Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Social Affairs,
Science and Technology
Issue 17 - Evidence - October 7, 1998
OTTAWA, Wednesday, October 8, 1998
The Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology met this day at 3:30 p.m. to consider the dimensions of social cohesion in Canada in the context of globalization and other economic and structural forces that influence trust and reciprocity among Canadians.
Senator Lowell Murray (Chairman) in the Chair.
[English]
The Chairman: Honourable senators, yesterday we began our study of social cohesion in Canada under the pressure of globalization and technological change. We heard from Michael Adams, the co-founder of Environics, a firm which has studied changing social values in Canada for close to 30 years. It was a very interesting presentation. He told us, and it is no surprise, that Canadians still have a strong emotional attachment to the idea of Canada. While it may be said that differences between Canadians and Americans are eroding, those differences are still significant, and his view was that they will have powerful political ramifications for some time to come.
When he talked about globalization, he insisted that for Canadians, globalization really means the influence of American commerce and culture. I would say, however, that if it were the commerce and culture of only the United States, we could deal with that using the traditional policy tools that we have used over the years. What creates a special challenge is the factors of globalization and technology. He did tell us that a determination to reassert sovereign control remains, because people feel that things may be slipping out of our grip in Canada.
Government as an institution is still more valued here than it is in the United States, although there is no automatic deference to politicians or government people. There is a desire for fairness and equality of opportunity, and a recognition that government has a role to play in that.
He finds that there is a greater consensus on social values in this country than there is in the United States, supposedly a melting pot culture. He sees a big difference between Generation X and the babyboomers who preceded them, in that Generation X is less oriented to the nation state. They are becoming social Darwinists and we could shift to that kind of society. However, in the meantime, the boomers are in charge and they are the people who wish to balance social justice, equality and personal liberty.
What Mr. Adams did not address and what we need to address is the question of what is driving the changes in social values. We need to know what factors are causing values to change. I suspect, as do most of the people in this room, that these factors are largely economic -- in the world of work, the labour market and so forth. That is why we need to go beyond the level of social values and try to focus on the economy and the other structural forces that are affecting trust and reciprocity among Canadians.
I do not think anyone has done more thorough and highly respected work in this area than today's witness. Ms Jane Jenson is a professor of political science at the University of Montreal and a research affiliate at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard.
She has written extensively on European and Canadians politics, social movements, political parties, economic restructuring and on the comparative theory and practice of citizenship. She is the author of "Mapping Social Cohesion," a research paper prepared for the Canadian Policy Research Networks.
Professor Jenson will speak to us today and we will have time for an extensive dialogue. On October 20 we will hear from Ms Judith Maxwell, who will describe for us, as she has done on a number of occasions and in some written work, some of the symptoms and the problems as they exist in Canada today.
Professor Jenson, I invite you to speak to the Committee after which we will open the floor to questions.
Professor Jane Jenson, University of Montreal, Political Science Department: Honourable senators, I will speak today from the perspective of the work that I have done for the Canadian Policy Research Network, of which Judith Maxwell is the chair.
The idea behind the work was that people talk about social cohesion but they tend to use it in different ways and to mean different things. Sometimes social cohesion is talked about as something that we need to promote for itself and sometimes it is talked about as something that would allow us to achieve other things if we were to have a lot of it.
I will try and give you some background of those kinds of matters. When we find people talking about social cohesion, whether they are ordinary Canadians or people doing research, we find that they usually think about social cohesion as a problem. If you are talking about problems, then you get to a discussion of social cohesion. It is very rare for people who think everything is going well to talk about social cohesion. That is an important difference; social cohesion comes up when people feel things are coming apart, that something needs to be done, that there is a bit of a crisis here, or something of that sort. It is that kind of concept.
It has become more visible in the last couple of years as the sense that things are not going so well has been increasing, again, among the ordinary public in Canada and in other countries and among experts in social policy networks.
Though people talk about social cohesion, they do not necessarily agree on what it is. There is even a tendency not to define it. You may have had this experience yourself; this is your second meeting and you may not be quite sure what social cohesion is.
I wish to give you two definitions of social cohesion. These are taken from two different sources. One is from the Government of Canada's policy research subcommittee on social cohesion. The other is from a working group set up by the Government of France.
If you read these two definitions, you find that there is a fair amount of agreement. The policy subcommittee on social cohesion defines social cohesion as the ongoing process of developing a community of shared values, shared challenges and equal opportunity within Canada, based on a sense of trust, hope and reciprocity among all Canadians.
You can see in that definition the reason why Michael Adams put so much emphasis on values and why the chair of this committee put so much emphasis on trust and reciprocity, which are integral to social cohesion.
[Translation]
For the purposes of the plan, social cohesion is defined as the ongoing process of developing a community of shared values, shared challenges and equal opportunity within Canada, based on a sense of trust, hope and reciprocity among all Canadians.
[English]
In the two definitions, we have basically very similar statements. The first is that social cohesion is a process. It is not an end state. We do not get to social cohesion. What we are concerned about is processes that will contribute to a more cohesive society.
Second, social cohesion involves a definition of the community, of who belongs. People who use the concept incorporate into it the notion of "belongingness."
Third, in these two definitions we see the idea that social cohesion depends on shared values. We will have a cohesive society when people agree on a common set of values. It does not tell us what these values are, but it tells us that it is important that there be shared values.
