It comes quietly, on page twenty-one of the twenty-three-page document, and is cast innocently as a creative idea, indeed as a “creative leap to consider,” and it is simply stated: “Support people rather than places.”
In the context of a narrative predicated on the counterintuitive notion that when times are good the moment for fundamental change has arrived, such an idea is not much of a leap at all. Set against the happy backdrop of eliminating taxes on creativity, cutting them on investment, learning from children, freeing aboriginal Canadians from a reserve mentality, dramatically improving labour mobility, and, in short, a full-blown appeal to our very selves, such a statement washes over the reader. For so many countries—perhaps for most—such an individualist approach seems eminently sensible, even desirable. But Canada is not most countries, and any reading of our literature—not just Margaret Atwood’s Survival, Dionne Brand’s Land To Light On, or Gilles Vigneault’s “Mon Pays,” but also countless foundation myths, and, in fact, countless policy manuals since the bna Act—reveals that Canada has always been about place, about rendering and securing an unlikely country in a godforsaken landscape.
From building the railway, settling the Prairies, and creating the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, to adopting the peculiar idea that individual medical care is a shared responsibility, Canada has always been about knitting places together and about the sublimation of personal desire needed to do so. It has been this way for very simple reasons: “I got mine, every crumb for himself” makes no sense before the monumental challenge of this place; and investing in places means securing national sovereignty over them. Without investing in the North, the Northwest Passage will fall to the highest bidder; without two cities in Saskatchewan and another one in Manitoba, our claim to the Prairies might be lost.
While Canada is governed by a Charter that prioritizes individual rights and freedoms, “Support people rather than places” actually runs against the entire drift of our evolving nation-state. Such a prescription would unravel equalization payments—that clever strategy, consistent with a history of settling difficult places, of sending money to less advantaged regions because, for example, Newfoundland needs Cornerbrook as much as it needs St. John’s. And it would unleash a level of competition between clusters of people that would, in the end, leave enormous tracts of land deserted.
In truth, “Support people rather than places” informs all of “From Bronze to Gold,” including Appendix II, a handsome ten-page list of 148 corporate executives—a handful of women, a few ceos located in the US, vast stretches of this place strikingly under-represented, and the usual suspects in a majority position. The ccce looks at Canada and sees in its institutions and stabs at equalization a failed socialist utopia, a structural-engineering project gone terribly wrong. And, unlike the old directors of the Hudson’s Bay Company—gone now, swept up by a bigger, more voracious American machine—who might have taken this age of soaring corporate profits and lagging investment and said, “We ought to do something about this place,” the ceos of the ccce argue that it is people who determine place, that Hobbes was right, Rousseau fanciful, that the natural order of things is unbridled competition, and that the manifest destiny of some will and must triumph.
Canada has always been a concept. In this it is no different than any other nation-state. But in America, the people are the foundation myth. In Canada, it is the land we light on.
Mr. Harper, against the best wishes of a few and perhaps against your own instincts and desires, the task ahead is monumental, and it is about place. May you govern yourself accordingly, or may your reveries be punctuated by the ghosts of Ignatieff, Rae, Dryden, or even Stronach.
