"Canadians recognize the challenges." and "Canadians have already shown they’re willing to accept difficult truths."
Please. Where is the evidence for these claims? As far as I can tell the ONLY challenge Canadians are prepared to recognize is Trump and the collective response to his BS suggests the entire country is on SSRIs. We now have 20 months (and counting!!) of sitting on our collective asses fretting about Trump while the house that is Canada continues to rot. It's as if Trump has given the populace an excuse to do SFA about this place. I am already looking forward to next spring's announcement of an upcoming meeting between the PM and Premiers to discuss interprovincial trade barriers - followed by nothing.
I wish it were so. But in an oligarchy/aristocracy which Canada has effectively been since the days the white colonialists arrived, the mechanisms for change are either very few or non existent.
Some elements which would help would be eliminating the forced French language education of a fifth of the Canadian population. By effectively preventing a large segment of the population from learning the language of free markets you reduce their opportunities to improve themselves and effectively create a lower caste of workers who have limited opportunities outside the confines of the “Laurentian plantation” and must look to their superiors to survive.
Eliminating the power of the political party system which with the current system of having centralized candidate approvals by the party whose interest in kowtowing to their party establishment results in choices between bland individuals with little to choose from. The presence of 75 percent government subsidization of political contributions reinforces this inertia.
With the suppression of free speech embodied in vaguely defined hate speech legislation and de facto censorship by compromised mass media, controls on electronic media, etc , not to mention the unseemly haste to disarm the Canadian population, I despair to see how any consensus on a way forward that doesn’t preserve the power of Canada’s current oligarchy.
The status of French in Canada is perhaps unique in the entire world. We expend untold financial and cultural resources propping up what would otherwise be, let's face it, a de facto dead language in North America, ostensibly so that a tiny minority can stubbornly refuse to (or not have the opportunity to) learn a word of English so long as their first language is French. As you point out, this has the effect of keeping these people uncompetitive in the general market and beholden to government in a number of ways.
This has also mutated into a means of keeping the country run by a bilingual elite which reside almost exclusively in Montreal and Ottawa, based on an ability conferred by geography far more often than talent or even desire. It promotes a characteristic - bilingualism - that for any other language would be a minor piece of personal history and slight situational advantage, into something that can carry your entire career without any other particular skills. No wonder it is held so sacred by those so advantaged. Madness.
Bilingualism and / or biculturalism is central to the founding of our country. It's not some add-on concession to the French. A quick check shows that 13% of quebecers are anglophone and 50% are bilingual.
The country was founded on a lie. French is only regionally important. That is indisputable fact. Trying to engineer the entire country into a Trudeaupian ideal is not only doomed to fail, but also a pointless distraction. Provinces that want to promote French are free to do so. They should also bear the full cost of detaching from global innovation.
Yeah, and French immersion programmes are very popular right across the country, not only because learning a second language makes you smarter, but because parents recognize that learning French increases your opportunities and exposes you to all that another culture has to offer.
All excellent reasons, beside it being foundational to our country, to learn and promote the French language.
The main attraction of French immersion is that it acts as publically funded private school: no special education students, smaller class sizes and students from generally more privileged demographics
I've met a shocking number of people who went through French immersion who claim to have no functional proficiency as an adult. It's very hard to keep much less gain proficiency in a language that is totally irrelevant to your daily life.
If any government ever wanted a blank cheque to bring in wholesale structural reforms to the Canadian economy and way of doing things, they have it now. Any objections, just say "Orange Man Bad" and you are absolved of everything.
Carney can use this rare leverage to remove anti-development laws, remove First Nations defacto veto powers, actually build pipelines and mines, reform the tax codes, and build the military. These changes will bring in way more investments than any investment conference ever would.
OR, he could simply respond with retaliatory tariffs and industry specific bailouts.
However, in the absence of a suggestion as to what society can do in conjunction with politicians and public servants to bring about the reversal of the trends you've identified, I'm afraid the article left me feeling little but despair.
Respectfully, a general goal needs to be articulated. Say, for example, aim to:
* lead in the exploration of Mars, or
* become more deeply integrated with countries in sub-Saharan Africa over the next decade, in order to take advantage of promising demographic and economic trends there, or
* build a high-speed rail network that links all of its major cities, from Halifax to Vancouver, by 2060.
If not these, perhaps we could aim to:
* greatly boost original and leading edge research and development in the medical, biotech and pharmaceutical sectors, with a view to creating effective treatments for major illnesses, including Malaria, Dengue Fever, Ebola, Zika, and degenerative neurological diseases, or
* lead in the development of "green tech" in the mining sector, or
* build capacity in the field of nuclear fusion.