There is an ambiguity in the notion of social cohesion. One can imagine a situation where one has shared values, but those values are quite unpleasant ones. You can also image a situation where you have shared values and they are ones that foster equality. The sharing of values is not sufficient for most people who talk about social cohesion. They tend to talk somewhat about the content and here in the case of the policy research subcommittee, that content was equal opportunity and a sense of trust as well. They are trying to orient it towards positive values right through the definition. We need to know why people are talking about social cohesion. Why is it on the agenda now? Why is it being talked about in Canada? Why is it being talked about by the European Union and by the OECD? Why is it being talked about by a large number of individual governments?
Once you start to look for it, you will find social cohesion everywhere. Pick up the newspaper and you will find it. When I was working on this in the summer, I would find editorials in The Financial Times on Tony Blair and social cohesion, or articles on social cohesion and its decline. It is everywhere.
The question is: Why? The OECD provides us with an explanation. This is an explanation which I share with the OECD; that is why I am sharing it with you. The OECD stated:
For over a decade, OECD countries have been committed to a cluster of economic policies aimed at encouraging macroeconomic stabilization, structural adjustment, and the globalization of production and distribution. Although these policies have been generally successful$there is now pressure on many governments to take stock of the longer-term societal implications$In part this is because of growing political disenchantment arising from increasing income polarization, persistently high levels of unemployment, and widespread social exclusion$The diffusion of this malaise threatens to undermine both the drive towards greater economic flexibility and the policies that encourage strong competition, globalization and technological innovation.
That paragraph summarizes the situation. It says that globalization, macroeconomic stabilization policies and structural adjustment policies -- all of those things that we have been hearing about for a number of years as being necessary to get economies back on track -- are resulting, as an unintended side effect, in the destruction of social cohesion. If the goal of policymakers is to maintain and keep economic growth on track, then they must start paying attention to social cohesion. We see in this paragraph the idea that this is causing social cohesion to decline. Social cohesion must increase if we wish to maintain economic well-being. Social cohesion is both something caused by economic factors and something that causes economic conditions to be positive or to be negative.
The question then becomes: Why precisely now? I wish to make a quick argument about that here. In the 1980s and the 1990s we saw a paradigm shift in economic policy thinking towards what we might characterize as neo-liberalism. Some people in Canada call it neo-conservatism -- that is the term that Hugh Segal prefers -- but to limit confusion I will call it neo-liberalism. This paradigm shift produced a set of structures and ideas. These structures are described by the OECD in its perspective on societal cohesion, which we might think of rapidly as structural adjustment. It also produced ideas which were the ideologies of neo-liberalism -- that is, the belief that the state has no role or very little role to play; that everything that is good can be done through markets or voluntary association; and that the state should be a minor actor.
These kinds of changes in ideas and structures produced not only new economic policies but also popular disenchantment with political forums and politicians. What we have now in Canada, as shown in study after study done by political scientists, sociologists and public opinion pollsters, is worrying levels of disenchantment with political actors and our institutions.
The question is: In the face of this, how should we respond to these worrying trends? These worrying trends are both the political things that I have cited and also more general social trends such as rising poverty, declining population health, unemployment that passes from one generation to the next, dependence on social assistance, and so on. There are different answers to this question.
One set of answers stresses that we foster social cohesion. I also cite a couple of fears in the overhead. In your studies in university or in your political work, some of you may have come across either these names or the category. These are ideas that are associated with people like Émile Durkheim, Talcott Parrsons or English tories. For people who say that the most important thing is to foster social cohesion, social order results from interdependence, shared loyalties and solidarities. According to this particular model for fostering social order that is how you obtain social order, but there are other strategies. Fostering social cohesion is only one strategy among several.
The second strategy is one that we might characterize as a liberal strategy which emphasizes choice. By "liberal" I do not mean it in the sense of our political parties, but liberal as one of the basic political theories and political ideologies. The central proposition of classical liberalism is that social order results from private behaviour and private institutions such as markets. You get order by allowing markets to work through the invisible hand. People concerned with political institutions have modified that. They have said that markets are not enough.
We have a version of liberalism which we can call Tocquevillian Liberalism after Alexis de Tocqueville. This liberalism is most associated these days with the American political scientist Robert Putnam. You may have read his articles about social capital in the newspapers. The central proposition for neo-Tocquevillian Liberals is that social order results from private behaviour and private institutions such as markets, families and social networks. With Putnam and his thinking about social capital, we associate the classic statement that healthy democracy results from participation in singing groups and bowling leagues. There you see the creation of a public good, democracy through private action; and the association of people and citizens in their private lives in bowing leagues and singing groups. This is an alternative way to think about how to get to social order.
The third argument about how to get to social order is one which talks about democracy and equality. Here, again, we have some examples which have everyday political meaning. We can think about social democracy, Christian democracy and positive liberalism or active liberalism. Here the central proposition is that social order -- and sometimes social change, because these are political positions which often stress change -- results from active democratic government guaranteeing a basic measure of economic equality and equity.
This is quite different from the positions of classical social cohesion theorists or classical liberals, even in their neo-Tocquevillian versions, because they talk about the importance of economic equality and the importance of equality of results or equity.
These are three different ways of getting to social order and a good society. What can we say about them? The lesson of history -- and here I am, perhaps, being a bit abusive in drawing the lesson of history -- is that both too much of one model and not enough of another are unhealthy. We need to mix together these three ways of getting to social order.
