Like it or loathe it, the government has proved itself substantial on many fronts: reducing child poverty with a targeted benefit and extending affordable childcare across the country, introducing and successfully defending a world-leading approach to carbon pricing, hammering out a new funding agreement for health care, renewing the free trade agreement in the face of an erratic American presidency, and steering the country through a once in a century pandemic.

Yes, there have been failures, delays and missteps. Pharmacare and electoral reform are broken promises. The longstanding consensus on ambitious immigration quotas is straining against a deepening housing crisis. The carbon pricing pause is a genuine self-own.

What’s missing, however, is not principally a lack of policy ambition but a lack of cultural imagination — of the kind that pulls communities and people together.

Despite the promise of sunny ways, the government’s nine years have passed with few uplifting or unifying cultural touchstones.

Of course, no Prime Minister chooses their time, and Trudeau’s tenure has been marked by many calamities: from the pandemic to the slow-to-come recognition of unmarked graves at residential schools in many parts of the country, to harrowing wildfires that first burned Fort McMurray, then Lytton before blackening skies across the country this summer.

Whether by disinclination or in part because of these events, there have been few inventive, generous moments that have helped Canadians connect with one another and see themselves in a new and positive light.

After all, Canada is the country that in 1967 showed the world how transformative a major event like a Centennial can be. Yet, the government’s lackluster Canada150 celebrations passed without any lasting memory or impact.

Despite initially naming himself Youth Minister and establishing the Canada Service Corps to give young people a chance to explore the country and serve communities, at most just 5,000 people — in a country with more than 7 million 15-29-year-olds — participate in its programs each year.

Canada’s prized and internationally admired citizenship ceremonies have begun migrating online — as though a mouse-click ‘virtual attestation’ can replace the memories and goodwill that flow from the thousands of community events and oath-swearing ceremonies that take place each year.

Incredibly, for almost a decade major new sports centres and cultural venues have gone unbuilt. Even the Prime Minister’s residence, 24 Sussex, has been left to rot.

This stands in contrast to the cultural ambition of the Prime Minister’s father, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, who along with Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson before him, gave Canadians nothing less than a new anthem, flag and national honours system alongside dozens of new cultural programs and institutions.

It’s too easy to say this was simply the spirit of the times. But in a country as vast as Canada, we will always need to create both iconography and opportunities that supersede our geography so that we can share experiences that kindle pride, belonging and optimism.

One moment that did stir Canadian hearts came during the early days of the Syrian refugee response when more than 100,000 Canadians volunteered to help newcomers escape their war-torn country. At its height, Toronto Pearson reopened its infield terminal to help handle daily flights. The Prime Minister and other dignitaries — including opposition MPs — welcomed refugees as their children got fitted with snowsuits alongside the other necessities of life in Canada.

Here was a moment that brought a purposeful culture — in the form of mass volunteerism — and policy together, and which illustrates what’s possible when governments support the capabilities of publics to do big things.

This was also the lesson of the 25,000 volunteers who ultimately brought the 2010 Vancouver Olympics to life, and the lesson we recite each fall as four million Canadians lace up their sneakers to support the Terry Fox Foundation.

Purposeful and participatory, not passive and remote: this is the style of a high energy, popular politics that brings people together and provides an antidote to the belief that strangers can no longer find common ground or that good policies are all a country needs.

***

About the author:

Peter MacLeod is the principal of MASS LBP, a democracy organization based in Toronto.

The post Trudeau Government: substance only gets you so far appeared first on Toronto Guardian.

So I rarely voted. And regardless of which party was in power in what jurisdiction, it usually seemed to me that scandals and dishonesty, half-truths and deliberately misleading doublespeak were the consistent order of business for governments and politicians.

I now realize, to my considerable embarrassment, and notwithstanding my arguably justified cynicism, that I was wrong to not vote. More importantly, I know how I was able to be so ignorant with impunity: my indifference was a product of my immense privilege. To borrow a phrase from the late John Kenneth Galbraith’s wonderful 1992 book, I am part of the culture of contentment.

It is now, and has always been, completely safe for me to allow the status quo to continue, quite irrespective of who is or was governing. My privilege is secure as a white male professional. I can continue to thrive if my taxes go up. I will continue to prosper if social programs are cut, and my taxes go down.

I have realized though, shamefully late in the game, that it’s not about me. It’s not about any of us privileged, pampered, white, upper-middle class men who worry about how much taxes we pay, or about interest rates, markets, and the threat to our way of life posed by “immigrants.”

It’s about our children, to be sure, but even they for the most part have little to worry about, except inasmuch as our excesses and those of the generations before us (who at least didn’t know better) have imperilled the planet we will bequeath them.

But mostly it’s about all the people who haven’t been so lucky, who perhaps chose their parents less carefully, or who elected to be born in more tumultuous parts of the world. It’s about the countless millions on the planet, both in North America and abroad, who, like our ancestors before us, need to start over, or in some cases simply start, who deserve a chance to grab the ring that most North Americans had handed to us, or at any rate placed close enough that we need only reach a bit for it.

In America, Trump debases the very concept of democracy, not the least by maligning the media, thus undermining the informed citizenry that is a pillar of a working republic. In Alberta, the newly formed United Conservative Party is being led by a fear-mongering putative Christian who is trying vainly and loudly to take Alberta back a few decades; to Leduc in the 1950s, when air was clean, sex was dirty, and money talked. In Ontario, an oafish conservative boor has been forced underground lest his presence contaminate and scuttle the national campaign of Andrew Scheer’s deliberately no longer progressive Conservative Party of Canada. Mr. Scheer, whose Christian zealotry rivals that of Mr. Kenney, appears to be trying to out-do his predecessor and some say puppet master, Stephen Harper. Andrew Scheer genuinely seems to believe we can make Canada great again by cutting billions in spending, and mumbles with his fingers crossed that the conservative wet-dream of a balanced budget can be achieved without more taxes. Although the emboldened so-called conservatives in Canada, like Trump and his quislings, would have us fear “liberals,” fear deficits, fear our neighbours, and fear the “other,” I am afraid of something worse. I am afraid that if we don’t soon appreciate the failure of trickle-down neo-conservativism, the lovely but demonstrably false myth that self-serving rugged individualism will yield a cohesive and compassionate social fabric, we will pay, or actually, our children will pay. Their privilege will no longer protect them. The I hear a rumbling, and it’s the pounding of fists on the windows of our air-conditioned limousines. It’s the disenfranchised multitudes, alienated by the policies that protect us and disempower them, as they grow in number and frustration, in the hot dirty waste from our production, our progress.

My biases are clear: raise my taxes if it will help, but leave more oil in the ground, negotiate a fair price for the land and resources we’ve stolen, and welcome others to this broad great continent, not as temporary workers by means of whom to keep costs down, but as builders of a future, a future that can, if we let it, if we are willing to pay for it, be as bright as that delivered by and to our grandparents and their parents, when they arrived anew.

Vote. If you’re tempted to stay home, don’t, but vote so others may enjoy that which too many of us take for granted. Staying home is not a protest, it’s a privileged washing of hands. Vote like it matters, because it does.

The Elections Canada website has a lot of info for voters.

Find Out About Candidates | Ways To Vote | Voting Away From Home | Accessible Voting | Check If You Are Registered

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