Canada. Nor is it the Canada of Sir John A. Macdonald, Mackenzie King, John Diefenbaker, Lester Pearson, Pierre Berton, Margaret Atwood, Michael Bliss, Douglas Coupland or Avril Lavigne. They would not recognize it, and few in this new country would recognize them. The nation roams around under a cloud of amnesia, as if nothing happened before yesterday. This summer holiday — what do they call it? This capital — what does it represent? This Parliament — what does it do? July 1 was once Canada Day (in prehistoric times, it was Dominion Day) and this was a national celebration. Ottawa was a national capital and Parliament was a national legislature.
There is no "national" anymore because there is no nation, at least not as we knew it. In 2020, Canada is a country in little more than name. It has taken the 19th-century idea of the nation-state and turned it on its head; Canada is now a collection of many nations (its ethnic minorities) who know only their own past, and many states (its provinces) that know only their own interests. For many who have come here, Canada is a country of convenience. It offers security and anonymity and asks for conformity and equanimity. People take rooms in this grand hotel, as the novelist Yann Martel once put it, with little knowledge of — or attachment to — the place itself. In a rootless world of shifting loyalty and no fixed address, Canada is just another comfort station on the road to somewhere else.
The federal government is an antique notion in the era of sub-governments and supra-governments. Canada's provinces have turned into princely states like those of British India, governed by pashas who have the powers of minor monarchs. Within these kingdoms are city-states. "National," an anachronistic term, now competes with "provincial" and "municipal" at home and "international" abroad.
So, Canada Day is now called People's Day, a celebration of our great mingling of races from the corners of the earth. The Parliament of Canada is no longer a supreme body of lawmakers but a jumped-up town council of superannuated time-servers taking up space in that grand pile on the Ottawa River. The House of Commons has had little to do since the federal government transferred its remaining powers to the provinces some 10 years ago. No wonder Ottawa is only a symbol these days. It is overshadowed by the real centres of power in post-confederation Canada — Vancouver, Edmonton, Toronto and Montreal — which drew the country's best minds from Ottawa, as Pierre Elliott Trudeau had warned long ago. In happier times, a travel writer compared Ottawa to Cetinje, the capital of Montenegro up to 1918. Now, with cruel irony, it is Cetinje that has reclaimed its imperial glory as the seat of a renewed Montenegro, while Ottawa has become a backwater in a diminished Canada.
What we have here is a virtual country. In the 500-nation universe, Canada is an area code and an e-mail address. Yes, it is still fantastically rich, awash in petrodollars, endowed with mountains, forests, minerals and unfathomable space between three great oceans. Its biggest export is water and it is more expensive than oil. But today, 153 years after it was created, a visitor from the past might wonder what the country is celebrating. After all, what is Canada, anyway?
Physically, it may be hard to tell the difference between the country in 2006 and 2020. It will surprise many to learn that Canada still includes Quebec, despite all those bond-traders and currency speculators who thought otherwise and lost money. With all of Quebec's new powers, the sovereigntists shrewdly concluded that independence would be unnecessary, even redundant. After all, with federalism like this, who needs sovereignty?
But there is indeed a new Canada, and it is the product of twin forces that had been at work for some time. Contemporary historians have come to call them "the great migration" and "the quiet devolution."
The "great migration" was a byword for the greatest influx of immigrants Canada had ever known. By 2010, the country's political parties were treating immigration as an auction, bidding against each other for ethnic voters in urban Canada to raise the quotas of immigrants from 250,000 to 500,000 a year. There was a sound economic reason (a shortage of unskilled labour) and a moral reason (boatloads of refugees were washing up on our shores, just as they were in Spain, Malta and Sicily). As global warming began to wreak havoc around 2012, a suddenly popular Green party formed the government in Ottawa. The United Nations began to pressure empty, enormous Canada to ease the refugee crisis. By opening the country's borders, politicians could feel that they'd helped the world, as well as themselves.
Of course, immigration has benefited Canada. Even with a low birth rate the population grew from 33 million in 2007 to 38 million in 2012 and to 45 million in 2018. Within two years, Statistics Canada predicts there will be 50 million Canadians. Fifty million! Finally, in size, Canada is the nation that Sir Wilfrid Laurier imagined a century ago.
While the influx has made the country's big cities even bigger (Toronto's population is now 11 million, served by high-speed rail service and three airports), it has developed regions like northern Ontario, where Sudbury, Sault Ste. Marie, Thunder Bay and North Bay are flourishing. Down East, immigrants have remade Saint John, Moncton and Halifax. They have also made things interesting. Oh, how things have changed in old Anglo-Saxon Canada. You can now eat pad thai in Red Deer and chapatis in Estevan.
For the most part, Canada has taken a laissez-faire view of its new arrivals. Multiculturalism is a kind of narcissism for Canadians. We are in love with it and the image it gives us around the world. We look down at old Europe for its difficulty in integrating immigrants of different cultures, spawning ghettos in lily-white Stockholm, Amsterdam and Oslo.