The classical example of the mix is what the French talk about when they talk about the French Revolution: "Liberté, égalité, fraternité." We do not say "fraternité" any more because it is exclusive of half of the population, so we call it "solidarité." It is the notion that one needs to combine freedom in the market with equality and concern for social solidarity.
My reading of the discussions of social cohesion in Canada is that people are trying to get to that combination. They are trying to figure out how to make that combination. It is only that combination which will produce a stable result. If we put too much emphasis on one of the three parts -- for example, liberty -- then we begin to get unfortunate social consequences, the kinds of things that the OECD wrote about. If we put too much emphasis on equality, however, we might begin to stifle inventiveness, the kinds of things that the critiques of the negative aspects of social welfare have put on the agenda. If we pay too much attention to solidarity, we may begin to stifle other values like the capacity to be different and the capacity to be innovative.
The lesson of history and the lesson of the work that I did was that we need to combine all three of these models and consciously think about the best aspects of the liberal model without giving up the commitment to equality and solidarity.
That aside, I think we can still raise some questions about how to foster social cohesion. Since that is what you want to talk about, I will continue to raise it in terms of social cohesion. However, I gave you this preamble because if we talk only in terms of social cohesion, we will not get too far.
The question is how we can foster social cohesion using the definition that I used before. The work that I did for CPRN led me to three big sets of issues about social cohesion. The first came because people who study social cohesion and are concerned about social cohesion come to the conclusion -- this is in many of the studies -- that values and sharing of values will be promoted or prompted only when institutions and institutional practices are working. This is because values are always different in a modern society. People disagree. You have what you call pluralism of values. People do not agree with each other. You must have ways of managing those differences. Democracy is one way of managing differences in values, but there are all sorts of other ways to manage these differences, and institutions besides elections are involved in doing so.
If we are worried that Canada suffers from a lack of shared values -- a lack of social cohesion -- we need to put our minds to the question of what, if any, responsibility our political and social institutions have for that problem. We therefore ask the question, are these institutions managing differences? Are they managing pluralism of values correctly or not? That is a big question. It is a question for which we do not have answers, even as social scientists. My sense is that this is the fundamental question. Do our institutions manage differences well, or are they in fact closing down differences?
The second issue is: What does social cohesion do? Why do we even care about social cohesion? Why do we want it? Here there are three possible ways of thinking about what social cohesion does.
The first is that social cohesion does have an impact on individuals' health and well-being. In cohesive societies where people are well integrated, they tend to be healthier. Obviously genetics and luck are involved, but the statistical distribution is that the more people are integrated into a society, the healthier they tend to be. That said, there is a real question of whether that kind of health translates into community health. Can we say that a cohesive community is a healthy community, or are we more sceptical about that?
Finally, we can begin to ask questions about the impact of social cohesion on economic performance. When Judith Maxwell comes to talk to you, she will stress that, because that is where she positions herself. She has data and studies which show that social cohesion has a major impact on economic performance.
Discussions as to why we want social cohesion usually are stimulated by the fact that it does something. That is, it creates economic well-being, it creates healthy communities, or it even creates healthy individuals.
A third set of issues -- and this is one that is of greatest concern to me -- is the question which I always describe as "the silly question." Can social cohesion be a threat to social cohesion? Can we get too much of a "good thing"? Are there dangers to too much social cohesion?This returns me to my notion of the need for a mix.
If we stick on the question of social cohesion, could it be a threat to other values? Here, two questions come to mind. Can citizens' identities be both varied and multiple without threatening social cohesion, or do we all have to adhere to the same national identity? This is a big question for Canadians. It pushes us right back to the question of institutions. Can we manage difference, or do we all have to agree in order to keep things together?
Secondly, are there mechanisms and institutions which can create a balance between social justice and social cohesion? One of the things that we see when we look at history is that, for much of the last hundred years, the history of political action, of political movements, of political parties, and of governments has been to overcome some of the most cohesive parts of society in order to promote social justice.
If we think about things like the traditional community in a traditional society, those communities had very clear boundaries on who was in and who was out; who were the strangers. Only some communities were welcoming to strangers, and sometimes they were not at all welcoming and kept them far from their borders. We have abandoned that kind of thinking when we think about social justice and the importance of integrating newcomers into our society, whether they be immigrants or people from other places who come to live in our communities. We spend a lot of time talking about the necessity of breaking down cohesive institutions like private clubs which ban or refuse to admit as members people who are not like them.
We all lived through a period during which it was considered perfectly normal to have not only whites-only social clubs, but also to exclude Jews and all sorts of people from them. We spent a lot of time fighting against that. Certainly the women in the room can remember times when women could not go certain places and do certain things. We spent a lot of time fighting against that. Those clubs were very cohesive. Those male institutions were very cohesive. One of the things we see is the need to perhaps be less cohesive in order to advance other values.
The mix is probably as important, or, in my way of thinking, more important than the simple achievement of shared values. It is not shared values at any cost.
The Chairman: Thank you, Professor Jenson.
Senator Kinsella: This has been extremely interesting, Professor Jenson. I have a number of areas to explore. Do you suppose that it would be very difficult to make a catalogue of the various instruments and the various institutions already in play in Canada that speak, in their purpose and in their operation, to social cohesion by whatever definition?
That is my question and I will give you a hint of the answer I am looking for.
