WELL, WHO IS WHO, ANYWAY? The Canadian Who's Who 199

WELL, WHO IS WHO, ANYWAY?
 April 1, 1998, Books in Canada

Canadian Who’s Who 1997
Elizabeth Lumley ed.
University of Toronto Press
ISBN 0-8020-49966

There is nothing nosy about wanting to know who people are. It is natural and proper to want to know where people come from, what they do, what family they have, even how old they are. For years I have kept an old copy of Canadian Who’s Who handy and made regular use of it to fill in the background of people I have read about or run into or just heard mentioned but could not place. The earnestly casual manners under which people are introduced as Sue or Joe without even a surname to hang on to suppose that our mere humanity is all we need to know, while treating names like pets’ names, simply something to answer to. But we are constituted by every fact about us. If we can know some basic facts about each other, we can have a more genuine regard for each other than the abstract respect enjoined by modern correctness.

Nor is there anything vain about making some basic facts about oneself publicly available. It is a courtesy to save people the trouble of piecing them together over time and to be open and direct. Perhaps in time most of us will have Web pages on the Internet. For now, for most of us, a telephone book listing is the extent of published information available. To get any more detail into a volume even the size of the Toronto telephone book requires a selection to be made. It is the job of a Who’s Who to collect the basic facts about those people who, because of their activity, we are likely to hear of and want to know something about. The Canadian Who’s Who does that job for Canada and does it pretty well. It is the only biographical reference book in Canada that is not restricted to some profession or calling and that does not charge for a listing or expect people it includes to buy a copy. Its limitations perhaps say more about Canadians than any failure of effort or judgement in the editors or staff as they undertake their massive task each year. Now that it is available on CD-ROM it is more useful than ever. Every library and most offices should have one. Individuals should save up and buy one every few years. They never lose their interest and your grandchildren will be grateful for their inheritance.

The obvious test of any biographical reference work is who’s in and who’s out. With more than fifteen thousand entries, up from twelve thousand only six years ago, there should be room for anyone one might hear of. A conscious effort has been made since the University of Toronto Press bought the publication in 1978 to get beyond the politicians and businessmen who in the past made up the largest portion of the entries and to include artists, writers, scientists and sports figures. Despite the editors’ best efforts the list of prominent Canadians who are not in would be a long one. Not surprisingly, politicians are still well represented. The federal cabinet and party leaders, the premiers, are all there. But most members of parliament remain nobodies, though over eighty senators are in. Andrew Thompson is there, if not in Ottawa. He does not list his Mexican home. Perhaps Svend Robinson is the best known missing M.P. Ontario opposition leader Dalton McGuinty and NDP leader Howard Hampton are missing, though McGuinty’s predecessor Lyn McLeod, who always had a recognition problem, is in.

In the media Pamela Wallin, Wendy Mesley and Lloyd Robertson are in but Peter Mansbridge is not. In painting Alex Colville and Paterson Ewen are in but Atilla Richard Lukacs and John Meredith are not. In music the composers, Murray Schaefer, Harry Somers and the rest are well represented, but tenor Ben Heppner and conductor, impresario and Companion of the Order of Canada Nicholas Goldschmidt are not. Lawyer John McKellar is in but his son, actor, director and scriptwriter Don is not.

If distinguished and prominent Canadians are missing it is not for want of the editors trying. They are practically speaking completely dependent on their subjects responding to their enquiries for entries. Over five thousand invitations to submit information for new entries produced only about seventeen hundred new entries for this edition. They have tried to get a response from some people for years without success. Some people may just be too lazy to reply, or think that there is some catch, that they will have to pay to get in, at least for a copy of the book, as they would have to for many apparently similar books. Some may think it is pretentious to be in Who’s Who; but if you are a celebrity anyway such modesty must be false. Some people may be concerned about their privacy. For people who have already been the subject of media profiles, such concern would be equally false. The information provided is anyway is not compromising and under the control of the subject.

The entries follow a standard form: name with any title and degrees; occupation such as author, lawyer or politician; place and date of birth; parents; education; family; present position; career; memberships; politics; religion; recreations and address. Again Canadian Who’s Who is entirely dependent on its subjects for how and how much of this form is filled. The results can be disappointing. Barbara Amiel of course omits her date of birth. Alan Fotheringham omits his parents. So does Art Eggleton, who seems to have done nothing before being elected to Toronto’s City Council at age 26. One expects to find in Who’s Who where people went to school or university and for a politician what was his taking off point. Eggleton also omits his occupation. His cabinet colleague Pierre Pettigrew changed his occupation from politician to statesman for the 1997 edition, getting pilloried in Frank for his pains. Catherine Callaghan simply says she is Senior Editor at Chatelaine and gives her office address. As anyone who might look her up would know that much, there is no point to the entry. The editors must have been so grateful for any response that their judgement was clouded.

Knowing where people live can say a lot about them but many people just give office addresses. Some, like actor Donald Sutherland, just give an agent’s address. Mordecai Richler and his son Daniel both give “c/o McClelland & Stewart”. Gordie Howe gives no address at all.

Some people have altogether too much to say about themselves. Roberta Bondar’s trip in space has led to her receiving 22 honorary degrees in Canada together with many other awards and a whole column of special lectureships, fellowships and committee and patron appointments. The entry badly needs editing. The length of entries seems to have been left to the subjects and is no measure of their celebrity or achievement. Jean Chrétien says enough in three inches. Brian Mulroney modestly takes two. Trudeau takes six. Sculptor Elizabeth Holbrook goes over twenty inches describing all her works. If Canadian Who’s Who is ever going to bring in the large number of notable Canadians who are not in and keep the volume to a manageable size in readable print some limit on the length of entries will have to be set and the editors will have to do some editing.

Apart from the few like Catherine Callaghan, and Gordon Capital vice-chairman James Conacher, who are not prepared to say anything about themselves, there seems no reason to drop anyone. The more the merrier. Judith Anderson is a lawyer in Vancouver but nothing in her entry indicates why she should be in when perhaps two thousand other lawyers in Vancouver are not. The effort to include artists has relied too much on membership in the Royal Canadian Academy, sadly no longer the assurance of standing in the visual arts that it once was. But the book is most useful in its coverage of the more obscurely accomplished. The famous we may know well enough already or have other sources for. Several of the famous missing from Canadian Who’s Who are in The Canadian Encyclopedia: Heppner, Goldschmidt and Svend Robinson.

The book is about who is who and entries are dropped when the subject dies. Books in Canada founder Val Clery, however, is still in though he died in the fall of 1996 and this edition is sufficiently up to date to reflect at least partly the results of the June 1997 federal election. Conversely Idler magazine founder David Warren who is still alive and well and busy at the Ottawa Citizen disappeared when the Idler died in 1993. Generally people are in for life, though many stop responding when they retire.

A selection of foreign diplomats posted to Ottawa is included and there are several expatriate stars: Joni Mitchell and Neil Young; Christopher Plummer and Donald Sutherland. Oddly, Body Shop founder and C.E.O. Anita Roddick is in, apparently on the strength of her 118 shops in Canada and an honorary degree from Victoria University.

The editors must largely take the information they are provided on faith hoping that the embarrassment of published fibs will keep their subjects honest. They should however be strict about titles. David Berger, our ambassador to Israel, titles himself “His Excellency”. In accordance with diplomatic formalities he is His Excellency in Tel Aviv. In this country he is plain Mr. Berger. Not a career diplomat but for fifteen years a Liberal member of parliament, Berger may not know that. Who’s Who should. As should our man in Quito, David Adam, and our man in Brussels, Jean-Paul Hubert, both career diplomats. The couple of dozen other Canadian Ambassadors abroad, including Raymond Chrétien, do not make the same mistake.

A sillier instance is John Marvin Mitchell. His 1991 entry describes a plausible career in financial services. By 1996 he has added a series of publications on motivation and negotiation and several odd distinctions including listings in dubious biographical reference books such as International-Men of Achievment and International Who’s Who of Intellectuals and Most Admired Man of the Decade, American Biographical Institute and One in a Million, International Biographical Centre. In 1997 he adds “Mem., Order of the Holy Grail-Knight” and, on the strength of that presumably, titles himself “His Excellency The Hon.”. One hopes that most of this is tongue in cheek, but it is weak humour and the editors should not indulge it.

With the decay of political allegiance in recent decades few people now list their politics. Most who do are Liberals. Even most politicians do not bother to say what they are, perhaps because it is obvious from their career, though Bob Rae tells us that he is NDP. Many Conservatives who state their politics say just that: Conservative, without the official Progressive qualifier. It is a conservative thing to have a conscious long term political allegiance.

Perhaps 15% of the entries list a religion. Anglicans, oddly, seem the most numerous. Most who do not list a religion must still have some religious attachment. Religion is perhaps no longer seen as saying much about who we are. It is more seen as a private matter that the public need not know about.

There is no French edition of Who’s Who, but 195 entries are written in French. Parizeau’s entry is in French. Bouchard’s in English. French Canadians are under-represented in relation to their proportion of the population, but the 195 entries in French represent only a fraction of the entries for French Canadians.

