A politician's speech I'm waiting to hear . . ..

Remembering Van Gogh's "A bedroom in Arles."

Friends

First of all, let me clarify why I’m here, speaking to you. In a few weeks, you’ll choose one person from this constituency to represent you for four years in the national government. I and four others have filed the paperwork that places us on the ballot. Your choice is yours to make, and it’s entirely secret unless you choose to divulge it. In the best case scenario, the candidate with the best knowledge of the constituency, the best equipped and qualified to represent its citizens will be chosen for the job. I’m here today to help you judge whether or not I am that person. Simple as that.

To my mind, our national government is remiss if it’s unable to think beyond current reality toward both the short term and the long-term future needs of this country, something that we have done only poorly recently, probably because our politics has become overburdened with strategies for re-election and under-burdened with big-picture thinking.

An example: Miranda works for a Toronto-based company in its Sudbury branch office. She’s called to meet with senior management in downtown Toronto and chooses to drive. Miranda owns a Ford Focus weighing 1,400 kilograms, she weighs 55 kilograms, so her choice requires enough energy to move 1,400 plus 55 kilograms from Sudbury to Toronto and back. She gets into greater Toronto at the height of the morning commute and ends up in a traffic tie-up so that the engine on her car is running for an extra half-hour, belching its contribution of greenhouse gases along with all the other cars, semis and motorcycles. It’s a scenario that’s almost comically absurd, bordering on the obscene even, when we think of how much energy is wasted when we need to move 55 kilograms of person from Sudbury to Toronto and back in order to facilitate a one hour conversation around a board table.

Unfortunately, our knee jerk response to such absurdities is to facilitate them, throw another billion dollars of taxpayers’ money into the addition of yet another traffic lane, yet another overpass. A middle-school Science class might well come up with a suggestion that Miranda and senior management could quite nicely have held their meeting on Skype, or Face-time, or perhaps the low-tech speaker phone. A more sophisticated, adult thought process would take into account all the factors relative to corporate, tourism, freight demands and invest in a twinned, high-speed passenger and freight link between Sudbury and downtown Toronto.

Trucks can back right up to the loading dock, both at the source and the destination of a shipment. Ships can’t, trains can’t and airplanes can’t. Taxis come right to your door and drop you off at your destination, commuter trains and buses don’t. And weighing the convenience factor more heavily than the conservation/pollution factors has brought us to where we are.

As your representative, preparing our country for an efficient, sustainable travel and transportation future would be one of my preoccupations.

Everything governments do involves the budgeting process. You can write the following down, if you like, as a policy or as a promise coming from me; the swings from deficit to surplus and back must end; henceforth the relative weighting among revenue sources: corporate taxes, income taxes, consumption and property taxes, etc. must be established semi-permanently, and the formulae for what is owed to the work we do federally should slide up and down according to the bottom line of the budget approved by parliament. If, for instance, a large infrastructure plan is budgeted for, thereby raising the bottom spending line by 4%, all tax, excise, licence, etc. categories for the year will rise by 4%, and if the budget for a year shrinks by 4%, all tax categories reduce by 4%. In other words, all budgets are always balanced. Governments will no longer campaign on tinkering with tax percentages; computer algorithms will take that job on.

Healthcare will undoubtedly remain the elephant in the room of both federal and provincial budgets. Little can be done to downsize this portion of the budget when providing universal healthcare as we do. The shortages in healthcare personnel tells us that lowering salaries and reimbursements would only make that problem worse, and there’s probably not much more we’ll be able to do about drug prices in the current marketplace.

Two goals I would pursue would be prevention and reinvention of client-service models. We’ve already begun to emphasize nutrition and exercise, stress relief and well-being as precursors of mental and physical health. Forward thinking would have us plan for facilities and practices that tend to make accessing health-preserving strategies simpler and easier. As examples, Rosthern has fitness gadgets as part of the central park/playground green space. Recreation and diversion for nursing home and assisted living institutions, for retirement communities always have room for expansion to alleviate more of the anxiety and depression of people in confinement. Bowling alleys, skating rinks, golf, pickleball, etc. when made affordable via subsidy could do a lot to keep the people who access the healthcare system both active and happy, precursors of better health. So far, our emphases has been mainly on expanding and modernizing critical care facilities, alongside the struggle to attract practitioners, of course.

