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 Rudyard Griffiths and Taylor Owen: Learning from Britain's three great debatesAfter Thursday's third and final debate, there is now no doubt that televised leaders' debates have proved their value to the British electorate. Snappy, substantive and high-stakes, they have made for great television. By elevating a third party, and shining light on an appointed Prime Minister, they have provided a vital character analysis of the prospective leaders -- a prolonged stress test that you simply don't get in press conferences and media scrums. Most importantly, however, the frequency of the debates has created a new rhythm to the election; and the issue-specific focus of each debate has encouraged a far meatier policy debate in the broader campaign. However, we should remember that the very holding of the debates was a matter of happenstance. The United Kingdom, like Canada, leaves all aspects of debate planning to the will of the main political parties and television networks. As such, these first ever British debates occurred only because the incumbent leader, Gordon Brown, was looking for a political game-changer. Going into the election, Brown was down in the polls. He needed a way to restore the electorate's rattled faith in politics following the MP spending scandal. Once Brown endorsed the debates, 12 representatives (two from each of the parties and networks) spent four months negotiating, in private, all of the details -- a process described by one participant as "mind-numbingly detailed." Yet the results were a success. Why leave the negotiation of future debates, including whether to have them at all, to the whim of the party and leader who is ahead in the polls at election time? Canadians must ask themselves the very same question. Unlike the U.K., we have a history of election debates. However, they have been, almost without exception, predictable and dull. Our debates are stultifying because there is neither accountability nor transparency in the negotiating process surrounding the planning, because the negotiations occur only once an election has been called and because the sole medium used to disseminate the debates -- television -- is not in and of itself a sufficient way of stimulating public engagement. How would we design an election debate process that put the interests of the electorate ahead of the party's? One way to accomplish this would be the establishment of an independent election debate commission. Having reviewed all relevant international comparisons, we believe the guiding principles of such a commission must be independence and transparency. This means, first and foremost, that it must operate as an independent charitable civic institution, rather than either a part of Elections Canada or a new government bureaucracy. This would look much like the League of Women's Voters, which independently ran the U.S. presidential debates until they were co-opted by the political parties. Planning of the debates would occur between elections, with the commission transparently negotiating the rules using the goal of a substantive policy debate as the primary interest. Models would draw on international best practices, and would likely include a diverse range of debates, held throughout the campaign, on various policy issues. Money to fund the debates would be raised privately through charitable contributions, taking the burden of the cost away from the television networks. We expect that there will be intense pressure for political parties to participate in debates organized for the public good with widespread public engagement. Such a model would also relieve the TV networks from the uncomfortable position of having to negotiate with the squabbling political parties they are supposed to be covering impartially and holding to account. If we want debates in Canada that can rival, in style and substance, their new U.K. counterparts, then we need a new model for their planning and execution. All it will take is a genuine citizens' movement to reclaim Canada's election debates so they serve the long-term public good as opposed to the short-term interests of our would-be leaders. National Post Rudyard Griffiths and Taylor Owen are currently working on an initiative to reform the Canadian televised election debates
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 Rudyard Griffiths: The mother of all loopholesWhile last week's federal budget generated the usual grousing by economists about unrealistic deficit projections, the Conservative's snipping of a raft of erroneous tax loopholes met with near universal applause, and rightly so. It strains credulity to imagine how it was in taxpayers' interest to subsidize fellow Canadians' Botox treatments and chin tucks. Similarly it defies logic, in an era of fiscal restraint, to allow corporate mucky-mucks to use generous stock options to take gobs of cash out of their companies tax free. Closing tax loopholes makes good financial and political sense. This is why the Conservatives should move to close the mother of all loopholes: the tax-free status non-resident citizens enjoy on their world-wide earnings. Currently, there are some three million Canadian citizens who are deemed non-residents and live abroad -- most of them permanently. By virtue of holding a Canadian passport these individuals have the right to extensive consular service (case in point: the 2006 Lebanon War) and can access, after as little as six months residency in Canada, free health care and heavily subsidized education. The C.D. Howe Institute calculated that the monetary value of citizenship to non-residents can run in the hundreds of thousands dollars annually -- all the while they contribute nothing financially, or otherwise, to Canada. Closing this egregious loophole by taxing all Canadians on the basis of their citizenship, not residency, would generate a number of immediate benefits. For starters, the federal government could collect potentially hundreds of millions in new taxes each year from non-resident citizens. This would be no tax grab. Rather it is a sensible way to mitigate against a potentially massive charge to the public purse caused by another Lebanon War-type event and the mass return of absentee citizens, all of them clamouring for services. More important, the new tax could be used to pay for the considerable health-care costs associated with the slow, but inevitable, return of tens of thousands of aging non-residents in years, and decades, to come. Collecting taxes on all Canadians' world-wide earnings is also not the Herculean task some make it out to be. The United States and Israel both tax their citizens globally; and we already have tax treaties with scores of nations. Another big plus of taxing all citizens on their world-wide earnings is the extent to which it would deter people who acquire a Canadian passport for its generous perks but have no attention of settling permanently in Canada. This is growing problem with our immigration system. One in four skilled or professional male immigrants leaves Canada for good within ten years. These are the very newcomers we need to retain to meet the twin challenges of our aging society: a shrinking workforce and declining tax base. By attaching a life-long economic cost to maintaining Canadian citizenship, regardless of residency, we could create a financial disincentive for citizens to leave the country permanently. By attaching a life-long economic co Arguably, some of the Conservatives' biggest policy successes in the last year have come from their revitalization of Canadian citizenship. They scored big with voters when they ended the practice of allowing citizens born outside Canada to pass on their citizenship indefinitely and when they revamped a stale-dated citizenship study guide to make it take newcomers and Canada seriously. Closing the tax loophole that allows citizens of convenience to enjoy the incredible benefits of Canadian citizenship without taking on an iota of shared responsibility is right thing to do financially and ethically. Indeed, reforming our tax laws so they strengthen our common citizenship could make the patriotic afterglow of the Olympics into something truly enduring. National Post Rudyard Griffiths is author of Who We Are: A Citizen's Manifesto. Tonight in Ottawa he will vie with five other finalists for the $25,000 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for political writing at the Politics and the Pen dinner.
