Here comes the pendulum

My latest from the Guelph Mercury.

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My dad teaches history. I grew up in a house where discussion focused as much on the causes of the American Revolution as on the Maple Leafs; and remember, this is back when the Leafs were a professional hockey team.

My old man, an historian by instinct as much as by training, never really understood the last quarter century or so. The political and cultural values which accompanied the Liberal and liberal ascendancies of the 1990s were alien to his constitution and sour to his taste. He was Churchill at a WNBA game.

Being an acquaintance and interpreter of the past, the elder Bondy would often boil his key finding down to a handily communicable take-away for his interlocutors: there is a pendulum to history, which swings back and forth. And it’s gone too bloody far to the one side.

Well, Dad, look behind you. Your infamous pendulum has waxed to the left and now wanes back toward the middle.

It’s astonishing how increasingly friendly Canadian society is to the values under whose mantle I matured.

You’ve noticed, for one, that Canada is and has been at war for eight years now. That’s war, mark you, and not blue-helmeted peacekeeping. Though war, as such, is by no means one of the antediluvian values espoused by my father’s intellectual cohort, the recognition that war exists and that some of them are justified ends the seemingly interminable monopoly of contrary fantasies.

You’ve noticed, also, that Canadian foreign policy is now framed as an exercise in the promotion of democracy, a principled commitment to confronting terrorists and rogues, and a near-revolutionary recognition of the professionalism, utility and dignity of the armed services.

Remember the 1990s when war didn’t exist and Canadian soldiers were non grata? How long ago it seems.

Think also of the significant domestic reform which has accompanied the last half-decade or so, roughly coinciding with federal Conservative rule. A more family-friendly tax code, lower business taxes, a stiffer criminal justice system, fewer anti-American rants by federal politicians, and a left-wing whose obsession with environmentalism and foreign policy doveishness has consistently failed at the ballot box.

Of course, in democracies, things change slowly, and sometimes only at the margins. Canada remains a country whose values of tolerance, diversity, private initiative, public welfare and social orderliness remain intact; and well they should. These values are Canadian values, and they belong at the centre of our domestic order.

It’s how we think of ourselves that’s changed. From peacekeeping to war-fighting; from social justice to public safety; from multiculturalism to an unprecedented emphasis on Canadian identity.

This last represents perhaps the most profound shift. A new guide to Canadian citizenship, released last week, was drafted under the tutelage of Jason Kenney, a social traditionalist and monarchist who also happens to be one of Stephen Harper’s most trusted colleagues. The guide emphasizes Canada’s martial history, our parliamentary heritage and the responsibilities of Canadian citizenship.

The plaudits the new guide has won from commentators and the public at large signals not simply a shift in the federal government’s conceptualization of Canadian society, but Canadians’ growing affinity for such a profound re-thinking of ourselves and our country.

The fact is that things have changed over the past five or so years, and considerably. Canadians have become more patriotic and more conservative. As the population grows increasingly used to having a Conservative government with a moderately but unmistakably conservative understanding of the nation, this trend could continue to stabilize and deepen. Now noteworthy, it could become the norm.

Hear that whooshing sound, Dad?

Matt Bondy, a former member of the Guelph Mercury’s community editorial board, is a graduate student and writer living in Waterloo. He invites your correspondence at m.j.bondy@gmail.com.

Obama wrong to abandon ABM defence

My latest from the Guelph Mercury.

September 17, 2009

On Aug. 27, Polish media began reporting that the Obama administration would not pursue an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) shield for eastern Europe. Since that time, other media have confirmed Washington’s growing reluctance to see the initiative through.

An undertaking of Obama’s predecessor, president George W. Bush, the ABM program for eastern Europe would have featured a radar system in the Czech Republic and 10 missile interceptor sites in Poland. The Bush administration sought to justify the implementation of this eastern European ABM shield — which required America’s withdrawal from the ABM treaty — as necessary to defend Europe from Iranian missile attack.

Obama reportedly agreed to spike the initiative in exchange for the Russian Federation’s co-operation in securing Iran’s verifiable suspension of all military nuclear activities. This, the reasoning goes, would have undercut the need for the program in the first place, enabling the United States to achieve its security objectives without pursuing a policy antagonistic to Russia. This was all part of “resetting” — Obama’s diplomatic shibboleth — U.S.-Russian relations.