Sport often brings fleeting fame. The inclusion of practically the whole synchronised swimming team from the 1996 Olympics brings in Valérie Hould-Marchand, who, turning 18 on May 29, is the youngest person in the book. Casting the net that broadly could bring in hundreds of amateur athletes destined for lives of obscurity after their moment of glory. Donovan Bailey belongs in, if he never accomplishes anything again, but amateur athletes had better wait until they show whether they are going to establish a career, like skier, now sports commentator, Steve Podborski. Generally professional players are under represented. The superstars of hockey are in: Beliveau, Gretzky, Howe, Hull, Lafleur, Orr. The heroes of 1972, Paul Henderson and Ken Dryden, are not. Alan Eagleson is perhaps the only convicted criminal in the book.

CD-ROM is an ideal medium for works of reference. Canadian Who’s Who has wisely not added any mixed media bells and whistles to its CD-ROM. It gives us just the text. The added value comes from search, copy, print and bookmark functions. You can find people by surname or given name, occupation, position or title, birthday, birthyear or birthplace, creative works, recreations, clubs, address by city, region or postal code or do a full text search for any words you like. Unfortunately there is no search field for education. If you want to find people who went to Trent University, you have to search the words Trent AND University. This calls up anyone who ever taught their or received an honorary degree or had any connection with any university and had a family member called Trent. The CD-ROM makes sticking to the format for entries more important. Future editions of the CD-ROM could be much more easily searched if the format was better used. As it is, many searches are tricky because information is given in different places and different forms. There is no easy way to find all the heads of the chartered banks or all the generals or admirals in the Canadian Forces. But you can easily find the oldest person in the book, retired diplomat and journalist Fulgence Charpentier, who will be 101 in June, or how many people were born in Kamloops, ten, including jazz composer Phil Nimmons and Diefenbaker cabinet minister Davie Fulton, or look up all the playwrights, of whom there are forty-seven.

Canadian Who’s Who cannot get much bigger. Perhaps another couple of thousand entries could be squeezed in. If it is to get any better notable Canadians will have to overcome their shyness and coyness and perhaps a bit of laziness and be more forthcoming in supplying material for their entries. If they do, the editors may have to make difficult judgments to accommodate the most useful entries. But, perhaps like The Canadian Encyclopedia, Canadian Who’s Who should abandon the book and once it has mastered the medium publish only in CD-ROM or, shortly, DVD-ROM. The editors might balk at the work and the cost might be prohibitive, but then there would be room for everyone and we could really get to know each other.

THE SERIOUS BUFFOON - John Crosbie's No Holds Barred

Books in Canada

NO HOLDS BARRED
My Life in Politics
by John C. Crosbie
with Geoffrey Stevens
McClelland and Stewart,
ISBN 0-7710-2427-4

John Crosbie is the Mulroney cabinet minister held in the highest regard by both the general public and journalists. He is the only one, with the exceptions of the egregious Kim Campbell, and Erik Nielsen, who resigned in 1986, to have published memoirs. His book makes agreeable reading, but it contains few revelations and will be a minor contribution to Canadian political history. Its main interest is the story of an unusual political career.

Crosbie's entry into politics was effortless. He was easily elected Deputy Mayor of St. John's in the fall of 1965 but only seven months later, when he was 36, Joey Smallwood simply appointed him to his cabinet and practically appointed him to the Newfoundland House of Assembly. Not for him the years of going to mind numbing meetings and working in campaigns and trying to make connections from which most politicians emerge and which leave them too intellectually stunted to make any contribution to government. Politics was government to Crosbie and as a young lawyer in St. John's and a Crosbie he could enter government in Newfoundland at the top. He plays down the wealth of the Crosbies, who certainly had their financial reverses, but they were Newfoundland's most prominent business family and had been active in politics since the days of his grandfather, who had been Newfoundland's Minister of Finance from 1924 to 1928.

Crosbie was an outstanding student at Queen's University and Dalhousie University Law School and won a Viscount Bennett Fellowship to study at the London School of Economics. Unfortunately he was to study law at LSE and gave it up after Christmas because "They weren't really teaching me anything new or different...". If he had returned to his undergraduate interest in politics and economics at LSE he might have learned to think more deeply and critically about those subjects to the benefit of his politics and his book.

Crosbie's father had warned him against getting involved with Joey Smallwood. Crosbie's two years under the madcap, corrupt, petty tyrant he depicts were frustrating but they launched him on his political career and enabled to him to make important contributions to the reform of Newfoundland government. Resigning with Clyde Wells over Smallwood's eagerness to pour government money into John Shaheen's doomed Come by Chance oil refinery, he sought the Liberal leadership but was frustrated again by Smallwood's trickery and corrupt domination of the party. He sat as an Independent Liberal  until June of 1971 when he joined Frank Moores' Tories, serving four years in his government before his election to the House of Commons in a by-election in 1976.

In helping to clear up the mess left by Smallwood and bring in long overdue reforms Crosbie was able to do the good work in government that he entered politics to do. In his first taste of power in Ottawa, as Joe Clark's Minister of Finance, Crosbie was frustrated by politics. The budget that he presented in December 1979, and which led to the government's defeat, was a worthy effort to address Canada's growing financial problems so far as Clark's stupid raft of election promises permitted. In contrast to Crosbie, Clark, who had beavered away at politics from his early teens, had no idea what government was about. Policy was for Clark just another kind of political equipment like buttons and posters and a campaign bus. Crosbie is scathing about Clark's promises but admits to sharing his inept political judgment that they should govern as if they had a majority and that the Liberals would not risk an election. Thus he must share a small part of the blame for Trudeau's disastrous last government.

Crosbie's account of his nine year in Mulroney's government is superficial. He gives little sense of how he worked and what difference he was able to make. He recounts his difficulties with Mulroney's underlings. He had none with Mulroney himself. He complains that twenty-five to thirty hours of cabinet or committee meetings every week left little time "to think or act intelligently on issues...".  His account of his activity in his four successive portfolios seems to confirm this.

His most important work was as Minister of International Trade in piloting free trade legislation through Parliament and speaking up for it and initiating negotiations for the North American Free Trade Agreement, but his account of this is simply a series of anecdotes. Whether he can take as much credit as he claims for the establishment of the World Trade Organisation history will tell, but it was a worthwhile Canadian initiative.

As Minister of Justice Crosbie presided over the kind of supposed progressive reforms that seem to happen regardless of politics and he takes pride in them and the number of bills that he got passed as proof that on "social and human issues" he is an "intelligent liberal". But his account of his work shows no great thought or awareness of the contradictions in his positions. The review of all existing legislation lest it might conflict with what it was imagined the Supreme Court of Canada would make of Section 15, the equality section, of the Charter was basically a technical job. It amounted to making parliament subject to academic theories of equality that are always abstract and dogmatic but not always coherent. It would have been better simply to wait for legislation to be challenged and defend it before the courts, unless, without speculating as to what the courts might do, it was simply thought to be bad legislation. Crosbie was gung ho for expanding the powers of the Canadian Human Rights Commission to cover alleged cases of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and for women in combat roles in the armed forces and most other correct causes. On the other hand he introduced precise anti-pornography legislation that would have been made mincemeat of by the courts if it had not died on the order paper after the usual outcry from arts groups, the National Action Committee on the Status of Women and others.

Crosbie finally says that he is a Newfoundlander first and he unashamedly fought for Newfoundland's interests in Ottawa. But he does not seem to see any future for Newfoundland beyond
its dependency on money from Ottawa: equalisation payments for the Newfoundland government and Employment Insurance scamming for its people, and the kind of big projects that obsessed Smallwood. He calls the development of the Hibernia oil field off Newfoundland his proudest accomplishment in politics. He devotes a chapter to it and his two successful efforts to save it. He is contemptuous of his critics but he does not explain what exactly Ottawa's role was or why it should have had any role in financing the project.

Though Crosbie's manuscript was cut to a fraction of its original length with the help of the distinguished political journalist Geoffrey Stevens and the book is easy reading, it is still too long without managing to get into enough detail to come to grips with many of the issues Crosbie faced. Incidents and arguments are repeated and trivia, like a trade mission to Boston are recounted. The early chapters of the book setting out his family background and his struggles with Smallwood are the best. The book is as much reflections as memoirs but these, while thoughtful, are too casual to be persuasive.

Many of his digressions concern the difficulty of intelligently addressing public issues in the face of political correctness and public suspicion of politicians encouraged by the media. From time to time he launches a tirade against media bias and the wilful gullibility of the public. His observations are not altogether unfair, but these are problems that must be faced up to. It does no good to dismiss them with humourous abuse, calling journalism a "grubby little craft". Crosbie has no answer to these problems. The only answer is to show leadership, as Crosbie did to the extent his positions permitted. He earned respect for it. Many politicians have contributed to public suspicion by their unprincipled conduct. Crosbie could say something about this, but he is too genial to draw sharp and insightful portraits. Even Smallwood is finally proclaimed " a great Newfoundland patriot". He is far too generous to Joe Clark and claims to like and admire Trudeau, whom he voted for in the 1968 Liberal leadership convention.

Crosbie is most fondly remembered for his humorous sallies in the Commons and on the hustings. He retails many of these, but however successful they were when launched and however well they filled the need for media sound bites and served Crosbie and his party they mostly seem pretty lame in cold print. Crosbie complains that he was a victim of political correctness when his jokes were denounced as sexist and that the media stereotyped him as a buffoon. But he consciously developed his public speaking style to overcome a native shyness. It worked very well for him and he obviously enjoyed it. The uproar from feminists never did him much harm and if he was not always taken completely seriously, he had no one but himself to blame.

