Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Social Affairs,
Science and Technology
Issue 30 - Evidence
OTTAWA, Tuesday, March 16, 1999
The Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology met this day at 10:01 a.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: Senators, one of the two witnesses we had expected to hear today -- Professor Keith Banting -- will not be available. We are attempting to reschedule his appearance before the committee for some time next month, even if we are at that time launched in the process of drafting our report.
Our witness is Brian Tanguay, who is a political science professor in the Department of Political Science at Wilfred Laurier University. Professor Tanguay is, among other things, a scholar and expert on political parties, interest groups, social movements, Canadian and Quebec politics, and labour relations. He has conducted research into the political activities of interest groups, the organization and ideology of political parties, contemporary Quebec politics, labour policy in Canada and contemporary Ontario politics, specifically state-business-labour relations.
Professor Tanguay has a brief opening statement to make, after which we will open the floor for questions and comments. Professor Tanguay, please proceed.
Professor Brian Tanguay, Department of Political Science, Wilfred Laurier University: There are three parts to my written presentation. The first starts deals with some evidence for the transformation of political parties. I hesitate to call it "the decline," for reasons that I will make clear. I do not want anyone to take personal offence to this sentence, which is written by Geoff Mulgan, who is a British intellectual, now advisor to the Tony Blair government. He says that one of the pieces of evidence that parties are having difficulty with, whether they are in decline or not, is that the repute of politicians as a profession has fallen down to the lower reaches, cheek by jowl with journalists, lawyers, and other systematic distorters of the truth. To that end, page 12 of my brief includes two tables drawn from the Canadian National Election Study 1997. These tables indicate that feelings among Canadian voters about politics are decidedly lukewarm. The results of that survey indicate that the supporters of the two new regional parties of protest, the Bloc Québécois and the Reform Party, are most disaffected. Feelings about democracy and the democratic system in Canada are a bit better but, again, it is the supporters of the two new parties that are the most skeptical about the functioning of our democratic system.
The evidence is there about the difficulties our political parties are encountering. I argue that the levels of cynicism and disaffection and alienation from the political system began to reach a crisis point in the 1980s. Prior to that time, although I would never argue that there was a golden age of politics or the party system in Canada, reasons parties were more effective in integrating the various regions in Canada and dealing with the translation of citizen preferences into public policy.
The key watershed event in crystallizing the disaffection and alienation of voters from our party system was the collapse or unravelling of the Meech Lake accord. That was followed by the Spicer commission -- sardonically called a roving psychiatrist's coach -- which probed the causes of voter angst in the country. One of the strongest messages, according to the Spicer commission, was that voters have lost their faith in the political process and in political leaders; that governments, especially at the federal level, do not reflect the will of the people nor do citizens have the means at the moment to correct this.
That was followed shortly thereafter by the Royal Commission on Electoral Reform and Party Financing, otherwise known as the Lortie commission. It lamented the fact that political parties seemed to be losing out in the competition for representing voters to interest groups and social movements.
I argue in this first part that we cannot really conclude that parties are in decline. They are being transformed. They are facing the most serious challenges to their operation since they were formed in the latter half of the 19th century, much like trade unions. I conclude that section with a quote from Geoff Mulgan, whose book, Politics in an Antipolitical Age, is worth reading -- bedtime reading definitely. He says that political parties "cannot avoid looking like elderly institutions that have been overtaken by more effective means of campaigning, communicating and policy making, whether these be in the voluntary sector, the media or the research institutes."
Why is this happening? In the second section of the brief, I run through five interrelated trends that are contributing to the transformation of political parties, starting with the complex nature of the economic and social systems that sprang up in the post-war period, which meant that interest groups and lobbying removed from the political party some of its function.
The post-war period has also seen a value change. There has been a shift, to varied extents, across the liberal democracies towards more post-materialist values, which means that social groups and social movement organizations become more popular forms of expression than political parties. Political parties have had trouble everywhere, not only in Canada, adapting to the new reality and articulating the concerns that seem to motivate voters more in the 1990s than they did in the 1950s when concerns about defence and economic distribution were more pronounced.
Part and parcel of this shift toward a more post-materialist value set is declining levels of deference among voters. Voters are simply not deferring to political parties or their representatives in the way that was typical in the 1950s. Voters want a voice and they want to be involved directly in political decision making.
That ties in with the next factor, the proliferation of new technologies of politics -- polling, direct mail, focus groups, electronic townhalls, televoting. The new technologies hold out the prospect to many voters that they can be involved directly in political decision making without the intermediary of traditional political parties. This opens up the political system to new kinds of political entrepreneurs who are willing to mobilize these voters -- people like Ross Perot in the United States.
The last factor is what this committee is concerned primarily with, the issue of globalization, which has brought with it what I have called the flattening out -- and I have stolen this from somebody else, although I cited him -- of political debate or political discourse in the 1990s after the collapse of the former Soviet Union. This flattening out means that there has been an apparent narrowing of the capacity of political parties to deal with the economic problems of the 1990s. No matter what the ideological stripe of the political party, once they get into power their actions seem to be remarkably similar. I have quoted an economist by the name of Susan Strange, who says:
...the political choices open to government these days have been so constricted by those forces of structural change often referred to as "globalization" that the differences that used to distinguish government policies from opposition policies are in process of disappearing.