This was a mistake on the administration’s behalf, however, which leaves the U.S. weaker, eastern Europeans more vulnerable, and Iran dangerously emboldened.

First of all, Obama traded away a bargaining chip to Russia in exchange for future payment — specifically, Russia’s help in making sure Iran does not achieve a military nuclear capability. This is naiveté worthy of the Carter administration, and reveals what more hawkish security analysts suspected all along: Obama was simply searching for an excuse to abandon a project ideologically antithetical to his own views.

As a result, Iran is now no less dangerous and Russia is now no less obstructionist. In fact, the Russian Federation vigorously broadcasts its opposition to further sanctions on Iran, let alone military strikes. As a permanent, veto-wielding member of the United Nations Security Council, this all but ensures the UN no longer represents a viable platform for decisively managing Iran’s ongoing nuclear activities.

Second, Obama’s abandonment of an ABM shield for eastern Europe is precisely the wrong move at precisely the wrong time. Why? Under Obama, ABM defence for Europe makes sense. Under Bush, it didn’t.

ABM defence was always a suspicious, illogical initiative under Bush’s watch because the Bush administration would never have accepted Iranian nuclear armament in the first place. Rejecting defensive containment strategies as flaccid and dangerous, Bush instead pursued a policy of nuclear counter-proliferation in the Middle East: a forward-leaning policy of ensuring nuclear threats from rogue states never materialize.

Under Obama, however, ABM defence is logical. This defensive policy of nuclear containment fits with the current president’s less-hawkish, more-multilateral approach to international relations. Since Obama’s Washington remains unwilling to commit the U.S. to attacking Iranian nuclear or missile facilities should diplomacy fail, the abortive ABM shield would have given U.S. allies in the region an insurance policy against the Obama administration’s possible resignation to Iran’s nuclear trajectory.

Having adopted a less assertive global security strategy than his predecessor, the ABM shield was an opportunity for Obama to show strength to the international community and build confidence in his restrained and cautious foreign policy. He could have shown resolve in the face of Russian intransigence, Iranian belligerence, western European insouciance, and American war fatigue.

Not only has he lost that opportunity, but in forgoing ABM defence for eastern Europe, Obama has predicated American foreign and defence policy less on American capability, and more on Russian good will.

Not a good bet. Just ask the Poles and the Czechs.

Matthew Bondy writes on international relations and domestic politics, and is a featured commentator at PolicyNet.org, an online academic community administered by the Centre for International Governance Innovation, in Waterloo. He can be reached at m.j.bondy@gmail.com

Bush, Obama presidencies reassert, re-imagine America

My latest from the Guelph Mercury.
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July 16, 2009
Matt Bondy

As the Roman Empire careened toward destitution in the 4th century AD, Roman emperors undertook to overhaul its civil, fiscal and military methods and objectives in a grand attempt to rejuvenate the beleaguered civilization.

As Joseph Tainter, author of The Collapse of Complex Societies, put it, “the Romans responded to challenges by increasing the size and complexity of their government and army, at great expense. Fiscal weakness and exploitation of the population undermined the effort and made collapse inevitable.” It’s what Tainter calls “the Roman model” of problem-solving: a costly, centralized, government-centric and militaristic restructuring of society in the hopes of preserving the imperium’s breadth and power.

At least on the surface, there is a basic consonance between the ill-fated Roman resurgence and recent attempts by the United States — by two successive presidencies — to preserve American power.

The administration of George W. Bush took a big bite in invading Afghanistan and Iraq. Both actions were part of a militarizing metamorphosis of U.S. foreign policy in the wake of dizzying security setbacks, designed to extend American primacy by actively searching for monsters to destroy. This, surely, was much to the celestial dismay of John Quincy Adams, America’s sixth president who counselled to the contrary.

President Barack Obama’s administration, in its turn, has taken on a challenge no less daunting: the fundamental transformation of the American economy. In envisioning health care for all, gas-guzzlers for none and an economic recovery involuntarily financed by posterity, Obama and his team have decided America’s economy needs a top-down overhaul.

