Dan Gardner | Articles

Obama, Gay Marriage, and Leadership

Fri, 18 May 2012 14:18:00 +0000

Last week, when Barack Obama declared his support for gay marriage, the president was lionized by many, who thought it was an act of courageous leadership, and mocked by others, who saw it as nothing more than a politician scrambling to keep his feet dry after the tide had turned.

Both takes were true, though not in equal proportions. Obama led, to a modest extent. But mostly he followed.

That's not a criticism. In fact, what Obama did - getting out in front a little, but mostly following - is what leadership usually amounts to.

Of course we tend to think of leadership in grander terms. Leaders have unique visions. They inspire others to share their visions. Collective action is taken. The vision is made real. In short, leaders decide what change will happen and make it so.

This is the Great Man theory of history. In formal terms, it was popular in the 19th century but soon fell out of favour among historians who looked seriously at how and why change happens. Less formally, it lived on. And it thrives today.

Prime ministers and presidents have little ability to control free-market economies, especially over the short term, and yet they are routinely credited or blamed for the performance of the economy. That's Great Man thinking. Nor do leaders have much control over the intellectual climate, or social mores, or cultural trends, or developments in science and technology. But when change happens we routinely personalize these impersonal forces and imagine it happened because a Great Man - a Ronald Reagan, maybe, or a Steve Jobs - grabbed History by its shirt collar and dragged it along, kicking and screaming.

And that is simply wrong.

Consider the British election of 1945, when Winston Churchill and the Conservatives warned that a victory for Clement Attlee's Labour would mean the implementation of a socialist welfare state and Britain's ruin. Attlee won. And he implemented the ambitious program he had promised. It's easy to see that as a moment when Great Men decided the fate of a nation's future: Surely, if Churchill had won, history would have taken a very different course.

But in the 1930s, Conservatives had taken tentative steps in the same direction. And the blueprint for Labour's post-war welfare state was the Beveridge Report, published in 1942 by a prominent Liberal. The reality is that the post-1945 changes were the culmination of long-developing political, economic, and cultural trends that transcended parties and had little or nothing to do with the individual politicians. "If the Tories had been returned to office in 1945," observed historian David Kynaston, "they almost certainly would have created a welfare state not unrecognizably different from the one that Labour actually did create."

Or consider the 1968 decriminalization of homosexual sex in Canada by then-justice minister Pierre Trudeau. Trudeau's leadership has been hailed ever since, but he was no more acting in advance of the times than Barack Obama did last week. Poland decriminalized homosexual sex in 1932, Denmark in 1933, Sweden in 1944. Countries all over the Western world followed. The first American state to decriminalize was Illinois, in 1961. England started seriously considering decriminalization in 1957 and actually did it a year before Trudeau introduced his bill. (Trudeau himself was modest about the change. In the same statement in which he famously declared "there's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation," Trudeau said the bill "is bringing the laws of the land up to contemporary society.") It's not simply a matter of the times making the man, to use the old saw. It's that the times convince the man to do what he might never have imagined doing. The times may even grab the man by his shirt collar and drag him along, kicking and screaming.

Look at Richard Nixon's domestic policy legacy. One liberal landmark after another. This, from a lifelong conservative who worried that the Beatles were spreading socialism. Why? The times insisted.

Or consider Winston Churchill again. "I have not become the King's first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire," declared the proud old imperialist in 1942, not many years before he presided over the liquidation of the British Empire. Not even the last lion could defy the tectonic forces at work.

Or think back to 1999, when the House of Commons passed a motion declaring that marriage "is and should remain the union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others." Jean Chrétien voted in favour. So did Paul Martin. Liberals today sometimes claim their party led on same-sex marriage but in reality the courts led, and they followed, until it became clear that the tide had turned - and they scrambled to keep their feet dry.

But as I said about Barack Obama's support for same-sex marriage, that alone does not amount to criticism. Political leadership routinely involves sensing when change is coming, and then, when the time is judged to be right, getting out in front of it, assisting it, and guiding it, to a happy conclusion. Politicians are like midwives: They are useful, sometimes even essential, and they can justifiably take pride when the job is done well. But they cannot take credit for the existence of the baby.

Is He Lying Or Merely Incompetent?

Wed, 16 May 2012 14:02:00 +0000

Let's recap the Harper government's record on climate change, shall we?

In the beginning, the Conservatives said nothing. Climate change wasn't even mentioned in the 2006 election platform.

In 2007, though, climate change became a top public priority and Stephen Harper became very concerned. Climate change is "perhaps the biggest threat to confront the future of humanity today," the Prime Minister declared. And yes, the Conservatives had plans. Big plans. Unlike the Liberals, who talked lots, but accomplished little, the Conservatives were going to get the job done.

In early 2008, the government promised to work with the United States to put a price on carbon dioxide emissions by creating a North American cap-and-trade system. When Stéphane Dion's Liberals also promised to put a price on carbon emissions, but with a carbon tax instead, the Conservatives savaged it as a "tax on everything" and vilified Dion as the man who would destroy the economy.

When the global economy melted down, public concern about climate change plunged. At the same time, and to the same extent, the prominence of climate change in government communications also plunged.

In December 2009, in Copenhagen, the government met with others from around the world and agreed to cut Canada's emissions by 17 per cent from 2005 levels by 2020. It later formally scrapped Canada's commitment to the Kyoto Protocol, which had committed this country to much steeper reductions. The government said Canada couldn't possibly meet the Kyoto targets without damaging the economy, which was probably true since it, and its predecessors, had spent so many years doing nothing. But, anyway, Peter Kent said when he became environment minister, the government was fiercely committed to the Copenhagen targets.

In 2011, after the Conservatives won their long-desired majority, the government delivered a Throne Speech. Climate change wasn't mentioned. Same for the 2012 budget.

The budget did, however, scrap the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, a body created by the Mulroney government to provide expert policy advice to the government. It's not needed any more, Kent said. There's lots of policy advice out there. Just Google it.