The fact that there is such a large gap between the promises political parties make in an effort to get into office and actual performance, once there, fuels cynicism and disaffection. This leads to a kind of withdrawal from politics as a whole as voters throw up their arms and say, "It does not matter what they say, they will all act the same way anyway. They will not address my concerns." One of those concerns is trying to hold on to a decent job, stability in the economy.
In the last section of brief I deal with whether we can reverse these trends. Here, I am fairly nebulous. I do not believe that there is a specific, magical institutional fix that can make the parties healthy again. They will have to adapt to the new reality and accept the fact that there will be competition with interest groups, social movements, and political entrepreneurs like Ross Perot.
A number of things could be done -- and I do not know whether this is within the purview of this committee. One is electoral reform. It was specifically excluded from the terms of reference of the Lortie commission, which I think was a mistake. I am not saying that proportional representation or a German-style electoral system will magically make us better, but if we had a task force investigating the nature of our political institutions in the way that New Zealand did a few years back, we could actually get some political debate in this country which is, to my mind, sadly lacking. I would not want this to be a make-work project for academics. I prefer a mechanism similar to the Spicer commission that would really listen to the people more than the academics, even though I am an academic.
Another nebulous proposal is for the political parties themselves to be more realistic. In a fax I received, somebody alluded to the third way, which I take to be Tony Blair to be representative of the third way. What strikes me as exciting and potentially is cause for optimism with Tony Blair is that the Labour Party, for the first time since the 1930s, has recognized that there are limits to the effectiveness of state action. Tony Blair is serious about wanting to use the state to make the lives of individual citizens better while at the same time recognizing that there are limits to what can be accomplished. Political parties will never be healthier unless citizens realize that there are limits to what they can accomplish once in power. To some extent, the parties themselves are victims of the heightened expectations that they themselves have unleashed in the post-war period, especially about what they can do with the economy.
On that somewhat nebulous note, I will conclude.
Senator Cohen: This will be good bedside reading tonight. Perhaps it will leave us all with insomnia. I do not think that anything you have said has shocked any of us. We are realistic enough to know that there is a malaise in the air.
I work in the area of poverty. It concerns me that political parties really only give lip service to people who live in poverty. The poor have become a social group that is now speaking out and drawing more and more people and becoming angry. People in poverty do not have power, and we know that power talks. People in poverty do not vote because they do not believe that anyone is listening to them. How can we encourage governments to get more involved with groups in need, in order to make this a better Canada, as they did post-war and during the Depression years? Politicians do not run on a platform for the poor. We know that. It would be so refreshing if they did, and perhaps it would turn the whole picture around.
I want to hear your views on that because we are talking about social cohesion. The group to which I refer is marginalized and has no voice anywhere.
Mr. Tanguay: To the extent that it does have a voice, it is usually found in the social movement organizations. Ontario is a prime example of this phenomenon and the fact that political parties are deemed irrelevant by the poor or the voices of the poor themselves.
I was at a recent colloquium at my university about the upcoming Ontario election, which will probably happen in a few months. In attendance was a representative from a coalition of social movement organizations concerned with community welfare, poverty groups and so on. Her disaffection from the political system was obvious. It led to a kind of unreality on her part because she ended up saying that it does not make any difference whether Mike Harris or Dalton McGuinty are elected, which I think is clearly mistaken because what Harris has done since coming to power in 1995 has been pronounced.
We are seeing the effect of the disappearance of the NDP and the traditional voice of the marginalized in our party system. The left everywhere, if it has not retooled and rethought what it means to be a social democratic in the 1990s, is marginalized, and nowhere is this more obvious than in Canada. The NDP has never really recovered from the early 1990s. I do not want to take Ontario's experience as representative of the entire country, but the failures and the limitations of the Rae government in Ontario caused huge problems for the NDP, and they have never recovered from them. They have never really tried to rethink their program. When Alexa McDonough suggested that perhaps they need to look at the European experience and what Tony Blair and the Labour Party are doing, the traditional supporters of the NDP closed ranks and squelched any possibility of an internal dialogue.
Until a party -- and I think it has to be the NDP -- holds itself out as the voice of the marginalized and becomes a real alternative for voters, marginalized groups will be excluded from the political system. The only link will be through the social movement organization.
Senator Cohen: That is my point. Why does it have to be the NDP? All political parties should realize that there is a major problem in Canada. It should not be left to one party to look after this need. We should all get together to look after this need, otherwise we are all working against each other.
Mr. Tanguay: Short-term factors are a possible explanation. The 1993 federal election did hold out hope for many marginalized groups. In fact, if you look at that election, Canada does not have a history of posing clear alternatives among the parties for voters. We had two successive elections in Canada -- 1988 and 1993 -- where clear alternatives, first on free trade and then on jobs versus the deficit, were offered to voters. What happened subsequently? Again, I do not want to be overly partisan but the entire agenda of the Chrétien government seemed to metamorphose into that that was offered by Kim Campbell and the Conservatives during the 1993 election. Marginalized groups, poor people, unemployed, who had had a lot of hope in 1993, saw their agenda taken over by the deficit, deficit cutting and responding to the larger international economic environment.
Short-term factors have contributed again to the levels of cynicism and public disaffection and the feeling of exclusion of so many groups. This is the issue of globalization. What can political parties, no matter what their ideology, accomplish once in power? I think most voters can remember back to 1993. There you had the promise of a concern with jobs, jobs, jobs and the performance where the focus on jobs was more a concern, a preoccupation with the deficit.
