I recently listened to a panel on “public sector perspectives on challenges to the community sector”, featuring representatives from all three levels of government.  Each speaker virtually began with: ‘Don’t look to government for the money because government can’t afford it.’

But, in a democracy, isn’t the government us?  So when our governments say they can no longer afford something, what they are really saying is that “we” can’t afford it.  But, is this really the case?  Have we really become poorer?

Canada’s average GDP per capita—the value of total productive output divided by the population that produced it—has continued to grow, with a few minor interruptions since 1946.  Our national wealth is, relatively speaking, where it has always been.

On the other hand, Canada’s median income—the mid-point income level—currently stands at only two thirds of GDP per capita.  Until the 1970s, Canadian GDP per capita and median income were roughly the same.

Obviously, we don’t have a wealth problem, we have a distribution problem.

Secondly, we have a revenue shortfall. Tax revenue is the interest we claim for the use of public resources which, collectively, we all own and maintain.  Simply, we are not paying ourselves enough.

Between 2004 and 2012, Canada’s federal corporate income tax rate fell by one third—from 21% to 15%.  The argument against corporate taxation holds that corporate profits are either reinvested in the company, resulting in new jobs, or returned to investors. In either case, the taxes on those profits are realized through the personal income taxes paid by the employees and/or the rentiers.  However, despite a 30% cut in the corporate tax rate, virtually none of those new, after-tax profits went into new jobs or investors’ pockets.  Instead, corporations chose to retain their windfall as cash reserves—which are not subject to income tax on either the corporation or the investor.  By the end of last year, there was nearly half a trillion of these dollars—what former Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney called “dead money”.  That’s a significant revenue loss.

And the GST.  Each percentage point of GST is estimated to return around $5 billion, annually.  In 2006, the government reduced the rate from 7% to 6% and, in 2008, from 6% to 5%.  This translates into a revenue loss of $5 billion in each of 2007 and 2008, and $10 billion in each of 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012.  So what did you and I get out of this $50,000,000,000 in ‘savings’?

At roughly 33-34 million, that meant every Canadian realized, on average, about $150 in GST savings in 2007 and 2008—roughly 41¢ a day, or the HST levy on a $3 chocolate bar.  Since 2009, those savings have increased to 82¢ a day, or the HST on two chocolate bars.  So there you have it.  Although we can no longer “afford” adequate public health care, we can each enjoy two additional candy bars a day.

Finally, between 1982 and 2010, the median annual income of the top 1% of Canadian taxpayers increased by almost 50% to $283,400—an increase of $91,800.  Over the same 28 years, the median income of the bottom 99% rose by $400—from $28,000 to $28,400.  Keep in mind that fully half of the 99% earns less than the median income.  Despite our wealth, a too many Canadians earn too little to contribute much tax at all.  Another significant revenue loss.

Thirdly—we have a spending problem.

For example, in 2011, Canada spent $24.7 billion on defense.  That was an increase of about $8 billion since 2006 and more than $10 billion since the start of 2001.  An annual expenditure of $24.7 billion dollars a year amounts to just under $67.7 million a day.

So, at the risk of repeating myself, why, if the total national wealth continues to grow, in absolute terms, do our governments say they can no longer afford to meet our needs?

Here’s why.

Federal corporate income tax brought in $30 billion dollars in 2012.  At the 2004 rate, that would have been $42 billion.  Repatriating the lost corporate tax revenues from the dead money reserves, brings us $12 billion.  Restoring the GST to 7% (at a cost of 84¢ each, a day)—$10 billion.  Rolling back defense spending to 2006 levels—$8 billion.  Altogether, that gives us an annual revenue increase of $30 billion.  Given that the deficit for 2012 is estimated to be $26 billion, we can not only balance the books this year, but do so with $4 billion to spare.

Yes, Virginia, we can afford what we need.  And if we can afford it, so can our government.

Pat Steenberg is a former Executive Director of KAIROS, and a former Vice-President of the Canadian Council on Social Development.

Normally, I wake up thinking  in a deaf and grinding way: ‘Shit!’.   Then I swing my legs over the edge of the bed and spend the rest of the day getting on without thinking about thinking.   It works.  I’m busy.  I play with my grandchildren whose bright and happy faces I adore.  I write words on electronic pages like netting summer butterflies.  I strum tunes on my father’s old guitar and so on; that’s the script I take out each day, and it’s not false, but it’s also true the old wounds never quite heal; and then I woke thinking of Mikhail.