Last week, the environment commissioner, who works within the auditor general's office, reported on the government's climate change plan. There isn't one, he said. Or rather, there isn't anything sufficiently coherent and developed to be worthy of the name. Rather than putting a price on carbon emissions - either by a cap-and-trade system or by a carbon tax - the government went with command-and-control regulations and the commissioner's report noted that the government doesn't know what the costs of its regulations will be, or whether they will do any good. The commissioner also reported that, if current trends persist, Canada's emissions in 2020 will be 7.5 per cent higher than they were in 2005, not 17 per cent lower, as the government had committed.

That takes us to Monday, when John Baird - foreign affairs minister and former environment minister - defended the government's decision to scrap the NR-TEE in the House of Commons.

"Why should taxpayers have to pay for more than 10 reports promoting a carbon tax, something that the people of Canada have repeatedly rejected?" Baird fumed. "That is a message the Liberal party just will not accept. It should agree with Canadians. It should agree with the government to no discussion of a carbon tax that would kill and hurt Canadian families."

Presumably, Baird meant "kill jobs," not Canadian families, however, given the government's penchant for rhetorical excess we can't be sure. But let's leave that aside.

Baird confirmed that the government scrapped NRTEE because it didn't like the advice its (Conservative-appointed) members were giving. This is the Soviet approach to research: Politics and ideology determine the correct answer, and it is the researchers' job to prove that the correct answer is correct. Failure means Siberia.

Baird's references to "a carbon tax" are also misleading. The NR-TEE insisted that putting a price on carbon emissions was by far the most effective way to reduce emissions (as virtually all experts in this field agree). But that could be done with a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system, like the one the Conservatives promised to set up back in 2008.

But that was 2008. This is now. Back then, public support for action was at an all-time high, and now it's low: Goodbye, price on emissions. Farewell, NRTEE.

So what can we make of all this? There are two possibilities.

First, Stephen Harper and Company may be sincere about tackling climate change. In that case, they are grossly incompetent. Their policy is a mess. They have accomplished little or nothing. And there's no reason to think they will do any better in the future.

The other possibility is that Stephen Harper and Company are lying. They do not have any intention of tackling climate change. They never did. Their only real goal is to manage the file so it doesn't become a political liability, which they have done with considerable success.

When I've raised these possible explanations in the past, the response has been curious.

Unsurprisingly, critics of the prime minister write to say, in effect, "hell yeah he's lying!" But so do many conservatives. Climate change is a fraud, they say, but the government has to pretend it believes in it, and is doing something about it, to satisfy the gullible. It's a lie, they say. But it's a noble lie. Hooray for the prime minister.

That strange argument has even made the august pages of Policy Options, where Michael Hart - a Carleton University professor who apparently believes anthropogenic climate change is some sort of socialist plot - praised the Prime Minister. "Harper has successfully ridden the climate change juggernaut to its inevitable end," Hart wrote.

"By not directly confronting an inherited policy that he found distasteful, he has been able to manage it to a conclusion that has alienated fewer and satisfied more Canadians. In the years to come, as the international climate change file gradually fades into obscurity, similar to many other such utopian initiatives, he can look back with satisfaction at a job well done."

That's how professors say, "Hell yeah he's lying!"

Why Harper Should Love The Loopy Left

Wed, 02 May 2012 14:16:00 +0000

As in the Sherlock Holmes story of the dog that didn't bark, what can be most interesting is what didn't happen. So what hound didn't howl during the first year of Stephen Harper's Conservative majority government?

The hardcore right. All year long, the Conservative marching band stayed in lockstep behind the drum major.

Conservative pundits remained seated politely in the reviewing stand. And the conservative base cheered and clapped on the sidewalks. Oh, there was a little grumbling here and there, but it was barely noticeable and quickly forgotten, and there was nothing that could be called dissent or alienation. And not a whisper of rebellion against the man leading the parade.

Which is astonishing. For five long years, True Believers had consoled themselves by reciting a mantra. "He has to because it's a minority," they would say. "Wait until the majority."

Stephen Harper accepted gay marriage and refused to even discuss abortion. "Wait until the majority," social conservatives sighed. "Wait until the majority."

He increased federal government spending 19 per cent even before embracing Keynesian stimulus spending with the fervour of a convert. He expanded the federal civil service by 13 per cent. He supported supply management, expanded regional development agencies, interfered with foreign investment and implemented a series of tax reforms that made economists cringe.

"Wait until the majority," tearful fiscal conservatives whispered to themselves. "Wait until the majority."

Then came the majority, and not much changed.

At the beginning of 2012, when the government was accused of trying to quietly roll back gay marriage, it responded with strong support of gay marriage in both word and legislative substance.

Last week, when a private member's motion prompted accusations that the government was trying to quietly raise the abortion issue, the Conservative whip condemned the motion, declared the government would never do a thing to restrict abortion rights, and, for good measure, made a pro-choice speech as powerful and emphatic as any ever heard in the House of Commons.

Fiscal conservatives did a little better than social conservatives in the first year of the Harper majority, but the emphasis must be on the word "little." The budget which had been touted as "transformational" was nothing of the kind. Yes, there were modest cuts, but orthodox Keynesianism calls for spending to be curtailed after a recession passes and the economy is moving up the business cycle, so there was nothing particularly radical about that. The simple truth is that the prime minister's first budget with the free hand of a majority could have been delivered by a Liberal government led by John Manley or Paul Martin.

Conservatives know that, but don't take my word for it. "I haven't spoken to a single Conservative who's satisfied with the budget Jim Flaherty brought down last month," noted Paul Wells of Maclean's.

So why haven't we heard more of that disappointment in public? Where's the alienation and dissent, the hint of rebellion in the ranks?

Why doesn't that dog bark? There are many factors at work. For one, Stephen Harper essentially created his party and has managed it to ensure there are no Paul Martins with prominence and power of their own.