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 Rudyard Griffiths: Central Canada's capacity for self-delusionAs a born-and-bred central Canadian, I am well and truly fed up with my compatriots' mindless bashing of the oil sands in the run up to, and now during, the Copenhagen summit on climate change. What has me ticked off isn't just the boundless capacity of fellow Torontonians to ignore basic facts about the oil sands. That they are responsible for only 5% of Canada's greenhouse gas emissions. That the C02 released per barrel extracted from the oil sands has fallen by a third since 1990. And, that fourth-fifths of the emissions caused by each of these barrels comes out of tailpipes -- driving on Highway 401, for instance. What leads me to despair about central Canadians is our wilful blindness to how the fundamentals of our own economy have caused the country's C02 emissions to soar in recent years, and will make any new reductions we pledge in Copenhagen extremely difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. Consider: In much the same way that the oil sands fuel economic growth in Alberta, immigration drives the Ontario economy. The 150,000-plus newcomers who arrive in my province each year sustain our booming housing market, buoy consumer spending and fuel our service sector. Immigration, or more precisely rapid population growth, has become a significant factor in Canada's surging C02 emissions. On a per-capita basis, we welcome more newcomers than any other nation -- on average, 300,000 each year. Part of the rite of passage for each new arrival is to embrace the Canadian-born's super-sized energy lifestyle, and emit, on a per capita basis, somewhere in the order of 18 metric tonnes of carbon annually. Given that Canada's population grew by a whopping six million people since 1990, almost all through immigration, it is no surprise that we failed miserably to meet our Kyoto Protocol obligations. Indeed, population growth alone is easily responsible for half of the 30% increase in Canada's annual C02 emissions today as compared to 1990 levels. The fact is that rapid population growth in central Canada is a far greater challenge to meeting the kinds of future C02 reductions Canada will commit to in Copenhagen than emissions resulting from oil sands exploitation. Consider that if Canada formally adopts the pledge it has floated to cut emissions by 20% over 2006 levels by 2020, we will need to take some 125-million metric tonnes of C02 out of "circulation." Yet, between now and the end of the next decade, Canada's population will grow by 4 million people -- again, almost all through immigration. Even if we achieve a 20% per capita reduction in carbon emissions, these folks will still be producing 14.4 metric tonnes of C02 each, or 58 million metric tonnes of additional emissions over the 2006 levels. To make matters worse for planet Earth, the vast majority of the newcomers who will settle in Canada over the next decade come from countries with very low per capita emissions. Our top three source countries for new arrivals have average per capita C02 emissions of only 2.2 metric tonnes. These facts bear repeating if only to point out the hypocrisy of much of central Canada's climate change-borne assault on the oil sands. One could only imagine the braying on Bay Street and among the construction unions if big cuts in immigration levels became part of a national C02 reduction plan. Central Canada needs to take a long, hard look at its own economic drivers, including non-environmentally friendly population growth, and fess up to its role in pushing Canada's emissions ever higher, today and into the future. National Post - Rudyard Griffiths was the co-organizer of the recent Munk Debate on climate change in Toronto, and is the author of Who We Are: A Citizen's Manifesto.
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 Rudyard Griffiths: The case against action on climate changeIn my column yesterday I previewed the case for a bold response to rising C02 levels that will be presented at the upcoming Munk Debate on climate change. Let's now turn our attention to arguments of climate "skeptics." Here we find views that suggest Canada would be foolish to follow a global stampede to forge an ambitious successor treaty to Kyoto. For climate skeptics the debate revolves around three central questions: what is the actual extent of the problem; what are the economic and human costs, not just of inaction, but also of action; and, what are alternative policy options? For Bjorn Lomborg and Nigel Lawson (two of our Munk debaters), climate change is hardly the major threat facing mankind. While this may seem the case for environmental activists who live in modern industrial societies, for the billions living in poverty without access to sufficient water and food, there are more pressing priorities. According to skeptics those who place climate change above all other human concerns are ignoring the adaptive capacity of humans and the potential benefits of higher average temperatures. For example, rising average temperatures will reduce the number of cold spells, which are a far greater cause of death than heat. Estimates made in the journal Ecological Economics put the number of saved lives at 1.8 million a year, and it is argued that the number of lives saved would surpass the increase in heat-related deaths for the next two hundred years. Second, before embarking on a global shift in economic and development policy, climate skeptics argue, we need to consider both the economic and human costs. The direct economic costs of meeting Kyoto's obligations are upwards of $150-billion per year. The costs of new commitments made at Copenhagen could be substantially higher. There are several concerns which stem from this fact. The Copenhagen Consensus, a think-tank run by Bjorn Lomborg, found that $27-billion in funds could prevent 28 million people from getting HIV, $12-billion could cut malaria cases by more than a billion a year, and $10-billion spent annually on food aid and agricultural production could feed the 229 million people who currently live in hunger. Climate skeptics think saving these lives now should take precedence over seemingly ineffective treaties that attempt to prevent potential harms decades distant. Next, climate skeptics rightly question whether the policy prescriptions being advocated in the leadup to Copenhagen can achieve the reductions in carbon emissions needed to halt global warming. Specifically, there are a growing numbers of scientists who are advocating for geo-engineering as a solution to global warming. New technologies that reduce the amount of heat that gets reflected off the Earth's surface could provide the means to stem rising temperatures thereby providing our economies with decades to lessen our dependency on fossil fuels. Two proposals in particular, injecting sulphates into the stratosphere and seeding clouds with seawater in the lower atmosphere, are gaining adherents. We need a full debate on climate change as the issues at hand are too important for the planet and our economic wellbeing to be left to bureaucrats and politicians to decide. National Post Rudyard Griffiths is the co-organizer of the Munk Debates. Readers can take part in the Munk Debate online discussion forum at www.munkdebates.com