Senator Cohen: So the focus of traditional thinking of political parties has changed. You mentioned one change, that the NDP is now worrying about small business. In other words, everybody's base of operation is shifting, to a degree.
Mr. Tanguay: The NDP clearly has to come to terms with business. The era of large-scale nationalization is over. The notion of large-scale social engineering that was held out as the solution and maybe the path to utopia has ended. The big ideologies are over.
Social Democrats have to rethink what can be accomplished, how to make a more caring society, and how to do it through political action. Again, there is the Labour Government in Great Britain. There has to be a real concern with partnerships -- this is a word that is bandied about quite a bit -- between the voluntary sector and the state.
What has happened in the post-war period is that maybe all political parties -- Social Democrats in particular -- have become too dependent on the state as the sole source of political invasion. In some cases, that has allowed civil society, the network of voluntary organizations, to whither away or to atrophy. That network of social volunteerism and volunteer groups has to be revitalized somehow. It can only be done through real partnerships, where the state takes a secondary role or an equal-partner role and does not try to dominate the system, does not try to co-opt the groups at the local level.
Senator Cohen: The civil society is also worn without because, as a result of cutback, they have been carrying so much of the load of government for the last 10 or 15 years that they do need to be revitalized and renourished.
The Chairman: A political party that calls itself a national political party is really not worth a candle if it does not concern itself with, and seek to represent and speak for, welfare recipients, as well as the middle class, as well as professional people and so on in our society.
You were mentioning the NDP. Interestingly, the way this plays out in practice, however, is that the NDP is not, as you know, always or everywhere the beneficiary of people's disillusionment with whatever party happens to be in power.
I take your point about the 1993 election. But then if you look at 1997, which the Liberal Party won largely because of its Ontario support with 38 per cent of the vote nationally, those who wanted to cast a vote against the government split their votes among Tories, Reform and the NDP. I think that NDP people will tell you that at different times over the past five or six years, they have lost votes to the Reform Party.
Intellectually, that is hard to contemplate or understand, but it happens. It is an old story in parts of this country. You will see in British Columbia, votes in the same poll going back and forth from Social Credit, which was considered to be quite far to the right, and the NDP, which in British Columbia was considered to be quite far to the left. So the protest votes are usually all over the lot.
Mr. Tanguay: Yes. One of the bizarre features of the party system in Canada in the 1990s is the fact that there are new issues that have worked their way into the party system, which means that on the old left and right divisions among the parties are superimposed a new kind of conflict: insider versus outsider, elites versus non-elites. The Reform Party has been the most successful in articulating the interests and the concerns of the non-establishment, non-elites, and the NDP has not. In fact, the Reform Party has been very successful in saying that the NDP is tied to a special interest, namely organized labour. That term is always in Reform discourse. That makes it much more difficult to get a cohesive national party with a vision that can win votes in all regions.
The Chairman: However, it is healthy to the extent that it will encourage and provide incentive for Conservatives and Liberals, and all the parties, to compete for the support of welfare recipients, as well as the middle class, as well as professionals and so forth. Their policies are not going to be identical, but it is healthy if they make it their business to compete for those votes and to say, "We will represent these people as well as others in the mainstream of society."
Mr. Tanguay: It could be healthy. To date I do not know that it has been. You yourself mentioned that one of our problems that is fuelling voter resentment in certain regions, is that the only party that is close to being national governs with a popular vote of 38 per cent. It is a one-party state in Ontario right now.
The Chairman: If you look at the local level, though, that phenomenon where parties compete for the votes of the entire community is quite well known, such as in Newfoundland in 1997.
Mr. Tanguay: Yes.
Senator Butts: My question will put me with you in the world of the nebulous.
Would you say that a sense of community or of interest groups on the national level would do more or would do less to promote national social cohesion? In other words, the sum of the whole is greater than the parts.
The next part of my question concerns the role of political parties. My sense is that political parties are great in their parts, yet there is no overall picture. When you said "the big ideology," in my head, a big ideology means no ideology. Would you comment on all of these things for me, please?
Mr. Tanguay: By "parts" do you mean provinces or regions?
Senator Butts: Not necessarily. We have spent a lot of time on the local community, whether they are immigrants, unemployed, or whatever. I want to know what happens to the sum of the parts.
Mr. Tanguay: The sum of the parts does not always get translated into policy at the national level. Getting back to Senator Lowell Murray's comments, what happens is that parties compete for the votes of these marginalized groups, and these groups and the individuals are important at least once every four years, and that is at election time. Their votes do matter. But we see that other concerns take over once the parties are in power and once a party has a majority. What majority governments do with their power fuels alienation and cynicism in our country. Once they have harvested the votes of all of these different components of society, what do they do with that power? Many people, especially among the marginalized groups, see that the power tends to be concentrated and focused on issues that are of most concern to the "haves" in society. So that fuels cynicism and voter disaffection in our country.
The parts are not being translated successfully once a party has used those parts, if I can take "parts" as meaning local communities and the groups that comprise the local communities.
Once in power, the party tends to turn away from those local groups. Then they feel that they have no effective voice and that there are not a lot of prospects. If the NDP is not their voice, there are not a lot of prospects for them. That is again one of the problems that we are facing in the 1990s. These local concerns of primarily marginalized groups do not have a high priority in the policy agenda of a majority government.