Twice in the book Crosbie calls the Liberals "brothel keepers". Colourful as the phrase is, coming from someone who was a Liberal until he was 41 and sought the leadership of a provincial Liberal party, it does not convey a serious contempt earned from a lifetime's experience. Crosbie calls Trudeau a "worthy adversary'' and Sheila Copps a "worthy antagonist". Whether they conceived as high a regard for him, future memoirs will show, but for Crosbie his exchanges with two people he should regard as particularly vicious and responsible for great damage to the country seem not to have been much more than a jolly game.

Crosbie would have won the 1983 Tory leadership convention if he had been able to speak French and most likely would have become Prime Minister. At the end of the book he reflects on "the importance of being number one". A Crosbie government would undoubtedly have made a difference. Good political leadership is so scarce in Canada that the frustration of Crosbie's ambition must count as a serious loss. As this book shows, when someone of Crosbie's intelligence, talent and disinterestedness makes his way into politics but not to the top, there can be disappointingly little to show for it.

COURTS SHOULD APPLY LAWS - NOT MAKE THEM Rosalie Abella and her Cadillac

COURTS SHOULD APPLY LAWS - NOT MAKE THEM
Rosalie Abella and her Cadillac
January 5, 1998,  Ottawa Citizen

Frustration with the expense and delay involved in going to court seems to be leading people to lose sight of what courts are for. Across the political spectrum, mediation and alternative dispute resolution are promoted as the way round problems in the courts. They have become growth industries for lawyers and lay counsellors and at times the prospect of the privatisation of civil justice looms. Governments baulk at the cost of the administration of justice and judges grow tetchy with the tedium of hearing peoples' private disputes.

The courts, however, are not just there to provide a government subsidised dispute resolution service to parties who could and should resolve their disputes themselves. There has never been anything stopping people from resolving their differences privately. The courts have no monopoly on dispute resolution. The expense and delay in going to court should provide plenty of opportunity for private competition. There has always been some private resolution of business disputes. It has never developed far because the courts offer something private dispute resolution cannot. What is new is government encouragement and, in prospect, requirement of alternative dispute resolution.

What distinguishes courts, what defines them, is their monopoly on the power to invoke the authority of the state. When a court issues a judgment property may be seized or people might be sent to gaol for not obeying an injunction. Alternative dispute resolution, if it cannot invoke the authority of the state, is simply another layer of preliminaries before the parties can finally put their case to the courts who can. If it can invoke the authority of the state, alternative dispute resolution is simply a new form of court proceeding, which there is no reason to suppose will be any cheaper or faster than the traditional courts can be.

The purpose of having the courts adjudicate private disputes is the same as the purpose of the courts in their criminal jurisdiction. It is to keep the peace. If people could not turn to the courts for a final determination of their differences backed by the authority of the state, they would end up fighting in the streets. People who can settle their differences amicably do not end up battling them out in court. If parties to a lawsuit often do manage to maintain civil, and even business relations, it is because they know that the state through the courts will dispose of their dispute and that there is no point in being nasty about it.

The rapidly growing political role of the courts has complicated and obscured their basic and essential role. It has complicated it in two ways: by adding to the courts' work and increasing the delays, particularly as political cases are usually given priority for hearing. And by encouraging a weakness of the courts for making law rather than applying it. When courts make law rather than applying it, no one can know where they stand until the highest court has spoken. Parties will not accept the law and settle but are encouraged to think that if they push hard enough they can get whatever they want from the courts. The political role of the courts has obscured their basic and essential role because, apart from criminal cases, most court cases receiving public attention are political.

Even judges have become confused about the role of the courts. Rosalie Abella of the Ontario Court of Appeal, the most popular choice to succeed John Sopinka on the Supreme Court of Canada, in an address she gave in 1991, when she was chairman of the Ontario Law Reform Commission, distinguished between public and private cases and called for more "expansive" hearing of "Constitutional questions, issues involving new jurisprudence", i. e. political cases. For Abella these were Cadillac cases, as opposed to the mere Chevies that you or I might have one day to drive to court.

Such a distinction is dangerous for the courts. The meanest dispute between neighbours must implicate the full authority of the state when brought to court. Conversely, whatever the political implications of a case, it is no occasion for being expansive. The facts must be found based on a painstaking review of the evidence and the law must be scrupulously applied and not made up from political considerations.

If we are ever to get prompt and economical justice from our courts they must be prepared to continue conscientiously in their essential work and not be put off by their mundane substance or distracted by political ambition and the lure of the big fancy cars. 

DO YOUR HOME WORK, SKIP LEADERS DEBATES Canadians pay far too much attention to the painful displays that offer no insight

May 24, 1997,  Ottawa Citizen

Politics is an endless debate. The leaders debates, which have become a fixture of Canadian general elections since 1979, are brief episodes in that debate. They are a contrivance that distorts the reality of the election contest and are paid far too much attention. It would be best if they did not take place at all.

The observation is now trite that it is the media reaction to the debates rather than the debates themselves that has the most influence on the election results. Last week's debates will be seen as defining moments and turning points in the history of the election. They were none of that. Such analysis reinforces the distortion worked by the debates on the election.

Though I have tapes of leaders debates going back to 1984, I have never actually watched one through. They are at once painfully rehearsed and stilted and ragged and disorganised. Anyone who follows politics will hear nothing new and learn nothing new about the characters of the leaders.

Most of the audience must be political enthusiasts who will root for their champions. People who tune in to help decide who to vote for are choosing the lazy and worst route to a decision. If all you know of politicians is the debates, you are seeing politicians at their worst with no background from which to assess their performances critically. If you have the background, you do not need to see the debate.

But for journalists as much as voters the debates are the lazy way of following the election and we have become fixated on them.

The inspiration of leaders debates is the American presidential election debates going back to the classic Kennedy Nixon debates of 1960. American presidential candidates are running for the same office in an entrenched two party system.

Our parliamentary government being radically different the American debates provide no model for us and distort our politics when they are imitated. Real Canadian nationalists would see this and object to leaders debates on that ground.

The debates exaggerate the importance of the leaders, even Jean Chrétien. The distortion is extreme this time round as we all know that only Jean Chrétien will come out of the election as Prime Minister. The other parties are simply jockeying for position in opposition. The inclusion of Gilles Duceppe in the English debate and Preston Manning in the French debate is bizarre, as neither leader expects or wants the votes of the respective audiences.

But the debates have always distorted the election campaigns by giving leaders an audience out of a contrived fairness that they should earn by their support, work and persuasiveness. The debates reinforce the tendency to see the parties as nothing more than the leaders' vehicles. Preston Manning at least, if he were lucid and principled, should decline to participate or send a spokesman for his party. But Reform is nothing but Manning and despite his professed populism he knows it.

In the recent British election there was for the first time a serious prospect of a leaders debate. Happily, Tony Blair was able to bury the prospect in the details of the arrangements. The Tories tried to tag him as chicken, but without a tradition of leaders debates in Britain it had no discernible effect. We can only hope that some future leaders will have the courage to refuse a leaders debate.

France is also holding parliamentary elections, but there will be no leaders debates. French television is running one on one debates between spokesmen for two at a time of the many parties, not always leaders. These are firmly but unobtrusively moderated with a digital clock showing how long each participant has talked and the moderator intervening to even up the time. These debates will not mark turning points or defining moments in the campaign, but with the lightening articulacy of the French political class they make good informative television.

The television networks still conspire to force the leaders debates on us. They should leave it to the CBC, which reaches everyone in Canada with a television, and by offering their usual fare test more fairly how much we really want the debates. At least cable now offers most of us alternative viewing.

The money and air time saved by the private networks not carrying the debates could be put to better use by offering focused debates between other politicians on the French model. Paul Martin could take on Alexa MacDonough. Lewis Mackenzie could debate Douglas Young. Deborah Gray could clash with Svend Robinson. All of these could prove much more exciting and informative than the leaders debates. They would also test the fitness of the participants to serve in parliament rather than leaving them simply to cheer on their leaders and slave away at their local campaigns.

As it is, if politicians are not just newscast sound bites they are too often interviewed and too little forced to debate. Most political interviewers let our leaders off easy while maintaining a detached and slightly cynical pose. Local stations run lots of panels with candidates from each of the major parties, but these are more like confused group interviews than debates.

Above all, if there are to be debates, the people should be kept out of it. The questions from earnest members of the public with their posed indecision are simply a distraction in a distraction.

Peter Emberley's very modest proposals for universities under siege in 1997

THE EMBERLEY PRESCRIPTION

April 1, 1997 GRAVITAS



Zero Tolerance:
Hot Button Politics in Canada's Universities

Peter C. Emberley

Penguin Books



Peter Emberley has acquired a reputation as a trenchant critic of education policy with Bankrupt Education: The Decline of Liberal Education in Canada and other writings. His regard for George Grant, Michael Oakeshott and other ambiguously conservative writers and his advocacy of traditional liberal education has been sympathetic to many conservatives. But Emberley is not the kind of man who can happily accept a political label. He is at once too high brow and too combative. Zero Tolerance is largely a polemic against the pressures besetting universities in the 90's. He dishes it out with equal vehemence against what he calls the corporate right and the cultural left. His prescriptions might be called moderate, though they are more truly lame: better management.



