By now I think most of us are pretty
tired of the terms lefties and
righties—or versions
thereof—being hurled about as pejoratives. The terms don’t define
anything that actually exists and even if a given person tends to
side with liberal views and policies while a neighbour tends more
toward conservative values, that doesn’t justify the labeling
that’s becoming so strident in the West, for instance.
Right-wing
worldview has come to mean
something like a preference for keeping things as they are because
they’re working. Its focus is individualistic; it favours
self-reliance over social benefit, strict property rights, and as a
result, isn’t keen on income equality, preferential hiring for
minorities, feminism and/or any program that hands tax money over to
the needy who should “just get over it, get a job, get off their
asses.”
Left-wing
worldview sees a role for
government in ensuring the well-being of all citizens and
tend
to be sympathetic toward universal health care, subsidized housing &
daycare, social welfare and food banks. In North America, this
doesn’t equate to socialism,
particularly the kind we see in Venezuela, the former Soviet Union,
China or North Korea. The fringes I’ll mention later tend to attach
words like communist,
or fascist to augment
their vacuous pronouncements.
According
to Jordan Peterson and others, the “leftie” viewpoint and the
“rightie” worldview are necessary as checks against a politic
that can swing too far toward the total nanny state on
the one hand or a dictatorship/police state on the other. It’s when
people with differing viewpoints lose the ability to dialogue
productively and see each other as teams that must be defeated that
the balancing breaks down and reasonable policy becomes difficult to
negotiate.
We
have plenty of examples to guide us in assessing where we are in
keeping Canada in balance. The Russian Revolution swung so heavily
toward the nanny state side
that it destroyed itself and millions of its citizens with the
excesses that followed. Latin American countries (Nicaragua,
Columbia, Venezuela, for instance) have swung so sharply from one
extreme to the other that citizens have been left to duck and run or
die, time and again. Their balance systems have been known to fail .
. . to put it graciously.
And
let’s face it: in Canada today we’ve chosen a mixed economy and
multi-culturalism, both of which are negotiated and balanced stances
between extremes. What this means is that we have left wing
and right wing-style
commerce going on side by side, smoothly and productively. Most
Canadians are conservative on preserving/ “conserving” the
environment, liberal (actually, socialist) on healthcare. Phone, gas
and hydro service in Saskatchewan are state-owned, potash mines are
free enterprise. These few examples illustrate the frustrating and
unnecessary dividing into hostile camps (NDP voters are lefties,
CPU voters and Saskatchewan Party voters are righties.)
What exactly is this labeling supposed to achieve? Except, if one of
our great desires is for peace, another thing we are itching to have
is a fight (this irony I witness in myself, time and again). And for
fighting, name-calling, ridiculing you need sides. And these sides
need derogatory names that can fit on a placard.
One might think
that a test of our “balance” could be had from the way we have
dealt with, for instance, gun ownership, or Medical Assistance in
Dying, or gay marriage, or drug regulation. Typically, we have felt
our way over time toward a position with which the majority can live.
Liberals start a gun registry, Conservatives abolish it. Liberals ban
classes of weapons, Conservatives cry foul. It’s a nation of
social-leaners, capitalist-leaners and a mass of voters indifferent
on the subject clumsily negotiating their way to a compromise.
Liberalism may bring in assisted dying legislation; Conservatives are
there to ensure that it doesn’t escalate to extremes. And vise
versa, of course.
For reasons wise
people could probably explain to me, our politics hasn’t
capitalized on cooperative legislating and decision making. Take
right now in this minority parliament during a pandemic when
collaboration ought to be so very obvious an approach. What we have
instead is decisions made for us in cabinet, opposition parties
scrambling to find messages that denigrate the Liberal’s plans and
processes when it would make good sense to govern in a “committee
of the whole” manner, with all the ideas and all the “safeguarding”
voices in one room.
Here’s a
thought. What would change if in that debating phase of governance we
call parliament, legislators would draw lots for seating in the
chamber? It strikes me that at present—with government and
opposition members ranged like battalions across a no-man’s land as
if in preparation for medieval battling—the very configuration
militates against productive dialogue and the necessary give and take
when important matters are being negotiated. You’re much less
likely to jeer an opposition member if he/she is sitting right beside
you and you’ve been chatting about your respective grandchildren
while waiting for question period to start.
The upshot of “us
vs. them” politics is written all over the news coming from the
USA. Divisive leftie/rightie rhetoric seeded into the general
population will, I think, always produce hardened fringes that don’t
even need to know what the issues are, that bond with others to form
an antagonistic “club” identifiable as the extreme version of
whatever ideology gave them birth. A problem is that democracies know
intuitively that the extremes aren’t what they want, but the Skin
Heads, the Antifas, white supremacists, the Tea Party, the gun lobbies, etc., tend to
suck up all the oxygen available to journalism, dominating our news
and encouraging us to think that we’re headed toward one or the
other hell.
Some would say
that “it’s just human nature,” or that “this is as good as it
gets,” neither of which give us much hope for a future in which
we’re eager to participate.
Being Canadian,
I’m obviously most concerned with how we as a nation will launch
ourselves into the future, particularly now in the light of the
pandemic, the decimated economy, the changes happening in our
southern neigbour and climate change. Perhaps this column falls into
the category of the old man who plants trees, knowing he’ll never
live to enjoy their shade, although the temptation is to hunker down
and make the best of the good things this country has allowed me . .
. and to hell with politics. But I’m also a history buff and
through much reading have discovered how extensively one generation
sets the table for the next generation . . . and the next . . ..
We must not let
the line between imagined camps grow darker and wider as is the
tactic of an incompetent US president. How to erase this barrier is
the challenge before us. To this end, I have two suggestions: 1) do
away with the party system in provincial politics and run our
provincial government the way municipalities are run. (Side note:
Toronto has 2.5 times the population of all Saskatchewan), and 2)
have members of parliament choose their seat in the chamber by lot,
not by party.
Would that be a
start? I think so. If you’d like to dialogue with me on this or any
other topic, my email address is gg.epp41@gmail.com.
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