He lost a whole lot more than a city.  He lost the multitudes of a continent to the vilest of greed, to the ugliest exploitation.  The whole Russian middle class was tanked.   Ballerinas lost their pensions and went looking for food banks.  Famous engineers line up beside them and commiserated.  The Russian public interest was raped from the Bering Sea to Poland.   Mikhail’s tribulations make mine look like chicken soup.

He flew so high.  Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990.  He brokered the first nuclear arms reduction treaty.  He was the key figure in ending  the Cold War and bringing down the Berlin wall.   And all along he preached the gospel of bringing a balanced change to Russia, by restructuring (glastnost) the Soviet economy, and opening it up to the west and new ideas (perestroika).  Gorbachev wanted to turn the corner, not drive off a cliff.  Then his buddy Boris came along, mounted a tank and drove the old Soviet Union straight off a cliff.  Mikhail and his message of balanced progress were entirely extinguished.  From glory to compost in a few weeks.

It’s gotta be tough to go from addressing the United Nations and organizing a new world order to being a middle aged man with an odd birth mark on your forehead and few employment prospects.  So I should just buck up.  Shit happens.  That’s the lesson of Mikhail.

It wasn’t until I watched the city’s beautiful electric rail project vanish into the hands of my opponents, the great South March forest felled for McMansions and Lansdowne Park ploughed under for McCondos  that I began to see what was what.  At the very centre o f myself, I had this unshakable conviction that  we Canadians were immune to the world’s nonsense.   We were capitalists – yes, but no one died in Canada because they couldn’t afford hospital care.  Nor did we hold with the idea that owning weapons was a sacred right.  We didn’t shoot each other in schools and shopping centres.  We were magically insulated  by the 49^th parallel and cold northern air.

For four municipal terms, I worked in the cocoon of this profound conviction that it was ‘all good’ .   Unlike Mikhail, I didn’t win the Nobel Prize and no Pope noticed me, but I was very happy with what we accomplished, and the recognition it received.  To everyone’s surprise, in 2010, I was voted Ottawa’s Man of the Year; to less surprise, in 2004 Canada’s eco-councillor of the year, and like Mikhail I wrote a book about my experiences.  Mine wasn’t a grand world release, but ‘Urban Meltdown: Cities, Climate Change and Politics as Usual’ did well at home and was short listed for a prize.

We were on a roll.  Mikhail was getting Russia ready for the last decades of the 20^th century and I was getting my city ready for the first of the 21^st.  Like Mikhail, I had lots of forehead but unfortunately no interesting birthmark, but I did think about getting a tattoo, perhaps an image from the Chauvet cave in France.  The paintings  from that cave are extraordinarily beautiful.   Those horses were painted 30,000 years ago and they are still stunning today.

Did I think of getting the tattoo after being defeated by a former Mayor or after? When the climate change statistics kept running through my head?  No doubt, it’s not good to think these black thoughts, but it’s hard not to when the trees being hacked down in the park for condos are just down the street, not in someone else’s town.  When some company registered in Manitoba is peeling the old park apart like a rotten orange and replacing it with cement structures and underground parking.

I wonder if Mikhail ever thought of running away to the South of France?  I certainly have had those moments, but to what purpose?  To be more comfortable?  Sometimes, I think the idea of paddling  a voyageur canoe from Ottawa to Washington was about running away, not about clean water.  You have to be a little crazy to be a grandfather paddling  at 45 beats per minute, day after day for 40 days.  Paddling until your hands and feet went numb, paddling as if your life depended upon it.

The trip was in memory of William Commanda, the Algonquin Elder who preached peace and the circle of nations.  His daughter blessed our departure with a smuging ceremony.  It was an exhilarating  moment with the Parliament buildings picturesquely  on the bluff.  We left with the ambition to bring Canadians and Americans together around the importance of protecting the waterways that we all need and share.   We did it because great modern cities like Ottawa, Montreal, New York, Philadelphia, Washington have all been built at the river’s edge and need clean water.

Wherever we camped, we talked about how we would like to see the Ottawa and the Potomac become sister rivers, as a way of celebrating these great rivers and encouraging  the citizens of each nation to to protect them.   The people we met were wonderfully welcoming.  Nor did it matter what political allegiance or religion they professed, they helped us and spoke eloquently themselves of how they also wanted to see the day come again when people could fish and swim and drink the water of our rivers.   We paddled and talked and camped  and everywhere people’s kindness and generosity was overwhelming.

