As one who has had the good fortune of visiting the majority of First Nations Indian Reserves in Canada and also having spent some time on the Navajo Nation in Window Rock, Ariz., while doing a year-long study into policing, I find the recent media frenzy concerning the Attawapiskat housing situation overblown and rather frustrating.

To begin, please bear with me while I record an excerpt from a speech given by a prominent Canadian, to an assembly of aboriginal people many years ago:

“So this year we came up with a proposal. It’s a policy paper on the Indian problem. It proposes a set of solutions. It doesn’t impose them on anybody. It proposes them – not only to the Indians, but to all Canadians – not only to their federal representatives, but to the provincial representatives, too, and it says we’re at the crossroads. We can go on treating the Indians as having a special status. We can go on adding bricks of discrimination around the ghetto in which they live and at the same time perhaps helping them preserve certain cultural traits and certain ancestral rights. Or we can say you’re at a crossroad – the time is now to decide whether the Indians will be a race apart in Canada or whether it will be Canadians of full status.”

Those words were spoken back on Aug. 8, 1969, by then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau at the Aboriginal and Treaty Rights meeting in Vancouver.

Trudeau continued: “And this is a difficult choice. It must be a very agonizing choice to the Indian peoples themselves because, on the one hand, they realize that if they come into the society as total citizens, they will be equal under the law, but they risk losing certain of their traditions, certain aspect of a culture and perhaps even certain of their basic rights, and this is a very difficult choice for them to make and I don’t think we want to try to force the pace on them any more than we can force it on the rest of Canadians. (But) here again is a choice which is, in our minds, whether outside, a group of Canadians with (whom) we have treaties, a group of Canadians who have …many of them claim, aboriginal rights or whether we will say we’ll forget the past and begin today and this is a tremendously difficult choice because, if – well one of the things the Indian bands often refer to are their aboriginal rights,” Trudeau said.

“We will recognize treaty rights,” continued Trudeau, those 42 years ago. “We will recognize forms of contract which have been made with the Indian people by the Crown and we will try to bring justice in that area and this will mean that perhaps the treaties shouldn’t go on forever. It’s inconceivable, I think, that in a given society one section of the society have a treaty with the other section of the society. We must be all equal under the laws and we must not sign treaties among ourselves. And many of these treaties, indeed, would have less and less significance in the future anyhow, but things that in the past were covered by the treaties…things like so much twine, or so much gun powder and which haven’t been paid, this must be paid. But I don’t think that we should encourage the Indians to feel that their treaties should last forever within Canada so that they be able to receive their twine or their gun powder.

< http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/Trudeau+words+about+aboriginals+resonate/5938345/story.html >

It was on Oct. 8, 1971, that Pierre Trudeau announced the policy of multiculturalism. Saturday was its 40th anniversary. Being Canadians, we did not celebrate.

Yet an overwhelming majority of Canadians are quietly proud of it and view it as a defining feature of Canada.

The policy has not been free of controversy. Right-wingers keep sniping at it. Periods of economic insecurity and fear of terrorism produce a backlash against it. But such phases prove “transient,” says Barry Watson of Environics Research Group. With each passing year, more Canadians approve of multiculturalism. Tellingly, the Canadian-born and the foreign-born endorse it equally. They also overwhelmingly approve of immigration and only 9 per cent want Canada to bar non-whites.

Such broad acceptance of multicultural equality partly explains why Tim Hudak bombed with his attack on a provincial job-training program for new immigrants, “foreign workers.” It also explains why Stephen Harper succeeded in the federal election with his strong defence of multiculturalism when wooing “ethnic voters,” whereas Michael Ignatieff failed with the same bloc by being lukewarm about the trademark Liberal policy.

Support for multiculturalism now crosses ideological lines.

While French President Nicolas Sarkozy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister David Cameron pronounced multiculturalism dead, no serious national politician in Canada dare suggests it.