Both Bush and Obama have offered a profound reconceptualization of America’s place in the world and the way it functions at home, and both approaches were conceived in adversity and rooted in a feeling of vulnerability either at home or abroad.

This leads to only one certain conclusion: the status quo — globally, domestically, financially and militarily — is failing Americans. The United States is entering into its second transformative presidency, and this speaks to that country’s consciousness of the fact that a kind of civilizational Darwinism — change or die — is now the political imperative of the imperium.

But Americans, some will tell you, have been here before. The world was a grizzly place when Jimmy Carter failed on foreign policy and presided over economic catastrophe. But Americans persevered, as they always have, and soon it was morning again in America.

And, in 2001, the twin towers fell with a murderous thunder. But soon thereafter, Americans gazed not at rubble and ash, but at the sight of young Iraqis hoisting American flags in triumph because an American president re-envisioned a safer world with America in the lead.

Since Sept. 12, 2001, Americans have been on a journey of reflection, soul-searching, and existential anxiety which has continued with the Obama presidency. They hear the low groans that bespeak their nation’s economic vulnerability, and the crisp snaps that accompany the cracking of empire.

In time, the Bush and Obama presidencies will be remembered as an era in which America reasserted itself internationally and reimagined itself domestically. In the face of new security challenges and massive financial setback, Americans have twice chosen transformation over tinkering.

When the present crisis clears, Americans will have indeed succeeded, as ever, in preserving their civilization and their place at the centre of international political life. But when they do, the world — and America — will be much changed.

Matt Bondy, a former member of the Guelph Mercury’s community editorial board, is a graduate student and writer living in Waterloo. He invites your correspondence at m.j.bondy@gmail.com.

Conservatives should spend summer on ‘big think’

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My latest from the Guelph Mercury
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June 17, 2009
Matt Bondy

Michael Ignatieff is thinking. The leader of Her Majesty’s loyal Opposition presumably spent the weekend at Stornoway — sipping a dry white, I’ll bet — and pondering.

When the Stephen Harper-led Conservative government produced its economic report card this month, Ignatieff guffawed at his fellow opposition types who trashed the Tory economic update in haste. Not Ignatieff. Not the Liberal party. The Liberal leader would comb through the details of the report card and decide whether it had any red lines.

While this strategy conveys to Canadians that the Liberal caucus takes seriously its responsibility to provide the country with a measured and constructive opposition, it also frames a larger issue.

Does the Liberal party find the Conservative vision for Canada something to be tolerated between elections? Or, is it so base, so wrong-headed and backward, that no loyal opposition could conceivably suffer its ignominy?

And so we arrive at the heart of the matter: What in fact is the Conservative vision for Canada?

I dare you to splurt out a one-sentence motto or message — it’s just not possible. It’s impossible because the Tories have systematically purged their speaking notes of anything that could reasonably be construed as ideological or grand.

The Conservatives have been successful lately precisely because they promised neither to articulate nor pursue a real vision for Canada.

A few years ago, it was good strategy.

In 2004, and even more so in 2006, the Conservative appeal was simple. “We know you don’t love us” they might have said, “but come on. Surely that lot over there needs a time out. We’ll just take the wheel while they nap — we’ve got the directions there on the dash. We promise there’ll be no surprises.”

That approach worked whilst an exhausted Liberal party slipped miserably into a restless slumber under the premiership of Paul Martin. It even continued to work while Stéphane Dion provided an opposition so fickle and feckless as to not justify any potentially risky expansion on the Conservative vision in 2008.

But things have changed now, and the Conservatives must find a drawing board.

Ignatieff is tough, brilliant, appealing, moderate and hungry. The Liberals, Ignatieff will say, are the party of egalitarianism, compassion, balanced budgets and Canadian independence. The Conservatives, he’ll add, are the party of the wealthy. They’re callous to the plight of ordinary Canadians, and they’re bad economic managers. Just look at the deficits, he’ll charge.

Suddenly, the Conservative party messaging strategy of the last five years falls short. Suddenly, claiming to be minimally competent and being in no way different from the Liberal status quo fails to be either convincing or sufficient.

And that is why right now — this summer — is the right time for a regeneration of the Conservative party. Now is the time for Harper, his key cabinet colleagues, and all the smart and honourable advisers they can find to step back and do a “big think.”