Somewhere in northern New York, out of the twilight, a father and his daughter paddled towards our remote island campsite with a box of local beer for us.  He thought we might appreciate it.  Another night, for supper, an evangelical Christian  brought us a huge box of fried chicken.  We paddled down the Hudson, past Pete Seeger’s boat, the Clearwater; we paddled into New York City past the United Nations, past the  Statue of Liberty; we paddled past aircraft carriers, we paddled past Philadelphia and the Liberty Bell, we paddled into Washington  to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial where we poured some water from our river, the Ottawa into America’s national river, the Potomac symbolizing the connections and importance of these two waterways.

We paddled to the doors of Capitol Hill and arrived in time to help participate in the 40th anniversary celebration of that nation’s Clean Water Act, first passed in 1972.  We talked of our journey.  We shared our hopes for rivers where you could fish, swim in, and had water you could drink.

Yesterday, I awoke thinking of Mikhail Gorbachev walking across Red Square, a small figure in a big place, carrying a briefcase, the purple birth mark on his forehead hidden under a fedora, walking towards his little institute on good governance.  How useless.

I thought of myself on that long trip, where every stroke, every day, every week was a stroke for clean water and I did not care if it was useless.  I awoke thinking Mikhail would have come with us and this cheered me.

I am Canadian.  My father fought in the RCAF in WWII from Naples to Ortona; my father-in-law, an infantryman, was awarded the Military Cross.  In the earlier war, my wife’s grandfather was one of the original Canadian members of the Royal Flying Corps.  Both my father-in-law and his father-in-law were shot and lived with the physical and emotional scars of that experience for the rest of their lives.  Their history—Canada’s history—lives on through their, and my, extended families.

But had you suggested to them that wars were the defining events of Canadian history, they would have been gobsmacked.  They fought so that they and others would be free from tyranny—and so that no one else, ever again, would have to fight a war.  And when they came home they repatriated their courage, their principles and their ideals and applied these to their civilian lives.  Proud as they were to have fought for their country, they were equally proud of the country that welcomed them home and helped them restart their education and embark on civilian careers.  As lifelong public servants—one a fisheries economist and one a professor of particle physics—they now engaged in a different kind of national service.

But, as my fathers knew, patriotism encompasses much more than war.  It is, in fact, the entire landscape of “significant aspects” from which our history is made.

A history that saw immigrants settle the West with unmatched Canadian grit and perseverance.

A history that celebrates compassion—introducing public health care so that no one again would be denied medical attention for lack of money.  No one again would suffer financial ruin simply in order to preserve their health or that of their family.

A history that built a national railway system—an industrial project of enormous difficulty and significance and a feat possible only through the combined efforts and vision of Canada’s nascent public and private sectors.

A history of innovation and enterprise that built one of the first national broadcasting networks—giving Canada her voice while, at the same time, setting her up as a leader in modern communications technology for the better part of the 20^th century.

As a founder of the United Nations, and a pioneer in the science and art of peacekeeping, we earned the world’s respect.  At home, abolishing capital punishment reflected a new maturity and national self-respect, as well as obedience to the commandment: thou shalt not kill.

A history of three national populations and two official languages demanded flexibility, tolerance and a willingness to compromise—demands not always honourably met.

For, of course, our history has its darker side.  Our systematic and ongoing marginalization of Native peoples’ rights, cultures and desires.  The Family Compact.  Our internment of Japanese Canadians.  Our treatment of Jewish refugees during the Second World War and the imposition of admission quotas in our universities.  The expulsion of the Acadians by our British colonial ancestors.  The suppression of the Metis.  And countless other examples, both past and, regrettably, present.  No history—no society—is perfect, certainly not ours.

But our national story—the arc of our history—has, until now, “bent towards justice”.  It has been a history of individual and collective effort and one of shared prosperity.  We have sought to be a decent country and there is no shame in that.  It is a history that has been expressed in many forms—through the art of the Group of Seven, Emily Carr and the women of Beaver Hall; through the documentary films of John Grierson at the NFB, through the stories of Margaret Atwood; and through the songs of Gordon Lightfoot, Stan Rogers and Rita MacNeil.

Canada doesn’t need to rewrite its history, we need simply to remember it.

I am Canadian.  I continue to stand on guard for a Canada that still bends, clumsily but steadily, towards democracy and justice.  If history is written by the winners, may my history be written by all the ordinary men and women whose stories make up our sprawling Canadian narrative.

