Friday Morning Links

Assorted content for your Canada Day reading.

- Oh, how nice it would be to be able to take pride in Dan Gardner's message about Canada's true identity:

The level of civility seen every day at fourway stops across Canada is unheard of in countries around the world. That doesn't mean Canadians are, individually, better people than others because that civility isn't the product of careful moral deliberation.

In fact, we seldom think about civility at all. It's habit, ingrained in the culture and in us. We just do it.

And it improves our lives immeasurably, not only by making four-way stops work and traffic flow, but also by making everything function better, including the economy our prosperity depends on.

It also makes life a lot more pleasant.

Best of all, it's contagious. Think about all the immigrants this country takes in. An awful lot come from countries where saying "after you" - or holding a door open for someone else, or queuing in line - is a ridiculous thing to do.

But after some time here, what do they do when they come to a fourway stop? "After you."

And that, on this day and all others, is a reason to be proud and grateful.

- But the problem with a relatively trusting society is that it creates dangerous opportunities for anybody who views that trust as a weakness to be exploited, rather than a strength to be developed. And Susan Delacourt's list of lessons from recent political campaigns hints at the problem facing the media in dealing with a federal government which does just that:

I have a degree in politics and a career in journalism. Both are fields that were "professionalized" in the mid-to-late 20th century. The idea, popular in the 1950s and 1960s, was that everything could be a science; measurable, predictable, operating under certain, mechanized, routinized rules. (That's why kitchens, incidentally, started to be designed like hospital operating theatres in this era. Science fixed everything.)

My view is that the public is no longer "buying the science," as they say. (Shades of last year's census controversy, or, for that matter, the climate-change debate.) I think the public was more influenced by skewed, partisan ads in this election -- certainly when it came to the Liberals -- than they were by journalistic reporting or political debate on a level playing field.

I think we journalists have to grapple with the fact that the public is perhaps more willing to believe a blatant partisan report than a perhaps complicated work of journalism. Repetition works; even when the facts being repeated are wrong. It may mean that this 50-year-old experiment, treating journalism and politics as a measurable science, with absolute rights and absolute wrongs, is coming to an end. And what rises up in its place?

- Which has resulted in our country receiving the punishment pointed out by Gerald Caplan:

(T)here was only one strategy the right wing’s propagandists, organizers and billionaire financiers could now follow – sheer, unmitigated chutzpah. Instead of acknowledging a whit of responsibility, they would do the opposite, preposterous as it seems: Blame government, taxes and unions, and distract attention from the filthy rich. This quite explicit strategy has been working for several decades; why not try it again? After all, shamelessness is the signal characteristic of those who survive and prosper in this life. Sure government regulations and bailouts saved us all from an even greater crash. Sure unions in the public sector helped their members maintain a barely modest level of middle class comfort and security, the precarious embodiment of the North American dream of upward social mobility. So attack both government and unions, what else?

Of course this makes no sense of any kind, except that it’s working like a charm. It’s elected many right-wing politicians, some so far off the conventional ideological continuum they’re in a parallel universe of their own insanity. Thus the United States in the mid-term elections and the surrealistic contest for Republican presidential candidate. Thus a know-nothing union-baiting mayor in Toronto. Thus a Harper government, enabled by working class and middle class ethnic voters in Southern Ontario who somehow trusted him but distrusted a larger role for government.

Thus the sustained attacks across the United States, and now Canada, on public service employees who have been lucky enough to have unions to keep them from a life just above permanent financial anxiety. It shows the worst of human behavior and the failure of reason. Instead of solidarity with those lucky enough to hang on and with little responsibility for society’s ills, frightened, insecure people have turned mean and vindictive towards those just marginally luckier than themselves, instead of turning against those who are in fact responsible for it all.

- And all this while Canada's own corporate sector stands out even among its worldwide peers for its failure to generate meaningful social benefits alongside the pursuit of profit - as Susan Riley laments:

(T)he underlying problem is not misfiring federal attempts to help; it is a private sector that, for a variety of reasons, has long been risk-averse, or lazy, or complacent, or otherwise slow to innovate.

Too few companies, for example, are taking advantage of the strong dollar to buy new technologies.

There have been only fitful efforts to develop green technologies, or process our abundant raw materials here and create spinoff jobs. It is easier to simply export crude natural resources and collect the cash and executive bonuses - and it always has been, from the fur trade to the tarsands.

This persistent timidity, and self interest, sounds more dangerous to national prosperity than overly generous union sick day provisions.

Why has Canada never developed its own car, like Sweden? Why does a small place like Switzerland (pop. 7.8 million) have so many more iconic brands and companies than Canada - Swatch, Victorinox, Nestlé, Novartis to name a few?

Sweden is synonymous with Ikea, Holland with Shell. What company says "Canada"?
...
Veteran Globe and Mail business columnist Eric Reguly has an explanation: Canadian investors, he writes, "would rather take an even meagre payout today than stick with a company for years to create a world beater."

Short-term greed, in other words. We'll see if the Harper government agrees - and if it will be as ruthless with its foot-dragging ideological friends as it is with its enemies.