With regard to the big ideology, academics use this fancy term, "meta-narrative" or paradigm, post-modern lingo. The last half of the 20th century has been tough on these big ideologies, the ideologies that hold out the prospect for a sweeping transformation that will magically usher in utopia. That seems not to have happened. Many people as a result have scaled back their expectations about what can be done in this life, on this world, in this society.
I think they are concerned with changing local circumstances and making things better in a piecemeal fashion. That has replaced the large, sweeping utopian visions that were so pronounced in the first half of this century. That is what I mean by big ideology.
Senator Butts: Do we need a big ideology or a general ideology to have social cohesion, or is it hopeless to even look for a national social cohesion?
Mr. Tanguay: We do not need a big ideology. That is why I am sort of excited or cautiously optimistic about Tony Blair and New Labour. Blair is an interesting case. His social democracy is melded with a religious base. That has given him a certain skepticism about what can be accomplished by the state and a desire to focus on those things that can be changed successfully, but also a recognition that there have to be limits to social engineering. That has been one of the big problems with left-leaning parties in the 20th century. They have not recognized that there are any limits to what the state can accomplish. In fact, then they have acted like bulldozers once they have gotten into power and actually obliterated what I call civil society, the local community groups that are really the essence of society.
We do not need a big ideology. The fact that they have collapsed in the last half of the 20th century is a good thing. It holds out the prospect for real change, but parties have to seize that. In Canada, for a variety of reasons, it does not appear that our parties have seized that opportunity yet. I am not saying they will not, but they do not appear to have seized the opportunity yet.
Senator Johnstone: You mentioned Ross Perot. Would you care to outline something of Perot's approach to politics, government and social cohesion?
You have also touched on Tony Blair. Would you like to expand on his approach?
Mr. Tanguay: I mentioned Ross Perot as one of the prime examples of a new kind of political entrepreneur who can bypass the party system entirely and mobilize voters on the basis of his extreme wealth and the new political technologies that exist for hire on a kind of mercenary basis. The American political system is probably the easiest system to highjack in this fashion. We may see it in this upcoming presidential election with Steve Forbes running again on the basis of his immense wealth. Then he can simply bypass all forms of party organization and hire pollsters, media consultants, direct mail experts and so on and so forth.
The Chairman: And he can lose again.
Mr. Tanguay: We hope.
Senator Cools: And do everything but politics; he can do advertising imagery, but very little politics.
Mr. Tanguay: Exactly. Forbes does not have the charisma that Ross Perot has. Perot touched a chord. We see in all Western societies this group of alienated individuals who feel that they are excluded by the political class. The size of this group varies from country to country but they are there and they can be mobilized by a person like Ross Perot. Forbes is obviously not the person to do it, but Perot succeeded to an extent, getting 19 per cent of the vote in 1992.
The Chairman: Pat Buchanan is pretty much on the same level.
Mr. Tanguay: That is right. That is one of the more disturbing features of the present political situation. There is a group of disaffected, turned-off voters who are there in every Western democracy waiting to be mobilized by the right political entrepreneur. The existence of these new technologies gives these entrepreneurs the opportunity to bypass the traditional party structures. If you have an entrepreneur who has a particularly nasty view of the world, then the prospect for mischief is great.
We see in Western Europe, for instance, the rise of very right wing and even racist political parties mobilized around a new generation of political leader, like Joerg Haider in Austria, who is telegenic, media suave and cryptofascist.
The Chairman: Much of it is a reaction against globalization and technology.
Mr. Tanguay: Yes. The marginalized groups in Western Europe often include the manual working class, who have seen their high-paying jobs in factories go to Mexico and Brazil. Those are the fruits of globalization, and they then are willing to be mobilized by a leader who tells them, "Look, I can solve this very easily."
Senator Johnston: Tony Blair, of course, is already elected. What success has he had so far in moving towards improved social cohesion?
Mr. Tanguay: To date the record is mixed. In the first year he made some bold moves on the regional questions that affect Great Britain, the devolution of power to Scotland and Wales and the Irish question. On the large socioeconomic questions, right now, the record is mixed at best. That is why I said I was cautiously optimistic.
Senator Wilson: I was interested in your comments about partnership. An awful lot of nonsense is spoken about partnership with government. My experience is that NGOs in civil society either feel co-opted in the process -- you find that out after the fact, of course -- or they adopt a confrontational stance. That may make them feel good and get some PR but no change is effected. Or they turn to public consultation, which I find the public increasingly cynical about because one has to ask who is consulted and what is done with the consultation. NGOs are in great danger of being written off as special interest groups. The government never gets written off as a special interest group.
Some of the issues there are the enormous resource imbalance between the government and the NGO community and the information dissonance. The NGO sometimes has a lot of information that the government does not have, but they never meet because they are both protecting their turf. They did meet more creatively around the International Criminal Court and the land mines conference but it is not as obvious to me at the municipal, provincial or federal level.
Mr. Tanguay: That is a very good statement of the problem. I do not have any magical solution. You have outlined very well the problems that exist. A desire for co-optation on the part of the state seems to be a natural phenomenon. The state cannot resist trying to co-opt and assume the superordinate position in any relation with local NGOs or local interest groups.
