Saturday, November 14, 1998
LIBERAL VOICES IN A CONSERVATIVE WILDERNESS
Reflections on the Public Good, last week's left-wing love-in at the University of Toronto, proved that true liberalism never runs smooth.
Oakland Ross
Toronto -- Why would 1,600 apparently sane individuals part with $20 to spend a Saturday squeezed into a Toronto auditorium for eight hours of progressive-minded speechifying by a collection of intellectual policy wonks? Shouldn't they be out shopping like everybody else?
Packed in they were, listening attentively, even raptly, often breaking into sustained applause, as half a dozen speakers -- all more or less opposed to the debt-slashing, budget-balancing, anti-government orthodoxy of the day -- took turns at the microphone.
Look out, Mike Harris.
The Left is back, and this time they're . . . well, they're quite nicely dressed, on the whole. They're also articulate and often funny and generally charming and not without a certain sex appeal, and they don't always agree with one another (but that's a Good Thing). They also tend to be over 40, male and white. Plus they all write books.
Nervous yet? Well, maybe not.
The arch-conservative Premier of Ontario may not be quaking in his golf cleats, but if it were up to the six pundits and thinkers who gathered last week to address a sold-out room at the University of Toronto's Convocation Hall, he soon will be.
It should be noted at the outset, however, that those on the left have their work cut out for them. Apart from their unanimous opposition to Mr. Harris and his neoconservative soulmates in other jurisdictions, the six speakers couldn't agree on much of anything.
Are leftists against economic globalization or for it? Do they want to increase taxes on the rich or not? Once upon a time, the answers to both questions would have been immediately apparent to all: Down With Globalization! Soak the Rich!
Not any more. Now progressive thinkers disagree profoundly on these issues and on much else.
In fact, about the only idea that all the speakers shared is that, contrary to rumour, the progressive movement in Canada is not dead. It just acts that way.
And, boy oh boy, does it ever.
"Why is the left so hopeless?" asked James Laxer, a long-time left- wing gadfly. He shook his head. "It's just too broad a question."
That didn't stop others from trying to answer it. According to Michael Ignatieff -- the Canadian journalist and author who lives in London -- things are not as bad as they seem. "We have to stop underestimating our strength," he said. "Above all, let's feel our strength."
Mr. Ignatieff brought heartening news from across the pond, where 11 of 15 European governments are controlled by centre-left coalitions. He seemed optimistic that this same feat will be accomplished here, but he warned it should not be achieved by papering over ideological disagreements between liberals -- among whom he counts himself -- and social democrats. "We have to stop expecting that we should all agree."
No fear of that, at least not to judge by the sniping among the six. In addition to Mr. Ignatieff and Mr. Laxer, they were: philosopher Mark Kingwell, journalist and author Linda McQuaig, former Ontario premier Bob Rae, and pundit and author John Ralston Saul.
One other thing they all have in common -- besides a real concern for the decline of the public welfare in Canada -- is that they have each written a book that has been published in the past year by Penguin Canada, the main sponsor of the conference.
And so, not surprisingly, the day's proceedings also had a little something to do with that sordid capitalist activity -- selling things. Some of the speakers deftly worked pitches for their books into their addresses. Mr. Rae, author of The Three Questions: Prosperity & the Public Good, made the most slyly winning of these pitches; Ms. McQuaig cracked an impressive number of mildly salacious jokes concerning her book's somewhat ambiguous title, The Cult of Impotence. (Her book is not about a secret society of men burdened with sexual-performance problems -- although, if Ms. McQuaig had her way with the captains of high finance and the golf-playing premier of a certain province in Canada's industrial heartland, some such sect could conceivably result.)
Despite their disagreements, or more likely because of them, the six speakers provided a sort of road map of leftist-flavoured thinking in Canada today, at a time when the left seems to be in general retreat across the country (apart from two remaining redoubts, Saskatchewan and British Columbia, where the New Democratic Party continues to hold power).
Unfortunately, if the road map these people sketched was even remotely accurate, then the left in Canada is going simultaneously in at least two directions: forward and backward.
At least four of the speakers quickly aligned themselves into opposing camps: those against the current trend toward economic globalization and in favour of making the rich pay (Ms. McQuaig and Mr. Laxer) and those who tolerate the lowering of national barriers to trade and investment while wondering whether demonizing the rich will help the economy or anything else (Mr. Ignatieff and Mr. Rae).
For his part, Mr. Saul agitated somewhere between the two sides. He has his doubts about globalization, certainly, but he also believes that we are responsible for the world we live in.
"We've become lazy as citizens," he said. "And when things didn't work out, we said we were being victimized. Lazy victims."
Mr. Kingwell, meanwhile, remained philosophically above the fray, peppering his discourse with words such as "uneliminable" and "semiotics."
"Too many big words," complained one audience member, who was evidently not alone. "I sort of got lost."
But Mr. Kingwell was forgiven his excesses, if excesses they were. The same could not be said of Ms. McQuaig, who encountered a considerable barrage of not-so-friendly fire from two of her fellow speakers. Mr. Rae, for example, disagreed strenuously with her contention that the economic disarray of the new global age can be easily overcome.
That disarray may be summarized as follows: The speed and fickleness of international capital movements in the computer age have caused governments to trip all over themselves, cutting debts and slashing public services, in a desperate bid to hold on to private capital or to prevent it from migrating elsewhere. Result: a world that's falling apart.
But, says Ms. McQuaig, it's all unnecessary; governments themselves are to blame.
In her new book, she argues that governments must impose their will on financial markets, rather than the other way around. She makes a case for the so-called Tobin tax, which would levy a small charge on the transfer of capital from one currency to another. This tax, she said, could raise roughly $150-billion a year and thus would discourage purely speculative transfers of money.