After all, Sir John A. Macdonald won because his patriotic nation-building policies resonated with Canadians. Sir Robert Borden won because he had a vision for an assertive Canada in world affairs. John Diefenbaker won because ordinary people affirmed his vision of a diverse, peaceable and proud northern nation. And Brian Mulroney won because he had a dream for a new Canadian economy and a new national unity.

Harper, on the other hand, won because the Liberals were exhausted.

Now that they’re back in the game, it’s time to think big.

Matt Bondy, a former member of the Guelph Mercury’s community editorial board, is a graduate student and writer living in Waterloo. He invites your correspondence at m.j.bondy@gmail.com.

The Waterloo Room

Friends,

I hope you’ve been keeping well and the Spring has been good to you.

As you know, I have been reserving this blog as an online archive for my columns with the Guelph Mercury. Having a few months ago been awarded a monthly column of my own – Arch Over Main Street – I continue to contribute a monthly piece to that paper. Keep stopping by for updates. (I was a wee bit tardy posting the latest edition of my column. I do apologise.)

But there is a new addition to the family! I have been provided with a phenomenal opportunity to contribute in my own little way to the exciting work being done over at Waterloo’s own Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI). I’ll be a Featured Blogger at PolicyNet. I’ve named my online journal The Waterloo Room, for reasons explained in my inaugural post. Come on over to PolicyNet and check out the new blog!

With that, I ask that you please continue to stop by and participate in whatever I’ve got going on online. I’d love to hear form you, swap links, exchange ideas or go a couple rounds on whatever issue seems to knotting your proverbial knickers these days.

All best,
M

US Republican party has serious choices to make

My latest from the Guelph Mercury
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It’s become the lead question for morning show and political talk shows all over the United States — what must the Republican party do to get competitive again?

Barack Obama’s thumping of John McCain in November was merely a ratification of a much deeper trend in American political life. The conservative movement has been tumbling out of control since very soon after George W. Bush’s second inauguration, and not even McCain’s “straight talk express” could tug it back up the hill.

Like the economy, the Republicans have pretty well hit rock bottom. Pick your preferred method of measurement: state houses, Senate, House of Representatives, White House . . . the Democrats are on the rise.

Like the smart investor though, it’s all about buying low. Now is the time for American conservatives to begin building a coherent and saleable alternative to the very liberal agenda sponsored by the Obama administration and fawningly affirmed by the powder blue congress.

At the heart of this much-needed process of rebuilding lies one central question: should the new and improved Republicans be based in ideology or sensibility?

Prior to the radicalization of the Republican party, which began in the 1950s and triple-peaked under Ronald Reagan, 1990s Republican house speaker Newt Gingrich and, finally, the newly retired Bush the Younger, the Republican party was the party of sensibility. It was your dad’s party. It was the party of polished shoes, balanced budgets, well-regulated financial markets, and a foreign policy rooted in realism and an appreciation for the limits of military power.

But after the 1960s — we’re generalizing here, but not unfairly — American conservatism ceased to be an exercise in prudently maintaining and incrementally improving the status quo. The status quo was perceived by American conservatives to have been destroyed by anti-work, anti-family, anti-religion Democratic policies which required an all-out counterattack.

And that’s been the narrative ever since. The Republican party has been the party of an idealized past — or of timeless moral and philosophical principles, depending on taste — anchored in a mentality of static values.

And so the economic downturn couldn’t have come at a better time for a Republican party needing to reinvent itself. It is a problem so deep and existential that it could have several plausible solutions, and both ideology and sensibility could conceivably work.

Economic management as an ideological issue would mean selling tax cuts, spending cuts and fiscal restraint to voters. It would mean abandoning Bush’s big-government conservatism, and puritanically pursuing an economic agenda designed to shrink government.

If bad government regulation and too much government spending are to blame for the current recession, a small-government sales pitch could resonate with voters tired of political solutions to economic problems.

Alternatively, the Republican party could return to its roots at the sensible centre of the political spectrum. Republicans could focus on the need to improve the regulation of financial markets, because corruption and incompetence are insufferable.

They could focus on fuel-economy standards and alternative-energy production as part of a long-term vision of balanced budgets, greener meadows, and healthier children.