Other prime ministers, especially Conservatives, could not have dreamed of the control Harper has.

There's also the sense that, however much Harper may compromise conservative principles he is, at heart, a conservative, and so he is cut far more slack than the young Stephen Harper and his Reform colleagues gave Brian Mulroney, who was never seen as "one of us."

But there's another factor at work. It's seldom recognized. And it's critical to keeping the right quiet.

It's Stephen Harper's leftist critics.

Last spring, Toronto Star columnist Heather Mallick described Canada after a Harper majority. "Guns on the streets, gated communities, rampant drug use, unlimited anonymous corporate political donations, no government safety standards for food and medicine, classrooms that resemble holding pens more than civilized safe rooms for the young to learn. -" Deep breath.

"Women's rights would retreat, including abortion rights, access to medical advances and the right to go to court to protest inequality. Everything would be up for privatization, from roads, parks, and parking meters to schools and hospitals." There's more, but you get the idea.

Hardcore conservatives love hearing stuff like that. It means Stephen Harper is hated to the point of loopiness by people they loathe, and so they conclude that the prime minister must be doing something right. Even if they can't identify what it is.

In this way, the more unhinged warriors of the left and right mirror and reinforce each other.

When Stephen Harper was in opposition, the left insisted he had a secret agenda he would implement if he ever took power.

The right hoped that was true.

Harper took power and there was no secret agenda. The left said that was only because he was restrained by minority government. "Wait until the majority," they said. Nothing cheered up the right like hearing the words they whispered to themselves coming from the left.

Then came the majority. Still no secret agenda.

No matter. The zealots are sure it's coming. Slowly. Very slowly.

"Stephen Harper is remaking the country," Star columnist Thomas Walkom wrote after the budget was tabled. "It is not a convulsive remake. Like the prime minister himself, it is slow, relentless, inexorable."

Evidence? There isn't much. Or any. Now. But there will be. Just wait. It's all part of his master strategy. He's "boiling the frog," the left insists. It's incremental.

We won't recognize the country when he's done.

The right wipes away a tear, smiles and keeps marching in lockstep.

Abortion and Liberty

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 14:13:00 +0000

When Conservative MP Stephen Woodworth introduced a private member's bill on the status of the fetus last week, the government was expected to distance itself. But when Conservative whip Gordon O'Connor stood to deliver the government line, he did far more than that.

"I can confirm that as a member of the Conservative caucus for nearly eight years, the prime minister has been consistent with his position on abortion," O'Connor said. "As early as 2005 at the Montreal convention, and in every federal election platform since, he has stated that the Conservative government will not support any legislation to regulate abortion. While the issue may be debated by some, as in the private member's motion here tonight, I state again that the government's position is clear: It will not reopen this debate."

It was a surprisingly sweeping and categorical pledge. And we can be sure it was crafted in the prime minister's office, or at a minimum, personally approved by the boss.

But that was just the beginning of the surprises.

"The decision of whether or not to terminate a pregnancy is essentially a moral decision," O'Connor declared, "and in a free and democratic society, the conscience of the individual must be paramount and take precedence over that of the state."

It was a genuinely shocking moment. In effect, the government engaged the debate it said it didn't want to discuss, but rather than siding with Woodworth and the social conservatives who want abortion restricted, it came out swinging for the other side.

"I cannot understand why those who are adamantly opposed to abortion want to impose their beliefs on others by way of the Criminal Code," O'Connor said. "There is no law that says that a woman must have an abortion. No one is forcing those who oppose abortion to have one."

O'Connor also appealed to practical realities. "Whether one accepts it or not, abortion is and always will be part of society. There will always be dire situations in which some women may have to choose the option of abortion. No matter how many laws some people may want government to institute against abortion, abortion cannot be eliminated. It is part of the human condition."

In closing, O'Connor went further still, channelling the spirit of J.S. Mill. "I am sure we all recognize that the issue of abortion raises strongly held and divergent views within and outside Parliament. However, I firmly believe that each of us should be able to pursue our lifestyle as long as it is within the boundaries of law and does not interfere with the actions of others."

With that, the government repudiated Woodworth and social conservatives who want abortion restricted.

It also repudiated a big chunk of its own agenda.

By coincidence, the same day O'Connor spoke those stirring words in the House of Commons, the government announced it would appeal an Ontario Court of Appeal ruling that had struck down key anti-prostitution laws. This was expected. The Conservatives have vociferously opposed any suggestion that the prostitution laws - which do not forbid prostitution per se but effectively make it impossible to do it without committing a crime - should be curtailed in any way.

So how does that square with the government's declarations on abortion? Try replacing the word "abortion" in any part of Gordon O'Connor's statement with "prostitution."

"Whether one accepts it or not, prostitution is and always will be part of society. There will always be dire situations in which some women may have to choose the option of prostitution. No matter how many laws some people may want government to institute against prostitution, prostitution cannot be eliminated. It is part of the human condition."

Fits rather nicely, doesn't it? Notice also that in O'Connor's statement he declined to answer the question of what constitutes personhood, which is the question raised by Woodworth's private member's bill. That's important. If you believe the fetus is a person (I don't, for the record) the issues of autonomy and liberty become more complicated. Not so in the matter of prostitution, which makes O'Connor's words even more apt.

Then there's marijuana and the other illicit drugs the government is making war on. Try plugging them into O'Connor's statement.

"I cannot understand why those who are adamantly opposed to drug use want to impose their beliefs on others by way of the Criminal Code. There is no law that says a person must use drugs. No one is forcing those who oppose drugs to use them." Again, the fit is close to perfect.

Of course, whenever someone raises J.S. Mill's "harm principle" - that people should be free to do what they wish provided they don't harm others - those who want to restrict liberty insist they don't disagree. Theirs isn't a moral objection, they say. They want the activity banned because it harms others.