This is on my mind because a few days ago I was holding  forth on life in my father’s little Cape Breton fishing village (which I often do for it in my mind is symbolic of the many changes we’ve seen, no fish, no farms and no people left) and a young friend of my daughter’s listening asked me the same question the journalist asked Hefner.  “What were the greatest changes I had seen in my life?”

No one has ever asked me this question before, presumably because I’m too young to consider  such a burdensome question, nonetheless I gave it serious attention.  As important as women’s anatomy is to the human race, its’ appearance was not first on my list, but it was easy to understand why it was for Mr. Hefner.  He has found prosperity buying and selling photographs of naked women and we tend to see and judge what is important  through the lens with which we observe the world.

No doubt, the high tech folks would say the invention of the internet has been greatest change.  The internet has made the global transfer of capital instantly possible.  It has spawned whole industries and moved us from the world of paper to the world of online.  Newspapers are now staggering into the sunset as people move to being ‘on line’ – all the time via their cordless phones.  It isn’t hyperbole to say the internet has changed the way we live.

Canadian political commentators which populate the media like dandelions would probably say the greatest change has been the rise of pluralistic politics.  A majority of Canadians are no longer required to elect a parliamentary majority.  All that matters is how the vote splits and how much of the plurality or ‘base’ your party controls.  Pluralistic politics have become permanent politics.

American Presidents would probably be inclined to say terrorism.  Terrorism has changed the local and international legal fabric of the American nation from the Geneva Convention to freedom from incarceration without due legal process.  Drones war is in but chemical war is still out.  What appears to be incontrovertible is what people regard as important depends more on the lens through which they’re looking than what they’re actually seeing.

For me, it was and easy question to answer.  After 1950, North America invented a new kind of city.  If you stand on the Bridge over the Rideau  on Bank Street in Ottawa and look north, there you can see the pre-1950 city.  Bank Street north is narrow.  It’s lined with small shops and back in 1950 a street car ran down the centre of it and through the adjacent communities.  Now, spin a hundred and eighty degrees and face south and look across the river, you will see Ottawa’s first shopping centre ‘Billings Bridge’ built in 1952.  It has about 2,000 parking slots.  It’s single story and behind it are townships of tract housing, car based suburbs, six lane divided arterials, no street cars and few buses.

This changed North America and created the world we live in today.  Stephen Harper grew up in Etobicoke north as did the present Mayor of Toronto.  It created an endless demand for cheap oil because the suburbs can’t work without cheap oil.  It created the landscape of warehouses that we call malls where ‘cheapest’ price possible is the principal religion.  It created a world where people and the planet’s resources are at the service of ‘cheapest possible’ but the rich pay ‘fair wages and buy ‘organic goods’ for quality because they can afford it.  Everyone else does what they must.  The new landscape killed the idea that quality of life was a more complex equation than a high grade owner/operator franchise and low taxes.  The new landscape changed us culturally, creating communities of purpose perfectly matched to the internet world.  Dial it up.  Plug yourself in and connect to the lowest prices possible.

The pre-1950 urban landscape were communities of place before they were communities of purpose.  They still exist and are endlessly celebrated in product ads and political ads but the reality is every year there are less of them, fewer small towns, fewer remnants of the pre-1950 streetcar villages.  Fewer places which people feel to be a place first rather than a collection of advantages and purposes.

The differences between the two communities pre and post 1950 are so encompassing materially, physically, socially, psychologically and spiritually that their significance escapes most people.  Like a goldfish accepts his bowl of water as the only reality possible, so do people accept the post-1950 landscape as the only life possible.  Not surprisingly a new kind of politician has emerged to serve this new landscape.  Mr. Harper grew up in Etobicoke north, resolutely part of the post 1950 North America.  His principal interests are oil, low product prices at the mall (and it’s concomitant low wages for local and foreign workers) and of course growth at all costs.  I call it the one, two, three policy for a happy Canada.  Nor does Mr. Harper have any choice but to follow this course because post-1950 residents are his chief support.

The same applies to Mr Ford, Toronto’s new mayor who was elected on a series of simplistic slogans.  One of the them being ‘getting the streetcars off the streets’ and ‘stopping the war on the car’.  No doubt, Mr. Ford would be a perfectly acceptable Mayor for Toronto if  it consisted entirely of post-1950 communities.  Unfortunately for Mr. Ford, he also represents the largest, collection of old streetcar communities – with their streetcars still operating – left in Canada.  Hence he constantly clashes with these residents who live differently and see the world differently than post 1950 residents.