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 Rudyard Griffiths: Fight protectionism by going greenAs a hundred heads of government gather in New York today at the United Nations for a chinwag on climate-change policy, Canadians would do well to pay attention to the increasingly testy debate over how to craft a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol. The negotiations leading up to the big Copenhagen climate-change summit in December are not going well. Despite the passage of a bill in the House of Representatives that would see the United States reduce its carbon emissions by 17% over 2005 levels, Barack Obama's climate-change legislation is hopelessly bogged down in a Senate deeply divided by the health-care debate. It is becoming more unlikely by the day that the world's largest economy will arrive at Copenhagen with a national plan to reduce its carbon emissions. The other major irritant in pre-Copenhagen negotiations are the hard-line demands of developing nations, namely India and China. The common line out Beijing and New Delhi is that Western countries must not only "lead the way" by achieving steep and rapid reductions in their greenhouse gas emissions, they should also transfer hundreds of billions dollars to poorer nations to help them with climate-change mitigation and adaptation efforts. While developing nations garner some sympathy by virtue of the fact that their historic contribution to the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere is a fraction that of Western countries, their clamouring for massive cash transfers is a non-starter for debt-strapped developed nations. But if all this confusion and conflict sound like the perfect excuse for Canada to tune out the Copenhagen cacophony until someone, somewhere, sometime gets serious about crafting a successor treaty to Kyoto, think again. For selfish economic reasons, our leaders need to focus on Europe's continent-wide rush to reduce C02 emissions. From Germany to France to Britain to the Netherlands, European governments are unilaterally adopting aggressive greenhouse-gas reduction targets -- cuts in the range of 20% to 30% below 1990 levels by 2020. In France, such binding legislative commitments has meant introducing a national carbon tax. Britain and Germany are requiring whole swathes of their economies -- auto manufacturing, power generation, agriculture, etc. -- to meet onerous carbon-reduction targets. Sitting in Canada, an ocean away, it is tempting to observe the green wave swamping European industry with bemusement. So what if the French are paying more for baguettes to assuage their guilt about rising sea levels in Bangladesh? Without an enforceable international treaty, is it up to Canadians to decide when, and by how much, they should shrink their carbon super-sized lifestyles. But while this is the reality now, just how long are climate-change-obsessed Europeans going to allow imports from heavy-emitting countries to undercut domestic industries that are struggling under binding national C02-reduction programs? For the likes of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, the answer is about six months. This is when the European Community is expected to start discussing tariff regimes to punish countries who are in breach of their Kyoto targets. Considering that Canada's C02 emissions are now 26% over 1990 levels --and given that our Kyoto target was a 6% percent reduction from 1990 levels, by 2012 -- the proposed Canada-Europe free trade pact could be the first causality of a rising green-tinged protectionist tide. More worrying for an exporting nation such as Canada is the anaemic global economic recovery, which is causing political leaders to ache for excuses to protect domestic industries. For the likes of Sarkozy what could be a better excuse than saving la Dame Nature? While today's U. N. climate confab will most likely produce only more hot air, Canada needs a realistic national plan to deliver on its own ambitious emission targets so it can fight off the surging green protectionist wave. Rudyard Griffiths is the co-founder of the Dominion Institute and the author of Who We Are: A Citizen's Manifesto (Douglas & MacIntyre).
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 Rudyard Griffiths: The blighted environment of the urban ArcticHaving recently returned from two weeks on Baffin Island I am struck by the profound disconnect between this summer's Arctic chest-thumping by our professional political class and the realities of life in the far North. For starters you can't visit a town such as Iqaluit (population 7,000) and not question the sustainability of large-scale human settlement along the Arctic Circle. The challenge is more than simply having to ship or fly every single brick, board or litre of gas from thousands of kilometres away at huge cost. Rather, it is the extent to which the capital of Nunavut has enthusiastically embraced the highenergy habits of your average Canadian suburb, including miles of roads, extensive single-family track housing, vast garbage dumps and supersized sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks. The reality is the polar-bear size per capita carbon footprint of Arctic communities such as Iqaluit erodes the legitimacy of Inuit and federal government sermonizing about the impact of global warming on the North. The lack of environmental sustainability in the development of our Arctic communities is being fuelled by one source: sky-high federal funding. In 2009, 90% of Nunavut's revenues will be made up of direct cash transfers from Ottawa. This represents some $37,000 in federal funding for each of the 30,000 men, women and children living in the territory. The majority of federal transfers go to support the health, housing and educational needs of a population in which half of all families are on welfare and for whom the government of Nunavut is the largest employer, bar none. The real economy in Nunavut -- where people make and do things -- is capable of supporting only a fraction of territory's current population. Yes, there is a vast array of natural resources to be exploited within Nunavut and throughout the Arctic. However these potential revenue sources are found in some of the most remote and challenging environs known to man and are subject to the boom-bust cycle that governs commodity prices. The irony is that in the very part of Canada many of us think best represents our sense of self-reliance and love of nature, we are creating communities that are utterly dependent on the financial largess of people "from away" and are evermore disconnected from the natural world. What can be done to give Arctic towns and hamlets the chance to break out of their cycles of economic dependency and environmental degradation? The locals I spoke with in the small Baffin Island community of Pangnirtung (population 1,300) are all too aware of the degree to which generous social programs create powerful incentives for people not to seek out work. In towns such as "Pang" the employed lose not only the ability to claim free housing but also free home heating and electricity, both major living costs. If the people of Nunavut hope to achieve an iota of real independence from Ottawa they need to begin the long process of weaning themselves off their social benefits. Given the seasonal nature of life in the Arctic, some form of expanded employment insurance could be a welcome substitute for the culturally stultifying effects of a generation of cradle-to-grave welfare programs. More controversial but essential is the need for Nunavut to confront the crippling effect of rapid population growth -- the territory's population swelled by 12% from 2001 to 2006 with almost all the growth coming through child birth. Slower population growth means less long-term reliance on what in the future could be fickle federal subsidies. It also means fewer SUVs, less track housing and less energy consumption, thereby allowing the Inuit to speak with more legitimacy about how climate change is affecting their lives. The combining of incentives for families not to have a second child along with exchange programs for youth to consider living elsewhere in the country could be important first steps to creating sustainable communities in Canada's far North. National Post Rudyard Griffiths is the co-founder of the Dominion Institute and the author of Who We Are: A Citizen's Manifesto (Douglas & MacIntyre).