These claims are often disingenuous and easily disproven. But the simplest way to respond is to take them at face value and ask "but does criminalization actually protect others from harm?" The answer is clearly no. It even inflicts harms on others that would not otherwise exist (the only reason why street prostitutes blight residential streets, for example, is that they can't conduct their business legally elsewhere). So if harm to third parties is really the concern, the answer is not criminalization but regulation - to ensure that only informed and consenting adults are involved.

So what's left? Why does the government think its ringing words apply to abortion but not to other moral choices? Simple. In O'Connor's statement, he objects to "new laws" that curtail personal freedom but says that the exercise of that freedom must respect "current law."

Today, there is no law banning abortion. But there are laws banning prostitution and drugs.

Thus, what looks like a highly principled statement about the relationship between morality and liberty in a pluralistic society is actually something less grand: It is a lazy and weak defence of the status quo.

Big Data and Big Brother

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 14:11:00 +0000

In the 1921 novel We, Yevgeny Zamyatin imagined a future where every building is made of glass so the authorities can see what citizens are doing at all times. Is that the world Big Data will construct? Some pessimists worry that it could. I worry that the pessimists are too optimistic.

If you're scratching your head, "Big Data" is a term that describes the accumulation and analysis of information. Lots of information. Oceans of information.

Every time someone clicks on something at Amazon, it's recorded and another drop is added to the ocean. Every time a scanner beeps at the Loblaws checkout. Every time a home electricity meter reports a reading. Every time a parcel passes a FedEx checkpoint. Every time a customs officer checks a passport, every time someone posts to Facebook, every time someone does a Google search - the ocean swells.

And new forms of data are being developed all the time. Increasingly powerful and clever computer algorithms are able to sift through things we wouldn't think of as "data" - still photos, video images, text - and extract data that can then by analysed as easily as tallies of mouse clicks and scanner beeps.

But Big Data is much more than big data. It's also the ability to extract meaning: To sort through masses of numbers and find the hidden pattern, the unexpected correlation, the surprising connection. That ability is growing at astonishing speed. It won't be long before Amazon's ability to dazzle customers by suggesting just the right book will seem as quaint as our ancestors' amazement at horseless carriages.

In many ways, this is all to the good. Indeed, it could do wonders. Look at medicine. At one time, doctors made decisions based on nothing more than experience and hunches. The shift to proper data collection and analysis - science, in other words - improved medicine spectacularly. Similar advances could be made in other fields where decisions continue to be based mostly on experience and hunch.

Probably the biggest impact could be in business, a field where the manager's gut continues to be the prime source of wisdom and direction. A recent study found that companies that adopted "data-driven decision making" enjoyed significantly greater productivity gains than those that did not. That may sound a little dry. But remember that productivity gains are the foundation of prosperity. Big Data is in its infancy. If it lives up to its promise, the future will be bright.

But as humans learned when we invented fire - a blessing for cooking meat and keeping people warm, a curse when it burned down your hut - technological promise always comes with peril.

In that ocean of data is a frighteningly complete picture of you. Where you live, where you go, what you buy. What you say. What you feel and believe. It's all there. With access to even a small portion of that data, corporations and governments can know far more about you than you might wish them to know.

"If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn't want us to know, can you do that?" As Charles Duhigg reported in the New York Times, that's the question marketers at Target, the American department store chain, asked one of Target's dozens of data analysts. "Specifically," Duhigg writes, "the marketers said they wanted to send specially designed ads to women in their second trimester, which is when expectant mothers begin buying all sorts of new things, like prenatal vitamins and maternity clothing."

Although Target refused to officially discuss the story, Duhigg found that the company succeeded. One man actually complained to Target when his teenage daughter was sent maternity ads, only to apologize later when she admitted she was pregnant.

And this is where we are with existing technology and data sources. If you've seen the video of Google's interactive glasses - imagine a pair of Foster Grants with a high-speed Internet connection - you have a small idea of what's coming. Refrigerators that restock themselves. Clothing with sensors and Internet connectivity. Imagine every photo you've ever taken, every email you've ever sent, every purchase you've ever made, every website visited, every book read, every song listened to, every prescription filled - all stored on giant servers scattered around the globe.

Strict regulatory control to protect privacy may be enough to keep Big Data from becoming Big Brother. Or it may be futile. And we will live in the world of glass buildings imagined by Yevgeny Zamyatin almost a century ago.

But awful as that dystopian vision is, it doesn't quite capture what such a world would be like.

The most basic insight of modern psychology is that most of our mental life happens outside consciousness. By definition, we are not aware of it. And so we are, to an unsettling extent, strangers to ourselves.

This is why, when people are asked what choice they would make in a certain situation, they are often wrong. It's also why, when they are asked why they made a particular choice, the reasons they give are often not what actually motivated the choice but are, rather, post-facto rationalizations that disguise the unsettling truth: We don't know the answer.

Big Data can't tap into our unconscious thought processes directly, of course. But with a vast storehouse of our past decisions to analyse, it could detect patterns of behaviour we are not aware of, and those patterns could reveal the unconscious thought processes that drive the behaviour. In a very real sense, Big Data could know us better than we know ourselves.

In that world, not only the buildings would be made of glass. So would our skulls.

The Strange Death of Liberal Canada

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 14:40:00 +0000

If history repeats, we are about a decade away from the publication of a book called "The Strange Death of Liberal Canada."

The history in question is that of Britain's Liberal party, which dominated British politics in the late 19th century, laid the foundations of the modern welfare state at the beginning of the 20th century, led Britain in the First World War ... and then collapsed. It wasn't reduced to rubble all at once, of course, but the transition from dominance to irrelevance was swift and bewildering. George Dangerfield captured the feeling of political observers in the title of his 1935 classic The Strange Death of Liberal England.

Like Canada's Liberal party, Britain's Liberal party had roots in a classical liberal philosophy of legal equality and free trade. In the 1890s, the Liberals started to embrace a more interventionist approach. Free trade was still the foundation. But government would take steps to take the rough edges off capitalism.