They could lay out a vision for an America whose relationship with the world is one defined by not only power, but also by laws and norms.

And they could challenge Americans with policies, initiatives and bully pulpits — especially wealthy and middle class Americans — to serve their country in the military, the peace corps, and in multitudinous existing and would-be service organizations designed to revitalize America’s civic culture: the key to what Alexis de Tocqueville believed made Americans not only great, but good.

For now, though, it’s a waiting game. Obama will continue governing absent a meaningful opposition. Republican heavyweights (and Sarah Palin) will continue testing the presidential waters for the next time round. And American voters, mercifully, will eventually cease to view the choice between Republican and Democrat as the choice between an irrationally despised Bush and an idealized and untested Obama.

But until some equilibrium is restored to the American political spectrum, voters and pundits would do well to remember that the Republican party isn’t dead — it’s just sleeping.

And if they play their cards right their nightmare will soon be over.

Despite setbacks, these Conservatives won’t fade away

My latest from the Guelph Mercury (16 April)

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Canadian conservatism has always been an uphill kind of thing. From the MacDonald-Cartier compromise to Diefenbaker’s we-can-win-without-Quebec strategy, to Mulroney’s appeal to Quebecois nationalism and right up to the subsequent divide between progressive conservatism and the Canadian Alliance, Canadian conservatism has always struggled to provide a coherent alternative to Liberal rule.

Indeed, the commentariat seem to have concluded that in the life cycle of Canadian federal politics, conservatism has again crested and will again crash. Admittedly, their belief isn’t baseless.

The Mulroney-Schreiber affair has made life difficult for Conservative insiders and opinion-leaders whose loyalty to the former prime minister’s legacy has been cruelly tested against the so-called discipline of power.

Conservatives are equally disenchanted with their own party’s hypocritical embrace of big spending in the good times and reckless spending in the bad.

And perhaps most troubling for Tories was the political miscalculation late last year which nearly resulted in parliamentary defeat. Learning that the prime minister is politically fallible has tested the iron discipline Mr. Harper has maintained since January 2006.

That is just to say that the new conventional wisdom – that Canada’s conservative coalition is cracking – is not totally invalid. The coalition is indeed being tested along old PC-Alliance lines, along pragmatic-ideological lines, and even along parliamentarist-populist lines.

But this time, Canada’s conservative coalition is going to survive. Not only is the party’s organisational infrastructure better than it’s ever been – even during the Mulroney ascendancy the federal party leaned heavily on provincial political machines, particularly in Quebec – but after spending so long in the wilderness, the Conservative Party’s different factions know good and well they must either tolerate one another or embrace irrelevance.

In a recent speech to a conference of the Manning Institute – a conservative advocacy group in the ideological tradition of its namesake – Mr. Harper said that what ultimately binds conservatives together is their belief in faith, family and freedom.

Setting aside that ‘faith, family and freedom’ was Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee’s boilerplate slogan during his 2008 bid for the US Republican presidential nomination, this trifecta is more than rhetoric; it really does explain Anglo-Saxon conservatism in a profound way. Especially the faith bit, which informs the rest.

Conservatives, sometimes unwittingly, consistently affirm basic Christian principles in the majority of their policies. Their resistance to gay marriage, their promotion of the nuclear family, their tough approach to justice issues and even, on a different level, their commitment to a strong military, all stem from a basic understanding of human nature.

Conservatives believe that, though created for and capable of good, human beings are weak against their passions and ultimately need to be stewarded by strong institutions and societal norms. The church, the family, and the state should mutually re-enforce basic morality and social structures conducive to moral and social order.

And on a global scale, conservatives believe that the world is anarchic, dangerous, and that it will always be that way. Good guys can’t stop building planes and training soldiers just because they’d rather be sending aid money to Africa; civilisation needs to be actively defended.

These basic assumptions – that societies require order based upon traditional practices and civilisations need to be strong to survive – bind all conservatives together.

And so in the Canadian political context, conservatives of different stripes put up with each other’s pet policies because they share a basic worldview.

For example, red tories may dislike blunt, Alliance-style rhetoric on social issues, though they surely agree that government must not be used as an instrument of the elite for the purposes of social engineering.