Finally, we could consider how to exploit things that Canada has and which need to be taken up the value chain. For example, we could seek to use our vast forestry resources to build top-quality, yet affordable pre-fabricated housing for domestic use and for global export.
The only impediment to Canada's potential would be to indulge in the usual Canadian tendency to worry about "the risks" of doing bold things, coming up with outrageous ideas and then doing what's necessary to make them a reality.
Not our strong suit, but what better time to change the paradigm than now.
Just as comfort made us complacent, I think being uncomfortable will inevitably inspire people too. Not merely in the exciting, possibility-opening sense, or even because necessity forces innovation, but because people will take more chances when the calculus starts to favour “may as well”, when they have less to lose and more to gain from taking one.
My concern is how much those who still have plenty to preserve will be able to block those increasingly inclined to take that chance.
We all know some of that is generational. Our ability to progress has been limited not only by demographic outflanking, but, I think, by kindness too, because those standing in the way are, by and large, our parents. We’re understandably reluctant to upset them, but there’s a limit to how much of our own future we can sacrifice to preserve their expectation of abundance, particularly when most would still be nowhere near actual hardship, even with quite a bit less.
But it’s of course broader than that, too. The system we’ve been working within for too long simply made complacency remarkably rewarding. You could get rich off rising assets without producing anything, businesses could prosper in relatively easy markets or by running the clock on government work, and those same governments could administer this decline without paying much of a political price for it. I think we underestimate how unusual it is for someone not to become complacent when their circumstances simply don’t demand anything else. Conversely, I’m not sure hard times make people stronger so much as make taking a chance more rational when the comfortable option stops being particularly comfortable.
Luckily (in a way), this really isn’t a moment when we can resist change in the hope of preserving that old normal. The change is already happening, and it won’t be preserved no matter what we do. The question is how much of our resources we waste coddling those who benefited from the old bargain and aren’t ready to admit it isn’t coming back, or whether we speed up that realization and make sure the incentives now run the other way.
I think that means people and institutions that refuse to adapt actually need to feel some consequences for refusing to. We can’t keep rewarding preservation while asking the people trying to build something new to absorb all the risk.
That will likely require changing our social framing. People who feel they’re merely enjoying what they earned, or businesses merely operating as they always have, probably don’t feel like they’re doing anything wrong. But we’re approaching, if not already beyond, the point where demanding that the country protect your expectations at the expense of what it needs to become, and what it needs to do to make sure no one can threaten us quite so easily again, starts to look not just complacent, but a little unpatriotic.
If this really is a nation-building moment, patriotism can’t just mean an admittedly heartening collective freakout when we’re threatened. It has to mean being willing to change with the country, compete for it, build something for it, and sometimes accept less from it, so we can come out of this with something better than what we went in with.
If Carney were honest about the trade dispute requiring war like mobilization, he would :
-expedite trade agreements with Pacific rim countries to provide preferred access to oil, LNG, potash, critical minerals and agriculture
-remove roadblocks to building export infrastructure (pipelines, ports, roads, rail), which would likley involve time boxing environmental reviews and consultations to a few months and exercising Parliamentary Supremacy to subvert lawsuits and the Supreme Court
-critical minerals do not provide leverage if they are in the ground. As above, the Feds need to remove roadblocks to get mines up and running in 4 or 5 years
-redirect federal resources to dividing the TCH through BC, upgrading all roads leading to the Port of Vancouver to limited access and grade separating rail lines such that port becomes one of the world's most efficient. The same needs to be done for transportation to the Ring of Fire
-reforming Federal labor law that allows unions to get in the way of operating the world's most efficient transportation network
-changes in tax laws, government funding and legal liability to significantly diminish the ability for activist groups to obstruct. The Harper government had many ideas back in the day
-most of all, a change in political messaging to label obstructionist NGOs, activist groups, unions, academics, lawyers, politicians and government relations firms as bad Canadians
I hope Mr. Carney reads this piece and recognizes his limited communucation anf policy are drift, as you described.
His best and immediate solution is to rescind many of the green, anti-oil and anti-business regulations passed by his predecessor.. Let our citizens and businesses achieve and succeed.
"Canadians recognize the challenges." and "Canadians have already shown they’re willing to accept difficult truths."