Gradually, middle class support slipped from the Liberals to the Conservatives, but the Liberals became the party of industrial workers. The Liberals also enjoyed regional bases in Scotland and Wales. It was a winning combination.

A landslide in 1906 was followed by the enactment of the new program - old age benefits, health insurance, workman's compensation - and the extension of the franchise. More victories followed. But then came the First World War and the end of the golden age. (Dangerfield argued the Liberal decline began prior to the war. Historians don't agree. The Strange Death of Liberal England is, one wrote, "a literary confection which does not attempt serious analysis." In this column, I'm mostly working from Chris Cook's A Short History of the Liberal Party, which is the standard introductory reference.)

Liberal prime minister H.H. Asquith led the government into war and in 1915 he brought Conservatives into cabinet. But stalemate at the front and the terrible strain of the war on British society doomed Asquith. He was effectively pushed out. David Lloyd George, a leading Liberal minister, replaced him as prime minister, with the support of the Conservatives. Asquith and many other Liberals chose to sit in opposition.

In 1918, the war ended and an election was held. The de facto coalition of Lloyd George Liberals and Conservatives won a huge victory and Lloyd George continued as prime minister for the next four years. (Minority governments were common in this era. So were coalitions, alliances, and a wide variety of electoral arrangements. As a Canadian reading about this history today, it's striking just how completely it repudiates Prime Minister Stephen Harper's claims about coalitions and how the Westminster system works.)

Outwardly, then, the Liberals were divided but still in much the same position they had been before the war. In reality, however, there had been a seismic shift.

Lloyd George's Liberals - despite not having to compete with Conservatives in many ridings - had done poorly, and became in fact the junior partners in the coalition. Worse, Asquith's Liberals were crushed. Worst of all, Labour became the official opposition for the first time.

The Labour party had been founded at the beginning of the 20th century (with earlier antecedents) but the Liberals had always co-operated with Labour, rather than treating it as a threat. There was even a secret agreement to minimize competition in the election of 1906. This approach worked well for the Liberals. Before the war, Labour's support was in the single digits and the Liberal dominance of the industrial working class was never in doubt.

But with the split in the Liberal party, Labour moved aggressively. Its pitch to industrial workers wasn't that it was more radical. In some ways, it wasn't. Instead, it portrayed itself as the more united, more competent, more effective alternative to the Conservatives. And it worked. Whole swaths of voters switched from Liberal to Labour. Despite a modest Liberal resurgence in the election of 1923 - when a Conservative protectionist platform allowed Liberals to rally around the old battle flag of free trade - Labour steadily conquered Liberal territory.

In 1924, Labour formed its first government, a minority, and the Liberals were relegated to thirdparty status. Even more unfortunate for the Liberals was the determination of Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour prime minister, to avoid being seen as a socialist radical. His government was moderate and competent. And British politics increasingly looked like a choice between Conservatives and Labour.

Division is an obvious theme in all this. Another is the lack of leadership. Asquith and Lloyd George were both impressive men but their best days were behind them by the 1920s. The Liberals drifted. The party's constituency associations crumbled.

However, notes Chris Cook, "this failure of leadership, together with bitter personal divisions within their ranks, tended to obscure a more fundamental weakness in the party: Its whole fundamental philosophy."

It wasn't clear what the Liberals stood for, what they believed, why they wanted to win. It wasn't enough to be the alternative to the Conservatives. Labour was that.

And it wasn't enough to be in the reasonable centre. Labour was there. Neither Asquith nor Lloyd George made any serious attempt to shore up the party's intellectual foundations and so there were constant defections, with left-leaning Liberals going to Labour and rightleaning Liberals (including Winston Churchill) going to the Conservatives.

In 1926, Asquith retired. Lloyd George took sole control. He had one final chance to restore the party's fortunes and he made the most of it.

Lloyd George assembled many leading intellectuals, including John Maynard Keynes, to discuss policy. Together, they published a series of important, insightful research papers and books. In the election of 1929, the Liberals had a policy platform which was hailed at the time, and by historians ever since, as the most intellectually distinguished document of its kind.

Liberal hopes were high and Lloyd George campaigned well. But it came to nothing. Because it was too late.

The Liberal share of the popular vote did rise substantially. But the Liberals didn't have a base. Labour had taken Scotland and much of Wales from them, and snatched away industrial workers. As a result, the Liberal vote was spread evenly across much of the country. That's deadly in the first-past-the-post system.

Labour elected 287 MPs, the Conservatives 260. The Liberals had 59. The circumstances had been right and the Liberals had done all they could, but still they were reduced to a rump, and they withered further in the years that followed. Never again did they seriously contend for power.

And if Canadian Liberals don't see lessons in this history it won't be long before someone writes "The Strange Death of Liberal Canada."

Ending the War on Drugs

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 14:24:00 +0000

On the weekend, at the Summit of the Americas, Prime Minister Stephen Harper expressed doubt about the war on drugs. "I think what everybody believes and agrees with, and to be frank myself, is that the current approach is not working, but it is not clear what we should do."

It's admirable for a politician to admit uncertainty. And rare. Especially for a politician who has never expressed anything less than unshakable conviction in the Reaganite nostrums of drug prohibition. But Harper had good reason to be a little shaken.

The summit was held in Cartagena, Colombia, and the host, Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos, put the war on drugs at the top of the agenda. It was the only topic of discussion at the final meeting. And although we don't know in detail what was said - it was a closed-door discussion - the broad outlines are clear.

The war on drugs isn't working. Santos and other Latin American leader have said so, in public, repeatedly. Drug production is suppressed in one country so it surges in another. Trade routes are cut off so more are created. Kingpins are jailed or killed and dozens of would-be kingpins open fire - precisely the sort of "success" that has created more than 50,000 corpses in Mexico since 2006.

And all the while, corruption rots institutions from within as traffickers give politicians, judges, and police officers the awful choice of "silver or lead."

