What If Gerson Is Right? What If Government No Longer Works?

I can be pretty hard on Justin Trudeau. He does deserve credit for the good things he's done but that comes with responsibility for his lapses and willful failures. I prefer Trudeau by a country mile over the Tory party and their leadership, past and present, but that's still not enough to make me think the Liberal prime minister is doing a good job. He's not. He's doing a less worse job than I'm sure we would be getting from his Conservative adversary but that's about it.

Is it Trudeau's fault or is it a systemic failure of our politics? Probably it's some measure of both.

The final paragraph in Michael Gerson's op-ed in today's Washington Post resonates in my mind.

"It is quite possible that moderate conservatism and moderate liberalism are inadequate to explain and tame the convulsive economic and social changes of our time. Which places America’s future — uncertain, maybe unknowable — on the other side of an earthquake."

Could that hold true for Canada? Are moderate conservatism and moderate liberalism no longer adequate to the challenges that we face, "the convulsive economic and social changes of our time"? Is the future of Canada and generations to come consigned to uncertainty "on the other side of an earthquake"? In several ways that seems to be the case and that perception grows stronger with the passage of time as we see Canada, like every other nation, being overtaken by some rather dire events.

What can you say for a government in denial? Trudeau's government certainly fits that bill.  Take climate change, generally accepted as the gravest threat facing mankind.  As nations go, Canada has a much better than average chance of avoiding the very worst impacts. It's not that we're better or brighter or wiser. We're simply latitudinally blessed. We're more distant from the equator than most countries, the one with which we share a border in particular. Our land reaches further beyond the polar circle than most. We have a population density advantage. We have a natural resources advantage. So what is our government doing to ensure we maximize the benefit of our natural advantages to avert or reduce the impacts we will otherwise sustain?

A carbon tax. Really, that's it? A carbon tax. Is that the best they can do? Earlier this week I posted an item about Swedish bomb shelters. The Swedes have a network of 65,000 bomb shelters but they think they need more in this Age of Trump, enough to shelter an additional 3 million people. At first it sounded a bit funny, 65,000 bomb shelters. How many do you imagine our government built during the Cold War? A couple of dozen, maybe? But then humour gave way to wonder at the resolve the Swedish government must have had to build all those shelters in the first place. Plainly they recognized a peril and identified a response and, despite the magnitude, they went ahead and built 65,000 shelters.  Bravo Sweden.

Is the threat we're facing from climate change somehow less certain, less dire than the threat the Swedes perceived faced their people during the Cold War?  Yet little Sweden, about a third the size of our population, mustered the resources and resolve to tackle this Herculean chore. So what have we don't to address an even graver threat that remotely approaches what Sweden did to protect its citizens against Cold War threats? Obviously we haven't done much so far but what are we planning to do? Anything, nothing? No, not nothing, a carbon tax.

There is so much that can be done right now. We can assess what Canada will be like in 20, 30 and 40 years from now, new areas that may open up, low lying coastal areas that might have to be abandoned, populations displaced and needing relocation, especially in the north. We can evaluate what we may need by way of essential infrastructure, communications, transportation and power grids, that sort of thing. We can explore how the future may change ways we're governed and how we're organized and how we'll interact.   We should be identifying all of our options and opportunities and their relative merits.

These are indicative of what Gerson calls the "convulsive economic and social changes of our time" and yet it's becoming increasingly obvious that moderate liberalism and moderate conservatism are inadequate to rise to these challenges.

The worst part is that I suspect Trudeau and Scheer and Singh know they're not up to these challenges. They know that our political apparatus isn't sufficiently robust to meet our uncertain, unknowable future which could also leave us on the "other side of an earthquake."