This is the greatest change I have seen in my life time.  It’s the greatest because whether you live in a pre- or post 1950 landscape it affects everyone.  It affects how we are govern ourselves as a nation and as civic collectivities.  It affects what we define is important and it has created an unsustainable form of human life which is slowly but surely bankrupting human society financially and suffocating us biologically.  Everything else is trivial in comparison.

Location: Colonel By Room at Ottawa City Hall (110 Laurier Avenue West, Ottawa)

After the business meeting (at 7:45 PM), join us for an evening with special guest, Clive Doucet who will be offering us a presentation on his involvement in the Capital to Capitol canoe expedition for watershed conservation.

Join the Facebook event page

For further information, please contact us at (613) 232-7297 or at ov-outreach@cpaws.org

The only problem with Jim’s Clusterfuck Nation rants is the same one as the original Jeremiah had. It’s a long, long drop from our current state of petroleum based bliss to the one where people will abandon just-in-time global production, cheap franchise distribution and the world re-localizes. I have no doubt Jim is right and it will happen, but unlike Mr. Kunstler I don’t believe there is any collective cliff face waiting for us to drive over.

Rather it is going to be a city by city grand and slow progression as cities change from refuge areas to refugee. It’s going to be more like a moth eating away at a wool blanket. At first the holes are scarcely noticed. There is simply too much systemic inertia, supported by too much global investment in more cars, trucks, oil, bigger boats and jumbo jets. Watersheds and wilderness will continue to be sacrificed to keep the black gold flowing and the status quo intact.

The most successful economies will continue to be the ones that find a multitude of ways of slowing and managing the steps down as the European Nordic nations are doing today. It’s not especially complicated. Look at the city of Detriot or Cyprus and you can get clear images of how deep the voyage down can be, but that doesn’t mean it’s coming to New York or Toronto anytime soon. As frustrating as it is for Jim Kunstler, there’s simply too much money to be made out of supporting the status quo, but in a more perfect world this is how the steps down would be delayed and reduced.

1) The financial meltdown. Solution: Return progressive taxation to all sectors of society including the banks. Get rid of derivative and currency speculation entirely. Societies can’t succeed with fewer and fewer people bearing the costs. It didn’t work in the 18th century and it’s not going to work in the 21st. In the long term, it creates a revolutionary scenario and in the short term starves both the public and individual capacity. But progressive taxation won’t work by retaining today’s expenditure patterns. There’s no point in improving public revenue generation if it just means there’s more money for wars in Africans deserts and Asian mountains.

2) The governance meltdown. Solution. Share the taxes more fairly. Cities get 8 cents of every tax dollar; the federal government gets 50 per cent but provides fewer services. This isn’t sustainable. Can you imagine the Mayor of Toronto flying in his armoured car to Calgary for a meeting? Even if he wanted to, he doesn’t have the cash.

3) The environmental meltdown. Solution. Stop subsidizing the oil and car industries. One underground parking space costs 15 to 25,000 dollars depending on where it is. Surface storage costs 5 to 10,000 per slot. Each private vehicle requires 8 storage spaces. No society can continue successfully when it costs more to store machines that it does to house people.

4) Urban Meltdown: Get off the global umbilical cord. Local rail. Local energy. Local food.

These are some of the ways we start to walk down the stairs instead of driving happily forward until arriving at the cliff face. Will it happen? It has already begun in some countries, but not in Canada. Our current crop of federal leaders have made it clear, they are followers and to give them credit, they have been clear about this. When every other nation get their tax, environmental, tax and public investment acts together, including developing nations then Canada will consider following. In the meantime, it’s business and politics as usual.

Needless to say, followers don’t have much street cred. No one cares anymore if Canada has ‘the bomb’ or not, or is more interesting in armed intervention than ‘keeping the peace’, or vice versa. Canada has become a ‘you-lead, we’ll follow country’ while managing to retain it’s unpleasant hectoring qualities as in ‘our banks are better than your banks’. Not a way to win friends and influence people.

Reading Jim Kunstler’s ‘Clusterfuck Nation’ blog is a pleasant diversion, but it’s very existence in the blog world and not as a syndicated column in the mainstream print media is proof enough that it is the sound of Jeremiah howling and not North America changing. -30-

Clive Doucet is a writer and former Ottawa City Councillor. He is a retired Jeremiah. His latest book is “Shooting The Bruce”. It can be purchased electronically in electronic or print versions. It has no redeeming social importance.

