May 2000 Fraser Forum: The Impact of Globalization and Individualism on Governance
When I first came to work in Ottawa in 1990, I knew very little about the federal government. Despite having worked in policy and politics in BC for six years, I was not prepared for what I would find. I had to learn quickly, though. As press secretary to then-Attorney General Kim Campbell, I had to answer questions from the media on a host of topics. One of the first things I did was read the government phone book. A decade later I still remember my stomach churning and gurgling. What the heck do all these people do? Why do we need pages and pages of policy analysts and personnel managers? Since then, Ottawa has supposedly undergone "wrenching cutbacks." Yet I recently saw the new phone book for 2000-2001. It was bigger than the one I read in 1990. My conclusion: Canadians were overgoverned in 1990, and things are just as bad in 2000. Yet if nothing much has changed inside government, plenty has changed outside of government. Here are a few thoughts on how and why globalization and cultural change are creating the conditions for substantive reform.
Much is made of the impact of globalization on the nation-state, and with good reason. As communications, media, money, and trade slosh across borders, markets expand and the competitive discipline of large markets reaches further into politically-protected national nooks and crannies. Critics rightly point out that nations have yet to give way to networks. No matter how global a citizen you are, you still need a passport. True, too, that globalization affects different people differently. Laid-off factory workers in Brampton find new jobs at the local mall: Osgoode Hall law graduates move to New York. Though we are a long way from the one-world-one-market, people today can choose to stake not only their identity but also their material lives on something more than the accident of where they were born. Territorial states now find themselves competing among each other to retain and attract people, particularly successful ones. We are now gaining greater freedom to choose what governance we wish to have order our public lives.
That Canadians have governance choices barely blinks on Ottawa's official radar screen. The Prime Minister scoffs at the brain drain and great statistical exercises are concocted to show that either it doesn't exist or, if it does, it runs in Canada's favour. Another sign that people are making their own governance choices is the underground economy. Here, too, the official line is to blithely deny or smoothly downplay. Here's a research project for the Minister responsible for revenue. Do what I did. Go to the web site askjeeves.com and ask: "How do I set up an offshore bank account?" My search results produced 30 or so web sites. Almost half of them were Canadian. As the technology of encryption advances, Canadian governments are going to find out quickly whom the public really prefers to govern their money.
Considerable mental and emotional distance separate having a choice and making a choice. Albert O. Hirschman, in his wonderful little book, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, described the steps from submission to rebellion. The motive is less self-interest than self-identity: how do I see myself? Throughout the developed world, people are seeing themselves more as individuals with individual tastes and interests than as simply members of a group with a primary interest in collective self-preservation. People are starting to ask themselves, "Why is collective unity a higher priority than my personal wants and desires?" Acid-like, individualism eats away at the deeply engrained habits of deference to our natural governors. As Canadians' identities become more inner- and less outer-directed, they will exercise their choices and alter how and how much their lives are governed.
Ottawa's traditional response, when called upon to bind people's loyalties to the national state, is to encourage second-tier collective identities. In doing so, one group is pitted against another in a competition for favours and protections. This contest, of course, perpetuates the justification for the first-tier collectivity - Canada. Without it, your group, be it a province or an ethnic community, may either suffer at the hands of others, or will not receive its "fair share." Growing prosperity has led to greater physical and social mobility and that, in turn, has led to stronger individual identity. This restrains Ottawa's practice of manipulating collective identities to its advantage, such as pitting francophones outside of Quebec against their provincial govern- ments on issues such as health and education. As Canadians have grown wealthier over the last 30 years, despite rising taxes, they define themselves less by government and, therefore, presumably want less from government.
Ottawa has yet to adapt. It has failed to understand or appreciate the growing scepticism towards its grants strategy of binding jobs to specific locations, people to associations, and permanency to favoured institutions, irrespective of market choices and outcomes. The first response is to blame patronage politics, hence the recent criticisms of Human Resources Development Canada and Indian and Northern Affairs Canada. To be sure, it's political blood sport to hammer the government for managing grants badly. But that political payoff only exists because of the underlying cynicism as to the effectiveness and appropriateness of grant-driven economic development - whether its well-managed or not. To contemporary Canadian ears, it sounds more uncomfortably passé than politically objectionable to hear a grant to a Cape Breton call centre defended as "patronage at its finest." Cultural acceptance of subsidies has eroded even as the practice has grown.
The British Empire ended in the mid-twentieth century not because England was weakened by war, but because the English people stopped believing in it. Whether by changes in the world or by changes in the self, Canadians are ceasing to believe, as they have, in the empire of governance chronicled in the federal government phone book. Ottawa ought not to take their loyalty for granted. The relevance of governance today rests more upon individual choice than territorial control. The book of Ottawa should not be closed, but made sufficiently readable so as not to cause dyspepsia. Both the world and the individual are pressuring Ottawa to realign the supply of with the demand for governance.
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