It’s not just public opinion. Unlike in Europe, where multiculturalism-lite was left to the whim of governments, our policy is anchored in the 1982 Charter of Rights as well as the 1988Multiculturalism Act. No government, regardless of political stripe, is going to axe that act, let alone contemplate constitutional change.

There are also positive reasons for the endurance of the policy, rooted as it is in our history.

The 1867 British North America Act recognized aboriginal peoples, English-speaking Protestants and French-speaking Catholics on the basis of race, language and religion. The DNA of BNA was pluralism.

The same spirit informed the Bilingualism and Biculturalism Commission’s declaration in the 1960s that while Canada was bilingual, it was no longer just bicultural but rather multicultural. That set the stage for Canada to become the world’s only constitutionally multicultural country.

We are now the envy of the world, for having expanded our legal, political and social space to include all citizens, regardless of culture, religion, ethnicity or colour.

Nothing being perfect, systemic racism endures. Studies show that visible minorities, including those born in Canada, suffer job discrimination.

Quebec rejects multiculturalism, preferring its “interculturalism,” with its presumed supremacy of not only the French language but also French culture.

Many English Canadians blame multiculturalism for several sins: that it allows importation of alien practices and “old country” conflicts; erodes common values; encourages ethnic ghettoes, dual loyalties and fifth columnists; spawns political correctness that constrains free speech, etc.

But such challenges have little or nothing to do with multiculturalism. They are as old as Canada itself, and common to all immigrant societies, including the U.S. and others that are decidedly not officially multicultural.

Similarly, contemporary hot-button topics of “sharia,” niqab, gender equity, etc. have proven just as divisive in non-multicultural nations.

Religions that discriminate against women and gays — and most do — do so not in the name of multiculturalism but rather freedom of religion. The tension between the competing rights to religion and gender equity would exist with or without multiculturalism.

Canada has tackled these issues better than others, having developed case law on how best to balance minority rights and majority mores. Quebeckers were all hot and bothered through their 2007-08 “reasonable accommodation” debate but calmed down after the sensible report of the Taylor-Bouchard Commission:

“The desire for sameness is authoritarian.” “The right to freedom of religion includes the right to show it.” Schools and universities should provide space for prayers. The display of religion in public spaces — kippa, kirpan, turban, hijab, etc. — advances the common good. Restricting it may produce the opposite effect: some believers may withdraw and “cease to interact with the common culture.”

Professor Will Kymlicka of Queen’s University, one of the world’s leading experts on multiculturalism, has written: “If we believe that immigrants converge on Charter values the longer they reside in Canada (as all the evidence shows), then we do not need to continuously test or provoke minorities, as is the fashion these days in Europe. This sort of provocation is self-defeating. If we tell immigrants that we do not trust them, and that we are monitoring their every word and reaction for hints of disloyalty or illiberalism, they will not feel that their political participation is welcomed and their political integration will be delayed, if not derailed entirely.”

Sane words; Canadian words.

< http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1066902–siddiqui-happy-birthday-to-canadian-multiculturalism >

Judging from the flattering portraits of female executives in business publications, the increase in female MBA graduates and rhetoric of equality used by business leaders, you’d think women were rising through the ranks of corporate Canada.

You’d be wrong. A new Conference Board of Canada study shows that women’s advancement to the top echelons of business came to a dead halt in the mid-1980s. It has been stalled ever since.

“Now that the rousing early days of feminism are behind us, perhaps we have become complacent about the success of women in senior management,” said Anne Golden, president and chief executive of the Ottawa-based research organization.

The researchers who analyzed the data were shocked. Like most Canadians, they assumed women were slowly but steadily reaching the top. What they found was no improvement since 1987. Using Statistics Canada records, they tracked the percentage of women in senior management over a 22-year period. By 2009, 0.32 per cent of women had made it to the top echelon compared to 0.64 per cent of male workers — virtually identical to the proportions when Brian Mulroney was prime minister, the loonie had just been introduced and Sidney Crosby was a newborn.

