Halfway There

When many Canadians read about the crib death of the global economy that sprang to life after the Cold War, they are relieved that Barack Obama is president of the United States. They feel better about this country’s prospects, if only because of the important changes he is making next door. At home, we can’t even democratize the Senate. This state of paralysis seems increasingly intolerable; political change may be hard in Canada, but only yesterday it was impossible in America.

For Canadians, the most painful aspect of John Ibbitson’s latest book, Open and Shut: Why America Has Barack Obama and Canada Has Stephen Harper is his enthusiasm, not for Obama, but for a country that would attract to national politics such an exceptional talent in the first place. By highlighting America’s reformist tradition, Ibbitson shames us to do better. For that alone this book is worthwhile. Too often, simply not acting like Americans in public policy, electioneering and diplomacy has been good enough.

Ibbitson sees America “open” in the grass-roots triumph of a gifted Chicagoan and Canada “shut” in the grudging re-election of a schemer, toiling in a capital of wary insiders. However, by fixing exclusively on contemporary machinations between Democrats and Republicans and between Liberals and Conservatives, he exaggerates the morbidity of our politics and understates the tenacity of the status quo in both. Both Pierre Trudeau and Stephen Harper established their reputations in protest politics. We have universal health insurance because of the power of the CCF-NDP, not noblesse oblige. Ibbitson finds it emblematic that Harper is “an overweight economist” and not Obama in every obvious respect. Yet both are tireless political calculators, long-shot outsiders who made a science of understanding how power is acquired and squandered.

Ibbitson’s grievance might have been more precisely stated if he had subtitled his book “After three tries, why hasn’t a reformer under 50 made it to the last ballot of a Liberal leadership convention?” His answer is relatively all-encompassing:

But, despite his edgy pen, Ibbitson’s proposals to enliven Canadian politics and better secure the continent are impeccably mainstream.

He deflates the fantastical and recurrent notion that Canadian trade diversification strategies could effectively compensate for a robust American market. Canadian exporters earn about ten times more from trade with the United States than with the United Kingdom and the euro currency area, combined. Being a fraction less reliant is a distinction without a difference. He strenuously advances partnerships with the United States on security, climate change and external tariffs, echoing recommendations of various professional border watchers. Then he invites Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff to cut from his list of ideas whatever is “politically impossible.”

Inspired by Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke Ibbitson employs the format of the political pamphlet, which he sees as the last refuge of dissent. In his conclusion, he invites readers to offer their ideas, introducing an online coffee house from which he will try “to keep the crazies out.”

The pamphleteer cannot worry too much about whom he or she stirs up. While Ibbitson is a fine writer, he is compelled to waltz with ideas rather than risk seriously offending. Classic journalism may be the rough draft of recorded history, but a political pamphlet (such as Jean Monnet’s wartime call for European federation, or George Grant’s nationalist lament for Canada) must stand on its own. It is not necessarily useful to those in power. It does not wait for encouragement from a strong neighbour or good polling. Its overriding intention is to make people see. For Ibbitson, what readers must see is his contention that “Canada needs to strengthen its national government and renew its political culture by borrowing from some of the better angels of the American political nature.”

He offers a way to communicate to power, but no disruptive reason to change. Indeed, he submits to the official Canadian myth: the story of the moderate who accommodated French Canadians and all others while avoiding the rabid traps of American individualism.

Ibbitson can imagine an array of American-style changes in Canada, only because we already think approximately like them and will act approximately like Americans the longer we do politics on this continent. In fact, 2008 may best be remembered for the Canadians who cared—and spent time and money seeing to it—that the right guy was president, and for that luminous republican moment when we recoiled at the possibility that the governor general would choose our leader.

But nothing will come of last year’s excitement without transformative ideas to exploit it; there is no slippery slope for us or manifest destiny for America. Rather than an aide-mémoire to our leaders, Ibbitson could have roused federalists and classic liberals poorly represented in both our national parties. He repeats the worn hope that “paranoia” and “mindset” in bureaucracy are the problem. He proposes we stand “back-to-back” with Americans in a series of discrete alliances. But he cannot surrender an iota of Canadian independence because he does not wish to take to its logical conclusion his belief that Canada has failed “as a nation state,” while at the same time he can’t bring himself to make the alliance between Canada and the U.S. truly democratic.

Whether about subsidies, carbon permits, public procurement or security services, solidarity on policy goals cannot obviate conflicting interests. Ultimately, only elections keep government responsive and the exercise of power legitimate. So, the border, with passports, will stand as long as America is hated in many quarters and each country’s security service is outside the reach of the other’s electorate. What ought to bring liberal democrats in both countries together is North America’s challenge to govern itself—and its markets—better than the competition. In this light, the border is not merely a menace to Canada. It stands as a hindrance to the full expression of North America’s two preminent cultural achievements: transcontinental federalism and the freedom of people to change their minds, their work and where they live.

Instead of simply bemoaning the dysfunction of Canada’s politics because of linguistic rifts and regional drift, why not take up the vision of the European Union? Why not consider closing the real gap between us: the absence of shared democratic accountability for the conduct of federal government? Replacing a ten-to-one bi-national alliance with a ballot-for-ballot, citizen-to-citizen federation. At the start of a fresh millennium, why not stop saying never? After all, Ibbitson makes you wonder, if Canada is a bit American, why can’t America be a bit Canadian?

We could start by offering Americans reciprocally what British citizens long enjoyed in Canada: the right to vote in either country of official residence. And while Ibbitson argues for a common security perimeter and a customs union, we could facilitate even deeper economic integration and help stabilize the currency of international trade by creating a common currency out of the U.S. dollar.

We have not reached a consensus within this country to move in such a direction. But as Ibbitson notes when surveying the growing fractures in our country and the decline in Ottawa’s impact on Canadians’ daily lives, a root cause is our “growing indifference to the idea of Canada.” It is in just such a setting that radical new change may appear.