Please. Where is the evidence for these claims? As far as I can tell the ONLY challenge Canadians are prepared to recognize is Trump and the collective response to his BS suggests the entire country is on SSRIs. We now have 20 months (and counting!!) of sitting on our collective asses fretting about Trump while the house that is Canada continues to rot. It's as if Trump has given the populace an excuse to do SFA about this place. I am already looking forward to next spring's announcement of an upcoming meeting between the PM and Premiers to discuss interprovincial trade barriers - followed by nothing.
I wish it were so. But in an oligarchy/aristocracy which Canada has effectively been since the days the white colonialists arrived, the mechanisms for change are either very few or non existent.
Some elements which would help would be eliminating the forced French language education of a fifth of the Canadian population. By effectively preventing a large segment of the population from learning the language of free markets you reduce their opportunities to improve themselves and effectively create a lower caste of workers who have limited opportunities outside the confines of the “Laurentian plantation” and must look to their superiors to survive.
Eliminating the power of the political party system which with the current system of having centralized candidate approvals by the party whose interest in kowtowing to their party establishment results in choices between bland individuals with little to choose from. The presence of 75 percent government subsidization of political contributions reinforces this inertia.
With the suppression of free speech embodied in vaguely defined hate speech legislation and de facto censorship by compromised mass media, controls on electronic media, etc , not to mention the unseemly haste to disarm the Canadian population, I despair to see how any consensus on a way forward that doesn’t preserve the power of Canada’s current oligarchy.
The status of French in Canada is perhaps unique in the entire world. We expend untold financial and cultural resources propping up what would otherwise be, let's face it, a de facto dead language in North America, ostensibly so that a tiny minority can stubbornly refuse to (or not have the opportunity to) learn a word of English so long as their first language is French. As you point out, this has the effect of keeping these people uncompetitive in the general market and beholden to government in a number of ways.
This has also mutated into a means of keeping the country run by a bilingual elite which reside almost exclusively in Montreal and Ottawa, based on an ability conferred by geography far more often than talent or even desire. It promotes a characteristic - bilingualism - that for any other language would be a minor piece of personal history and slight situational advantage, into something that can carry your entire career without any other particular skills. No wonder it is held so sacred by those so advantaged. Madness.
Bilingualism and / or biculturalism is central to the founding of our country. It's not some add-on concession to the French. A quick check shows that 13% of quebecers are anglophone and 50% are bilingual.
The country was founded on a lie. French is only regionally important. That is indisputable fact. Trying to engineer the entire country into a Trudeaupian ideal is not only doomed to fail, but also a pointless distraction. Provinces that want to promote French are free to do so. They should also bear the full cost of detaching from global innovation.
Yeah, and French immersion programmes are very popular right across the country, not only because learning a second language makes you smarter, but because parents recognize that learning French increases your opportunities and exposes you to all that another culture has to offer.
All excellent reasons, beside it being foundational to our country, to learn and promote the French language.
The main attraction of French immersion is that it acts as publically funded private school: no special education students, smaller class sizes and students from generally more privileged demographics
Oh it's so easy, just learn, duh.
I've met a shocking number of people who went through French immersion who claim to have no functional proficiency as an adult. It's very hard to keep much less gain proficiency in a language that is totally irrelevant to your daily life.
If any government ever wanted a blank cheque to bring in wholesale structural reforms to the Canadian economy and way of doing things, they have it now. Any objections, just say "Orange Man Bad" and you are absolved of everything.
Carney can use this rare leverage to remove anti-development laws, remove First Nations defacto veto powers, actually build pipelines and mines, reform the tax codes, and build the military. These changes will bring in way more investments than any investment conference ever would.
OR, he could simply respond with retaliatory tariffs and industry specific bailouts.
I think we all know which way this is going.
This was a good read.
However, in the absence of a suggestion as to what society can do in conjunction with politicians and public servants to bring about the reversal of the trends you've identified, I'm afraid the article left me feeling little but despair.
Respectfully, a general goal needs to be articulated. Say, for example, aim to:
* lead in the exploration of Mars, or
* become more deeply integrated with countries in sub-Saharan Africa over the next decade, in order to take advantage of promising demographic and economic trends there, or
* build a high-speed rail network that links all of its major cities, from Halifax to Vancouver, by 2060.
If not these, perhaps we could aim to:
* greatly boost original and leading edge research and development in the medical, biotech and pharmaceutical sectors, with a view to creating effective treatments for major illnesses, including Malaria, Dengue Fever, Ebola, Zika, and degenerative neurological diseases, or
* lead in the development of "green tech" in the mining sector, or
* build capacity in the field of nuclear fusion.
