John Ibbitson

Howling in the Wind?

Much of what constitutes Canadian identity has been forged through an ongoing comparison of Canadian political and cultural institutions with American traditions and ways of life. The historical reasons for this practice run deep, particularly in the Loyalist heartland of southern Ontario. Therefore it is provocative to read a book that compares unfavourably a series of events from the Canadian experience with a similar series of events in the United States. Enter Globe and Mail Washington columnist and correspondent John Ibbitson and his most recent book, Open & Shut: Why America has Barack Obama, and Canada has Stephen Harper.

In late 2008 both Canada and the United States held federal elections. What lessons may be drawn from a comparison of these two separate yet almost simultaneous events? According to Ibbitson, two things are clear. He writes that, “for all its many faults, both structural and cultural, America’s political fundamentals remain robust and renewable, allowing the nation to shake off the worst of its own excesses and put itself back on the right track. But in Canada, something has gone wrong. The always-fragile national will has atrophied, revealed in a political culture that, at the federal level, smells of decay.” As the title of the book indicates, Ibbitson makes the argument that there is an essential openness in American political life that allows individuals and groups typically moving outside the establishment to break through to revitalize the political process. In Canada the same channels are mostly closed to outsiders, especially when it comes to the selection of political party leaders.

Ibbitson undertakes a stimulating examination of how the Liberal party and the Conservative party work at the federal level. The Liberals are revealed currently as “… an elite-driven party estranged from and indifferent toward the electorate”. At the same time, the Conservatives are shown to be weak and bordering on decline because the party, for reasons both historical and contemporary, “… cannot resolve the fundamental paradox of its existence, which is embodied in the paradox that is Stephen Harper”. Ibbitson draws conclusions that are unsettling. “Both the Liberals and the Conservatives, then, are dangerously weak, each in their own way. And there are alarming signs – the December constitutional crisis being only the latest – that they are growing even weaker, more closed, and more remote from the interests and will of the people.”

In collaboration with the Globe and Mail and the publisher, McClelland & Stewart, John Ibbitson has put forward Open & Shut as a modern-day political pamphlet. Not only has he asked many questions, he has taken the added step of inviting readers to contribute to an Internet forum in which people may offer comments and criticisms, as well as suggestions and ideas. (The link is provided at the bottom of this page.) In a recent talk with Canadian Interviews, Ibbitson shed light on what triggered his decision to write Open & Shut, and also laments that “maybe there isn’t any real desire on the part of Canadian voters to actually have some influence in how parties shape policy and how they choose their leaders.” This may be the reality of the situation. John Ibbitson has attempted to make it otherwise.

CI: You touch on several significant political events from the past eight to twelve months in North America: the Canadian and American elections, the proposed coalition government, the proroguing of parliament, as well as the Obama inauguration in January. At what point during all that activity did you decide to write Open & Shut?

JI: It was right after the proroguing of parliament. McClelland & Stewart, my publisher, came with this proposal: could we do something very quickly on the state of Canada and the United States in the midst of all these upheavals, and if so, what would the thesis be? I said maybe we could do it, and the thesis would be that the elections in Canada and the United States revealed the remarkable resilience and openness of American political culture, and that the Canadian political system was not only closed but stagnant and in decline – and this was something that we needed to address. They said that they liked that idea. We talked about it with the Globe and Mail, worked out a schedule for writing because I had to keep up my day job since obviously a great many things were going on, started work on it on the second of January, finished it on the second of March, and we had it in the bookstores on the fifth of May, which must be some kind of record, I think.

CI: You have put forward Open & Shut as a contemporary political pamphlet, and at the end of the book you invite readers to contribute to an online discussion. Are you pleased with the discussion that has been generated? Does it resemble what you hoped for?

JI: I am pleased with the quality of the discussion. It hasn’t generated as many hits as I would like, but those people who have taken the time to come on and offer ideas have come up with quite substantial comments. I have been replying to them as best I can. But I think, you know, it is easy to click onto the end of a newspaper story and say ‘I think this sucks’ or ‘I think this is great’. It’s a harder thing to read a book, ponder it, and then sit down and offer a contribution online. I shouldn’t be surprised that there are fewer people willing to do that than perhaps would be ideal.

CI: As you mention, central to the book is your observation that, regardless of its many faults, America’s political fundamentals are still ‘robust and renewable’, whereas the political culture in Canada, especially at the federal level, ‘smells of decay’. In the U.S. election last year there was a lot of talk about the way in which the international community viewed the United States, but there seemed to be significantly less discussion during the campaign here in Canada about how the world views our country. How directly linked is the decay in our political culture to the absence of a very clearly defined role for Canada internationally?

JI: I think it is one contributing factor. I remember covering the 2006 election when, if I’m not mistaken, there was only one question asked on foreign policy during the debates, and foreign policy was by no means a significant issue during the election campaign. Yet what was one of the first things that the Harper government did? It committed Canada to contributing substantial forces to the campaign in Afghanistan, a decision, granted, that had initially been made by the Liberal government beforehand. I think one of the problems that we have is that the federal government has lost the will or the ability to define Canada within the world. People will often tell you, especially down here in Washington, that Canada just doesn’t show up anymore at the major forums and conferences. That is a great departure from what it was like certainly when I was growing up in the era of Pearsonian and Trudeauesque diplomacy. It is just another sign that our chronically weak, chronically minority-gripped federal government is too busy trying to survive to the next week to carve out a definition for itself and for the country within the global marketplace.

CI: Early in the book you outline the way in which the Obama campaign engaged younger voters through online tools, and as you mention, the Obama campaign was able to capitalize on the deep opposition to the war in Iraq and the Bush administration in general. In Canada, in somewhat less extraordinary circumstances, do you think there is much likelihood that a politician could really reach young people through those same online tools?