Emberley proceeds through a series of issues denouncing what he calls hot button or predictable responses to each. He attacks the attack on tenure and the defence of tenure, Maclean's survey of universities and the universities' defensiveness before rating, the promotion of the Income Contingent Loan Program and students' expectations of free education. What he is for is obscure and there is an element of suspense as the reader slowly proceeds to the last chapter and its recommendations.



The treatment of the controversy over the zero tolerance "Framework Regarding Harassment and Discrimination in Ontario Universities and Colleges" proposed by Ontario's late NDP government in 1993 is a particularly frustrating case of his damning both sides on a quite straightforward issue. The Framework envisaged a truly Orwellian ideological restraint on the life of universities and colleges. Emberley is himself vigorous in his denunciation of it. The most noted protest against the framework was a "Statement on Free Inquiry and Expression" signed by 40% of the faculty at Trent University, in which the professors claimed a "right to offend". Emberley, with about equal vigour, denounces the professors' initiative, as if they were vicious boors intent on driving their students and colleagues to tears. The Trent professors, who include old lefties, conservatives and apolitical scholars are, when not in their union mode, a mild mannered lot and clearly all they intended to say was that in their writing and teaching they could not pursue the truth as they might see it if they had to worry whether someone might be offended by what they had to say.

No useful discourse is possible on the Framework's terms. No doubt some people will be offended by Emberley's book. Robert Fulford might be. Perhaps Emberley will be offended by this review. The Trent professors intended and implied no worse. But in calling down a plague on both houses Emberley leaves room for qualified oppression from revised frameworks. Happily he makes no such recommendation in his conclusion. Even without his encouragement and the lead of an NDP government, forces within universities will do their worst.



Emberley's chief concern is with the protection of what he calls scholarly culture from demands that university education show economic returns in acquired skills and from ideological restraint and discord. He insists on the commonplace distinction between education and vocational training. On this basis, the role of the university is the education of scholars. Training for a job belongs elsewhere. The distinction is difficult. Arguably, scholarship in a discipline like philosophy or physics is as much a vocation as law or medicine. In any event the greater part of university education has always been vocational. Universities were preparing lawyers, doctors and clergy for work in the middle ages.

The whole basis of modern government funding of universities has been the expectation of an economic return from the preparation of graduates for work. Without law, engineering, medicine, commerce, journalism, forestry and other professional schools established long before the hot button 90's the universities would be greatly reduced and exposed. Emberley bravely recommends that the professional schools should be ejected from universities and merged with community colleges to form polytechnics. He then fantasises that the professional training would be run on a full cost recovery basis involving the Income Contingent Loan Program and the resulting savings devoted to the purified universities. Rather inconsistently he says that the polytechnics should be given the financial support to acquire the lustre of an M. I. T.



But such a purification could not be complete. Much of what would be left in the faculties of arts and science is and always has been intended as job preparation. Science graduates will work in industry, economics graduates in finance, English and history graduates will teach. If they did not expect this, few students would spend the time and what money they might have to on a university education and governments would not support them.

 Perhaps the scholarly culture that Emberley seeks to defend and promote should be given generous financial support. But what exactly scholarly culture is and how and why it should be fostered and for whom would have to be clarified before this could be counted on. Emberley lards his book with high flown but obscure passages on his idea of a university:


The university is an institution formed to cultivate intellectual and spiritual passion, discerning moral judgment, imagination and the methodic discipline associated with scientific research. In its capacity to question prevailing social practices and to stimulate intellectual knowing and moral doing that transcend the immediate practicalities of the world, the university serves society by offering it a higher idea of itself and endowing it with decency and grace.

Repeatedly he argues that university education should make good citizens.

Two key words almost never occur in the book: accessibility and discipline. The quotation above is an almost unique use of the latter term. In the politics of post-secondary education accessibility has always been seen as a good thing. A secondary impetus behind the explosive growth of government funding for universities was the appeal to politicians of offering a college education to the masses, who had seen it as an upper class privilege, though universities had always been channels of social mobility. But politics has never gone so far as to aim at everyone going to university. Some selection on the basis of academic standards has always been assumed, even though standards have become highly elastic.

Any good idea of a university must entail that it is not simply impractical or unaffordable that everyone should go to university but undesirable. It must be sufficiently specific that some rough principle of selection will be implied. Emberley's ideas are so vague, his talk of making good citizens so broad, that it seems everyone should go to his ideal university. Only if scholarship is understood as a special vocation can principles of selection be developed. Emberley seems to understand and accept that only a small minority of each generation should go to university. After he had ejected the professional schools it would be less than 10% of any age group. But he cannot explain why this should be. The explanation can be found in concepts of scholarly vocation and scholarly discipline.

Emberley's idea of scholarly culture comes across as a rather juvenile adventure in ideas. He has a rosy view of the wide-eyed enthusiasm of youth, in contrast to Allan Bloom's pessimistic view of his students' complacency and ignorance. Zero Tolerance is sprinkled with the names of thinkers, or at least writers of thoughts, invoked perhaps to lend an air of authority to his arguments or to suggest the excitement of scholarly conversation. Plato cannot be too ancient or Derrida too post-modern, De Sade too transgressive or St. Thomas too orthodox, Siger of Brabant too obscure or John Ralston Saul too popular for Emberley. What is striking about these references is not the show of erudition but the lack of discrimination.

Plato was a philosopher and Derrida, to the extent he has any substance, was a philosopher too. Neither can be studied to any great purpose outside the discipline of philosophy. They cannot be understood without long hours of solitary study. The achievement of understanding, whether in writing or seminar discussion, must be rigorous argument and not an exercise in self-expression. Emberley is too fond of Oakeshott's pretty and overused image of conversation. Scholarship is serious stuff. It is not for everybody.

The contribution of scholarship to society is like that of pure science. It is indirect and unpredictable. It is no more necessary that we should all study philosophy than that we should all study cosmology. The test of scholarly vocation must be high academic standards. High enough that for the relatively small numbers who meet it full scholarships might be justifiable and affordable. The rest will have to be good citizens without being good scholars. It is for the high schools to make them such.  A scholarly culture based on scholarly vocations will survive in universities where most are pursuing other vocations. That is as it has always been.

Scholarship is best seen as a kind of by-product of practical education. While the mass of students seek to acquire useful knowledge and skills to permit them to follow a career, some will feel called to acquire a special mastery of their subjects. They will want to understand the foundations of their subjects and to go beyond what is received to new knowledge and understanding. Their mastery will qualify them to teach and to pursue research. Scholarship thereby becomes an independent vocation. But it cannot completely cut itself off from its roots in practical learning without risking Alexandrian triviality or irresponsible fantasy.

Emberley ignores intellectual issues that are perhaps more important than the political and financial issues he treats at length. He deplores the influence of post-modernism on the politics of universities but in one of his wackier passages celebrates Foucault and Derrida:

A seminar, in particular, can be intensely erotic....Every conversation is a seduction, every search for meaning is a longing for reconciliation and completion. Students love to seek the extreme:...They take naturally to the postmodernists Foucault and Derrida for their iconoclasm, for their dissolution of boundaries, for their celebration of ambiguity.

How far, it should be asked, are the minds of the thousands of students of cultural studies improved and who is there to judge whether the millions of dollars of public funds spent on this are well spent? Would we do better to spend more money on medieval philosophy and less on post-modernism? These questions cannot be answered without making serious intellectual judgements on what has value and what does not. Such judgments will be contested. But they must be made. It will not do simply to be excited by big names from Baudrillard to Bonaventure.

Academic politesse and a compulsion of the university community to band together to defend their rather agreeable jobs stifles an intellectual conflict that is necessary for the defence of scholarship. Academics are too afraid of tarnishing the prestige of universities and the possibility of philistine political interference to call into question the value of much contemporary scholarship. Students meanwhile, though they are supposed to be taught to think critically, if nothing else, are either dully impervious to their professors' attempts to indoctrinate them or all too ready to adopt the latest fashionable discourse as the assured means to academic success and a post-modern career.

Who determines what is taught in universities? Certainly the governments who largely pay the bills have little understanding of what they pay for and exercise control only at the level of gross funding. They grudgingly pay for whatever it is that people do in universities because it is a 'good thing' and because the affluent and articulate university community will kick up a fuss if they are squeezed too hard. In professional schools market forces have some influence. But as professional education is heavily subsidised, the supply of professionals often exceeds demand. Too many doctors and lawyers are being produced. Legal education, moreover, is at least one year too long, but no one would think of crossing the articulate and influential law professors, by whom and for whom the three year LL.B. course was designed.

Outside the professional schools the curricula are the incoherent product of tradition, fashion, politics, academic careerism and students' whims. The disinterested pursuit of truth, true scholarly vocation, is overwhelmed by it all. The universities' assumption of the role of centres of social criticism has politicised scholarship, compromising its quality while shielding it from criticism on the ground that criticism would be political interference. But why should governments subsidize academics some of whom are expressly out to subvert them?

If universities cannot assert and pursue academic standards based on an ideal of the disinterested pursuit of the truth, they cannot expect forever to protect themselves from the imposition of government standards. As it is, an important constituency within universities has rejected any standards of truth, seeing only discourses competing for power. And while universities raise the alarm at the prospect of political interference, they are keen to influence public policy and to act as social, sc. political, critics. Emberley himself argues for the importance of this role, descending into what is for him a rather unseemly pragmatic justification for universities. It is time for people both inside and outside universities to question the intellectual value of much that goes on in them and to reject the presumption that we can look to them for authoritative guidance on social issues. An intellectually critical attitude to universities can only be good for them. Only on that basis can they hope for financial and political security.