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 Rudyard Griffiths: CUPE makes a good case for eliminating CUPEAs Toronto's public service strike enters its fifth week, with no end in sight, an interesting social phenomenon is starting to unfold in Canada's largest metropolis: In bars, over dinner tables and around water coolers, Toronto's tax-strapped and recession-conscious denizen are all talking about how little their day-to-day lives have been effected by the strike. Yes, there is the inconvenience of having to pay $5 a bag to have garbage hauled away by the enterprising businessmen who come to your door. Yes, the city's main thoroughfares are starting to look like the gritty set of a CSI: NY episode. And, yes, if you are a parent with limited means who was counting on city summer camps and daycare, the last month has been downright awful. But for the vast majority of Torontonians, this summer is much like any other. Given this state of affairs, more and more people are asking themselves: What exactly were the 30,000 strikers doing before they took to the picket lines? Toronto is currently running on something like half of its total public service workforce. (While the entire city is thankful for the long hours its managers are working to keep essential services operating, they constitute a small fraction of the city's workforce.) Yet the impact of the strike on residents is nowhere near proportional to this massive loss of manpower. The streets are passable, stores and offices are going about their business and local neighbourhoods are holding summer fairs. This is bad news for the union. The longer Toronto's strike goes on, the more Mayor Miller's rhetoric about the city's "hardworking" public workers rings hollow. More importantly, every day the strike continues, Torontonians are exposed to a basic fact about their city: It is massively over-serviced by its public sector. Economists have postulated that somewhere on the order of one-quarter of government employees, at all levels, are pseudo-workers -- employees who contribute either marginally to core public services, or are employed in bureaucratic enterprises that have little or no lasting external effect outside government (think eHealth Ontario). Such a state of affairs is increasingly unsustainable in a country such as Canada, with its less-than-stellar productivity, fast-aging population and slowing workforce growth. As of 2020, 11 short years from now, the tab for health care and social services for our aging population -- when combined with the corresponding loss in tax revenues as the Baby Boomers exit the workforce permanently -- will soar to $40- or $50-billion annually. I would argue Canadians are well ahead of government on these issues. The public realizes that unless a bloated public sector is put on a slimming diet -- and fast -- taxes and deficits will explode to pay for the entitlements of an aging society during the coming period of little or no real workforce growth. The undeniably positive development to emerge out of Toronto's strike is the fiscal re-education of the great mushy middle of voters that constitute Canada's sixth-largest government by revenues. This group is receiving a powerful and long overdue object lesson that smaller and more efficient bureaucracies can deliver good quality public services and do so in a manner that anticipates the serious demographic challenges facing our country. If you don't believe me, just visit Toronto -- a once semi-socialist paradise that has become the unlikely poster boy for shrinking the size of government in Canada. National PostRudyard Griffiths is the cofounder of the Dominion Institute and the author of Who We Are: A Citizen's Manifesto. Full Comment welcomes your input. Signed comments will be considered for posting. Please e-mail us at fullcomment@nationalpost.com
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 Rudyard Griffiths: Looking ahead to Canada's sesquicentennialTomorrow, Canadians will fire up barbecues, pop open bulging coolers and circle their lawn chairs to celebrate Canada's 142nd birthday. This July 1, I think we should all take a moment and acknowledge that this country of ours is a pretty darn good place to call home. In world still reeling from last autumn's financial crisis, Canada is better positioned than almost any other Western nation to begin its economic recovery once the global tide turns. The great threat to our continued existence -- Quebec separatism -- continues to ebb; recent opinion polls show that support for separation in la belle province is at a historic low. And, while we had to endure a major political crisis last autumn and an unprecedented prorogation of Parliament, low and behold, our democratic institutions actually worked and our political leaders led, sparing the nation a pointless summer election. Given all we have to be grateful for, Canadians owe it to themselves and their country to celebrate this shared nationhood that our forebears toiled over generations to bring into existence -- and we should do so on more than just one day each year. This Canada Day should be the mental marker for all of us to start thinking about how we plan to celebrate eight years from now -- on July 1, 2017. We need to start now the collective project of imagining how we will commemorate Canada's sesquicentennial. Time is of the essence. The famous centennial celebrations of 1967 were almost a decade in the making. While Expo '67 looms in our collective memory as the defining event and symbol of the centenary year, we forget the ambition, scope and impact of the centennial celebrations. Not only were hockey arenas, libraries and auditoriums constructed across Canada, millions of people took part in community arts exhibitions and festivals, compiled local histories, restored heritage sites and generally had a great old time. The result of this incredible year-long outpouring of civic energy was the re-emergence of a renewed national confidence and shared purpose on a scale that had not been felt in the 50 years since our Forces' victory at Vimy Ridge. What should Canadians do in 2017 to celebrate 150 years of common history? My two cents are that we should avoid at all cost repeating the style and content of centennial. The myth of 1967 is sill too strong, so anything we do that looks and feels the same will seem underpowered and un-ambitious. Here is a counterintuitive idea coming from an amateur historian: Let's use 2017 to focus on our future, not the past. Specifically, in the spirit of our forbearers, let's think about new ideas, institutions and national symbols that we could unveil during the sesquicentennial that could become the patrimony of future generations of Canadians. We have had these moments of collective foresight throughout our history. In the 1840s, the creation of responsible government wasn't simply a way out of interminable conflicts between governors-general and the colonies' legislatures. It was an entire philosophy of government and society that forms the bedrock of democratic institutions today. The same goes for the creation of the Canadian Pacific Railway. More than just a ribbon of steel to plunder the vast resources of the West, our national railway gave Canadians a powerful and enduring transcontinental consciousness of what they could become. But, I don't think we should use the sesquicentennial as an excuse for Ottawa to build high-speed rail networks -- that kind of thinking is so '67. Same goes for those who will no doubt try to use Canada's 150th anniversary as an excuse to kick-start yet another pointless debate on whether or not to abolish the monarchy. In my view, the kind of forward looking, idea-driven gift to future generations that we should be taking on now as a sesquicentennial project is a National Charter of Civic Responsibility. Surely in a country as diverse and decentralized as Canada, all of us can acknowledge the need to create a greater consensus for what we -- as citizens -- owe each other and our country. Such a charter could have a positive and enduring impact on our schools, on our immigration and settlement systems and, most important of all, on the legions of Canadians who treat their citizenship as an afterthought. It is worth noting that it was a Conservative prime minister, John Diefenbaker, who had the foresight to launch the decade-long process to plan Canada's ambitious 1967 celebrations. Let's hope that 50 years later another Conservative PM is captured by the same national spirit. -Rudyard Griffiths is the cofounder of the Dominion Institute and the author of Who We Are: A Citizen's Manifesto.