JI: It can happen in Canada, it can happen in Australia, it can happen in Germany, it can happen in Turkey! What happened in the United States – and yes, obviously there was a ton of tremendous turmoil – but what happened in the United States was that a politician arrived who had a message that galvanized the ‘millennials’, voters under thirty, and then voters in their thirties, the Gen-Xers, a famously apathetic lot, completely unengaged in politics, uninterested in politicians, who have traditionally voted well below what their cohort gave them a right to vote in terms of proportion of total population. Yet Obama came along with a message that resonated with them on the environment, on Iraq, on the economy, on health care, on education, and used their means, used their tools – social networking sites and other aspects of the Internet – to engage them, to mobilize them, and to get them out. As a result, millennials for example, people under thirty, representing seventeen percent of the voting population, cast eighteen percent of the votes! That is there anywhere in the world for any politician who is able to do it. What we have in Canada, and most other countries it must be said as well, right now is a political class that simply does not connect with younger voters, doesn’t understand them, doesn’t share their concerns, doesn’t share their priorities. As a result, brokerage politics by baby boomers and ‘olders’ continues to be the order of the day.

CI: You write that ‘there is not the shadow of the statesman left in our politicians, nor much notion of public service in our public servants’, and as you mention, this connection with younger voters could happen in our country. Is there no one in our current crop of politicians that stands out to you as an individual aware of these issues and capable of responding to them in a spirit of openness and renewal that will engage younger voters?

JI: Well look, you and your readers probably have a much better sense of that than I do. I am living in Washington and have been here now for more than two years. I get back to Canada fairly often, but I am not intimately connected to the political scene in Canada. My job is to cover the United States for the Globe and Mail. So the answer is that I can’t think of any, but that doesn’t mean that she isn’t out there. I’m not closely following the backbench of the British Columbia Liberal party. I wasn’t at the Conservative leadership convention in Ontario. No one has emerged above the waves yet that I can see, but I am a long way away.

CI: With most of the crucial services being handled by the provinces as power has been decentralized, flowing out of Ottawa, you suggest that there is little to keep Ottawa busy, and mostly federal politicians turn into ‘store managers’. You make the provocative suggestion that this might be the opportunity for the federal government to do ‘something big’. You mention high-speed rail links. What are the options in this regard, and how do you see such options as being able to renew the role of the federal government?

JI: Well, the book is there to ask questions and get a debate started rather than to just pose solutions. I threw a couple ideas out there, but I don’t think it’s my job or the book’s job to propose a new raison d’être for the federal government. I think that is for Canadians to do in, again, what I hope will be a sustained and grassroots debate, but I think we do need to inculcate a generation of politicians who are prepared, without a sense of shame, to ask the question ‘what is Canada in the twenty-first century?’ What is the national vision? Where do we go from here? We don’t want to turn to the sort of shared-cost programs that get dumped onto the provinces leaving everyone angry and resentful that happened in the seventies and eighties and nineties. But we can ask, ‘what is the best role for the federal spending power to strengthen the Dominion, to strengthen the union?’ Is it to focus on the economic union? Are there goals that we can iterate? Can the federal government adopt a strategy to pursue those goals? It’s not that we don’t have any answers. It’s that, at this point, I’m not hearing anybody even asking these questions.

CI: One of the interesting things in the book is your discussion of the problems within our public service. I notice online that there is some discussion of it, but it is quite limited. It seems to me that this might be one of the most crucial questions that we have to answer, specifically how our public service is performing and how it may be less than open to young people. You mention that the younger generation does not ‘do bureaucracy’ very well. What response have you seen online to this question that you have raised about how our public service performs?

JI: Again I haven’t heard as much online as I would like to. I certainly have had a lot of conversations with people in Ottawa in the public service, or those who work with the public service, who say that to their mind the argument is germane. The public service is too closed. It is too resistant to outsiders. The bureaucracy is too bureaucratic. It does not connect with young people even though they are going to have a real hiring crisis in a few years, as the current generation gets ready to retire. The minority parliaments that we have had make the situation worse because there is no government to give the public service a clear direction for where it is going and what it should be doing. Again, I think you only have to compare and contrast public service at the provincial level with that at the federal level. If you do that, you regularly hear from people that again the public services at the provincial level tend to be more open, tend to welcome outside hires more, and tend to be more flexible. That’s what I mean about the federal political culture that has become increasingly stagnant and in decline. It’s just there, and the public service is just one manifestation of it.

CI: The last question that I have for you is about how we choose our leaders. You do a nice job in the book of contrasting the process of Barack Obama making his way through Iowa as distinct from the selection of Stéphane Dion or even Michael Ignatieff this spring. Have you heard any serious discussion from any of the federal parties here in Canada as far as reforming how their leaders are selected, or is it something that is not even on the agenda?

JI: It’s not on the agenda at all. You can have drink with somebody and talk about it and get a conversation going, but on the whole opening the party up to outside influences is anathema to party elites. The Liberals did move to one member-one vote at their last leadership convention, but that doesn’t really break the hold of the riding executives and the party hierarchy on the tiny fraction of one percent of the population that actually casts the ballot for the Liberal leader, when they ever get a chance to. They didn’t even get a chance to do it to elect Michael Ignatieff. I think, again, until we start to fundamentally re-think the role of political parties, and the way political party leaders are chosen, and unless and until there is an active demand from the public that they be a part of that process, the same old-same old will continue. I don’t know. Maybe we are howling in the wind. Maybe there isn’t any real desire on the part of Canadian voters to actually have some influence in how parties shape policy and how they choose their leaders. Down here in the United States, it is something they consider a holy right, and no one will ever take it away from them.

Date of Interview: 07/03/2009
Location: On the phone from Washington, D.C.
Link: www.globeandmail.com/open&shut