Ms Jenson: That is always helpful.
Senator Kinsella: For example, I think that the Canadian Multiculturalism Act is a legislative instrument that speaks directly to social cohesion.
Mr. Chairman, I thought that we could get some help from our witnesses on how to identify the headings of the catalogue that we should put together.
Ms Jenson: I cannot produce that list here because that is a major task, but I certainly think it is possible to create such a catalogue. In setting out the categories of where to look, my work emphasized the necessity of putting both public and non-public institutions on the list. Public institutions would include multiculturalism law, electoral law, elections, Parliament, the Constitution and those kinds of things. Non-public or private institutions would include clubs and the various voluntary associations and institutions which represent Canadians and provide a kind of mediation between individual Canadians and their governments.
In my study, I quoted quite extensively from a study done recently by the Club of Rome. The Club of Rome embarked upon a comparative study of social cohesion in 10 or 12 countries. They said that when they embarked upon the study they thought they would find that the problems with social cohesion came from public institutions and the solutions came from institutions of civil society, basically private institutions, associations and such things. They started from the position that private association will work best to create social order. They actually found that neither one nor the other was inevitably good -- that it depended on the circumstances.
The Canadian Constitution currently decreases social cohesion in major parts of the country because parts of Quebec, for example, are not happy with parts of the Constitution. However, one could easily imagine how, if we ever get it settled, the Constitution would be an institution in which Canadians see that their difference has been dealt with adequately and well. Therefore, it would become an institution that would foster social cohesion.
The institutions in and of themselves do not do it. It depends upon how they are used and what kind of tasks they take on. At any point you could ask whether a given institution is helping or hindering.
Senator Kinsella: The other day, when Michael Adams was here, we had the opportunity to explore the classical dynamic of folk ways versus state ways or state ways versus folk ways. It seems to me that that principle may be one which underlies what you speak of; that is, whether social cohesion leads to threats on social cohesion.
My experience in the egalitarian human rights field is limited to my participation in the drafting and administration of a human rights code at the provincial level. In the mid 1960s, when our colleague Senator Robichaud was the Liberal premier of New Brunswick, our province made a very unpopular judgment on what it thought was in the public interest. Among other things, the province enacted the New Brunswick Human Rights Act. That law made it illegal in New Brunswick for employers to refuse to employ on the basis of race and religion. A few years later, other prohibited grounds of discrimination were added.
Further to the example you gave a few moments ago, I can think of so many examples of associations and clubs which had and have prohibitive membership qualifications on those kinds of grounds. Their immediate reaction was that we were breaking them up. It seems to me that we must have a good understanding of the principles of our public policy in saying that sexual discrimination in employment is contrary to public policy and that that is the value to which we will subscribe.
Is there a measurable time line from when a social policy decision is taken -- be it at the corporate level, the community level, or the governmental level -- until it yields the new social cohesion that is intended?
Ms Jenson: I have never seen that, and the reason is partly found in what you said before. Social cohesion is not a thing. We do not say that we have achieved social cohesion. That is the problem with the concept, unless it is given the contextualization that you are talking about. One could make an argument that, by interfering with the cohesiveness of certain institutions, like these private clubs, one is fostering greater general cohesion because people feel more included. They feel that they have more access to the institutions, be it the labour market or a private club. They feel included and they have a sense of belonging to the place.
Others will argue that the recognition of those kinds of differences -- gender differences, racial differences and ethnic differences -- have done nothing but break down the social cohesion of Canada.
What we are really stuck in front of is not measuring how cohesive Canada is but, instead, trying to determine how to talk about values and value judgments in a time when people do not share those judgments as much as we tend to image they did in the past. Your example of Premier Robichaud is a very good one because you are presenting it as a history in which he had to decide in the face of opposition. We now tend to look back at those years and say everyone agreed and therefore that is how we got human rights codes. There is a lot of fuzzy thinking about what happened in history, even if that history is our own history. You are putting your finger on a very important issue, which is that, rather thinking in terms of social cohesion, we must think of fundamental values such as justice, what we want to achieve, and the advantages and disadvantages of certain public policy choices.
Senator Kinsella: My next question relates to what you said about identity. It is my hypothesis that there are many ways of being Canadian in Canada, and that part of our national identity is inclusive of that very notion. My theory behind that is that we saw how, during periods of great demographic migration, so many countries forced the first generation of immigrant children to adopt a particular ethnocultural identity or civic identity. Many tragic stories are told about that. Much of the American literature, as I understand, speaks to that. I do not know how extensive our literature is in Canada but, under the rubric of multiculturalism, we have allowed people to maintain traditional ethnic identities.
I would like your reaction to this concern. Must we also look at the social psychology of what we are referring to in social cohesion? I do not know what the literature is in this field, but if Canadians cannot somehow grab hold of some kind of a life, or cannot get ahold of being Canadian, are they left out? Is there an area of what I am calling the psychology of social cohesion? I know you are a political scientist, but could you help me with that?
Ms Jenson: I am sure there are probably fields for everything and there is much work done on individual identity, and then moving on to the political identities of individuals. I do not wish to sound like a disciplinary imperialist here, but I think that is the wrong direction, because we can get a lot of mileage out of talking about identities in a much more simple, straightforward way. The way we have talked about it in the last 15 years in Canada has created a great deal of discord. Basically, are you recognized, and is your contribution recognized, in our public institutions and as a contribution to Canadian society?