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 Rudyard Griffiths: Toronto's bad ideaLast week, Toronto Mayor David Miller revived one of his favourite hobbyhorses, voting rights for non-citizens, and promptly provoked yet another conflict with his city's voters. After advocating, at a forum convened by the City Hall, that permanent residents should be allowed to vote in municipal elections, the Mayor was excoriated in the media, and rightly so. Voting rights for non-citizens isn't simply a dumb idea -- it is downright pernicious. To begin with, Mayor Miller and his ilk are once again resolving to address a problem that isn't a problem. Yes, it's true that there are easily a quarter of a million or more permanent residents living in Toronto who are not entitled to vote in elections, as City Hall states. Toronto, after all, welcomes one-third of the quarter million-plus newcomers who settle in Canada each year. But before hyperventilating about a crisis of democratic under-representation among immigrants, the Mayor should take a deep breath and remember that Canada can proudly claim one of the world's highest naturalization rates. In recent years, upwards of 84% of permanent residents to Canada have gone on to become full citizens, as compared to 75% in Australia, 56% in the U. K. and even lower rates in the very Scandinavian countries that Mayor Miller celebrates for giving non-citizens voting rights. So, while at any time there maybe a quarter of a million newcomers who can't vote, the vast majority of them will go on to assume the rights and responsibilities of full citizenship after completing a three-year residency requirement. Toronto's Mayor also seems conveniently unaware of the reality that Canada already has some of the least demanding citizenship laws of any advanced country. The residency requirement for aspiring Canadian citizens is shorter than those of any of our peer nations. The Charter provides non-citizens with a whole panoply of individual legal rights and an array of privileges, from free public health care to heavily subsidized education. By removing municipal voting from the paltry bundle of rights that accrue to full citizens, Mayor Miller, and his progressive allies, risk exacerbating the very social divisions that their reforms are designed to heal. For starters, bestowing municipal voting rights on non-citizens would expand Canada's permanent resident population--and do so significantly over time, given that we would have removed, for the quarter of a million newcomers who arrive each year, a major incentive to assume full Canadian citizenship. An expanded permanent resident population would mean proportionally less immigrants being represented in Parliament and provincial legislatures. It would only be a question of how long it would take before Canadian society would start to reflect the kinds of toxic social cleavages that plague European countries where democratic institutions have failed to keep up with changing demographics. Worse still, a surging permanent resident population that could not vote in federal or provincial elections would introduce an ugly racial divide into our politics. Three out of four newcomers are visible minorities, and it is vital for reasons of social integration and harmony that these individuals take part in our democracy and shape their region and nation's future. The whole notion of extending voting rights to non-citizens is such a cockamamie idea that one can only suspect that another agenda is at work. My guess is that Mayor Miller isn't a Tammany Hall boss -- he is not pouring over a map of the city figuring out how many tax dollars he needs to dole out to buy the votes of different groups of immigrant permanent residents. Instead, I would venture that the Mayor long ago succumbed to the "city-state" group-think of what Toronto could and should be to its residents. If you are already providing health care, education and social services -- to name just a few big ticket items -- then why not get into the citizenship business, too? Why not extend voting to non-citizen residents in order to begin the process of binding their loyalties and civic identity to your city-state, first and foremost, as opposed to their region or the nation of Canada? Most Canadians feel their country is already plagued by too many divided and conflicting loyalties. Ours is a nation that wastes too much of its civic energy emphasizing differences, as opposed to what we share in common--most notably the institutions, symbols and values of Canadian citizenship. Mayor Miller would do well to find another windmill to tilt at before this issue and the considerable negative opinion it creates overtakes him.National Post -Rudyard Griffiths is the cofounder of the Dominion Institute and the author of Who We Are: A Citizen's Manifesto.
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Rudyard Griffiths: A nation of citizens (excerpted from Who We Are: A Citizen's Manifesto)
Those who would
have us believe that Canada has always been a contingent association of
different regions, linguistic groups and ethnic communities ignore or
have forgotten the story of our evolution as a civic nation. History
shows that ours is a political community built on shared democratic
values and institutions rather than on ethnicity, region or language.
Our
coming of age began in the aftermath of the American Revolution when
the colonies of British North America were convulsed by the bitter
politics of loyalty. The issues that consumed our forebears centred on
the shifting and fragile allegiances of a massive influx of immigrants,
first from the United States and then from Britain. Would these
rough-and-ready settlers remain obedient to the executive fiat of the
governors-general and the colonial elites? Or would America's ideals of
revolution and individual freedom fire their imaginations? Or, worst of
all, would the imported hatreds of distant homelands ignite existing
linguistic and religious divisions and plunge the Canadian colonies
into intractable sectarian strife?
Thanks to the tenacity and
courage of a small group of French and English Reformers, each of these
alternative futures was ultimately rejected. They were rejected because
the Reformers asked an entirely different question, one that galvanized
the colonies of British North America: What would it mean to be loyal
to Canada?