In spite of the constant news about climate shift, planet heating, ocean and atmospheric changes, most people can’t tell you what it means for human beings except the weather is less reliable and storms more frequent. This is what it means.  The human hunting platform is its social organization and the greatest expression of the human adaptive accomplishment is the nation state.

It was the nation state in the 20^th century that was the primary motor for the massive expansions to the human population and the provisions of extraordinary collective capacities in all the domains essential to human welfare – research, technological development, clean water, education, health, food supply, transportation.   There is nothing that you do each day of your life that isn’t the result of the successful operation of your local and national governments.

The problem is the human platform is melting down – everywhere.  All that varies is the rate and the details  but everywhere nations are becoming less and less effective at providing  the ‘universal’ services upon which we all depend.  The most spectacular failures are the most spectacular successes.  It is something of an international agony to watch that flailing giant the United States of America.  There are, of course, glimmers of hope.

The  Americans electorate decided on a decent, intelligent and well spoken chief executive but the reality is there is absolutely nothing he has done or will do in the next 3.5 years which will arrest the decline of the nation state.  President Obama is not alone. Everywhere we see the same incapacity to restore the forces that made nation states successful.

Progressive taxation has collapsed everywhere.  Yet, it’s clear progressive taxation was one of the key innovations that gave nations the capacity to provide the services needed to create more wealth, not less, more growth not less, more personal success, not less.   It’s also clear nations can’t function by taxing only part of their population.  It’s two sided sword.  It not only reduces government capacity, it twists and reduces civic commitment which is central to all national success, but this is what has been happening – everywhere. It is world wide news when a tiny state like Cyprus even suggests that a progressive bank tax should be applied to foreign capital hiding in their banks or when France suggests it will go it alone on a tiny transaction tax on international speculation.

Look at the actual legislative proposals of any national government and what strikes is how ineffective the are.  Austerity is the principal response to social and economic meltdown.   All austerity accomplishes is speeds up the the processes already in place which are feeding the decline of the national level of social organization.  The supra national state is already fracturing.  It is in Europe.  It’s fracturing in the United States and in Canada it is being tacked together with flag patriotism, Afghanistan and Tim Horton’s images.

Like or dislike Tim Horton’s coffee, all the metrics, not controlled by the federal government, show the nation is in full on decline domestically and internationally.   Even the famous inter-provincial equalization payments which did so much to build the famous sense of Canadian fairness and high quality public services are evaporating as each province is left to struggle by itself.  The once powerful Ontario flounders with no hope in sight and no real interest from the rest of the country in her troubles.

At the end of the day the Berlin Wall fell because enough people on both sides of the wall understood it didn’t work to do anything but protect a corrupt and inefficient supra national state.   In the 21^st centuries nations will fracture along old and familiar ethnic lines as they are in Syria but also along resource and organizational lines.  Meanwhile, the war on terror has been exposed for what it always was, an expensive side show which distracts people from focusing on the central problem – their national governments which are no longer successfully functioning.

As the larger organizational units fail, smaller ones will move to replace them – which is good news for some.  Pauline Marois, Quebec’s new premier has stated the province’s transportation future will depend on electricity, not oil.  She calls it a ‘structural’ issue. Her argument is simple.  Electricity is an energy source and a technology that is renewable, oil is neither.  In fact, the oil rich policies of the national government are suppressing and delaying the needed conversion in Quebec.

The decline of the Canadian Federation will happen as it does elsewhere with a push and a pull.  A pull from its constituent parts and a push from the national level as the human beings struggle to re-balance their organizational capacities just as the earth’s climate struggles for a new equilibrium at a higher temperature.  -30-

Clive Doucet is an author and former city politician.  His last book was “Urban Meltdown: Cities, Climate Change”.   His latest is “Shooting The Bruce”.

Death always has a summary effect.   Like it or not, one is pushed to evaluate, to measure, to summarize the life that has passed away.  When I first read “Time for Outrage” like millions of others, I found myself nodding my head in agreement.  Why were nations able to accomplish so much after the horror of the Second War?  At a time when nations like France and Britain were on their knees and all nations were poorer, yet national health care was invented and delivered.  Free public education was expanded to the university level or cost so little  a summer job could put you through.  (I graduated with zero debt.)