While I agree with you that there are many ways of being Canadian, there are political movements which do not agree with that. They make the argument that there is only one way to be Canadian, which is to be Canadian first before anything else. That denies people such as new immigrants what used to be called a "sectional interest," whereby you could be from Nova Scotia but at the same time still be Canadian.It is now primarily concentrated over the question of whether you are a Quebecer first and then a Canadian. Those movements that say there is only one way to be a Canadian are saying to many people who feel Canadian but who do not put that first on their list that they do not really belong.
When I talk about the capacity to recognize difference, I think it is the capacity to say, bottom line, do you feel Canadian or not, and what does that mean to you except an allegiance to a certain set of political institutions, practices, and ways of conducting oneself? We can ask about our institutions and politics, whether they facilitate that or whether they interfere with it by putting other conditions on the ways of being Canadian. There is much work to be done on those issues that you have already raised, such as multiculturalism and human rights.
The Chairman: When Joseph Howe famously told the young people down there to "brag about your country, boys," the country he had in mind was Nova Scotia. Later I will ask you whether you think Canada is a community of communities and, if it is, whether that is a problem, but for the moment I will turn to Senator Butts.
Senator Butts: Thank you for coming, Professor Jenson. I was intrigued by your ability to not only go between two strategies, but to work with three strategies without showing your own cards.
My question relates somewhat to what Senator Kinsella was saying. I wish to ask specifically if your studies include federations, confederations and unitary systems and whether it matters?
Ms Jenson: I did not consider whether institutional arrangements matter. Clearly the capacity to manage differences depends on the cards that one starts with, whether one has a federal system built on a single linguistic community -- such as Germany or Australia -- or whether one has a federation because, from the beginning, one had variation in the community, not only if we go back to references to history. We must remember that the communities that were being united in Canada in 1867 were not only English and French, but they also thought they had problems uniting English, Scots and Irish, and the "Maple Leaf Forever" was considered to be racially very diverse, as it was, because people felt very strongly that they were not Irish, or they were English or Scottish or whatever. That has washed out over time so that the major distinction is between English-speaking or French-speaking people, but the Canadian federation is built on that difference and therefore all institutions must manage that.
You can manage it by setting up a set of common institutions or by saying, "It was a nice try and let us go our separate ways." Both of those are strategies for managing. You may prefer one or the other, but they are both strategies.
Senator Butts: Does your Canadian social cohesion include Quebec?
Ms Jenson: People who talk about social cohesion take that issue on board and say that we need a set of institutions that can manage the diversity. This is not simply a linguistic diversity because there are francophones in provinces other than Quebec. It is diversity in the sense of what nation a person belongs to. It is not only Quebec raising the issue of what nation one belongs to, because aboriginal peoples also raise that question.
The task facing Canada is to manage a diversity which, as Charles Taylor says, is a deep diversity. It is not a difference of any sort. It is profoundly deep and we must manage it.
We could, for example, become so cohesive in Southern Canada that it would close down the space that would allow Quebecers or aboriginal peoples to recognize themselves as Canadians. That could happen.
Senator Butts: With respect to your topic "Why Now," I want to add to these reasons government withdrawal from services for everyone, such as airports, ports and wharves, harbours and harbour masters, and even flags at airport and ports. In general, the notion is that government is not looking after people the way Canadians think it ought to look after people. Would you allow me to add that to your heading "Why Now"?
Ms Jenson: I think it is already there, but if you do not see it, then you should certainly add it.
Senator Butts: I do not see it or it is too general.
Ms Jenson: The question of the role of the state and of the government and its responsibilities for providing services has been rethought in recent years as a result of the changes and the arrival of neo-liberalism. If we associate the kinds of thinking about structural adjustment and flexibility with that political position, then there is the issue of whether the government has rendered itself invisible to the population. It might need to get back into some position of visibility.
This is an issue that must be taken step by step because there are all sorts of arguments about the advantages of decentralized service delivery -- having services delivered by non-governmental agencies -- that are sometimes valid and sometimes not. We need a balance. That is precisely why I talked about the three kinds of balance -- liberty, equality and solidarity. The issues you are talking about involve the provision of services by the government, which would come under the solidarity heading.
Senator Butts: The government might consider it valid, but the people affected are distressed by it.
Ms Jenson: Which may lead to some of the things we see, such as the disgruntlement with politicians.
Senator Butts: I am reminded of the writing of Adam Smith, who said that the interior economy must be regulated by the government, but the international economy is regulated by providence. Would you agree that providence has now been thrown out in favour of the crass market?
Ms Jenson: I cannot say I remember that from Adam Smith.
One of the things people talk about with respect to globalization -- including Paul Martin when he was in Washington -- is the need to think about regulating these things beyond the national level, perhaps revitalizing institutions which were put into place in the post-war period when we were much more enthusiastic about institutional intervention. Things have been allowed to decline.
Senator Butts: Getting taxes out of it.
[Translation]
Senator Losier-Cool: This is a fascinating subject. If there is no democracy at the global or international level, then why should we expect there to be any social cohesion?
Ms. Jenson: Is that a comment or question?
Senator Losier-Cool: I would like to hear your views on the subject. Have there been times in the history of Canada where social cohesion was stronger? Is social cohesion threatened by government services, administrative decentralization and the fact that the current government is confronted by four opposition parties? Given the babyboomers who want more power, senior citizens and all the inequities that exist, how does social cohesion in Canada today compare with what we have seen in the past?