Emberley is a fluent, lively writer, but his book is poorly organised and repetitive. The chapter headings only partly describe their contents. The index is a bad joke. He has a weakness for rhetorical questions, which he should answer, and list rhetoric:

Amidst this battle there is misguided zeal, silly idealism, shrewd pragmatism, paralyzing cynicism and intractability....
We have an abundance of mission statements, talking-head conferences and fervent manifestos, but many of these are little more than smoke and mirrors.

He seems to have tried to put everything he ever thought about universities into his book without settling down to exact and concrete argument on anything. Where he descends to deal with facts, government financing for instance, he covers the ground too quickly before taking rhetorical flight again. Given Emberley's prominence in educational debate, it is all very disappointing.

DOWNHILL ALL THE WAY Canada's military as it appeared in 1997

DOWNHILL ALL THE WAY 
What killed Canada's military? Years of refusing to take ourselves seriously as a country


March 16, 1997,  Ottawa Citizen

The murder of Shidane Arone in Somalia on March 16, 1993 has led to the military becoming a major political issue in Canada for the first time since the uproar over unification of the Forces in 1966. The focus on the Canadian Airborne Regiment led to the exposure of extreme hazing practices and racist infection in the regiment and its disbandment in January 1995. The Somalia Inquiry was given terms of reference broad enough and went about its work with such ambition that no aspect of Canada's military leadership, training, equipment or organization seemed likely to escape its attention.

The commissioners have been preparing to point accusing fingers at several individuals. They have also been preparing a sweeping analysis of what is wrong with our military.

 The cut off of the Inquiry in its prime will prevent it from addressing the most important issues it was set up to investigate. It is unlikely to be able to pin blame on any but a handful of secondarily involved individuals. Brigadier-General Ernie Beno's success on February 19 in having the Federal Court ban its chairman, Mr. Justice Gilles Letourneau, from passing judgment on him is just the start of the inquiry's troubles on that front.



One Minister of Defence, David Collenette, and one Chief of Defence Staff, Jean Boyle, have fallen victim to the surge of public attention focused on the military. Opposition politicians and much of the public may be satisfied if more individuals can be found to take the blame for the messes that have been revealed.

Commentators on military matters have argued that the roots of the problems go beyond the individual failings. One school, best represented by Tarnished Brass, Scott Taylor and Brian Nolan's crisply depressing account of careerism and venality amongst the officers and bureaucrats, blames the top brass. Others have condemned the bureaucratization of National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa and the lack of political leadership. No one from Master Corporal Clayton Matchee, who beat Shidane Arone to death, to Perrin Beatty, whose relatively long stint as Minister of Defence in the heyday of Mulroney's government led to nothing but a mountain of white paper for recycling can be excused from their individual responsibility. The fault, however, is finally with ourselves. Canadians have not paid much attention to the military until it has forced itself on their attention and the mess we see is the result of decades of public indifference. If Canada took itself seriously it would have no problem maintaining a serious military and not be just discovering a military with serious problems.



Close to two million Canadians served in the the two World Wars and over one hundred thousand gave their lives. But even in World War II, despite the one week delay in declaring war observed to mark Canada's legal autonomy, we were following Britain's lead. Canada had never assumed responsibility for its own defence. We assumed we were safe if Britain was safe and in peril if Britain was in peril. In peacetime the military was little more than a poorly equipped skeleton force backed by a militia that was as much a social institution as a serious potential force.

On the eve of World War II Canada had less than eight thousand men in uniform. In the fiscal year before the war, defence spending, despite some steps towards rearmament, was under thirty-seven million dollars or about 0.6% of Gross Domestic Product. In four years it would rise to $4.6 billion or over 38% of GDP. After the war the military establishment collapsed almost as fast as it had risen. The army shrank from half a million to fifteen thousand troops in two years. By 1949-50 defence spending was down to $385 million or about 2% of GDP. The military looked set to return to its prewar token status. The Korean War and the building of NATO's forces in Europe combined suddenly to reverse the decline. In 1952-53 defence spending peaked at just short of two billion dollars or about 7.5% of GDP.



Canada's involvement in both Korea and NATO reflected its conscious post-war middle power status. With Europe only slowly recovering from the war and most of what came to be known as the Third World still colonial dependencies Canada had for a decade after the war an international status it has never had before or since. Led by Lester Pearson, Canada's clever and self-confident new diplomatic corps sought to take advantage of Canada's place at the relatively small tables. Its first and most important role was in the founding of NATO. In this role, still the most important that Canada has played on the world stage since the war and the keystone of our foreign relations ever since, Canada was acting in its authentic historic tradition. We helped formalize the links between our traditional allies and acted as the bridge between Britain and Western Europe and the United States. There was no pretense of a special vocation for peacekeeping or being the friendly disinterested country that could help with everyone's problems and be looked up to and walk with righteous pride around the world. We acted to protect our interests by joining with allies with whom we had an historic basis of trust and who shared our interests.

Our joining NATO expressed our continuing interest in the security of Western Europe, for which we had already made great sacrifices in the two world wars, and put our necessary alliance with the United States in a comfortable multi-lateral context. With memories of the war still fresh and many of those who served in the war still of military age the rapid resurrection of the forces from 1950 was relatively easy and uncontroversial. Korea was an anomalous war in almost every respect, but Canada's participation seemed both a restoration of the wartime alliance, with Canada joining in a Commonwealth Brigade, and a first serious use of the United Nations in which we placed such hopes. A volunteer force was recruited, lead by officers all but the most junior of whom had served in the war and remained in the regular army or the reserves.



With this background, the late 1950's were the heyday of the peacetime Canadian military. By 1960 regular forces strength was touching 120,000 and spending, though down from its Korean War peak and a declining share of a growing GDP, was over $1.5 billion, a healthy 3.8% of GDP. The army got Centurion tanks, the navy was getting first rate Canadian designed St. Laurent and Restigouche class escorts and the air force, despite the cancellation of the Arrow, had its all Canadian predecessor the CF-100 and was to get American Starfighters and Voodoos.



Since the 1960's it has been downhill all the way. Paul Hellyer was an ambitious minister who did not serve over four years as Minister of Defence to weaken Canada's defences. His work eventually and predictably had that effect. One of his goals in unifying the forces was to save money. Any savings were achieved by the integration of headquarters and support operations prior to unification. Hellyer's ambition expressed itself in a kind of policy wonk conceit. He thought unification was such a clever idea that he forced it through in the face of the reality of obviously distinct land, sea and air roles in the military, which had to survive unification.

Unification cut off the forces from their history and confused their purposes. For the public it became more like abolition as soldiers, sailors and airmen disappeared into their parking attendant uniforms. Real defence spending declined to about 2% of GDP, around which it hovered for twenty years until the public expectation of a post Cold War peace dividend and the search for politically palatable spending cuts to eliminate the deficit sent it towards 1%.



Unification was a mistake, but it was a mistake that occurred and would not be corrected because Canada was losing its way in the world. The United Nations, which had 59 members in 1950 had 127 by 1970. The former great powers like Britain and France had sunk to the status of middle powers and Canada, despite its economic strength, had fallen into other ranks. The memory of the war receded and Canada's political and military leaders had less and less experience of our role in the war or even the immediate post-war world.

Canada's neo-nationalism and opposition to the American role in Vietnam made Canadians increasingly reluctant allies of the United States. An entirely home grown peacekeeping mythology boosted by Pearson's Nobel Peace Prize fostered an fantasy image of Canada as a peacekeeping country without interests of its own or alignments. The inconsistency of this image with Canada's great military history and continuing membership in NATO never seemed to matter. As Canada agonized over its identity and fretted about its independence, the problem of Quebec and national unity came to dominate national politics. Despite Trudeau's invocation of the War Measures Act and calling out the army in the 1970 October crisis, it was always evident that the military could play no role in holding Canada together. The application of bilingualism to the forces led to a healthy participation of French-Canadians in the forces without answering the question of what country in the long term they would serve.



Trudeau had shown his contempt for the military during the war. Canada's place in the world never meant more to him than an excuse for foreign travel and a chance to indulge his intellectual musings before a diplomatically polite but usually indifferent audience. An attempt to strengthen ties with Europe as a balance to the United States, described by Trudeau himself as banal, North South dialogue, and the 1983 peace tour only obscured Canada's interests and relationships, premised an exaggerated appreciation of our power and dissipated our influence and obscured our alliances and our commitment to Western security.

Canadians took little interest in all of this, apparently satisfied by a series of photo opportunities that Canada was playing its rightful role in the world. They took even less interest in military affairs. Apart from press releases from disarmament lobbies the principal press coverage of military matters was as business news. When big purchases could be delayed no longer without a conscious decision to abandon defence entirely, as with the 1976 purchase of Lockheed CP-140 Aurora maritime patrol aircraft or the 1982 purchase of MacDonell Douglas CF-18 Hornet attack fighters there was business to be done, either directly on the projects or as offset purchases negotiated by the government as part of the acquisitions deals. The only political controversy was over who, or which province, was to get the work. The 1986 decision to have the Hornets maintained in Montreal rather than Winnipeg was never forgiven the Tories in the West.