For Louis LaFontaine, Robert Baldwin, Joseph Howe and
their immediate successors, loyalty to Canada meant a lifelong
commitment to the idea of a free and equal citizenry engaged in a great
democratic experiment. It meant creating political institutions, chief
among them responsible government, that brought the colonies' disparate
factions together in the common project of political reform, not
revolution. It meant establishing non-sectarian institutions of higher
learning and free public education. It meant bringing government closer
to the people by allowing for the election of local councils and
empowering towns and cities to collect their own taxes and fund public
works. It meant instituting sweeping land and legal reforms and
abolishing preferential treatment for the established church and the
Tory elite. And it meant using the nascent power of the state to
initiate important national projects -- canals, roads and railways --
that would spur economic development and commerce.
All of these
policies were intended to advance a single goal: the establishment of a
new nation, Canada, as an egalitarian, democratic, economically
ambitious and less sectarian society -- a wholly Canadian vision that
was consciously distinct from Britain's and America's. The period that
began with the achievement of responsible government in 1848 and
culminated with Confederation in 1867 established the civic trajectory
of our society: the conviction that we are equal participants in an
evolving democratic project that seeks to reconcile our individual
differences within common institutions and civic values.
Yes, Canada has
stumbled, and repeatedly, from the path our founders set out on more
than 160 years ago. Systemic racism against the aboriginal population,
the hanging of Louis Riel, the head tax on Chinese immigrants, the
mindless imperialism that sucked us into the grist mills of the Boer
War and the Great War, the conscription crises of both World Wars and
the two Quebec referendums and the near breakup of the country are all
boldfaced items on a list of collective sins of omission and commission.
Yet
despite these setbacks, the country remained true for the next hundred
years to the original objectives that Canadians had embraced at the
midpoint of the 19th century. The governments of Louis St. Laurent in
particular reinforced and advanced those ideals after the Second World
War, a period when the country's sense of itself was once again in flux.
Like
the mid-1800s, the 1950s represented a crucial juncture, a time when we
could have recast the country's identity in ways that would not have
been true to our history but would have mimicked the animating concepts
of British or American society. Instead, we reconnected, through
conscious effort, with the grand narrative that had launched our nation
a century before.
The parallels between the two periods are
striking. Mega projects such as the Trans-Canada Highway and the St.
Lawrence Seaway were the modern-day equivalents of the canals, roads
and railways constructed by LaFontaine, Howe and Baldwin to bind the
colonies together in commerce and industry. Like the Reformers of the
1840s, St. Laurent and his generation sought to give life and shape to
what our forebears called "a provincial feeling" by investing massively
in public education and by treating immigration as an economic
opportunity, not a cultural threat. Both generations, though a century
apart, understood and respected the desire to Canadianize the country's
British political conventions, institutions and symbols without
abandoning British parliamentary traditions or historically rooted
civic values.
The particular genius of St. Laurent and his
governments was to refashion for their own times the democratic project
instigated by LaFontaine, Howe and Baldwin. They used the levers of
national government to create nationwide programs such as universal
health insurance, old-age pensions and equalization, measures that
bolstered the conviction that we owed our ultimate loyalty to each
other as equal participants in a national enterprise, irrespective of
region or social class.
Just as importantly, St. Laurent's
governments understood that asserting Canada's distinctness from
Britain and the United States went beyond the realms of domestic
policy. Whether it was our leading role in the creation of NATO, our
significant contribution to the Korean War or our timely breakthroughs
in diplomacy, the imperative first articulated by the Reformers to seek
out an alternative
"Canadian way" became an outward-looking project with international ramifications.
This history
bears repeating. I believe that the first step in reclaiming the shared
values and social solidarity essential to our future well being is to
remember that Canada was founded and has evolved as a nation of
citizens, not a collection of communities.
We are a people who long operated according to a series of hard-won principles and beliefs about the purpose of our society.
First,
we are suspicious of anything that hints of sectarianism. Hard-wired
into our collective memory is an awareness of the harm 19th-century
sectarian variants caused to the country, of the ways in which
individual liberty was stifled by forces that defined our forebears
first and foremost as members of a group or faction. We know all too
well how religious and ethnic divisions, if left unchecked, compound
themselves and become intractable obstacles to economic and social
progress.
This legacy has taught us that if we are to function as
free and autonomous citizens, our highest loyalty must be to the
country's unique political conventions, to the institutions and
practices of our democracy that allow us to broker competing interests
and personal beliefs and act in common enterprise.
Second, we are
strong believers in public institutions, generally the most efficacious
expressions of both deeply held values and national aspirations. For
the better part of our history, we have looked beyond the words of the
Canadian Constitution to those institutions that act as instruments of
the country's core beliefs.
Institutions such as responsible
government, biculturalism and public education are more than just
expressions of our values at a particular moment in time. They
represent a distillation of the choices we have made, over decades and
even centuries, about the ways in which the country should operate and
the principles to which it is dedicated.
Third, we subscribe to
the idea of Canadian exceptionalism. Whether it be one generation's
pride in being the first British colony to achieve responsible
government or another generation's genius in creating modern-day
peacekeeping, we seek out the "Canadian way" that will distinguish us
from our peers.
Furthermore, we have long believed that Canada's
destiny is unique and that we have a responsibility to discover and
foster the sources of our exceptionalism. And this we have done: Time
and again, we have committed ourselves to nation-changing policies --
the most recent being world leadership in immigration -- that ensure
that the country's future will be neither European nor American, but
something all its own.
Fourth, we are a people who, historically,
relished ambitious national projects; the sheer size of Canada
challenged us to gird the country with railways, highways and canals.
At an elemental level, the country's early nation builders wanted to
see their prowess reflected in the physical mastery of Canada's
continental landmass.
As we matured as a country, our impulse for
national building took on an added dimension, giving substance to the
values and beliefs that united us. Here the postwar generation turned
to the Canadian state and used its powers to build not only physical
infrastructure, but 20th-century social and economic programs that
reflected our mutual goals and aspirations just as surely as the 19th
century's railways, waterways and roads.