Hessel’s generation wrote ringing declarations like the U.N. Declaration of Universal Human Rights.   Yet, today the most basic, the most primitive of these accomplishments is under relentless attack.  For example, where do drone attacks fit into the U.N.’s Declaration of Human Rights? Or the slave wages of Walmart and the ever, increasing gap between the poor and rich?  It’s ‘time for outrage’ said the 93 year old Stephane Hessel.

The Occupy Movement was a great success.  For the first time, it got people talking about government for the one per cent instead of government for the majority.  It helped to get Mr. Obama re-elected and  helped to at least slow the relentless union and pension bashing.  But the most significant accomplishment of all was that the Occupy demonstrations around the world exposed the harsh reality that there is no Franklin Delano Roosevelt with a New Deal plan in hand to fix the mess – anywhere. In France, Hessel’s home country, Francois Hollande defeated M. Sarkozy and this was supposed to be a Roosevelt moment, but each day, he looks more like a bespectacled version of Mr. Sarkozy himself than a white knight for Stephane Hessel.   Like other leaders he’s taken refuge in keeping the barbarians at bay in someone else’s country while the problems in his own remain unsolved.

What is happening?  Why can’t outrage be harnessed in a useful ways instead of igniting destructive ‘beggar thy neighbour’ policies as the present Canadian government has grown expert at.  The latest is protecting Canadians from ‘seasonal worker fraud’.  This is to be accomplished by impoverishing forestry and fishermen who are already poor, further.

The problem is ‘getting tough’ on people is not solving problems anywhere from Greece to Spain to the United States .   It’s just making people poorer.  Nor do we see any capacity to cut through the structural problems that are as evident as the strings that the Lilliputians used to tie down the giant Gulliver

It’s been clear for decades now that the costs of supporting the the oil/car industries are not sustainable, that each year they require greater subsidies and these subsidies are slowly bankrupting cities especially.   It’s been clear for decades that one of the principal infrastructure solutions is to re-build national and local surface rail systems.  Rail has always been the cheapest, most cost efficient and environmentally healthy way to move people.  This is why the car companies moved to get rid of them at the beginning of the last century, but there is no money for rail.  Yet there are billions available for fighting a war in the poorest nation on the planet.

It’s been clear for everyone who reads that the financial ‘industry’ is out of control.  Again, the solutions are crystal clear, transfer taxes have to be imposed, tax havens and derivatives eliminated, the Glass-Steagall Act to separate commercial from investment banking brought back etc., but what has been the political response?   Don’t upset the apple cart, ‘the banks are too big.’

It’s been clear that the richest nations especially have to re-localize food production, but we continue to allow food production to develop little differently from a human version of locusts moving across the planet  fishing the seas dry, burning the forests, destroying the soil in order to bring the richest nations the ‘cheapest’ possible products.

It’s been clear for generations now that the criminalization of drugs is an annual trillion dollar plague which keeps violent men very rich, impoverishes entire nations and kills thousands of innocent people each year, but what politician, what nation who has the courage  to declare drug abuse must be treated as a health problem, not a criminal problem?

These are just a handful of the fundamental structural problems that are never addressed by any politician or political party, because unlike Stephane Hessel they are afraid.  Politicians are afraid that people will suffer if they advocate for real change and some of them will.   They’re afraid that they will suffer personally for trying to cross the vast vested interests that supporting the status quo requires. They’re afraid that banks will collapse, interest rates will go wonky, or worst of all that the people who count will get poorer not richer.  So it’s best to keep shovelling more cars out onto the road, putting up more malls, jailing drug dealers and letting the banks play their margin games.  None of this is sustainable and that is why economies everywhere are melting down.

People are afraid from the highest to the lowest income levels of any real change and so they run around in ever diminishing circles.  Politics has turned into repetitive, public theatre where the same scripts and the words loop back on themselves like an electronic feed where the code has short circuited.  The Occupy movement arose from nowhere but a book to identify many of the problems the 21^st century faces but could not overcome the fear of leaders actually responding.  Stephane Hessel never understood this because he was one of those rarest of human birds – a fearless man.   -30-

Clive Doucet is an Ottawa writer and former city politician.  His most recent novel ‘Shooting The Bruce’  has just been released.  His last book, “Urban Meltdown: Cities, Climate Change and Politics as Usual” was short listed for the Shaughnessy-Cohen Prize for political writing.