As we get into the next century, there are going to be more and more issues in which the state will have to try to limit its desire for co-optation. The whole issue of home care in the health sector is one where there have to be real partnerships between the local communities, volunteer or community groups and the state. To date, there is not a lot of cause for optimism that this real partnership can exist because there seems to be a natural tendency for one side to try to dominate the other. It can only be resisted. The NGOs have to do their best to resist being co-opted. In some situations and areas they will succeed; in others they will not. That is a product of different political cultures. For instance, perhaps Quebec will be more successful in having local interest groups or NGOs resist the state; perhaps they will not, I do not know. It will vary from province to province, region to region. But it is going to be a struggle and there is no easy way to declare by fiat that there will be success.
Senator Wilson: I raise it because it has a great deal to do with the lack of credibility of the political process. As voluntary groups get stung time and time again, they withdraw and the cynicism mounts. I know there is no magical formula, but I was hoping that you might suggest some of the steps that might be taken.
Mr. Tanguay: It depends on the will of the group or the groups involved. This moves out of the social sector, but where I live now in a small town outside of Waterloo there is a big concern with pollution caused by a particular factory. There has been mobilization at the grassroots level. A group was formed and it was engaged in a kind of dance with the provincial Ministry of the Environment, which the group always felt was trying to co-opt it. This dance led to an ongoing relationship between the two. The group did resist co-optation and it has effected some kind of change at the local level. It has not been a perfect solution by any means, but they now have an increased awareness of the problem. They have actually mobilized the Harris government to at least make statements about what will be done. There has been a kind of mitigated success. Being a realist, that is probably the best one can hope for, that in certain circumstances, certain groups will resist the state and be able to, through education and mobilization, at least make the problem better, if not resolve it totally.
[Translation]
Senator Ferretti Barth: All of us in Canada live within a huge mosaic of diversity: cultural, economic and cultural. Do you believe that this diversity is going to hinder social cohesion?
To your knowledge, is there any country in which social cohesion already exists? If so, do you know whether it is working well or not? In the United States, what was the outcome of globalization and social cohesion? If I am not mistaken, it was a major fiasco.
Mr. Tanguay: Does cultural diversity pose an obstacle to political parties and hinder social cohesion? Not necessarily, in my opinion. It is possible in our increasingly diversified world. It is absolutely necessary for political parties to realize that diversity. Yes, it causes problems in certain societies, but the growing diversity in all Western societies and in contemporary democracies is virtually unavoidable. Political parties can design policies that reflect that diversity. Though not easy, it is possible. It is also an opportunity for political parties to design programs which could bring together all sectors of society.
Some societies have more success than others. In some countries in Western Europe diversity is one of the major problems. I believe Canada's situation is not as serious as that of certain other societies, France for instance. The increasing diversity of contemporary global society is not, therefore, the end of the world. With the proper awareness, political parties can design programs to attenuate the social effects of diversity.
As for the United States, in my opinion, despite the fact that their economic situation seems to be better than it has in a decade, there are serious social problems. These problems are caused in part by globalization. The rich-poor conflict in the States is probably more pronounced than in Canada. In these two societies, however, that division has been accentuated by the effects of globalization.
Senator Ferretti Barth: That is why we Canadians are always inclined to look to the United States. If they are doing something, then we are going to do it. We have the example of a big country like the United States that has created wider gaps in society, instead of eliminating marginalization and exclusion. We must therefore look around us to find countries where there is already an intention of social cohesion in place, to see whether there have been positive results. The situation in the States is truly disastrous.
As for our own diversity, as you said in your first response -- it is mainly our immigrants who experience that diversity and seek Canadians' understanding of it -- there is a major obstacle. In the Council of Europe in Strasbourg there were discussions of social union for Europe. Finland has clearly stated that it will never be part of the social union in Europe. Why not? Because of its cultural. linguistic, religious, economic and political values. I can understand that.
Are we in Canada ready for this social cohesion? Have we carried out a referendum among all Canadians to find out what everyone thinks of it, the wealthy, the less well-off, the poor, the cultural communities, the elderly, the students, the academics? Do you agree? Can we, working all together, be an exemplary nation? This would avoid later problems.
Mr. Tanguay: You are referring to a referendum?
Senator Ferretti Barth: In order to find out whether Canadians and the various groups are ready for it. I represent a community group of 12,000 seniors. Do we want to talk to seniors about social cohesion? Do we need their support? We need to tell them so. We need to be honest, to inform them of our ideology, our social intent. I am speaking of the elderly, but this also needs to be done with the cultural communities.
Next Friday, I am going to visit 15 cultural communities. We will be discussing ageing, what ageing means in the Chinese community. We are already beginning to gather information. This is a concern to me.
Do the people of British Columbia think as we do? Do the people of Toronto think the same as the Quebeckers? Do Quebeckers think the same as the people of Alberta? A common factor must be found if we are to make any progress. That is my impression.
Mr. Tanguay: First of all, what comes to mind is the fact that Canada is next to the United States, and seems to be affected by its policies. Unemployment is rather low there, and this constitutes a kind of attraction. U.S. policies seem to have considerable influence on Canadian governments, which is natural. These programs, these economic policies, bring about social problems. By accepting these economic policies, would Canada be increasing its social and cultural problems? I believe so. This means that all political parties, all interest groups, all social movements in Canada must be aware of the fact that yes, the United States constitutes the strongest economy in the world, but it does have its problems. This is something we need to be aware of. Once again, we must resist the homogenization of policies in the economic, social and cultural sectors.
Is British Columbia different? Are the interests of British Columbians different than those of Ontarians? Are the interests of the people of Vancouver different from those in Toronto? Yes.