Equipment purchases were always too little too late, but political support could generally be found for billions in spending as a questionable mix of industrial strategy and regional job creation. The price of big purchases was always inflated by the need to arrange production in Canada or offset orders for what could not be built in Canada. When the decision was finally made to order new frigates for the navy to replace ships nearing thirty years in service, the result was a massive $6.2 billion dollar order for twelve of the most expensive ships of their size ever built. The order had for political reasons to be split between New Brunswick and Quebec. There were several European designs that could have been adapted for and largely built in Canada for little more than half the cost and in less time. Instead the industrial strategists entertained vain hopes that having revived a warship building industry that had been neglected for decades we might be able to sell warships abroad. The prospect never grew serious enough that the political complications of such major arms sales had to be faced. Even when we decided that we had more frigates than we needed we were unable to negotiate a deal with the Saudis to sell ships from our production.

As the ships entered service the complimentary helicopter project necessary to make them the effective anti-submarine platforms they were designed to be fell victim to politics as the price tag, inflated by provision for Canadian assembly and customizing and offsets, for the EH 101 helicopters ordered by Kim Campbell became politically indefensible. The experience showed that political support for any large defence expenditure had disappeared. Canadians were grudgingly prepared to accept, largely out of thirty years habit, the small burden of Cold War commitment to NATO. With the end of the Cold War Canadians were incapable of imagining a true military threat or an interest requiring military commitment.



Peacekeeping had become the only acceptable political justification for Canada's armed forces just as Bosnia and Somalia were about to expose the phoniness of the idea. It ran directly counter to the purpose of having armed forces. The military exist to be ready to kill and be killed in defence of the country's interests. For a country like Canada their use has always been in concert with our historic allies. Peacekeeping premises having no interests and no alliances that might imply partiality between warring parties. Peacekeepers are not supposed to kill anyone and no one is supposed to want to kill them. Over one hundred Canadian soldiers have been killed in peacekeeping deployments, but they were not supposed to be. The level of mortality is not much higher than what results form peacetime training accidents and would not have been accepted if it had been.



Canada's infatuation with peacekeeping set in deeply after Pearson's succès d'estime in the Suez Crisis. Diefenbaker's government was prompted to overcome initial reluctance to send Canadian soldiers to the Congo in 1960 by public enthusiasm. Peacekeeping proved to be habit forming. Canada has managed to achieve an almost unbroken record of participation in UN peacekeeping missions since Kashmir in 1948 and claims to have unique expertise in peacekeeping. The unveiling of a monument to peacekeeping next to the National Gallery on a scale to rival the National War Memorial and the issuance of a peacekeeping loonie in 1995 marked the climax of Canada's celebration of its peacekeeping prowess. The extent to which peacekeeping had come to obscure our historic role in the world was strikingly evident when Jean Chrétien devoted much of his speech on the 50th anniversary of the Canadians embarkation for D-Day at Gosport, England, to Lester Pearson and Canada's peacekeeping.



Foreign leaders and diplomats are too polite to say it, but the truth is that Canada's peacekeeping efforts amount to no more than a few footnotes in the history of international politics since Suez. Whatever may have been the case in the 1950's, there are now scores of countries ready, willing and able to provide more than enough peacekeepers for any number of conflicts. The only problem is who will pay.

We hear little of other countries' peacekeeping roles. Canadians were always one of the smaller contingents in the former Yugoslavia behind the Dutch and the Ukrainians, of whom we heard nothing. A total of 35 countries had peacekeepers in the former Yugoslavia in 1994. The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon is now made up of contingents from Fiji, Finland, France, Ghana, Ireland, Italy, Nepal, Norway and Poland. So long as Canada has any armed forces it can continue to contribute to UN peacekeeping missions. But it is not needed and it will not impress anyone but Canadians by making peacekeeping the principal purpose of its armed forces.



With the end of the Cold War most Canadians have been at a loss to think what need Canada could have for armed forces beyond peacekeeping. But the circumstances of the Cold War, when the battle lines were drawn for a war that happily never took place, were unique. For most countries throughout history there are a range of more or less remote possibilities of conflict, some of them remote precisely because they are ready for them. For Canada, as for most advanced countries, there is little prospect of having to face a hostile power alone and little chance that it could do so successfully. But in seeking security in common with other countries, formally in NATO, and less formally beyond NATO, we must be prepared to bring our fair contribution to facing any threat. Without a serious military capability we cannot expect to be heard when any question of the use of force arises. We cannot call for a forceful response when we have nothing to contribute. We cannot urge restraint when we cannot exercise restraint ourselves but are merely impotent.



Canada's inability to shoulder properly an important military role can be seen plainly in the state of our navy. We now have sixteen modern or very expensively modernized surface warships. There principal purpose is anti-submarine warfare. After some difficulties in the early years Canada played an important role in anti-submarine warfare in both world wars. The threat posed by submarines is now greater than it has ever been. The volume of ocean going trade is vastly more important than it was sixty years ago. More importantly the capabilities and elusiveness of modern submarines, whether nuclear or conventional, make them effectively a new weapon system compared to the submarines that nearly strangled Britain in the two world wars. We have practically no experience of what they can do. The sinking of the Belgrano during the Falklands war was one of only two occasions when a submarine sank a ship since 1945.

The conventional opinion is that at the end of the Cold War submarines ceased to be a threat. But Russia continues to build formidable submarines: the 11,000 ton Akula II class and the 16,000 ton Oscar II class. The first of a new Severodvinsk class could be ready in the year 2000. The keel was laid in November for the first of a new Borey class of ballistic missile submarines. How many of Russia's 120 nuclear submarines could put to sea in time of war is anyone's guess. Older ships are steadily being scrapped. New warships have their problems. The crew of the Akula II Vepr struck in August over back pay. But the Germans had only 21 submarines at sea at the beginning of World War II. Russia can do a lot better than that. Its newer submarines have been regularly deployed in recent years, coming close to North America a times. They are the most heavily armed and reportedly the most stealthy submarines ever built. If, in their present state of disarray, the Russians think it worthwhile to build and deploy such ships, it surely makes sense to prepare seriously to defend against them.



Nor are the Russians the only threat. China has a growing fleet of submarines of all kinds, conventional, nuclear and ballistic missile carrying. It bought some from the Russians but makes its own in all categories. A large number of countries of varying degrees of responsibility have modern conventional submarines including Iran, Algeria, Syria and Libya. The submarine threat is large and growing. Who knows what these ships may be up to early in the next century? By that time Canada will still not have replaced its over 30 year old Sea King helicopters with the modern ship-borne helicopters necessary to make its new City class patrol frigates effective anti-submarine warfare systems.

The best choice would be an off the shelf purchase of a smaller number of the Anglo-Italian EH101 helicopters we agreed to buy in 1993. But for political reasons we are not likely to make that choice. We seem likely to have no submarines as the political will cannot be found to replace our three 30 year old Oberon class diesel electric submarines even with their near perfect replacements, the basically mint condition British Upholder class on offer at a bargain price after the Royal Navy decided to go for an all nuclear submarine fleet.



Ecuador, Portugal and Venezuela will keep submarines younger than those we are retiring. Australia, no more obviously threatened than Canada, is already replacing its six younger Oberons with six bigger Swedish designed and Australian built submarines at a cost of close to $5 billion dollars from a defence budget about two thirds of Canada's. Meanwhile Canada's frigates, according to recent reports are having trouble keeping their grocery and laundry bills within budget while showing the flag in Europe.



All writers on Canada's military pay fulsome tribute to the dedication and professionalism of our soldiers, sailors and airmen. Generally this is deserved. Particularly praiseworthy was the courage of Canadian soldiers in Croatia and Bosnia who found themselves in the middle of a real war, taking casualties and being humiliated by the forces of those they were supposed to be helping when they could not understand, any more than Canadians generally, what purpose their being there served. They have reason to be proud. Canadians should be ashamed that they have not been ready to assume the burden of preparing our forces to fight, but sent them vainly where they had to fight anyway.

 Somalia was the other side of the coin.

One immediate reaction to Somalia was that we were training killers in the army and should stop. But armies do not train their men to beat defenceless teenagers to death and have no need of recruits who would. It is an old saying that their are no bad soldiers, only bad officers. The implication is that the quality of recruits does not matter. Canadians have signalled in their indifference to the military, their unwillingness to pay to equip and train it properly, and their smug self-satisfaction with our peacekeeping that they do not want to recruit men ready to kill or be killed in the service of their country. Many step forward anyway and make the best of it. But along with those who are looking for training in a skill useful in civilian life and those who look forward to a cushy bureaucratic career it is not surprising that some delinquent characters are recruited and not weeded out or reformed. In Croatia and Bosnia Canadians were killed when they were not supposed to be. In Somalia they killed when they were not supposed to.



Canadians have to face the question of whether they are prepared to have armed forces ready to go abroad to kill and be killed in defence of their country's interests. All the evidence, from the infatuation with peacekeeping, to their low tolerance for defence spending and their recoil from the harsh facts of even limited involvement in minor real conflicts such as those in Bosnia and Somalia, is that they are not.