Fifth, we are an
egalitarian people. We do not think that the accident of birth should
determine the course of an individual's life or that the wealthy and
privileged few should unduly influence the direction of our society.
The breadth of the voting franchise at the country's democratic
beginnings and the nondenominational religious impulses of many of
Canada's early settlers had a long-term levelling effect on our civic
and political culture.
So, too, did the Reformers' sweeping
political innovations that empowered local communities and introduced
meritocracy into the administration of government and the judiciary.
Canadians' commitment to creating a more equal society was entrenched
by St. Laurent's affirmation of the concept of universality in national
programs.
I would add to this list of defining elements one last
feature: We are an ambitious people. Contrary to the view that
Canadians are a cautious bunch, one has only to read about our struggle
for democracy or our efforts to claim a voice for Canada in world
affairs to know that we are a nation that has consistently taken bold,
occasionally even reckless, steps to assert ourselves. As we know, such
undertakings as the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, the
defence of freedom in the Second World War and Cold War and the ongoing
project of welcoming millions of immigrants from the world over have
stretched us in unpredictable, but inspiring, ways.
If we take to
heart these six core beliefs about what it means to be Canadian, then a
different perspective on our current predicaments and their potential
solutions opens up. We cannot deal with the various challenges facing
our country today and in the future in isolation. Instead, we must find
a rallying cause to which we can summon the country's latent civic
energy. Just as responsible government called to the Reformers in the
1840s and national programs and the power of the federal government
motivated St. Laurent and his contemporaries in the 1950s, so must we
identify an inspiring and animating objective for our own times.
This
single idea needs to speak to the reality of Canada today, not some
idealized past or hypothetical future. And it must evoke the
constellation of first principles that have given our society its
momentum over the last century and a half: our sense of loyalty to each
other, our egalitarian impulses, our belief in the power of public
institutions, Canadian exceptionalism, nation building and, last but
not least, raw national ambition and competitiveness vis-a-vis our peer
nations. Fortunately, there is one such vehicle: the concept of
Canadian citizenship.
 Citizenship -- by which I mean the laws,
institutions and symbols that define our individual membership in the
Canadian nation -- has the potential to raise our sights again. In
fact, a revitalized citizenship may be the best and last hope for
Canadians ready to rid themselves of their "post-national" ennui and
reconnect with the enduring values and principles upon which Canada's
greatness rests.
Excerpted from Who We Are: A Citizen's Manifesto by
Rudyard Griffiths, published this week by Douglas and McIntyre.
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 Rudyard Griffiths: Canada pays the price of immigration on the cheap
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 Rudyard Griffiths: Unemployment crisis demands a re-examination of immigration plansDiscussion about what should be in the upcoming federal budget has focused almost exclusively on how tax cuts, infrastructure spending and direct cash infusions for troubled industries can revive the country's sputtering economy. As such, it seems all but inevitable that billions of dollars will be showered on groups and regions to create jobs and revive consumer spending -- all with the aim of getting Canada's GDP back in the black. The prevailing view in Ottawa is that the economic forces that will determine Canada's near-term fiscal future are mostly outside of the country's control. There is nothing, for example, the federal government can do to revive global commodity prices or shake U.S. consumers out of their doldrums. Conventional wisdom therefore dictates a massive stimulus package and sky-high federal deficits which future generations will have to pay off. But is it really the case that government is powerless to affect, in positive ways, the economic inputs that will determine the severity of the recession? Canada's immigration targets are an interesting case in point. As recently as last autumn, the Conservatives reiterated their commitment to maintain immigration levels at historic highs and accept 250,000 new citizens in 2009. We know, from a slew of studies, that newcomers are facing ever-greater challenges climbing Canada's economic ladder. Over the last decade and a half -- the very period when our economy experienced one of its longest and strongest expansions -- low income levels among recent immigrants rose from an already worrying 31% to 35% of all new arrivals. These higher rates of poverty cannot be blamed on lower skills or levels of employability among new arrivals. The percentage of new immigrants with university degrees increased from 17% in 1992 to close to 50% in recent years. Yet despite almost two decades of Canada selecting immigrants with higher skill sets and greater levels of expert knowledge, native-born Canadians earn fully one-third more than newcomers who are the same age and have similar education levels and work experience. With the current intake of newcomers set at a quarter of a million for 2009 it is unavoidable that the underemployment of recent immigrants will skyrocket as the recession deepens. Then the very real danger will exist that the skilled immigrants that the Canadian economy urgently needs will vote with their feet and leave Canada permanently. A recent Statistics Canada study found, for instance, that a whopping 40% of highly valued skilled and professional male immigrants to Canada exited the country permanently within 10 years. But this is only half of the problem. Immigrants living in poverty for extended periods of time are starting to realize that their diminished life prospects are likely to be passed on to their children. This is a profoundly disturbing trend that has the potential to undermine the universal immigrant credo that the sacrifices of the first generation are made bearable by the successes of the next. For each new wave of immigrants, the second generation is expected to reap greater economic rewards and social mobility -- a process that has now all but stopped for some immigrant groups. Given these realities, here is a modest policy proposal to complement any economic stimulus: Temporarily reduce the country's immigration targets to ensure that those newcomers who have uprooted their lives to settle in Canada do not experience even greater levels of economic hardship and privation. A reduction in immigration levels would also take pressure off the various social services and associated government expenditures that every recession necessarily puts into overdrive. In addition, an easing off on record-high immigration would help ensure that the jobs that are in fact created by an economic stimulus help bring down unemployment as quickly as possible. By taking a hard-headed look at the economic levers over which it has control, the federal government could help lessen the length and severity of the recession in ways that are not a burden on the public purse. More importantly, by temporarily reducing the country's intake of immigrants, the government could help ensure that we retain the skills, industry and ambition of the millions of newcomers who chose to settle in Canada over the course of the last decade -- the very people the country will rely on to rejuvenate our economy when the global economic tide begins to turn. National PostRudyard Griffiths is the co-founder of the Dominion Institute. His forthcoming book Who We Are: A Citizen's Manifesto will be published this March by Douglas & Macintyre.