And for what? The standard metrics for measuring success are price and purity: When drug supply is successfully restricted, the price of drugs goes up while the purity goes down. But over the last 30 years - as Canada and other nations poured literally hundreds of billions of dollars into suppression, interdiction, and enforcement - the price of cocaine and other illicit drugs plummeted while purity soared.

In 1998, the world's leaders gathered for a United Nations General Assembly Special Session, at which they pledged to "eliminate or significantly reduce" the production of illicit drugs by 2008. "There are naysayers who believe a global fight against illegal drugs is unwinnable," said the UN's top drug cop. "I say emphatically they are wrong." By 2008, illicit drug production was bigger than ever.

But even that doesn't capture the full scale of the failure. Consider that in 1971, the year U.S. president Richard Nixon coined the term "war on drugs," the vast majority of Canadians and Americans had never seen or smelled marijuana, let alone smoked it, and only a determined effort could locate drugs like heroin and cocaine in shady parts of a few major cities. Today, after 41 years of global war, the illicit drug trade's distribution and retail network puts FedEx and Walmart to shame.

In Latin America, where "war on drugs" is not a metaphor, a leader would have to be completely ignorant to think the current approach is anything but a catastrophic failure. But only retired officials said so in the past.

The former president of Colombia. The former president of Brazil. The former secretary general of the United Nations (Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, a Peruvian). Current officials never seriously questioned the status quo. They couldn't. The U.S. government would blackball them if they did.

The fact that Santos and others are speaking out is a historic change. So far, the United States has been respectful, with President Barack Obama saying that while he opposes legalization it's a legitimate discussion to have.

Something has changed. And Santos has caught the moment perfectly.

At the Summit of the Americas, Santos got the leaders to ask the Organization of American States to undertake a comprehensive review of drug policies and options for change. The outcome of that review, a Santos adviser told the Guardian, "could mean anything from blanket legalization to a new and different war on drugs. We just do not know until we have the data, investigate every option with open minds, and have the full picture drawn up by experts who know the terrain, and are not motivated by interest, ideology, or emotion. Whatever it is, it must be real change, based upon new paradigms."

That review may not sound like much but it could be a big deal if done right.

As crazy as it sounds, governments have poured spectacular amounts of money into drug prohibition with little or no analysis of what good it's doing. That was the basic conclusion of a 2001 National Academy of Sciences report that looked at the $30 billion a year the U.S. was spending.

A report the same year from Canada's auditor general was even more scathing. The federal government didn't have defined goals, or any way to determine if they were being met. It didn't even know how much it was spending. (The AG guesstimated the federal government alone spent half a billion dollars a year. The provinces and cities spent much more, although how much more "is not known.")

The word that best sums up the whole mess cannot be printed in this newspaper. Let's just say that this is, as the British might put it, a cock-up of colossal proportions.

And let's not fool ourselves into thinking that we have seriously discussed this. We haven't. Marijuana decriminalization is a worthy subject but it's trivial in the big scheme. Same with supervised injection sites and the one or two other drug-related items that have received some media attention and political debate.

In reality, drug policy is enormously complex and entangled with major problems - organized crime, terrorism, insurgency, corruption, disease, social deprivation, inequality - that span the globe. It also has a long history that few people know, which explains why so many politicians propose "changes" that are actually very old ideas that failed in the forgotten past.

Colombia's president has the right idea. We must, first, accept that the status quo is a mess. That doesn't mean committing to any particular change. It just means acknowledging what is obviously true.

Then we need research. We need the history of how we got here. We need myths to be swept away. We need the essential statistics and the best available research. And then we need to lay out the options for change.

Drug policy is routinely presented as a choice between the war on drugs and corner stores selling heroin to kids. That's nonsense. There is a vast array of regulatory options between these two extremes. We need to lay them out.

With luck, the OAS report will do all that. But even if it does it will be missing much of what Canadians need to know.

Which is why we need our own royal commission.

Yes, we had the Le Dain Commission of 1972. But that was before AIDS and globalization and the modern war on drugs. It was another world.

We need a royal commission. Tom Mulcair is in favour. And the prime minister? If what he said was sincere, he should be, too.

And act accordingly.

Controversial Ideas? Think Local

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 14:19:00 +0000

Many people hate the idea of clinics where people can inject illicit drugs under the supervision of nurses and counsellors. Others want them set up immediately. They include the University of Toronto researchers who recommended this week that supervised injection sites be opened in Toronto and Ottawa.

Which view is more popular varies from place to place. A recent Forum Research poll found that there was even considerable variation within the city of Toronto, with a strong majority of people (62 per cent) in the downtown core in favour, while people further out are just as strongly opposed.

That's life in a diverse country. Downtown Toronto isn't Scarborough. Ottawa isn't Cornwall. Alberta isn't Nova Scotia. Circumstances, opinions, and values all change down the road.

If we insist on applying public policies universally, that's a problem. We will never entirely erase our disagreements, no matter how much we talk, argue, and shout. And so, inevitably, when a policy is implemented, or blocked, people in some places will feel that people elsewhere have imposed their views on them.

Sometimes that's unavoidable. The Bank of Canada can only have one monetary policy, and, if it doesn't suit your local circumstances, tough. But there's far more room for decentralization and variation than we realize. We should make more use of it.

Consider the only safe injection site in the country, "Insite," located in Vancouver's bedraggled Downtown Eastside neighbourhood.

Before Insite opened its doors in 2003, popular opinion varied much as it does now in Toronto, with strong support in the downtown and opposition rising in the suburbs and beyond. If the municipal and provincial governments had insisted on a universal policy, they would have either denied downtown residents what they wanted or scattered clinics all over the map, in defiance of much local opinion. Instead, they did something modest and simple.

They opened one clinic in the downtown neighbourhood where support was strongest and need greatest. And they had scientists study the clinic's effects on drug users and the city.

In short, it was a local experiment with local support.