And in the same way, social conservatives may not share the obsession of fiscal conservatives on the need to keep public spending low, but they do agree that stifling freedom and initiative is dangerous because it weakens incentive for productive, socially beneficial behaviour.

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Ultimately, the federal Conservative Party is an imperfect machine. It hasn’t done a great job at building a communicable political vision for the country; it continues to be the subject of inter-faction rivalry, and there can be no doubt that each of the party’s major wings will try to wrest control of the leadership after Mr. Harper steps aside.

But having worked so long and hard to win power, Canadian conservatives know by now that division means defeat, and defeat means allowing an alternative worldview to dominate Canadian policy-making both on the domestic and international level.

And they won’t lose sight of the big picture this time. At least not yet.

Obama Doctrine starting to take shape

My latest from the Guelph Mercury, printed today, 19 March.
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After the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, the George W. Bush administration embarked upon what many have called nothing less than a revolution in foreign policy. Counselled and encouraged by his inner cadre of hawkish, ideologically driven advisors, George W. Bush made US global military dominance, pre-emption and American exceptionalism central tenets of US security strategy.

It’s taken Mr. Obama about five minutes to nix the Bush Doctrine, and recalibrate America’s military goals and diplomatic agenda. Three recent examples are especially revelatory, as the world seeks to understand how the Obama team view the world.

First is the phased closure of the American detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. This signals to the world that the Obama administration believe international terrorism is an issue to be treated more through the prism of criminality than war.

Dealing with transnational crime means stepping up efforts at interdiction, and tweaking international and national law to manage those charged with crime. It means soliciting the partnership and solidarity of the international community in an effort ultimately premised on co-operation – not confrontation.

While the Bush administration viewed international terrorism fundamentally through the prism of war – terrorists are the enemy, and the ones captured are like POWs without states, deserving little or no rights – the Obama team believe Gitmo undermines the basic principles of liberty and civilisation from within, and is therefore corrosive to American society and reputation.

This change in how the Oval Office approaches terrorism has deeper and broader implications for American strategy and action on the global stage, let alone on that tiny, irrelevant mosquito of an island we call Cuba. Bring on the second example.

When’s the last time you heard an administration official say the words Global War on Terror (GWOT)? A multitude of serious scholars believe that the Bush administration’s fashioning of the Global War on Terror was a brilliant attempt to deepen and broaden and legitimise America’s global military primacy indefinitely (even if said strategy has fallen out of favour with said scholars and their little cousins in the commentariat).

It matters how issues are framed, and how they’re packaged for mass consumption. Tossing ‘GWOT’ aside is a way for Mr. Obama to not only signal the dramatic end of President Bush’s relatively militaristic foreign policy, but it is also a means to re-frame terrorism in a way that they feel more accurately represents the stakes. Fact is, small arms, drugs and traffic accidents cause more death to citizens of the free world than do crackpot jihadists.

Though the Bush administration was right to focus American and international attention on the nexus of failed states, terrorism and nuclear proliferation, the Obama administration advocate an approach to this challenge that focuses on improving procedures for managing and accounting for dangerous nuclear technology and materials, working with allies and partners to detect terrorist activity, and using American military power more as a scalpel to kill gangs of terrorists than as a battleaxe to bring down rogue regimes.

Finally – and perhaps most significantly – the Obama administration have reached out to Russia in a way that is meaningful, apparently generous, and possibly brilliant. Whereas the Bush administration was hell-bent on basing anti-ballistic missile (ABM) technology in Poland and the Czech Republic – right on Russia’s doorstep – Mr. Obama and his staff have offered to scuttle these controversial plans if Moscow will endorse tough sanctions against Iran’s nuclear weapons programme.

This is a serious display of diplomatic ingenuity. It gives Mr. Obama – who’s never been big on high-tech ABM systems – a way to ditch the expensive programme whilst seeming tough on Iran. And more importantly, it puts the US on a conciliatory footing with Russia, whose co-operation is necessary to ensure a peaceful immediate future for the former Soviet satellites in Central Asia, and dependable energy for Europe.

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It is still too early to tell whether these basic and profound changes to American foreign policy are positive. In light of the Bush Doctrine, which sought to legitimise a martial, exceptionalist version of American global dominance by framing terrorism as a massive and existential threat to US and global security, the Obama team clearly envision a new era of American leadership premised on power, persuasion, prudence and patience.