Ms. Jenson: Perhaps I could make that comparison if I had a clearer definition to work with.
If we want to draw comparisons, we would be better off putting the question another way: has a broader consensus been achieved in terms of certain values and certain society projects?
For a variety of reasons -- the four parties, global problems, the generation gap -- can we argue that there is less consensus when it comes to future plans and goals to be attained?
I think we can draw comparisons. We can look at those moments in history when a consensus was achieved. For example, although there was considerable discussion surrounding the Charter of Rights in New Brunswick, the Premier backed this initiative because he had the support of a certain majority of the population. He was a democrat and he needed the support of the majority. A certain consensus was achieved, even though the debate was quite intense. These days, there is much less consensus on major issues and major society projects. Do we want the government to assume responsibility for providing services? Yes or no?
During the 1950s and 1960s, we had four parties which were more or less in agreement. Mr. Diefenbaker agreed with the Liberals. The NDP and CCF wanted the State to shoulder its responsibilities. Today, we note that there is much disagreement on these issues between the parties, between politicians and between members of society.
Senator Losier-Cool: Sovereigntists or Quebecers argue that they are the only community to promote a real community project in Canada. If we were to gauge the consensus among the population -- and there is a danger in so doing -- we would have to say that there is more social cohesion among Quebeckers than there exists in the rest of Canada.
Ms Jenson: I talked about a society project, while you referred to a community project. Your wording is more precise. Although the Quebec government talks about a society project, what it really wants is to achieve recognition as a community. By society project, I mean everything that involves the responsibility of the state and of the private sector. How should work be shared between the private sector and government? A society project encompasses all of this. When the Quebec government talks about a society project, it is more concerned about recognition as a community that it is about social cohesion.
Secondly, we have to recognize that this project may have the support of the majority -- we will see in the weeks ahead -- but that support is by no means unanimous. In Quebec, there are differences between federalists and nationalists, between anglophones and francophones, and so forth. Politics and democracy are very much alive in Quebec.
If I had to draw a comparison between Quebec politics and Canadian politics, I would have to say that at least in Quebec, the parameters of the debate are clearer given the importance of the national issue these past many years.
Quebeckers have been rather actively involved in this debate. I fail to understand how my colleagues from Calgary, notably Mr. Getty, can say that Quebec is not a democratic society. How can they say that in view of the high rate of participation in elections, referendums and school board elections? When people feel threatened, they do something. What do they do? They turn out and vote. Democracy is alive and well.
I believe we must achieve a certain consensus on the issue of a society project. You asked initially whether at certain moments in our history, there has been greater social cohesion. Basically, there have been times when a greater consensus emerged and times when conflict prevailed. I feel that I have perhaps lost my train of thought here.
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The Chairman: In this country we have always had, and continue to have, challenges to social cohesion along the traditional fault lines of language, region, and culture. What is new, I believe, is the pressures on social cohesion coming from the forces of globalization and technology.
Judith Maxwell speaks of the polarization of jobs and incomes, increasing inequality, and so forth. We have always had social problems to address in this country. I wonder whether what is new is that the middle class is more threatened or feels more threatened now than it has been.
Ms Jenson: When?
The Chairman: In the past.
Ms Jenson: In any past?
The Chairman: The middle class feels more threatened by the dislocating effects of globalization and technology, or is there a bigger middle class, or are people better educated and more in tune with what is going on in the world? Why is social cohesion under such pressure from globalization and technology?
Ms Jenson: The first thing is whether social cohesion is under pressure from globalization and technology, and this is the first time that this has happened. That is a hypothesis, it is not a fact, and it is one which I find disturbing because it tends to be associated with a whole set of other statements which are also more propositions than facts. We have never seen such diverse societies as we live with now. We have never seen such diversity in values as we live with now. We never had such challenges to the management of diversity as we have now.
Consider history -- not long history, but even just this century. At the beginning of the 20th century people thought they were living through a very difficult time, under pressure from changes on the world scene. Those changes were clearly the competition between countries which led to the First World War. There was also the adjustments in the economic circumstances and power of the British Empire and its capacity to maintain its place in the world and to organize industrial capitalism around the world. All of those things were under threat at that time.
When you read the documents of the time, people lived that as a crisis of social cohesion. That is why I mention Durkheim, because Durkheim was trying to come to grips with that. He was concerned about people leaving the countryside and going to the city, and about industrial labour being so different from agricultural labour, factory labour being so different from artisanal labour. This was creating social discohesion.It also had global dimensions, if you will, through the functioning of international markets, which very few people left to providence; they tended to leave it to the British navy or something.
At that time there were all sorts of things on the agenda, and they were the kind of things we talk about now, such as what should women do, what should gender roles be, what is the role of the family, who is responsible for babies. All of those items were on the agenda. I tend to see this more as a period in which, for whatever reasons, we are not managing things well. This is something new in history due to new technologies and world forces.
That said, there clearly are changes which we could label globalization. Those are changes related to technology, things like the speed with which we can move capital around the world, the speed with which we can do transfers, all those kinds of things, and the speed with which people themselves can move around the world.
The Chairman: The loss of control over those factors by the nation state and by national governments is what is key, perhaps due to our perspective because of what we do here. You are talking to a group of senators.