We have a federal system. It is the potential genius of federalism. The interests of these various communities differ. We must be aware of this, and federalism affords us the opportunity to take all of this diversity into account.
[English]
Senator Cools: The issues that are before us are very important and you could say that they are bedevilling us all in this country. When we speak of political parties, we must be mindful that the political party in our system has been the vehicle that delivered responsible government. In Canada -- and I do not know about the U.S. -- the weakening of political parties is at one and the same time the weakening of responsible government, which, after all, is a system where Her Majesty's chief minister chooses his cabinet from among the elected members of the House of Commons.
I would like to draw the witness' attention to a recent paper that Tom Kent did for the Caledon Institute of Social Policy, entitled "Social Policy 2000: An Agenda." It was released in January 1999. On page 4 there is a section called "How to live with government by improvisation." Mr. Kent says some very interesting things in this section of his paper. He says:
Political parties should be the central agents of democratic government by representation, by the election of a Parliament. They are the voluntary associations of people actively interested in public affairs.
Later he goes on to say:
The consequence is that when a party comes to Parliament, its members have no definite set of ideas on current issues, generated in discussion and pointing to policies around which they have coalesced. If the party forms the government, its cabinet ministers are unrooted in any public purpose for which they can be held accountable within the party and by the country. We have government not by democratic mandate but by improvisation.
He also says:
Nationally, the parties have become little more than advertising machines, competing for public support by much the same techniques of imagery as businesses with almost identical products use to compete for market share of detergents or banking services or whatever. The parties' political positions are shaped less by the views of their membership than by the devices of their professionals.
Mr. Kent goes to the heart of the matter. When I first presented myself as a candidate back in 1977, it was quite novel then, as a black woman, to do something like that, I can tell you. At the time I used an expression "advertising like a fragrant deodorant." I am very pleased to see that this imagery is coming through. I am putting the issue out to you for your thoughts.
We have seen a situation in recent years where parties are no longer choosing their members from the natural leaders in communities. A political party was supposed to be a way of engaging the interests, the activities and the work of the natural leaders in communities, so that from the communities across the land, public policy issues could come forward and be moulded. Alongside that, we have seen the diminution of backbenchers, or the role of the members of the House of Commons and of the Senate. We have seen the emergence of a new creature called the Prime Minister's office, now called the PMO. One is frequently surprised at the lack of involvement of many cabinet ministers in the development of certain policy issues, as the Prime Minister's Office seems to have emerged as a new entity. That has caused concern for many of us.
Have you given this question of the emergence of the PMO and its impact on responsible government and the political party as a process of reconciling opinion across the country any thought?
Mr. Tanguay: There are different parts to your question. I will move the terrain a bit and respond to your quote from Tom Kent. He is absolutely right. He is drawing attention to the fact that political parties -- and this is probably true in Canada more than in many other countries -- are primarily, if not exclusively, vote-gathering machines. They are quite lively and powerful at election time. Between elections they atrophy. Everyone in this room probably has belonged to a riding association. Those riding associations at the local level frequently whither away between elections.
That all draws attention to the fact that the parties' electoral functions are well developed. You talk about advertising. In the late 20th century, election activity is primarily a kind of advertising activity. However, their educational functions, their policy functions are underdeveloped if not totally undeveloped. Again, I hate to be a kind of Cassandra, but there is no easy solution to that.
There is a famous book on the Canadian political system written by a Frenchman, André Siegfried, and published around the turn of the century -- 1915, I believe. It was called The Race Question in Canada, and by that he meant the English and the French. That is going back almost 100 years. In the chapters on political parties, he recounts how astounded he was as a European to come to Canada and discover that the parties had no programs, that ideas seemed to mean nothing to them, that everything in politics in Canada revolved around the question of achieving power through vote-gathering and patronage. Those problems have been historical in Canada and it will not be easy to revitalize simply and magically the educational and policy functions of the parties.
Something can be done, however. It is not a complete loss. Foundations could be set up through tax incentives, for instance, to provide policy ideas to the parties. Because the parties are not generating policies and ideas, other organizations step into the policy vacuum. You mentioned the PMO. There are other so-called central agencies such as the FPRO and the PCO. Think tanks step into the policy vacuum. The Caledon Institute and the C.D. Howe Institute become a generator of policy ideas.
While other groups fill the vacuum, the parties are shunted to the sidelines because they are simply not generating ideas. To do something about that, you have to try to beef up the policy functions of the parties. Perhaps greater internal democracy in the parties would be helpful, although that may bring with it other kinds of problems. No reform is ever neutral. Frequently, when you change one thing and make it better, something worse in a different direction will happen. I am a bit of a pessimist. Your leaders might end up being amateurish or unskilled in the daily demands of parliamentary life. However, although reforms would not be neutral, the fact that the parties have really abdicated their function of generating policy ideas must be addressed.
Senator Cools: In point of fact, political parties have abdicated their responsibilities just as individual members of parliament have also abdicated their responsibilities to hold ministers responsible. The country is paying a terrible price for that. I cannot ask anyone in today's community to tell me what a Conservative is or what a Liberal is or what the difference is between Liberal Party policy and Conservative Party policy. A senator like Senator Murray, who is very accomplished, can give those answers, but I am speaking about the public mind. No one knows anymore. I find that extremely distressing.
I frequently sit in my own party caucus and I keep saying, "But the Liberal principle is...", or "The Liberal Party's position was...", or "Historically, this was the Liberal position." I hate to admit this, but I am often greeted with blank faces and blank eyes, as people seem quite severed from their history.