Finally, we could consider how to exploit things that Canada has and which need to be taken up the value chain. For example, we could seek to use our vast forestry resources to build top-quality, yet affordable pre-fabricated housing for domestic use and for global export.
The only impediment to Canada's potential would be to indulge in the usual Canadian tendency to worry about "the risks" of doing bold things, coming up with outrageous ideas and then doing what's necessary to make them a reality.
Not our strong suit, but what better time to change the paradigm than now.
If we could just get real transparency from our elected officials, that would be a huge step in the right direction.
Amen, brother. Now let's see if inertia and malfeasance allow a beautiful crisis to go to waste.
Just as comfort made us complacent, I think being uncomfortable will inevitably inspire people too. Not merely in the exciting, possibility-opening sense, or even because necessity forces innovation, but because people will take more chances when the calculus starts to favour “may as well”, when they have less to lose and more to gain from taking one.
My concern is how much those who still have plenty to preserve will be able to block those increasingly inclined to take that chance.
We all know some of that is generational. Our ability to progress has been limited not only by demographic outflanking, but, I think, by kindness too, because those standing in the way are, by and large, our parents. We’re understandably reluctant to upset them, but there’s a limit to how much of our own future we can sacrifice to preserve their expectation of abundance, particularly when most would still be nowhere near actual hardship, even with quite a bit less.
But it’s of course broader than that, too. The system we’ve been working within for too long simply made complacency remarkably rewarding. You could get rich off rising assets without producing anything, businesses could prosper in relatively easy markets or by running the clock on government work, and those same governments could administer this decline without paying much of a political price for it. I think we underestimate how unusual it is for someone not to become complacent when their circumstances simply don’t demand anything else. Conversely, I’m not sure hard times make people stronger so much as make taking a chance more rational when the comfortable option stops being particularly comfortable.
Luckily (in a way), this really isn’t a moment when we can resist change in the hope of preserving that old normal. The change is already happening, and it won’t be preserved no matter what we do. The question is how much of our resources we waste coddling those who benefited from the old bargain and aren’t ready to admit it isn’t coming back, or whether we speed up that realization and make sure the incentives now run the other way.
I think that means people and institutions that refuse to adapt actually need to feel some consequences for refusing to. We can’t keep rewarding preservation while asking the people trying to build something new to absorb all the risk.
That will likely require changing our social framing. People who feel they’re merely enjoying what they earned, or businesses merely operating as they always have, probably don’t feel like they’re doing anything wrong. But we’re approaching, if not already beyond, the point where demanding that the country protect your expectations at the expense of what it needs to become, and what it needs to do to make sure no one can threaten us quite so easily again, starts to look not just complacent, but a little unpatriotic.
If this really is a nation-building moment, patriotism can’t just mean an admittedly heartening collective freakout when we’re threatened. It has to mean being willing to change with the country, compete for it, build something for it, and sometimes accept less from it, so we can come out of this with something better than what we went in with.
If Carney were honest about the trade dispute requiring war like mobilization, he would :
-expedite trade agreements with Pacific rim countries to provide preferred access to oil, LNG, potash, critical minerals and agriculture
-remove roadblocks to building export infrastructure (pipelines, ports, roads, rail), which would likley involve time boxing environmental reviews and consultations to a few months and exercising Parliamentary Supremacy to subvert lawsuits and the Supreme Court
-critical minerals do not provide leverage if they are in the ground. As above, the Feds need to remove roadblocks to get mines up and running in 4 or 5 years
-redirect federal resources to dividing the TCH through BC, upgrading all roads leading to the Port of Vancouver to limited access and grade separating rail lines such that port becomes one of the world's most efficient. The same needs to be done for transportation to the Ring of Fire
-reforming Federal labor law that allows unions to get in the way of operating the world's most efficient transportation network
-changes in tax laws, government funding and legal liability to significantly diminish the ability for activist groups to obstruct. The Harper government had many ideas back in the day
-most of all, a change in political messaging to label obstructionist NGOs, activist groups, unions, academics, lawyers, politicians and government relations firms as bad Canadians
I can't disagree with any of this piece. Thank you.
I hope Mr. Carney reads this piece and recognizes his limited communucation anf policy are drift, as you described.
His best and immediate solution is to rescind many of the green, anti-oil and anti-business regulations passed by his predecessor.. Let our citizens and businesses achieve and succeed.
Well said Mike, thank you!!