In the years that followed, Insite delivered impressive results that were reported in the world's leading peer-reviewed medical journals. And its support grew substantially, across the city and beyond.

It was a textbook demonstration of the wisdom of decentralization.

Provinces, cities, and neighbourhoods vehemently opposed to the policy did not have it thrust upon them. A neighbourhood that very much wanted the policy was not denied it. And, as a result, a valuable experiment was conducted, producing research which other jurisdictions can consult.

So local views were respected. An experiment was undertaken. And everyone learned. What's not to love?

Of course this argument is far from new. The phrase "laboratories of democracy" was coined in 1932, when United States Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis noted that American federalism meant "a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory, and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country."

And 11 years ago, two gentlemen wrote that decentralization would ensure that "the policies in all parts of Canada will better reflect local economies and local desires - and that cannot but lead to a stronger country." One of those gentlemen was conservative policy analyst Ken Boessenkool. The other was National Citizens Coalition president Stephen Harper.

Of course Prime Minister Stephen Harper tried very hard to close Insite and would have if the Supreme Court hadn't intervened, and that underscores a key problem.

We tend to think local control and experimentation is grand when we like what the locals propose to do, but not so much when we don't. This hypocrisy can even be seen in strong advocates of decentralization. Like Stephen Harper. Or, in the United States, the Republican party, which loudly and proudly supports the authority of states except when states make decisions (like Oregon's legalization of euthanasia) that offend Republicans.

Another problem is the sheer scale of our jurisdictions. We have provinces the size of European countries and amalgamated cities that sprawl across the map. Each may be closer to "local" than the federal government, but they're still a long way from your neighbourhood.

And then there's the Constitution. It doesn't even recognize cities. And it gives power over the criminal law - which is connected to so many values-laden decisions - to the federal government.

But these difficulties are not insurmountable. As was done with Insite, the federal government can grant exemptions from the criminal law in some cases. Discretionary law enforcement can also make room for local experimentation, provided the discretion is exercised formally and openly. (That last bit is critical. Discretionary law enforcement is actually far more common than people realize - there are cafés in Toronto where marijuana is openly sold and smoked, for example - but it's usually done with a wink and a nod. That's no basis for well-constructed, publicly supported, supervised policy experiments.)

But, most of all, we have to collectively accept the idea that local is better, even when we don't happen to like what those people over there want to do.

We can start with prostitution. Key laws have been tossed by the courts. And good riddance. They were an incoherent mess. But what will we replace them with?

It's ludicrous to think we can find one answer to prostitution that will satisfy the circumstances, opinions, and values coast to coast. So let's decentralize: The federal and provincial governments should sit down with municipalities to discuss policy frameworks that would allow cities to take the lead and innovate.

And supervised injection sites? Thanks to Insite, the discussion is focused at the city level. That's good. But when we say "should this be in Toronto?" or "should this be in Ottawa?" we're still not thinking local enough.

Metro Vancouver doesn't have safe injection sites. There isn't one in Burnaby. Or Port Moody. Or Kitsilano. But there is one in the Downtown Eastside, where people want it.

That's local. National Citizens Coalition president Stephen Harper was right: We need more of that.

Putting Women on the Glaff Cliff

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 14:18:00 +0000

In British Columbia, the premier is a woman. In Alberta, the premier is a woman. Both women inherited successful political dynasties. Both are likely to lead their parties to defeat.

Call it the "Kim Campbell Phenomenon." Successful political parties that make women leaders have an unfortunate tendency to lose.

And it's not only a political thing. In 2003, The Times of London examined British corporate boards and discovered that, in the previous year, the number of women on corporate boards had risen considerably - and shares of corporations that had added women to their boards had fared worse than those which had remained all-male bastions.

"So much for smashing the glass ceiling and using their unique skills to enhance the performance of Britain's biggest companies," wrote one pundit in response to the Times' exposé. "The triumphant march of women into the country's boardrooms has instead wreaked havoc on companies' performance."

Clearly, women should not lead. Seems obvious, doesn't it? Sadly - for the Archie Bunkers among us - that conclusion is wrong.

Psychologists Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam had a close look at the Times' exposé and discovered something curious: Corporations that appointed women to their boards "experienced consistently poorer performance in the five months preceding the appointment." So the corporations didn't struggle because they put women in leadership roles. They put women in leadership roles because they were struggling.

Ryan and Haslam called this the "glass cliff": Only when an organization's situation is precarious are women given leadership, which ensures that women in charge often land with a thud.

Researchers have documented the "glass cliff" in a wide variety of settings. In an examination of Britain's 2005 general election, Ryan and Haslam ranked ridings by how secure they were for the Conservatives. Then they looked at the gender of the Conservative candidates who contested the election. As the likelihood of winning the riding declined, they found, the likelihood that the candidate was a woman increased.

One reason for the "glass cliff" is plain old status quo bias. When an organization is doing well, there's no reason to consider change. And, since putting women in leadership positions often represents change, they're often left out. Until things start to go wrong.

Experimental studies have also shown there are underlying stereotypes at work.

Researchers Susanne Bruckmüller and Nyla Branscombe asked 122 university students to read an article about a supermarket chain. In one version, the supermarket was doing well. In another, it was failing. The students were told a new CEO was being hired and they were asked to read profiles of two candidates, a man and a woman, and to rate them in 10 categories. Some were stereotypically male (competitiveness, decisiveness). Others were stereotypically female (communication, ability to encourage others). Then they were asked to choose the CEO. Roughly two-thirds chose the man to head the successful supermarket. Two-thirds chose the woman to be CEO of the failing operation.

It may be that people see stereotypically female qualities as those that are necessary to turn an organization around, which isn't entirely a bad thing, but other research suggests the explanation may be more dismal. "Women may be favoured in times of poor performance," Ryan and Haslam wrote, "not because they are expected to improve the situation, but because they are seen to be good people managers and can take the blame for organizational failure."