As such, even those of us who’ve supported major planks of Mr. Bush’s foreign policy must recognise that the Obama Doctrine – however it matures, and however it fares – is at least an impressive attempt to reassert American moral leadership, and it is obviously founded upon a learned and careful estimation of how the world works.

MPs the guardians of responsible government

My latest in the Guelph Mercury.
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This year, like the last, has so far been a big one for Canadian democracy.

Not in the sense that said democracy has generated particularly sensible legislation — surely you’ve seen the deficit projections — but rather that the Canadian parliamentary system has itself been reaffirmed, on the advice of political expediency.

It all began with what, at the time, must have seemed like a good idea. The Conservative government’s pitch to eliminate public financing for political parties was designed to nail a closed-for-business sign to the front door of Liberal party headquarters. The Tories’ massive fundraising advantage would have transformed the next federal election campaign from a communications war into a communications genocide, and with that, Conservative ascendancy would have become Conservative hegemony.

Spark begat fire, and Canada was soon poised for mixed ministry — that is, coalition — government; the first of three recent events to reacquaint Canadians with their parliamentary democracy.

Mixed ministry government

Coalition government has a stunted and inauspicious record in the Canadian context. Absent the pre-Confederation Great Coalition of reformers, blues and liberal-conservatives, the only mixed ministry to take power federally was that of Robert Borden’s Union government of Tories, Liberals and Independents. The Union government fell apart after the First World War.

The closest thing to coalition government since that time was when the Trudeau-led Liberals were propped up by an accord with the NDP between 1972 and 1974, though no ministries were awarded the latter.

But what makes this latest round of coalition-building especially remarkable is that the notion wasn’t even floated until well after the election cycle.

Notwithstanding the protestations of certain Conservative spin-masters and erstwhile strategists, the power of the executive can change hands whenever a viable alternative government is ready to take the helm.

The Liberal-NDP coalition, though stillborn, was a reminder to Canadians that parliamentary government is a fluid and dynamic and organic exercise; and that it is a process driven by members of Parliament.

Choosing a leader

Speaking of which. Michael Ignatieff’s accession to the helm of Canada’s so-called natural governing party was, in a throwback to the days before massive party conventions, orchestrated by his Liberal caucus colleagues.

Though it may be fun for anti-Liberals to feign incredulity at the elitism of it all, it is profoundly democratic for a parliamentary caucus to fashion a leader of its choosing, and it was refreshing to witness.

For a party to select its leader by way of caucus consensus makes the leader more accountable to the too-often powerless MPs of his own party, placing elected members of Parliament before the unelected partisans who dominate large party conventions.

Ignatieff’s rise to the top is more legitimate because it was driven by caucus, not less so.

Conscience before party

What’s more, the new caucus-centric Liberal party has shown in recent days that party unity can be ultimately underlined — not undermined — by the dictates of flexibility and prudence.

Ignatieff permitted the six Newfoundland and Labrador MPs in his caucus to vote against the most recent Conservative budget and was widely panned for it. His critics charged that the “one-time” dispensation amounted to a failure of leadership.

The truth is, Ignatieff skilfully pegged three birds with the same stone by indulging the Newfoundland dissenters.

First, the new Liberal leader preserved the moral support of his caucus. That’s the stuff successful premierships are made of.

Second, placing a tangible asterisk over the Liberals’ support for the budget was a good way to meaningfully criticize Tory stewardship of dominion-provincial relations and the economy. Stéphane Dion’s repetitious remonstrations rang hollow because they bore no democratic content; this one does.

And from the perspective of electoral strategy, the Liberals are wise to postpone a bid for power until the economy’s vital signs start improving.

No need to confuse the electorate as to which party drowned, in a vast pool of red ink, the sacred cow of balanced budgets.

This past year’s political calendar has been positively studded with intriguing parliamentary manoeuvre. The would-be coalition, the selection of a new Liberal leader by that party’s caucus, and the willingness of Ignatieff to permit a bloc of MPs to vote according to conscience, all point to one important principle: the primacy of members of Parliament.