I consider that to be historical and constitutional vandalism. I belong to that group of people who believe that the finest jewel of British parliamentary democracy is the system that we have. Without a rush from many of us to protect it, it surely will be lost.
The Chairman: Senator, you are right. I am working myself up to a speech one of these days.
Senator Cools: I would be happy to support you on that, senator.
The Chairman: Of the three components of Parliament, the Crown, the Senate and the House of Commons, two are not playing anywhere near the role that was intended for them. The Crown certainly is not, for reasons that I need not go into here. The House of Commons is a shell in terms of its essential role of keeping the government accountable. I would argue that only the Senate is playing the constructive role that it should play.
Professor Tanguay, Tom Kent is right, of course. Whether in government or in opposition, the party apparatus becomes an arm of the leader's office, which is the PMO in government or the parliamentary leader in opposition. Many of those who sit on the ministerial benches, especially if they have not had previous parliamentary experience, have had no experience in grappling with the complexities of national policy in national problems. One of the reasons they have not had any experience in grappling with those problems in a national context is that their political parties do not provide a forum for that to happen. Thus, in government they are dependent almost entirely on the federal public service, on think tanks and on interest groups. In opposition they are dependent on the caucus advisors. There is a fair infrastructure of policy advisors to each of the caucuses, plus the think tanks, plus the interest groups.
In the immortal words of Pierre Trudeau, counterweights are needed. Ideally, the counterweight should come from the political party. The ideas that should come forward from the political parties are ideas that have met the test of having been debated and refined in a process that is truly national, not only across the divides of region, language and culture that we know about in this country, but in terms of all the social and economic interests that exist. That is not happening. Something must be done with our political parties to make them functional again with respect to policy.
The Privy Council has a policy research committee that you may know about that is trying to identify the pressure points in the year 2005. They have put out a number of reports. Regarding globalization and technology, they have said that fiscal pressures and economic forces are challenging our willingness to share between those who gain from the transition to a new economy and those who experience difficulties in coping with it and that therefore the coming years will see either the formation of a new social contract or a serious challenge to our social cohesion. I agree with that and I think people at this table might agree with that.
An important element is missing in the process, and that is the democratic political party and its role in policy formation. There was not, as you say, ever a golden age, but there was a time when parties did rather more than they do now in that respect.
I can remember debates going back to the 1960s when Mr. Pearson was in office. I can remember a national Liberal convention having a very vigorous debate between the continentalists, if I may call them that, as represented by Mitchell Sharp and his followers, and the nationalists as represented by Walter Gordon and his followers. In the event, some kind of agreement or compromise was negotiated right there on the floor of the convention.
I can remember a similar debate in the Liberal Party about how medicare should be dealt with and whether it should be postponed and so on, pitting Mr. Sharp as Minister of Finance against others in the social portfolios. I can remember a time when the Conservative Party wrestled with the question of nuclear arms for Canada. Several members of the national executive resigned because they could not agree with the decision that was taken by the convention. I remember that the NDP had a major debate some years back between the waffle movement and those who were more in the mainstream of the party as represented by the trade unions and so on.
We all remember those debates. I do not think I have seen anything serious like them in a long time. You do not see very much of that taking place in our federal parties any more, and that is unhealthy.
Do you have any sense of how the political parties operate on a provincial level? As an outsider, I tend to think that they do a better job there. I follow the national council of the Liberal Party in Quebec and the Parti Québécois. The grassroots are represented and they meet at least once, perhaps several times, a year. They debate the issues that are current and hot and they try to come to some kind of consensus on them. Do you know anything about the operation of the provincial parties?
Mr. Tanguay: I know a bit. I have studied the PQ and have attended a couple of their conventions as an observer. As with so much in Quebec, the PQ is distinct and distinctive. It is one of the most dynamic and vibrant political parties anywhere in Canada today for reasons that stem from the nature of its formation and the role played by the early leadership and the importance of the national question to the members of the PQ. It gives a lot of free reign to internal debates. The conventions do debate policy issues frequently in a very divisive way.
The Chairman: But that is true of the Liberals in Quebec too; is it not?
Mr. Tanguay: More so than some provincial parties, yes. Politics in Quebec are motivated, for a variety of reasons, by the importance of the national question. When you get 94 per cent turnout in a referendum, that is an incredible statement on the extent to which individual citizens are motivated by the political questions that concern them. Quebec is, at this stage, unique. If we move to other provinces, I am not sure that we do not see some of the problems that we see at the federal level, although maybe on a smaller scale.
Again, if I take Ontario as an example, the parties there have shied away from the kind of large-scale rethinking that you referred to. The NDP in the 1950s and 1960s rethought its existence at the federal level. You would have thought that the end of the Rae government would have provided the party with an opportunity for reflection on what those five years in power meant, what the ideology of the NDP ought to be, and what can and what cannot be accomplished. That has not happened at the party level, although it has happened with Bob Rae. Bob Rae has published two books -- one of them is called From Protest to Power -- in which he does try to think through what it means to be a Social Democrat and what social democratic governments can accomplish. At the party level, Rae is frequently seen as a turncoat and a traitor and somebody who is now in the corporate sector. Unfortunately, that debate has not filtered down through the party.