The "glass cliff" theory fits Canadian political experience with almost eerie precision.

There was Kim Campbell, of course. And Alexa McDonough.

Christy Clark became premier of B.C. only after Gordon Campbell's handling of the HST drove the Liberal party's popularity into the ground, forcing him to resign.

Alison Redford became premier of Alberta and inherited the Progressive Conservative dynasty only after Ed Stelmach failed to stem the rise of the Wildrose challenge and internal dissent.

Redford is likely to be beaten by a woman, Danielle Smith, leader of the Wildrose party, but Smith wasn't given the leadership of a strong organization. She made it a strong organization.

Pauline Marois, the Parti Québécois leader whose fortunes are once again on the rise, is another apparent exception that isn't. Remember that Marois lost two leadership bids. Only when the PQ suffered a devastating defeat, fell into third place and looked hopeless was she given command.

Similarly, Lyn McLeod became leader of the Ontario Liberals after the Peterson wipeout.

Andrea Horwath, leader of the Ontario NDP, is arguably an exception to the trend. But the only indisputable exception I can think of is Audrey McLaughlin, who took charge of the federal NDP when it was riding high.

Of course leadership means responsibility and a pilot who flies a plane into the ground may be responsible. But before laying blame, we have to ask: Did the plane nosedive because of the woman at the controls, or was the woman given the controls because the plane was nosediving? If the answer is the latter, who is really to blame? Her or those whose irrational thinking bars women from leadership except when they are likely to fail?

A Closed Government is an Incompetent Government

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 14:14:00 +0000

As big as the F-35 fiasco appears, its true import is bigger. And more worrisome.

To see it, we first need to look at the world of 75 years ago.

In the 1930s, liberal democracies withered while authoritarianism blossomed. And many leading thinkers became convinced that open societies simply couldn't compete.

Open societies have free markets, which means duplication of efforts, failed experiments, and wasted resources. That's inefficient. And democratic governments encourage debate, which means squabbling, delay, and private interests blocking necessary changes. That's ineffective.

Authoritarianism replaced all that with centralization of decision-making, rigid hierarchies, and planning. That meant efficiency. And, when change was necessary, it would be done, swiftly and without complaint. The trains would run on time.

Clearly, a war between liberal democracy and authoritarianism would be no contest. The former would either adapt to the new way of doing things or be crushed.

But it didn't work out that way. In fact, during the Second World War, the liberal democracies outperformed fascist authoritarianism by most measures. And they won the war.

In 1948, Luther Gulick, a highranking official in the Roosevelt administration, wrote a book to explain why. The answer, he decided, was that the supposed strengths of authoritarianism were actually weaknesses and the weaknesses of open societies were strengths.

In authoritarianism, plans "are hatched in secret by partially informed men," Gulick noted. Such plans may contain weaknesses, but those in charge won't know because they're not subjected to broad criticism. "Even the leaders tend to believe their own propaganda; they live in cocoons. All of the stream of authority and information is from the top down."

But in an open society, "the public and the press have no hesitation in observing and criticizing the first evidence of failure once a program has been put into operation." As a result, information is far more widely shared and this ultimately makes actions better informed and more effective.

Canada is an open society. The auditor general's report on the F-35 program, the furious reaction of the opposition, the debate in the media, and the swift government pledge to make changes are all proof of that.

But there are degrees of openness. And, under Stephen Harper's control, Canada's federal government - which has never been as open and transparent as it should be - has become increasingly closed and opaque.

That is why the F-35 program turned into a fiasco. And that is why it's very likely there are more fiascos waiting to be discovered.

Recall that in March 2011, the Parliamentary Budget Officer published a report on the cost of the F-35s that contradicted the cost estimate of the Department of National Defence. The real cost is far higher, the PBO said.

So far, so open. But how did the government react? Peter MacKay, the minister of national defence, could have promised to take a close look at his department's estimate. That's what a minister in an open government would do. But MacKay didn't. Instead, his office immediately dismissed the PBO's report.

And the government went on the offensive, sending out Conservative MP Laurie Hawn - a former fighter pilot - to belittle the PBO's work as "speculative" and "illogical."

Thanks to the auditor general, we now know the Parliamentary Budget Officer was pretty much exactly right, which the government could have figured out last year if it had chosen to think instead of stonewall and attack.

But stonewalling and attacking is what this government does. Some days it seems that's all it knows how to do.

Remember that the PBO report was delivered after MPs had been stymied in their efforts to get proper cost information on the F-35s, crime legislation, and other government plans.

Watching over government spending is Parliament's most basic function in the Westminster system. That's its job. And Parliament is, in theory, supreme. If it wants information on costs, the government has to cough it up.

But this government is obsessed with controlling information and it repeatedly refused to give Parliament what it demanded. Which is flagrantly unconstitutional. The Speaker of the House of Commons said as much when he ruled that the government was in contempt of Parliament.

In response, the government shrugged.

When the government fell on a motion citing it for being in contempt of Parliament, there was an election. The government's refusal to provide Parliament with the cost information it demanded, and the finding of contempt that followed, were the reason for the election, but they were little discussed and quickly forgotten. Apparently, most Canadians didn't care.

So now we have the F-35 fiasco.

The irony is that Stephen Harper came to power promising to make a system that was far too closed and opaque more open and transparent. He created the PBO. He had other good reforms planned.

But the prime minister soon abandoned that effort.

Instead, he further centralized the decision-making process. He hoarded information. He closed information-producing bodies such as the Law Commission. He silenced government scientists and took other steps to ensure nobody in the government spoke publicly except those reading from scripts written in the prime minister's office. And he treated any dissonant statement of any sort, from anyone, as a hostile attack deserving of an even more hostile response: Witness the relentless barrage directed at the PBO.

In this way, Stephen Harper made a government that was far too centralized, closed, and opaque far more centralized, closed, and opaque. And, to the extent he did that, he made it a worse government.

The F-35 fiasco will not be the last.