What I mean by "refining client-services" is the remodeling and expansion of what we call “home-care.” The future requires that we make healthcare more and more portable—short of the do-it-yourself appendectomy kit, of course. There’s a difference in cost to the public purse if a practical nurse tends a wound or if a medical doctor does basically the same thing. Even cheaper if mom or dad know how to do it. There’s a saving if a patient is seen a few times a day by a practical nurse to monitor vitals as opposed to providing a hospital bed. Let’s face also the reality that when it comes to medical services, state-of-the-art, available-on-demand services can never be provided unless as individuals we have the means to bypass the medicare system, which in this country has gained the stature of a religion. 

Expectations have to be managed; an elective surgery for which one needs to wait a few months is not a failure of the system while a hip replacement that’s out of reach for a person with average or diminished means is.

And now to the really urgent stuff. When I consider what the newborn internet, email revolution was like in the 1990s when I was teaching adult education classes in Northern Alberta and then pick up my smart phone today to connect with anyone world-wide, access a million libraries of information, post my thoughts or videos or photos into a space accessible to the entire world, I’m bound to take seriously the warnings of philosophers and writers like Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. The cyber-revolution, the development of silicon chip technology so that a USB “thumb drive” can store about 9 million times the data that a hard drive could in 1996 has—along with myriad other emerging technologies—altered the landscape of commerce, politics, crime, even social relations, culture and art to an almost unimaginable degree.

Citizens’ safety ranks high on our political agenda but I don’t think we’ve grasped the enormity of what safety means in a cyberspace age. New technologies demand safeguards protecting citizens from the criminal options, the spreading of misinformation, the interference in the democratic process. Our efforts to date have been sloppy, as anyone who’s been scammed on the internet can tell you. We like the idea of communication free from censorship but unless the internet with its myriad platforms and possibilities is regulated, it will become more and more the assault rifle of cyberspace and we certainly don't need another NRA-like lobby for weapons of mass intimidation and mayhem. Had we the anarchy on the highways, on the airwaves, in schools and other institutions that we demand in cyberspace, the earth would be unlivable.

My advocacy for a genuine citizen’s cyberspace safety strategy will be unwavering.

I mention refugee/immigration policy only because it’s been brought into our political dialogue by circumstances. I have no quarrel with current immigration policy but as regards refugee resettlement, the word “policy” seems odd; a bit like formulating a policy around rescuing people from a burning building. I favour expanding immigration and refugee resettlement capability, increasing by at least double the civil service charged with vetting, admitting and resettling newcomers to Canada. Newcomers contribute to our economy, bring new perspectives and augment the employment pool significantly. It seems obvious that climate changes that render parts of the earth less habitable will increase the ongoing need for resettlement of migrants; Canada is in a good position to be proactive in getting our responses right.

And lastly, I want to take a clear position on climate change. I suspect you all know the rudimentaries of the debate: the earth’s atmosphere is warming enough to cause changes in climate and weather, some of these changes are life-threatening, some endanger living species, some threaten food security; our dependence on fossil fuels along with a list of agricultural, industrial and consumer habits and processes must be rethought if we’re to prevent the worst-case scenario actually coming to pass.

A plan to do Canada’s part in a world-wide prevention plan is absolutely necessary; our favoured position as a wealthy nation with a very generous supply of fresh water, clean air, mineral resources and arable, food-producing land means to me that our place in the discussion has to be one of leadership. Anything less than “much more than the average,” anything less than modeling options for poorer nations, anything short of making conservational improvements across all areas of our economy simply isn’t acceptable. 

One of my first acts if I am elected would be to advocate for a parliament of climate strategy in which scientists, economists, sociologists, academics, historians and representatives of the general public would labour over plans that would be both workable and acceptable enough to gain broad consensus. Many little adjustments in how we do things, with transition strategies mapped out will make the difference.

My time is up, but I would like to engage with you on whatever concerns you have. I don’t, of course, have all the answers, God knows: Truth and Reconciliation efforts, education and tuition, urban sprawl, reforestation, rural high-speed internet, Northern cost of living to name just a few areas I haven’t had time to raise. For this, I offer my ten-page platform including—but not identical with—my party’s program in deference to the fact that whomever you elect will caucus with a party, but will represent you, not any political party. Please pick up a copy as you leave and read it. Options for contacting me—including challenges to what’s in the platform—are detailed in the package.

Thanks for coming out and listening attentively. If you choose me to represent you, I’ll do my very best to be faithful to the objectives I alluded to at the outset: 1) politics is the astute planning and management of a national budget and 2) politics demands concerted efforts to enhance and safeguard the well-being of all citizens well into the future. I look forward to the challenges, whether in or out of government.