But Mr. Rae expressed skepticism about the Tobin tax. It can't work, he said, unless all governments in the world agree to impose it, something he considers unlikely.
"I don't believe that you can go around to people and say that there's a painless way out of this," he said. "I do believe it's important for progressive people to come to terms with some form of market economy, in which wealth is produced, in which the world is getting smaller. . . . Such a world is not in and of itself an evil place."
Mr. Rae also took issue with Mr. Laxer, who paints a lurid picture of huge sources of private capital being accumulated in what he calls "the new gilded age of capitalism." Mr. Laxer's solution: Tax the rich.
But Mr. Rae argued that targeting the rich with new or higher taxes won't solve much on its own. If people are to have the kinds of public services and social-welfare systems that they want, he said, then everybody has to pay for them, not just the wealthy few.
"The fact of the matter is, the income-tax system is relatively progressive," he said. "The real, tough question is how much are you prepared to pay?"
He noted that his government was defeated in 1995 -- and Mr. Harris's party elected -- not by a small compact of wealthy Ontarians, but by a large number of ordinary people, who apparently were not willing to pay for the very services whose withdrawal they now angrily decry.
"The people we have to convince are the people who live next door," he said. "Those are the people who elected Mike Harris. He may have been elected by some of you."
It is unlikely that many of Mr. Harris's supporters were at Convocation Hall.
"There are very few conservatives who would feel comfortable here," said Ken McEvoy, who, like most members of the audience, was middle-aged and white and did feel comfortable here.
But not necessarily happy. Many in the audience were deeply distressed by what they see going wrong both in Canada and abroad.
For Ms. McQuaig, things began to go awry in the early 1970s, when governments started to yield their regulatory control of the financial marketplace. She railed against what she calls "bad globalization," which has governments cowering before wealthy elites and allowing capital to serve the interests of the few at the expense of the majority.
"What's changed is the willingness of governments to stand up to financial markets," she said. "We're moving more and more to a society that works for the benefit of a very small elite."
Again, Mr. Rae disagreed. "This argument that governments are impotent or on the sidelines," he said, "is, frankly, rhetorical exaggeration. . . . It's not the case."
For his part, Mr. Ignatieff also took issue with Ms. McQuaig's contention that the quality of life for most Canadians has been declining in recent decades. He said the past 30 years of Canadian history have seen impressive advances in the way that most people live and are treated by one another. The status of disadvantaged groups -- women, gays, aboriginals -- have all improved dramatically, he said.
"This country is more open and fair than it was when I was a child. The fact is, millions and millions of people have benefited from globalization."
He dismissed Ms. McQuaig's view as "misplaced nostalgia" for a past that most people would not want resurrected. "Come back, Louis St. Laurent," he added in a mocking voice, invoking Canada's prime minister of the 1950s. "All is forgiven."
This brought Ms. McQuaig bounding back to her feet in search of a microphone. Mr. St. Laurent -- may he rest in peace -- would no doubt be pleased to learn that Ms. McQuaig declared a vigorous preference for his Canada over the country she sees around her today.
Disagreements on the left? There were plenty. According to Mr. Ignatieff, however, that isn't a bad thing. He said progressive-minded people should not strive to present a false front of unanimity, as has apparently been done under the centre-left administration of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a situation he referred to as "a smothered consensus."
"Liberals believe in liberty first," he said. "Social democrats believe in equality first. These are two very different traditions." On the other hand, Mr. Ignatieff seemed to suggest that political power is attainable by progressive forces only if they do agree, and the person they should agree with is, it turns out, himself.
He recommended, for example, against opposing free trade. "In my view, a liberal swallows hard and supports free trade. It's not smart politics to align in an anti-free-trade argument."
He also counselled against targeting the rich with higher taxes, as the left traditionally likes to do. A clobber-the-rich policy isn't smart politics either, he said. Why not? Because, Mr. Ignatieff said, the poor don't really want the rich to be placed under an increased tax burden. Next thing you know, the taxman will come for them.
Mr. Ignatieff said a crucial factor behind Mr. Blair's election was the Labour Party's decision not to press for increased taxation of the rich. "This was a hard lump to swallow, but it won him the greatest electoral victory since 1945."
Maybe so. But you'd have a difficult time persuading Ms. McQuaig of this.
"What stuck in my craw," she said after Mr. Ignatieff had spoken, "is his saying you shouldn't tax the rich because the poor won't like it." She raised her shoulders and rolled her eyes.
At which point, Mr. Ignatieff backed down -- but only a little. "Should the rich pay more?" he said. "Certainly. But watch how far you go with this."
And so the day progressed, some people going one way and others going the opposite way. Still, the experience itself -- tough questions being asked and sometimes answered; ideological differences being aired; serious issues being addressed -- left at least some of the audience downright delirious with the rare pleasure of straight talk about troubling matters, even if it didn't seem to go anywhere.
"Awesome," exulted Christine Cheng, a student visiting for the day from the University of Waterloo. "It was totally inspirational."
She and several friends seemed euphoric as they drifted off into the chill November night -- still conscious, not to mention coherent, after eight hours of debate about policy, procedure and politics.
Mike Harris may not be worried yet -- but, hey, it's a start.
Related Reading
Isaiah Berlin: A Life, by Michael Ignatieff (Penguin).
Better Living: In Pursuit of Happiness from Plato to Prozac, by Mark Kingwell (Viking).
The Undeclared War: Conflict in the Age of Cyber Capitalism, by James Laxer (Viking).
The Cult of Impotence: Selling the Myth of Powerlessness in the Global Economy, by Linda McQuaig (Viking).
The Three Questions: Prosperity & the Public Good, by Bob Rae (Penguin).
Reflections of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century, by John Ralston Saul (Penguin).
Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)