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COMMENTARY
October 14, 2009
The regime
Good morning, stupid Laurentian Canadians.The appellation is not mine, but rather lifted from the works of Barry Cooper, a dear friend in Alberta, whose latest book is entitled, It's the Regime, Stupid! -- hence the adjective. In addition to the exclamation point, the title includes an asterisk on "regime," which is then usefully defined as "(a) a regular course of action, or a settled way of doing things; (b) a form of government." The word "Laurentian" is not so conveniently defined, but I think we all know what Cooper (who teaches political science at the University of Calgary) means by it. He means us -- the denizens of Ontario and Quebec, or "Central Canada" -- though of course we also enjoy the geological allusion to a formation of gneissic granite. Looked at from another angle, we are the curious aggregate of "two founding cultures" -- the combination of French Canadian nationalist whining and extortion, with the old English Canadian Loyalist unction and anti-American malice, in a kleptomanic welfare state -- fuelled by revenue appropriated from Western Canadian resources. This is not exactly my way of looking at post-war Canada, and perhaps an over-simplification of Cooper's, but there's a lot of truth in it all the same. A "regime," which we may fairly associate with the Liberal party (though spread through other parties by such mechanisms as the "sacred trust" of our dysfunctional medicare system), has embedded itself in Canadian life, in the form of a self-interested and self-serving federal bureaucracy of extraordinary size. The notion that Canada consists centrally of ourselves -- the Laurentianistas -- plus imperial extensions east, north, and west, would come very close to being the irritant that has inspired Cooper to produce his string of pearls on Canadian politics, the most memorable of which before the book now published was entitled, Deconfederation (1991), co-written with David Bercuson. It was a book that proposed to call Quebec's separatist bluff, by sketching out the benefits to the Rest of Canada over and above the transaction costs, if Quebec would only leave. The subtitle of It's the Regime, Stupid! -- "A Report from the Cowboy West on Why Stephen Harper Matters" -- is somewhat misleading. The book argues, in fact very elegantly, that our settled regime has become so irrelevant to the nature of Canada and its constituent regions, that it not only must change, but is changing. Harper's government is more symptom than cause. My own view, that Harper's political strategy is simply to remain in power for as long as possible, governing with as much common sense as circumstances will allow, until the hegemony of the Liberal party recedes into memory, would probably answer to Cooper's requirements. Harper is a transitional figure; not the new regime but the man who allows one to emerge over time. He is astute in his grasp of his own limitations. In particular, he must stay in power until the threat has passed of the Liberals replacing their old divide-and-conquer "national unity" fraud, with a new divide-and-conquer environmentalist fraud. The global warming hysteria -- seized upon by bureaucrats all over the world as the means to advance and consolidate the Nanny State -- is itself receding. We must wait it out. But although the Canadian regime may eventually change, by acquiring a less "Laurentian" flavour as the country's centre of economic gravity moves ever west, Cooper's book does not convince me it can cease to be self-serving. He is a scholar, after all -- among the most accomplished in his field. But as a scholar his focus of attention is necessarily on the historical past. The term "The Embedded State" comes down to us from the title of a paper by Alan Cairns, one of Cooper's several impressive teachers in earlier life at the University of British Columbia. It refers to the scale of the modern state, which has come to eat as much as half of the economy. From its very size it becomes the principal source of demand for new government services. It is the elephant in the room of our little lives. The great transformation, in Canada as throughout the west since the Second World War, has been from the old arrangement in which a relatively small civil service served the people, under the direction of their elected government, to the new one in which the people exist chiefly to serve a civil service grown vastly too large for elected officials to oversee. The people themselves have adapted to its way of doing business and, in the course of satisfying the ever-growing bureaucratic demands of government at all levels, "civil society" (the Hegelian term for social institutions neither governmental nor familial) has also become bureaucratized. To paraphrase the late Pierre Trudeau, we are sleeping with an elephant, and no matter how friendly and even-tempered the beast, we are affected by its every twitch and grunt. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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