Still, as immigration has brought Canada prosperity, it has also brought ambiguity. No one has taught these new Canadians much about their new country, its past, its triumphs, its myths. In Canada, where the provinces are responsible for education, no one teaches Canadian history anymore. Captured by the canons of political correctness, schools celebrate multiculturalism as an end in itself, failing to teach the superiority of civic nationalism over ethnic nationalism. In the voiceless country, no one speaks for Canada anymore. East Indians, Pakistanis and Chinese come here and live their lives happily in Hindi, Urdu and Mandarin. Sadly, they import their prejudices and struggles, too, which often find violent expression in grim urban corridors.
But as the country changed you couldn't talk about this. The public campaign to persuade immigrants to adopt our mores and accept our rules was attacked as chauvinistic, even racist. Over time we diminished our citizenship, offering it freely and asking little in return. We became more interested in rights than responsibilities. The truth was that few Canadians of the last generation shared very much with each other, and even fewer have known what it means to be Canadian. No one has told them. It begged a variation of the biblical question: What hath a country if it gaineth the world but loseth its soul? If Canada was becoming more cosmopolitan, it was also becoming less cohesive.
While the wave of immigrants was flooding across our borders, the provinces were re-asserting themselves. They demanded more powers — and they got them. This is the other part of the re-making of Canada. There was a time Confederation represented a division of powers between governments. Once the province of the province was the province; now the province of the province is the nation, for that is how they see themselves. The quiet devolution has created swaggering potentates presiding over wealthy fiefdoms, especially Alberta, which continually threatened to leave. This happened subtly, through administrative agreements, when no one was looking. It was the natural outcome of decades of whining and petitioning. True, it had been going on since the 1960s, but the system always assumed an intergovernmental negotiation, not unilateral disarmament.
In 2014, the centre collapsed. The provinces already had spending power, taxing power, and their own pensions and social programs. They were choosing their immigrants and even running their own foreign policies. Indeed, for more than a decade they had embassies — no one bothered with the fiction of calling them "tourist offices" or "cultural legations" anymore — in international capitals. When the government allowed Quebec to send a representative to UNESCO, the province soon asked the same for the World Health Organization, the Human Rights Council and the International Labour Organization. As usual, what Quebec got, all provinces got. Now a once-influential country speaks to the world not with a single, eloquent voice, but in a contradictory and confusing cacophony.
When the provinces started raising their own armies — the last great federal preserve — the game was over. Ottawa handed the provinces monetary policy and divided up its military assets. The centre had nothing but the post office and the Parliament Buildings, now a Victorian architectural curiosity for Chinese tourists.
All along, of course, the accommodationists said this was the price of unity. Quebec was still in, wasn't it? Alberta and Newfoundland, with their oil wealth, had not left us, had they? We had chanted the hymn of unity for so long that it had become a mantra, blinding us from seeing our purpose as a nation. In the name of unity, we abandoned the symbols of our nationhood, allowed the provinces a free hand in the world, stopped teaching history, shared no collective ideas and promoted no great project beyond diversity itself. Oh, we were a good country, but not a great one.
Now, in 2020, we look around in despair. In the voiceless country, there is no one left to recall its past, no one left to celebrate its principles, and no one left to speak its name.
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
The future in the minds eye
What will your life look like in 5 years? How about in the year 2020? What will Canada look like? That is the question that is trying to be answered in a project sponsored by the The Dominion Institute in partnership with CBC, La Presse and the Toronto Star. The poject includes a national survey and a number of essays from prominent Canadian writers.
Interested parties can access these essays at the CBC website.
Rudyard Griffiths, the Executive Director of the Dominion Institute, provided the following introduction to the project.
Does Canada have courage and vision for the future?
Rudyard Griffiths June 29, 2006
To encourage debate about the challenges Canada will face in the coming decades the Dominion Institute, in association with The Toronto Star, LaPresse and CBC News, has invited twenty leading thinkers to comment, over the next four months, on an issue or event that they think could transform the country by 2020.
Rudyard Griffiths, executive director of the Dominion Institute, introduces the Series.
Each day 1.3 billion Chinese wake up to confront a stark reality: China's blistering eight per cent annual economic growth is increasingly underwritten by foreign energy supplies, primarily oil. In Iran, Africa, South America and Canada's own tar sands, the Chinese are ruthlessly securing the energy supplies necessary to support an economy that is predicted to triple in size by the year 2020. Coping with the social upheaval caused by a roaring economy and ever mindful of their storied history of revolution, China's leadership knows that the future prosperity of the Middle Kingdom is inextricably linked with their pursuit of oil and gas.