After all, members of Parliament are the raw material of parliamentary democracy. They are the fulcrum around which our system operates, and they are the guardians of responsible government.

And they just might be staging a rally.

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Matt Bondy, a former member of the Mercury’s Community Editorial Board, is a graduate student and writer living in Waterloo. He invites your correspondence at m.j.bondy@gmail.com.

Obama wanted JFK, got FDR

My latest from the Guelph Mercury. (View pdf of newspaper page here)

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On January 20th, Barack Obama will accede to the presidential rostrum a proponent of change, swear before God to become its agent, and intone its themes before an anxious, innumerable audience.

Though Obama’s inauguration will mark, as JFK said, not so much the triumph of a political party as that of a democratic process, the inaugural address is nonetheless the new president’s most critical opportunity to define his mandate and fortify it with the chainmail of popular support.

Inaugural addresses, like the one no doubt being drafted and redrafted presently, represent the high-water mark of political oratory in the Western world. We inhabitants of the British Commonwealth – exposed much more to pageantry than portentous speechifying in our political tradition – can look on only with a sense of awe at the magnitude of one man’s opportunity to lead his country toward a new set of goals, illuminated by a new set of ideals.

The ideals part is the trick of it – the essence of the major presidential address. In his inaugural speech, Mr. Obama has to achieve any number of objectives: he has to indicate where he’s willing to compromise with congress and where he isn’t; how he intends to engage with the global community and where he intends to lead it; and he has to place his administration in historical context, appropriating as imagery those moments when America has shone most brightly.

But above all else, he must give his presidency an intellectual and political ballast. He needs to fashion a few sentences or words that will reveal the grain and firmness of his administration.

To do this, the president-elect’s team should look to the two Democratic legends of the 20th century.

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After the stockmarket crash of 1929, and fed up with President Herbert Hoover’s unflinching commitment to laissez faire economics, Americans came to feel that unfettered capitalism was no longer a safe or just economic system. In response, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt devised his “New Deal”, which called for state intervention in the economy for the benefit of the working man.

Those two simple words wrought determination from despair, and changed America forever.

Roosevelt’s theme was unmatched in meaning or popularity by his immediate successor’s “Fair Deal”, and was not worthily replaced until John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier” rang forth from Washington and reverberated endlessly afield.

The “New Frontier”, as Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger has written, seemed to make Washington a “brighter, gayer, more intellectual, more resolute” centre of action. The very words themselves evoke images drawn straight from the American Settlement, and were equally representative of the Kennedy administration’s pursuit of a new, less hostile phase in the Cold War, its forward steps on race relations, and, eventually, its race to the moon.

Other, more recent presidential themes have penetrated the public psyche, but with less depth and staying power.

Bill Clinton’s “Third Way” and George W. Bush’s “Compassionate Conservatism” each evoked a feeling of centrism and compromise, and helped define their subjects for the electorate. But neither have stamped American history with the force or figure of FDR’s slogan or Kennedy’s theme.

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As tight credit and consumer anxiety continue to vitiate America’s economy, one can’t help but feel that Mr. Obama is finding himself the victim of a malevolent historical bait-and-switch that will forcefully impact his presidential tone and tenure.

Obama began his pursuit of the presidency wanting to galvanise public support for a progressive and energetic transfiguration of American foreign policy; instead, he gets to resuscitate an ailing economy.

He wanted to vastly expand federal support for public education and health services, and find creative solutions to America’s broken immigration system; instead, he gets to reform credit markets.

He wanted to precipitate a new era of environmental stewardship, and build a legacy of progressive social activism; instead, he gets to deflect bids by other nations to replace the US dollar as the world’s currency standard.

Obama wanted JFK, but he got FDR.
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The new president’s ability to play the hand he’s been dealt – a faltering economy, an over-stretched military and a world full of tight diplomatic knots – will do much to determine whether he is a man of words only, or one of action.

But for January 20th, words will be the focus, and rightly so. As President Nixon said of the importance of presidential communications, style must rank with substance.

Mr. Obama’s inaugural address must make Americans feel resilient in the face of economic disaster, renewed in the defence both of American interests and ideals around the globe, and defiant in a time that lends itself more readily to despair.

Do these things he must, because he now stewards the American presidency; and that, as the great man said, is where the buck stops.