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 Rudyard Griffiths: Liberals brought low by the hard minoritiesPoor St
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 Rudyard Griffiths: Take debate control away from the networksWith the Democrats and Republicans neck-and-neck in the polls, the pressure is mounting on both parties' nominees to land knockout blows during the slew of televised debates that will take place in coming weeks. Each is expected to attract upwards of 100 million viewers.If only in Canada!It is not as if we don't have the makings for some great political debates of our own. The leaders of the major parties have sharply diverging views. They have been steeped in the big public policy issues of the last decade. And most important of all, the fate of their own political careers (with the possible exception of Stephen Harper) depend on the outcome of the Oct. 14 election.Unfortunately, the Canadian leaders' debates likely will be what they always have been: boring, unedifying, inconclusive affairs. It's not the issues, nor the personalities involved -- it has everything to do with how our debates are organized.Among the advanced democracies, Canada is all but alone in perpetuating an election debate system that is utterly non-transparent, rife with serious conflicts of interest, and, technologically, a decade behind the times.As the Green party is learning the hard way, election debates are arranged by the Orwellian sounding "Broadcasting Consortium." This group is made up of TV executives from the five main networks. They alone are responsible for negotiating with the political parties the format of the debates, who is included and their frequency. Their meetings are secret, as is their decision-making process.Another serious problem with the current system is the control it gives to TV programmers alone to set the agenda and content of the debates. In the United States, on the other hand, several of the U.S. primary debates were broadcast on YouTube -- and they were the ones that drew the largest number of viewers under the age of 30. Given the glaring defects in our debate system -- and their importance to our democracy -- it is high time Canada joined countries such as the United States and France, and established an independent election-debates commission. Such a commission would have open public deliberations between elections to establish policies for the format, frequency and participants for election debates. It, not the networks, would negotiate directly with the political parties. The commission would pay for all aspects of the organization of the debates and allow anyone (the networks, bloggers, etc.) to cover the debates as they saw fit. Ideally, it would be funded by a private endowment and undertake its own initiatives to encourage public participation in the debates.The commission would be a godsend for the TV networks. They would be off the hook for the considerable cost of producing the debates, and free of the litigation promised by the Greens if they are not included.While the major parties would resent the loss of control they have over the current system, they would have little choice but to co-operate with the commission. Any party that refused to take part in debates organized by a truly independent and transparent body would be committing political suicide.There is an important point of principle here: Elections are held for the benefit of voters, not the parties. And in the case of debates, voters' interests are better served by an independent, transparent commission than by the current arrangement. National Post rudyard@dominion.ca
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 Rudyard Griffiths on Energy Prices and International Relations: Beyond 'Great Power' politicsReading the pages of the big European and American dailies this past week, it becomes clear a consensus view has emerged regarding Russia's brazen attack on Georgia. For policy experts, the Russian Army's blitzkrieg into South Ossetia and Abkhazia and mauling of Georgia proper with nary a regard for America and NATO's interests in the region represents the return of Great Power politics.According to this view an emboldened Kremlin will spurn traditional diplomacy and economic threats such John McCain's pledge to kick them out of the G8. Instead Russia will use the menace of unilateral military force to exert a creeping sultanry over Ukraine, the Caucuses and even Poland.These same experts argue that in a Great Power world where military force trumps the "soft power" levers of trade and multilateral diplomacy, Europe and America should respond to Russia in-kind. Patriot missile batteries in Poland and fast-tracking the NATO memberships of Georgia and Ukraine are all supposedly smart and early moves in a broader and larger military-led response by the West to deter future Russian aggression.Before the West locks itself into a cycle of military deterrence with Russia -- the most recent one having lasted almost half a century and cost trillion of dollars and tens of thousands of lives -- we would do well to consider Mark Twain's adage that "history does not repeat itself -- it rhymes."The forces that drove Russia to act unilaterally and invade Georgia are different than those that promoted Soviet-era interventions in their "near abroad." They also are not just shaping Russia behaviour. There are a host of other truly dangerous regimes that by virtue of the unique set of global circumstances today stand poised to act militarily and profit from their aggression.The fulcrum around which much of our geo-politics now spins, and which was absent in previous phases of Great Power politics, is sky-high energy prices.Oil alone has fuelled Russia's economic boom and provided the Kremlin with the billions in petro dollars it would not otherwise have had to rebuild its rust heap of a military. So too with Iran and Venezuela. High oil prices have given the Iranians the cash flow to sustain their ambitious and dangerous nuclear program while all the while snapping up sophisticated weapons systems from countries such as China, which are eager to shore up their energy supplies. Not be outdone as a revanchist rouge state, Venezuela is destabilizing its region by funding the narco-terrorists of the FARC and acquiring billions in Russian armaments to bully neighbouring countries.What is truly alarming about the rapid rise of these "petroarchies" is that their power increases as global instability grows.For example, Iran's beating of the drum of total war against Israel is motivated in part by the foreknowledge that an Israeli attack would drive up oil prices, over a long period, thereby dumping billions into Tehran's coffers that it could use to buy off internal dissent and restart its bomb building.This is just one instance of the emerging dynamic whereby the very factor that saps Western societies of their strength -- high energy prices -- not only empowers our most trenchant opponents, it encourages them to stoke global instability through aggressive behaviour, including war making.If the quandary of what do with Russia is viewed through the nexus of energy prices and global instability, then a different set of options present themselves.Undertaking a large scale push for some semblance of energy independence in Europe first, and then America, could have greater leeching effect on the roots of Russian aggression than strapping up to fight another Cold War. It could also do wonders for containing, over the long term, Iran's ambitions.In practice such a policy would see Europe refocus its trade and diplomatic efforts on securing long-term natural gas supplies from North Africa and continue to aggressively pursue nuclear power while promoting green alternatives. In the U.S., one would hope that the threat of a second Cold War, combined with high energy prices and two "hot wars" in the Middle East, would finally lead to the election of a president who could lead the country in a 21st-century Manhattan Project to make North America energy self-sufficient. National Postrudyard@dominion.ca
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