It's not just energy-starved giants such as China and the United States that are trying to figure out what policies and priorities they have to put into place today to preserve their way of life over the long-term. On the other end of geopolitical scale, the likes of Ireland, Singapore and Finland are grappling with how to further the growth of their knowledge-based economies at a time when instant communication and new technologies are allowing developing nations to produce many of the same high-end products and services at a lower cost.
Through long-term investments in research, higher education, and increased productivity, developed nations who have neither a superabundance of natural resources or large populations are discovering new ways to compete in the global marketplace and improve the quality of life of their citizens.
All of these countries – large and small, East and West, developed and developing – possess what is called a "strategic culture". Whether they are faced with energy scarcity, regional instability, new technological paradigms, the threat of terrorism, or population growth, these nations are grappling with immediate threats to their future welfare. These "externalities" create in a country, such as, say, Finland a strategic culture that allows its leadership to cut through red-tape, sideline special interests, build consensus, and most important of all, forego short-term fixes to create policies that address long-term challenges.
Canada has been slow in developing its own strategic culture. For much the 20th century our geographic location and abundance of natural resources insulated us from the rest of the world. When major threats to our way of life did emerge we benefited from living beside the largest fire station in human history which we fought alongside in two World Wars, Korea and the Cold War.
In recent decades, two factors helped Canada create a home-grown strategic culture: a secessionist movement in Quebec and the challenge of sustaining a high standard of living with a small population in an era of globalization.
As debilitating as it seemed at the time, the threat of Quebec separation forced the county to confront its internal entropy and build the consensus necessary to patriate the Constitution (albeit imperfectly) and enshrine the Charter. Then, in the 1990s, in response to the pressures of globalization, Ottawa enacted painful but necessary long-term policies to reduce the federal debt and invest in education and research. Despite what was, at times, uninspired leadership and the near miss of the 1995 referendum, Canada benefited from having a series of well defined national goals (e.g. unity, fiscal responsibility and innovation).
Fast forward to today and our greatest challenge is increasingly the absence of any pressing issue(s) facing Canada. As the threat of Quebec separatism has receded and commodity prices soared, no pressing impetus exists to help Canada renew its strategic culture and get about the work of allocating scarce human and material resources to pursue well-defined "national" goals or projects.
Find a way for Quebec to sign the Constitution Act? Confront the systemic failure of regional income assistance programs? Provide free post secondary education to qualified high school graduates? Rationalize our immigration policies? Forget it. For a federal government awash in surpluses, it's easier to throw money at short-term fixes and sustain the status quo rather than build a stronger and more efficient federation. Case in point: less than a quarter of the spending in the last federal budget was on long-term investments (e.g. infrastructure, research and education) – the lowest ratio to total budget expenditures in over a decade.
Without a strategic culture born of shared challenges and equipped to advance common national goals, Canada risks becoming a shadow of its former self; a collection of disparate regions, interests and groups all bickering over the unearned spoils of a resource-based economy destined eventually to go bust.
Right now Canadians, unlike Chinese and Americans, and a host of other more powerful countries, have the material wealth and room to manoeuvre to renew a strategic vision for the country's future. Do we, for instance, want to be known as the first G8 nation to have a "green" economy? Should we extend our efforts in Afghanistan and become the world's leader in rebuilding failed states? Or, it is time to finally get serious about using our present-day prosperity to build a knowledge-based economy for when commodity prices go into a tailspin?
We need to anticipate now the issues that will shape our future – the raison d'etre of our Canada in 2020 initiative – and set about developing national priorities and goals to manage the challenges that lie ahead. Hard-won experience tells us that to tarry too long in the safe and comfortable present is a luxury we cannot long afford.
I'll be posting a new essay from this project each day along with a brief bio of the author.
If you would like to share your vision of Canada in 2020 follow the link and have your say.
Thursday, August 03, 2006
V for vacillate
I watched V for Vendetta again today. I saw it when it came out in theaters and was moved by the notion that people could still stand together and take back what is rightfully theirs. It reminded me of my previous post when I was talking about the power of individuals and movements. I posted a link to a video concerning the situation in Palestine and today I'd like to post another. I think its important to look at different sides to a situation and make up our own mind. One should never simply follow the 'party line' as it where. In such an effort I provide you with this video concerning the happenings in Palestine. I found it quite interesting. Of course it in no way provides any comprehensive sense of what is happening there much like the other video did not but it might be another piece of the puzzle.
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With all the brouhaha surrounding the recent actions of one Mel Gibson I would like to share the the following clip from the Daily Show. Please pay attention to the final seconds of the piece when the Fox News commentator is speaking off air. For once I think I can clearly say I agree with a commentator on Fox News.
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With all the brouhaha surrounding the recent actions of one Mel Gibson I would like to share the the following clip from the Daily Show. Please pay attention to the final seconds of the piece when the Fox News commentator is speaking off air. For once I think I can clearly say I agree with a commentator on Fox News.
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