Ms Jenson: If you were a Canadian policy maker in the 1930s and you faced international markets for grain, you would feel like you did not have much control over what was going on. That was an international economic crisis and Canada was caught in that because it was a primary producer and the prices of primary products were set outside the country. Now when we say the Canadian dollar is disintegrating in the face of the Asian crisis, we are still saying it has the same structure as the economy we had in the 1930s. It was lived as a lack of control to which people then brought solutions.
The Chairman: We think that since the 1930s we have given ourselves, collectively, the tools with which to manage these developments. The country has not managed badly up until now. These new forces of globalization and technology are obviously threatening and calling into question the efficacy of our tools. Mr. Martin is talking about some kind of international regime. I think it is illusory, at least for the foreseeable future. That is my opinion.
Ms Jenson: If you think it is illusory, then you will stay home and not do anything. In the 1930s and after the war, people saw that things were out of control -- that they were helpless -- and so they looked for a solution. The solution was to get together in Bretton Woods and make some institutions. Those institutions no longer function.
The Chairman: There were national institutions, also, that had policies.
Ms Jenson: We often forget that institutions, particularly Canadian national institutions, were embedded in this set of international institutions.
The Chairman: Fair enough.
Ms Jenson: The Canadian institutions are no longer functioning. I chose my example of wheat because we now must decide what to do with the Wheat Board. Do we give it up or look for another solution? There are pressures coming from the United States to give it up. There are pressures from inside Canada to give it up. Do we need to keep it? Do we need something like this? Do we need another institution to replace it?
Those are the political options. We are in the process of trying to imagine what those options would bring. Now I am really preaching, but as long as we emphasize globalization, it leads to the response that it is illusory to try to do anything. No one ever asks me to do anything, but people do ask you to do things. If you will actually do them, then you need to say that we could imagine doing such things.
The next question is how. It is important to look at these lessons where other people felt equally disarmed and disempowered and come up with solutions. We need to ask about the solutions that are out there, rather than saying things are being done to us.
In terms of the middle class, clearly something is going on there which I believe is related to the problems of stalled growth and some of the issues of services which were raised before. When my parents looked at their children, they looked at a future that was upwardly mobile and moving. When I look at my daughter, I see a future where the probability of upward mobility is reduced. Downward mobility is a high probability despite our best efforts. This touches the middle class because the middle class have been the carriers.
The Chairman: That is potentially lethal in terms of social cohesion, is it not?
Ms Jenson: It risks leading to individualized responses. It risks leading to extra emphasis on one of my dimensions. Let us look, for example, at the health care system. My father is sick right now so I value the health care system.
If the health care system is under-funded, a huge amount of pressure comes from the middle class -- who have some disposable income if not enough -- to loosen up the system so that they can get access when they need it. That leads to privatization or parallel systems or some sort of change in the Canadian health care system.
Huge pressure comes from the situation. Is that because globalization has put problems on the health care system? It could be. You could do a whole analysis on those terms. Is it because certain choices were made about funding at a certain point? Perhaps the values which informed those choices were not the same values which informed the original choice of access to a universal system.
I keep coming back to my same point. This is more about political choices and value choices on the part of "actors," the institutions who make those choices, rather than these large social forces.
The Chairman: That is fair enough. That is what we are about at this table. I am dubious about the potential of supra-national institutions to solve these problems. I am more concerned -- and perhaps this reflects the perspective of Canadian Parliamentarians -- with seeing that our Canadian institutions are up to their jobs.
Senator Butts raised a point about the diminishing role or the withdrawal, as she put it, of government and that point is absolutely capital to this whole question. Those of us who supported and continue to support free trade, tax reform, open borders, free markets and all the rest of it never thought that these were an end in themselves. Either these changes will improve social cohesion and the standard of living and people's prospects in this country, or they are not worth the candle. Now we must address these issues ourselves.
I do not trace all our problems to globalization, technology or free trade. I have no difficulty with devolving where necessary or desirable. Many things should be devolved to provinces and other levels of government. However, we listened to Michael Adams yesterday as he spoke of the growing sense among Canadians that they did not want government to be doing so much in so many fields; that they wanted more individual autonomy and responsibility and all the rest of it. That does not get you very far in the situation we are facing.
I cannot see how we will be able to deal with these things without strong national government institutions. They may be different institutions doing different things. They may not be doing some of the things they are doing now, but we must have strong institutions as an anchor. I am not offended that we no longer own a railway and an airline, but it bothers me that we are slowly diminishing our role in other areas, even in national parks and that sort of thing. People are talking about privatizing the penitentiaries and this troubles me.
Ms Jenson: This goes to the Michael Adams reference that you made. When you say Canadians want less government, that idea is coming from somewhere. It is coming from a variety of places but one source is the governments themselves who are saying that they want to do less.
This goes back to the questions from Senator Butts. To what extent are governments, through their own political strategies, undermining the ties that bind? They are in fact down-playing or rejecting their own role. That is something which you must take on board. It may be that too much moving out simply removes the raison d'être for having the government at all.
This is not falling from the sky, and I am totally convinced that it is not starting with Canadians. That is where I disagree with people who analyze only the distribution of public opinion. The assumption is that somehow Canadians got these values themselves -- that they went into the street and found them. Those values are created through an interaction between individual citizens and their governments and other institutions. When governments are telling them that there should not be so much government, it is not surprising that they believe that to be so.