On Canada's present readiness to support its military and give them not only the money but the direction they need, we should do better to give up any pretense of assuming responsibility for our own defence. But it is a hard world and force and the readiness to use it are as much a part of it as ever. A nation that cares enough to survive will have to face that fact. Despite our experiences in the two world wars, we have evidently not grown up enough to do so. We are heading back to our prewar impotence. We have not learned to see long range or long term threats and forearm against them and thereby possibly forestall them. We have not learned that in collective security there are shared burdens as well as shared benefits. We have not learned to treat defence as a permanent part of our national life in which we all must take an interest.



The lesson of the last four years is that Canada's military require our constant attention and support. If we turn away when the present scandals have worked themselves out, lay the blame on a few individuals and refuse to support forces adequate to the tasks we may give them, new scandals will surely arise. We shall be powerless to defend Canada's interests abroad and our friends will not help. We shall have only ourselves to blame.

The Reform Party is not part of Canada's Conservative Future

September 1, 1996,  GRAVITAS

Which will be the conservative party in Canada after the next general election: the Progressive Conservative Party or the Reform Party? Merger is out of the question. But an answer can be given now. It will not be the Reform Party; for the Reform Party is not and will not be a conservative party. It cannot be a question simply of political strategy, of how best to exploit a given mass of conservative supporters for electoral success. The history, leadership, structure and active supporters of the two parties have shaped and will shape the nature of conservatism in Canada. The choice between the parties in not one of instruments but of philosophies.

The Reform Party's reputation is that of an rudely conservative movement. It arose in part as a reaction to a perceived failure of the Progressive Conservative Party to keep faith with is more right wing supporters. By far the greater part of its voters in the 1993 general election were Progressive Conservative voters in previous elections. But the Reform Party is not a breakaway conservative party. It is the creation of one man and its basic doctrines concern party and government structures and processes and have nothing conservative about them. Reform is a populist party inherently incapable of advancing conservative or any other consistent principles beyond the short term. In the classic paradox of populist parties, despite its claim to be the voice of the people, it is the tool of its leader.

Preston Manning is a square old fashioned sort of man. He heads a conventional traditional family. He practices a fundamentalist Christianity. His father was for twenty-five years a conservative premier of Alberta. He assisted his father in the research for, even ghostwrote, Political Realignment, the 1967 tract in which Ernest Manning called for two national parties offering clear right and left wing alternatives. Political Realignment espoused what Manning senior called "social conservatism" and his preferred choice for the national right wing party was the Progressive Conservative Party. As an alternative "if the cause of conservatism continues to suffer and decline" because of the failure of existing parties Manning senior warned that the formation of a new party was a prospect.

It is natural then to think that the party Preston Manning founded in 1987 is the new conservative party his father had foreseen. The right wing political culture of the Reform Party's home base in Alberta and the maverick right wing tradition of British Columbia, where it found its next strongest support, shaped the party's character and reputation at the outset. Alarmist reactions by liberals and leftists reinforced the party's crude right wing image. Some of this was just a cynical smear. Some if it was just stupidity, a plentiful resource among left wing academics particularly.

Preston Manning is a peculiar man and a peculiar politician. Before he became a politician he was a management consultant and as he presents himself in The New Canada he wants to extend his management consulting to the governance of Canada. He is an evangelist of systems analysis, a now dated American ideology developed in the 1950's and applied most notably to the management of the Vietnam war. The business of Manning Consultants, which he started when he was 26 with his father, immediately upon the latter's retirement as premier, grew from Manning senior's political contacts. Much of its work seems to have been in the fields where government and business meet in a mixed economy.

When Manning's policy pronouncements are most specific they are technocratic. His first contribution to public life was in jointly drafting The White Paper on Human Resources Development in 1967 for his father's Alberta government. Manning's description of it in New Canada gives a good taste of his policy making:

Our concept of human resources development focused on achieving certain levels of physical and mental health by requiring public and private sectors to perform specific functions: development/prevention, rehabilitation/adjustment, maintenance. The White Paper was accompanied by case studies analyzing poverty and underdevelopment problems..., and an inventory of public and private resources available to cope with these problems. It provided for the establishment of a Human Resources Development Authority to bring the resources of the big social-service departments...to bear on particular needs... It also provided for the creation of a Human Resources Council.

Happily nothing came of the report.

Manning's technocratic tendency fits naturally with the Reform Party's populism. Politics is reduced to the people's will and technical questions. Conflicts of interests and ideas, the real stuff of politics, disappear.

Manning is famously shy of confrontation and his personality, his religion and his management consulting lead him to want to be a conciliator. He seems never to have engaged in serious argument and, beyond his religious faith, not to have any convictions, which can only be developed in argument. He has reportedly read a lot but does not seem well read. His most famous reading was the Revised Statutes of Alberta, a testimony to his adolescent earnestness and interest in government, but it does not seem to have occurred to him that the work would be better if shorter. A more troubling literary interest has been the life of Lincoln and the secession crisis in the United States.

Manning's fundamentalist Christianity has alarmed many, who suspect that he may want to impose his religious principles through politics. But he has carefully explained that he does not seek to impose his religion on anyone and there is no reason not to take him at his word. The significance of his religion is different and twofold. Even in this secular age, perhaps particularly in this secular age, there is a tendency to think that the devout are people of principle and more likely honest. This has helped him sell himself as a new breed of honest politician even though his record is no better than that of the rattier sort of Liberal. His religion also seems to have given him a sort of moral complacency reflected in his manner and the confidence with which he has lead the Reform Party as he pleased never doubting that he spoke for the people. The one explicit connection he makes between his religion and his politics he also makes with management consulting: "How do God and man get reconciled? I studied that from a theological standpoint. I tried to see if there's any application of these principles that are in the Christian Gospel to conflict resolution in other areas." Manning sees himself as a conciliator rather than the champion of any particular political philosophy.

Manning's conception of Reform is so broad that it amounts to nothing more than a resentment of established parties. He claims for the Reform tradition in Canada Louis Riel and John Diefenbaker, Social Credit and the CCF, the Bloc Populaire Canadien and the Parti Qébecois. The fall of communism in Europe he writes in the preface to The New Canada came "under the banner of Reform." Writing in the early twenties he would perhaps have claimed Lenin and Mussolini for the Reform tradition. All that the various movements Manning claims for the Reform tradition have in common is that they were, for a time, popular protests. While he carefully avoids calling himself a conservative Manning does invoke populism, claiming to speak for "the common sense of the common people." This, as far as it goes, has been the foundation of the Reform Party's doctrines.

Many Reform Party activists are disenchanted Tories. But Manning was never a Tory and despite excellent political contacts ( he worked with Joe Clark thirty years ago on a study of the possibility of a merger between the aging Socreds and Peter Lougheed's rising Alberta Progressive Conservatives) he stood completely aloof from politics until the prospect of founding his own party emerged in 1986. His egotism largely explains this. But had he been a conservative he might have tested his father's hopes for a clearly right wing Progressive Conservative Party on the fringes of politics. Instead he waited to exploit the wave of disenchantment with the Progressive Conservatives as a base for his own party, with which he undertook the destruction of the Progressive Conservative Party while firmly refusing to make the Reform Party a new conservative party.

From before the founding of the Reform Party, at the Western Canada Assembly in May 1987, when plans for founding the party were laid, Manning was explicit and firm in rejecting any ideological base for the party.

In order to ensure that we could draw support from the disaffected members of the Liberals and the NDP as well as the Conservatives, it is important that a new western party have a strong social conscience and program as well as strong commitment to market principles and freedom of enterprise.

A new federal party which embodies the principal political values of the West will transcend some of the old categories of left and right....It should be a party whose members and leaders...attach high importance to wealth creation and freedom of economic activity on the one hand, but who are also genuinely concerned and motivated to action on behalf of the victims of the many injustices and imperfections in our economic and social systems.

We need a political party in which Canadian youth...will feel at home. Canadian youth have a special interest in jobs, in the economy of the future, in environmental protection and conservation, and in conflict resolution on a world scale-concerns which once again are not easily classified on the old "left-right" spectrum and which again call for ideological innovation and balance.

In the face of this, it is hard to see how conservatives could hope to make their home in Manning's party.

The second principle in the Reform Party's statement of principles, after a vacuous commitment to one Canada of equal provinces and citizens added recently, is support for a Triple-E Senate. The idea was talked up with religious fervour until it became obviously tedious and was sidelined with all constitutional talk after the 1992 referendum. In its origins it was an understandable expression of Western resentment against new wrongs like the National Energy Policy added to the history of Old Canada's periodic disregard for the interests of the West. But it is also the most concrete of a series of notions supposed to give the idolised people better control over government. Referenda and popular legislative initiatives are also called for. Most telling for any assessment of the Reform Party's claim to be a party of "stated values and principles", in accordance with the third of its principles, is the doctrine that M. P.'s should be simply the delegates of the voters, subject to no party discipline but bound to consult their constituents on how they should vote and subject to recall.

Opposition to party discipline has a long history in the West where it was felt that Liberal and Conservative members were prevented by it from properly representing Western interests. It was given new impetus by the GST, which was overwhelmingly opposed in Alberta but voted for by 22 of its 24 Progressive Conservative M. P.'s. That the 22 voted for it because they believed it was best for the country or that the Tories who bolted did not vote from conviction but to save their political skins (one, David Kilgour, became a Liberal and the only M. P. elected from Alberta in 1988 to be reelected in 1993) was irrelevant under Reform Party doctrine. The voters did not want the GST, largely because Manning and the Liberals were dishonestly attacking it, and M. P.'s should do what they are told.