There were five of us who paddled from Ottawa to Washington. Five paddlers, no matter how strong, cannot move a 34-foot voyageur canoe weighing 450 pounds empty, and about a ton with equipment, 1,800 kilometres. It’s simply too heavy and the distance too great: at 45 paddle strokes a minute, travelling 50 kilometres a day for 40 days, at least eight paddlers are needed to get the boat from dawn to dusk, town to town. Fortunately, most days we had them.

It started out as a trip about twinning the Ottawa and Potomac Rivers and making friends, as a way of celebrating and promoting cleaner water on both sides of the border. This is the way it started and ended, but somewhere in the middle, for the original five travellers, it turned into just surviving. Judging by the amount of Ibuprofen the original five consumed each day, big pharma should have sponsored our trip, not the Canadian Wildlife Federation.

No one had ever paddled a freighter canoe from Ottawa to Washington before. We had Max Finkelstein, one of Canada’s foremost wilderness canoeists, leading the expedition, but Montreal, New York City and Philadelphia are not exactly wilderness areas, and no one knew quite what to expect. Would it be possible to camp? How dirty would the water be? Could we swim or drink the water? Would it be ugly? These were not easy questions to answer because no one travels by canoe on these waters anymore. On urban waterways, people travel in versions of motor homes equipped with toilets, fresh water supplies, kitchens, sleeping areas. In an open canoe, you have none of these things. Would camping even be possible or would we have to stay in hotels?

With the exception of the Richelieu River south of Montreal, where it was like paddling through one long suburb, the rivers were surprisingly wild, surprisingly lush, filled with interest and wildlife. Even in the post-apocalypse landscape of New Jersey just south of Manhattan, the banks of the rivers were verdant, the foliage dense and vibrant, plants and trees pushing up amongst the abandoned factories. I went swimming on the Delaware, a day’s paddle from Philadelphia, and a beaver quietly surfaced, unafraid and curious at my unexpected presence. Great bald eagles are back all along the Hudson and Delaware Rivers. They soared above us every day, sometimes so close you could feel the power of their wing strokes and pick out the outlines of their pinion feathers framed against the sky. Fish jumped at our bow, sometimes so large, they seemed to breach like whales.

The 1972 American Clean Water Act has made a tremendous difference along the rivers. We saw the cleanup projects on many sites contaminated by polyclorinated biphenyl compounds (PCBs). All of these were funded by the U.S. federal government. Everyone we talked to said the quality of the water had improved since the passage of the Clean Water Act. American rivers and lakes were cleaner, wildlife was back, fish and fishermen were back. This was all good to hear, but to keep things in perspective, nowhere could we risk drinking the river water. We had to search out a faucet somewhere and carry our own drinking water in the boat. Only at the ocean end of Chesapeake Bay did we see people catching fish to eat, rather than catching and releasing. Here, we were able to join in and dine on pan-fried fish just pulled from the water.

Entering Manhattan or Montreal is a very different thing in a canoe than a car. Manhattan’s skyline appears at the mouth of the Hudson, as impressive as the Rocky Mountains rising from the prairie, but the buildings are not your focus. Your focus is the Hudson River, wide and tremendously powerful with standing waves and dangerous currents. When the view is from a canoe, even a great city is no more than a backdrop, its many bridges decorative rather than useful. Your entire attention is on what it always has been – the water and the canoe.

The great six-lane bridge that crosses Lac des Deux Montagnes carrying a river of vehicles each day between the cities of Ottawa and Montreal appears entirely different from a canoe. From the canoe, you cannot see or hear the vehicles pouring across it. All you hear is the rushing water beside and under you. The bridge with its six lanes appears and disappears remarkably quickly, and you are back in a different world. This is a world largely forgotten by the modern one, for the cities have all moved to the edges of the highways, and the rivers, except for the summer efflorescence of recreational boaters, are silent as a church at midnight.

I still can’t tell you how to drive to Washington from Ottawa, but I can tell you how to canoe. You take the Ottawa to the Lachine Canal, to the St. Laurent, to the Richelieu, to Lake Champlain, to the Hudson Canal, to the Hudson River, to New York Harbour, to the Raritan River, to the Delaware, to the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, to Chesapeake Bay, to the Potomac, to Washington – and add 800,000 paddle strokes.

And I can tell you that there is a great will out there on both sides of the border to have our rivers return to the condition Europeans found them in when they first arrived – rivers from which you can drink the water, catch and eat the fish, and swim.

To be continued….

 Clive Doucet is a poet, author,  former Capital Ward councillor and paddler extraordinaire.