The Chairman: That is a good point. Some people promote large scale devolution and decentralization under the guise of federalist solutions, but what they have in mind is dismantling governments, in particular the federal government.
Senator Kinsella: I have two areas I wish to go into, although one has been covered partially by the last discussion.
Has the social distance between Canadians expanded or contracted in the past five to ten years? In other words, the distance between Canadian and Canadian, individual and individual, neighbour and neighbour and, in this context, between the citizen and governments?
Ms Jenson: I cannot answer that question in the terms that you are posing it. It seems to me that is something you will have to ask someone like Michael Adams, or people who actually have measures of those kinds of things.
The one thing that we do know is that in Canada, as in other countries -- and this is not typically Canadian -- there is a growing mistrust of politicians. There is not a mistrust of political institutions, but they do not like the people who they have now. When the incumbents are replaced, they do not like them either.
The Chairman: We politicians keep telling them that they cannot trust politicians.
Ms Jenson: That may be part of the story.
Senator Butts: You cannot underplay the role of the media either.
Ms Jenson: That is true. The thing that interests me is that this is something which is quite widespread. It goes back to some of the questions you were getting at about middle-class politics and things like that. In many places, you find politics where people want more democratic involvement. They wish to feel more involved. To the extent that political institutions do not give them that, they create a distance between themselves and the citizens that cannot be bridged.
There may be some distance being created -- and again this is a political issue because there are differences of opinion on it -- by the politics which promote the hollowing out of bridges between individuals and governments. When I say bridges, I am referring to the institutional bridges. In traditional liberal democracy, we say those bridges are things like political parties, but there are also other groups which bring together people and then speak to governments for them. One of the things that has been happening in Canada is the "delegitimatization" of those bridges. It is not only politicians who are losing their legitimacy, but also the other institutions that form the bridges. That is why in my presentation I talked about institutions. One way to bridge a distance is to put a connector across it. If you take that down, it gets harder to cross.
Senator Kinsella: Sometimes one is simply dealing with demythologizing. I wonder sometimes whether or not we are a society in which ignorance has had a grand success.
If we were turning to the end of the book and trying to get to the last chapter of this inquiry that we have just launched, one area that is the exclusive jurisdiction of the Parliament of Canada is the Citizenship Act. The original act was introduced in 1947 or 1948. I think there was a major revision in the mid-1970s, but the model did not change.
Without prejudging anything, ought we to avoid the temptation to look for practical recommendations that this committee might make that the Parliament of Canada will be able to act on? To deal with the metaphysical and the overly philosophical is exciting in the seminar room, but we are a committee of Parliament.
Have you given any thought to citizenship as one of those instruments for social cohesion? At the front end, do you have some advice for us as to the kinds of questions we might be trying to nurture in our own minds as we go through this study? I take citizenship because it is an area in which we might be able to do something.
Ms Jenson: If you mean citizenship related to the acquisition of citizenship, there was a recent report on immigration policy. This question raises basic issues about the nature of the country and how one creates a sense of community. Does it happen by the choice of who comes in; or does it happen in a process once people have arrived in Canada? That is a real political choice that has to be made, however.
One can say we are a country which will take people who will fit in right away because we do not want to absorb the cost of transforming them from strangers into Canadians. For example, immigrants must speak one of the official languages. On the other hand, we can say that we will be open to people coming into Canada and we will assume the costs of transforming them into Canadians, which means, in concrete terms, giving them language training. That is an issue which is on the table.
Senator Kinsella: In terms of our national cohesion, would citizenship not have to speak to the 30 million of us and not just the new Canadians?
Ms Jenson: I was referring to the example of immigration.
In terms of citizenship as a broader concept beyond becoming a citizen and naturalization, there is a whole set of issues concerning the nature of Canadian citizens' rights. This relates to the issue of services. In the past, we have said that Canadians had certain kinds of social rights. We often called them access to social services. Basically, they were the rights that came with being Canadian or living in this country.
In social terms, they were often open to landed immigrants, or unofficial residents. To be Canadian meant to have access to social services, like health care or social assistance. Those kinds of expressions of citizenship are publicly and collectively generated, and that is what citizenship means. It is the public generation of something as opposed to simply being autonomous individuals. We are citizens of this country because we have a government which oversees it.
If I were a senator, I would be interested in the ways in which concrete public policies are either fostering a sense of Canadian citizenship or a sense of world citizenship, which does not mean much, or whether they are simply fostering a sense of being economic actors.
If we return to the free trade debate, one of the things at issue was the notion that free trade would make it difficult to foster those notions of citizenship.
I continue to believe that even if free trade worked economically, it did make it more difficult for reasons of access to other service providers and it made it more difficult to maintain those parts of citizenship.
There are concrete issues involved that are related to the responsibilities of institutions to reflect an image of the collectivity back into the collectivity. That sounds very seminar-like, but it is quite simple. Basically, do you say to Canadians that you share something in common because you all go to similar kinds of institutions like schools or hospitals, or do you say that you are basically just a collection of people who happen to live together in the same space, and your identity comes from your capacity to be active in consuming services and buying them in the market. That is a concrete issue.
The Chairman: We have gone over, but that is what happens when we have a particularly interesting and stimulating witness. Thank you, Ms Jenson, for providing a very interesting discussion today.
The committee adjourned.