A myth has grown up that M. P.'s are somehow forced to vote as their party says and that a good party could simply say that it would not do that and give M. P.'s and by extension their constituents more power. But if a party is to stand for anything its candidates must share a programme and confidence in its leadership and a commitment to work together. If there is to be no party discipline voters cannot know what they are voting for in voting for a Reform Party candidate and the party cannot honestly promise to do anything specific.

The Progressive Party, which in 1921 outdid the Reform Party in taking 65 seats in a smaller House of Commons in its first general election, foundered on a dogmatic refusal to be disciplined. In contrast to Preston Manning's dogged pursuit of official opposition status the Progressives declined the honour, leaving it to Meighen's Conservatives. Their inability to commit themselves led to the constitutional crisis of 1926 and the party effectively broke up in the general election of that year, only nine members being elected as Progressives.

As a practical matter the Reform Party's delegate theory of parliamentary representation might not amount to much. An M. P. is usually able to claim popular support for whatever position he may want to take and frequent detailed polling to test such claims is not possible. But the doctrine that M. P.'s should simply be spokesmen for whatever voters happen to feel makes the Reform Party's claim to be a party of principles untenable.

Up to now the contradiction between the party's claim to be simply the people's voice and its claim to be a party of definite principle has not been much of a problem for it. Its grassroots and its members' constituents are distinctly conservative and the party has comfortably reflected their views. There is a contingent link between the Reform Party's right wing politics and its populist doctrine. Its grassroots have assumed that people generally share their views and that only the deformation of political institutions, giving too much power to special interests and detaching politicians in Ottawa from the voters have led to governments following what they see as a leftist course. Hence the call for political reform that they presume will lead to smaller, cheaper and more sympathetic government. Hence also a tendency to advance simple right wing policies without either a sense of the complexity of government or the need to win people over to their policies. Developing and winning people over to policies requires a party of principle prepared to take unpopular stands. From the perspective of Reform Party doctrine a party taking an unpopular stand makes no sense because a party is supposed to be simply an instrument of popular will.

To the extent that they are defined and as they are perceived Reform Party policies probably have the support of about 20% of the voters, concentrated in the West. Beyond that, as has been tritely observed, the party garnered in 1993 a historically high protest vote. Some voters sympathetic to its policies still voted Tory in 1993. But if the party is not to stagnate before withering away it must be prepared to take a stand and risk unpopularity while developing its policies and facing the challenge of selling its policies to a majority of voters in English Canada or lose its conservative character.

Preston Manning understands this problem and is determined to resolve it and become Prime Minister. The advertising men and campaign strategists with old party or American experience have been recruited to do the selling job. But Manning does not want to try to sell conservatism to the voters. He wants to sell himself. And what he is is an opportunist looking for the wave that will carry him to power. The pollsters have also been recruited to find the wave.

The Progressive Conservative Party is the historic home of conservatism in Canada in all its aspects. It grew from the loyalism, respect for parliamentary government and compact between English and French from which the country grew. Its one historic departure from free market economics, the policy of protectionism proclaimed by Macdonald as the National Policy, could be excused on political grounds as necessary to integrate a sparsely populated country occupying half a continent. After tariffs had ceased for two generations to be an important political issue the Tories put protectionism behind them with their espousal of free trade in 1988.

Two things have confused the conservative identity of the Progressive Conservative Party. Any party is liable to act opportunistically and to try to win or hold votes by doing what seems popular. In the postwar period when there was a vague social democratic hegemony and when spending always seemed easier than fiscal restraint this affected the Progressive Conservatives as much as any party. They were in a sense infected by populism and promised to do and in office tried to do what people wanted rather than standing for principles and trying to bring people around to them.

More damaging to the integrity of the party was the Red Tory theory advanced in the sixties by the left-wing academic Gad Horowitz. Horowitz purported to trace a collectivist tradition in Canada back to the Loyalists and forward to the CCF and NDP and a Red Tory tendency in the Progressive Conservative Party. Chief in the meagre list of Red initiatives by Tory governments was their involvement in the founding of the CNR and the CBC. The establishment of the CNR was a purely pragmatic measure impelled by the railways' wartime debt crisis. The establishment of the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission was a national measure that did not exclude private broadcasting. Mildly interesting as an academic essay the Red Tory theory had a pernicious effect on the Progressive Conservative Party. It gave a spurious intellectual respectability to Tories who, under the sway of the leftist and big government ascendancy of the sixties and seventies and political opportunism, could see no conservative principles to separate them from the NDP, only matters of style.

The Mulroney government did much that was dismaying and not just to Westerners. But it was always the best conservative government available. With the GST it suffered for forthrightly applying conservative policies. Its main faults were a timid fiscal policy and constitutional conceit. The party also undoubtedly became unbalanced by Mulroney's personalisation of it. By the time the Mulroney era ended Preston Manning had drained away too much Western support for it to be righted.

Tories have always stood for the historic value of Canada. They have seen English Canada as having a real identity, not just leftovers from the American Revolution spiced up by the French. Their Canada has always included Quebec, without any illusions that its distinctness can be papered over by a hybrid nationalism. They collapsed in Quebec in the two wars when the historic attachment of English Canada came into conflict with the historic detachment of Quebec since the Conquest. But the Tories have always been a national party.

The Reform Party cannot claim to be a national party. It is not just a question of the concentration of its vote in the West. That could change. But the party was founded as a Western party to represent Western interests. Its roots lie in a Western Assembly held in Vancouver in 1987. Only in April 1991 did it resolve to expand into a national party, excluding Quebec. The only legitimate elements in the vast Reform tradition Manning claims are the parties of Western discontent. Manning wants to be Prime Minister and will offer whatever he has to to appeal to Ontario and the Maritimes in the next election, even at the cost of exposing his Western flank. But he cannot affect for himself a sense of Canada that neither he nor his party has. There is nothing in the Reform Party's or Preston Manning's history or pronouncements that suggest a sense of Canadian history beyond Western discontents, there is no sense of why Canada should exist. Reform's political doctrines about parliament and a Triple-E Senate show a contemptuous ignorance of why our parliamentary institutions came to exist as they do and how central they are to our identity. Reform has only a fig leaf foreign policy. Because it has no sense of Canada it has no sense of its place in the world.

Reform Party constitutional policy contemplates massive devolution of powers to the provinces. The suspicion of the left is that it intends that the provincial governments should do less with the powers devolved to them than the national government is doing, leaving holes, particularly in health care. But the more important point is that in the Western separatist tradition it seems just not to believe that Canadians as a nation can be trusted to work for their common good. The suspicion that Manning and his party would not mind if the country broke up is not without foundation. The party's policy Blue Book states that 'The Reform Party opposes the conception of Canada as "a meeting of two founding races, cultures, and languages"': but Quebec cannot be kept in the country on any other basis. If bilingualism has been oversold and applied dogmatically without, evidently, binding the country solidly together, the Reform Party's official languages policy is only what would be expected of an international organisation like the European Union. The Blue Book sections on national unity and the constitution do no even mention Quebec. The party's more recent 20/20 paper on national unity is most concrete in its description of the twenty consequences of secession, which reads more like a blueprint for separation than the Chrétien government's Plan B warnings about the consequences of a breakup. The party's unctuous refusal to see that Quebec is not a province like the others must mean either that Quebec cannot be satisfied or that separation would be generalised across the country. On one of his early forays into Quebec Manning allowed that in accordance with party doctrine a Reform member from a predominantly sovereigntist riding could speak up for sovereignty. Despite the tentative attempts to organise in Quebec it may be taken as given that the Reform Party will never make a breakthrough in Quebec unless it does a deal with the Bloc and makes explicit its implicit separatism.

Its claim to be a national party and Jean Charest's popularity in Quebec have kept the Progressive Conservative Party going since 1993. Supporters have hung on for old times sake and from suspicion of the Reform Party. But the party's necessary rebound has not begun. It has not overcome the legacy of loathing for Brian Mulroney and the uncertainties of Jean Charest's leadership. Time will slowly put Mulroney behind them; but only if his personalisation of the party is replaced by definite principles. Charest is the most deft and personable politician to emerge in Canada in a generation. But he is all technique. He has carefully avoided taking any position, cultivating good relations with Ralph Klein while pouring cold water on the enthusiasm of young Tories for the new right. All policy was put off to the Winnipeg policy conference in August, but without definite leadership the party risks being too vague to motivate a revival. It is an often successful strategy of opposition parties to wait for a government to defeat itself without advocating specific policies. But to wait for both the Liberal government and the Reform opposition to self-destruct is expecting too much. People must have positive reasons to vote Progressive Conservative and Jean Charest does not seem ready to give them.

But unlike the Reform Party the Progressive Conservative Party is more than its leader. Its riding and other associations and informal networks have independent strength and can shape the party if Charest will not. Progressive Conservatives are conservative. The operators and careerists who supported the party have fallen away and will not be back while the party struggles to revive. Beyond the activists there is a large Tory intellectual tradition in Canada that the Reform Party and Preston Manning reject. Canadian conservatives can make the Progressive Conservative Party a forthrightly conservative party with a national reach. If they do that, it will be the only conservative party on offer as Preston Manning tries to take his party across the political spectrum while his supporters straggle about offering right wing suggestions they lack the discipline, leadership and persuasiveness to make effective.