The Liberals as well have shied away from rethinking their ideas and their programs. There was again an opportunity when there was a leadership convention. There was some excitement around that leadership convention at the provincial level. Why? In part, it was because of the appearance of a new kind of political leader, Gerard Kennedy, who came from the Daily Bread Food Bank in Toronto. He came from a different sector of the community and he seemed to have leftish ideas but still be a Liberal. He did not slot easily into the typical categories. There was excitement about his candidacy, but that did not translate into any final rethinking.
To the extent that there has been rethinking and mobilization around ideas, it has occurred primarily among the right-wing parties. That is why for 20 years the political agenda has been dominated by right-wing thinking. They are the ones who are motivated. They seem to be conscious of where they want to go and they frequently can have a ruthless approach to implementing their ideas. They have seized the initiative.
The issues that concern this committee <#0107> inclusiveness, trying to keep all parts of society together, and trying to narrow or keep narrow the gap between the haves and the have nots when only one side of the ideological debate is mobilized -- did not translate well into party competition. That, to me, is one of the big problems.
The Chairman: Perhaps it is because the centre and the centre left were still fighting the old battles with the old weapons and were not staying current.
Mr. Tanguay: Yes.
The Chairman: The Reform Party of Canada has made a fair fist at trying to address policy issues, certainly the policy issues that are of most concern to their supporters.
Mr. Tanguay: Yes.
The Chairman: How do they reconcile the articulation of policy positions at a national convention with the notions that once members of parliament get here it is every member for himself or herself and that they are to be directed by the views, as they understand them, of their particular ridings? In one process, presumably, they go through the usual evolution of policy with compromise, give and take and the development of a consensus position that is supposed to be the party's position. But when they get here, they are bound to advance the views of their particular ridings as they understand them. How do they reconcile those two?
Mr. Tanguay: The Reform Party is like an experiment in progress. It has not been around for a long time and it is a victim of the same kinds of internal tensions that all previous expressions of Prairie populism have been subject to. Those parties tend not to adapt well to the constraints of British-style parliamentary government. In some cases they simply cannot adapt. The Progressives in the 1920s never adapted to the institutional constraints of parliament and they withered away and died. Reform has been far more successful than the Progressives were. In the space of ten years they have moved from being the party of western protest with the slogan "the West wants in" to the official opposition. That is an incredibly rapid trajectory. Therefore, from one perspective they have been very successful. There have been internal problems though and any Reform Party member will mention to you that trying to reconcile those different traditions is difficult.
Along with that, Preston Manning is a very hands on, if not dominant, leader, which seems at odds, at least on the surface, with the party's own view of itself as an expression of populism. In fact, that, perversely or counter-intuitively, is often what happens in populist organizations.
The Chairman: Almost always.
Mr. Tanguay: Almost always, exactly. If you look at some of the controversies that have dogged the Reform Party since it has come to Ottawa, they have not resolved those questions internally. If they do resolve them it tends to be because Manning, through some fashion, exerts control over the grassroots apparatus.
The Chairman: Unless all the mainstream political parties take on these issues, especially the social fallout from globalization and technology, the debate will be left to a Canadian version of Pat Buchanan: tear up the trade treaties, turn on the printing presses, moratorium on immigration, all that stuff. It is very much in the national interest that the political parties get moving.
Mr. Tanguay: I agree with that. Perhaps Wilfred Laurier and Waterloo are unique, but as a teacher at a university I find it interesting to see the extent to which the principal tenets of globalization have assumed the status of conventional wisdom. In other words, for a young person to think against globalization is very difficult and not all that common.
The Chairman: That is what we were going to talk to Professor Banting about. I hope we will have the opportunity to follow that up next month.
Senator Butts: I think the bad boy in the equation is the power of the media. When a person in the political party is painted as a maverick destroying the system, then people cower and get back in line. That is the biggest part of the problem of the Reform. Bob Rae states that extremely well in his book. He says it was the media that killed him.
The Chairman: They all say that, senator.
Mr. Tanguay: It might be a little self-serving.
Senator Butts: He has enough evidence to prove his point. In that book there is a lot of evidence to prove that he could not get what he wanted because the media turned everybody against it. I do not know what the answer is, but television especially is the maker of ideas at this stage.
The Chairman: I will add that to the four components of our parliamentary democracy. Three of the four are dysfunctional: the House of Commons, the Crown and the media. Only the Senate is playing the role that it should play.
Mr. Tanguay: The media and the pollsters, the direct mail experts, the media relations people -- they now form a clique around political leaders.
Senator Butts: They, not the political parties, are the opinion makers.
Mr. Tanguay: What speaks to this group of people more than anything is success. Again, if you look at Ontario, it seems that the Liberals at the provincial level are inhibited by Mike Harris's success. They are afraid to make any kind of misstep. Being afraid, then, they do not articulate policy positions. In Ontario that has now become the central focus of the media. When will the Liberals unveil their party program? What is the matter? Then they come up with a handy label for the present Liberal leader, Dalton McGuinty, calling him "Harris lite." That inhibits the risk takers who will depart from the conventional wisdom in a really dramatic way. It narrows again your options towards the status quo.
Senator Cools: This has been a very enlightening discussion today. I do not know what else is on the agenda, but perhaps we could continue this same debate and broaden it to what Senator Butts was raising, even to be able to look at the links between certain media outlets and certain pollsters and that sort of thing.
The Chairman: The steering committee will consider that.
Senator Cools: This has been a successful debate today.
The committee adjourned.