The hard numbers were more enlightening than the researchers’ attempts to explain why women had made so little headway.

They pointed to women’s educational choices (arts and humanities as opposed to technical disciplines), their desire for work-life balance, and the stereotypes that still prevail as possible barriers. They pointed out that most employers do not have a strategy to groom women for executive roles. And they echoed from women in business that they are judged on their appearance and expected to adopt male norms.

Sound familiar? It is. These same barriers have been identified repeatedly since women joined the workforce in large numbers in the 1960s and ’70s.

Likewise, the Conference Board’s remedies — more coaching and mentoring programs, a more inclusive work environment, an ongoing effort to promote talented women and track their progress, and a commitment to ensure that women are on the short list for senior management positions — have all been suggested many times.

The mainstream think-tank did not call for a radical shakeup of corporate culture. Nor did it propose new ways that women could use technology to keep their careers on track without sacrificing family responsibilities. It merely stressed that “fostering gender diversity is a natural extension of good business practice.”

But the report does serve one valuable purpose. It shatters the long-standing myth that time corrects gender equities. It’s true that a few female stars have cracked the glass ceiling. But the path to the top is still blocked for most women.

< http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/article/1048856–few-cracks-in-the-glass-ceiling >

Without Pierre Trudeau, we would not have, today, a Canada from coast to coast to coast. He was, for us, the essential leader, the indispensable leader during the greatest national crisis of my lifetime.

My case for Trudeau does not rest on his economic policies. Yet it must be said that Canada during the 1970s, at a time when the West’s golden age came to an end, did remarkably well considering the circumstances. Canada did far better than Britain, whose pound collapsed to almost the equal of the American dollar, whose politicians proved unable to confront overly strong unions, and whose businesses were unable to compete with those of Europe after Britain entered the European Economic Community. For Germany and France, too, it was a disastrous decade, as these two countries responded haltingly to the oil crisis, the food crisis and increasing inflationary trends.

Then there was the United States. In his book about the 1970s, How We Got Here: The Decade That Brought You Modern Life, David Frum details how Richard Nixon’s economic policies were a mess. Arthur Burns, the chairman of the Federal Reserve and a Republican pillar, bloated the money supply, blowing apart the Bretton Woods system of global monetary management, resulting in Washington’s 1971 announcement of a 10% import tax, the creation of special zones for American exporters and the end of the link between the American dollar and gold.

America’s trading partners were stunned. The Japanese called it the Nixon shokku. For Canada, the crisis epitomized the image Trudeau gave us: Canada is like a mouse sleeping with an elephant. Everything is fine until the elephant twitches. In 1971, the elephant rolled over and almost smothered us.

We were not alone. All of America’s major trading partners scrambled to develop trade and economic policies that reflected the new reality. Sure, we became protectionist. What country would not in those circumstances? Is it any wonder that we began seeking alternative trade partners, and tried to secure greater markets in China and Russia for our wheat?

Check the Hansard records from the time. The New Democrats who held a gun to the Liberals during the 1972-4 minority government wanted to nationalize most of our national resources. Even the Conservative opposition advocated national protectionist measures, as did many of the provincial premiers. When the Atlantic Richfield Company pulled out of the pioneering oil-sands consortium in 1975, a move that threatened to end oil-sands development, it was the Conservative Ontario government of Bill Davis that took a 5% share in the ensuing bailout. Alberta took 10%, the federal government 15%. Without that deal, the oil-sands would have remained yet another grand Canadian project that went unfulfilled.

On foreign policy, Trudeau himself declared that the subject was not his major interest — and it wasn’t. (It seems odd because Trudeau was without doubt the most cosmopolitan of our prime ministers, speaking fluent English, French, Spanish, with passable Italian and German.) He entered politics to deal with domestic issues — specifically, the place of Quebec, and of French-speaking Canadians, in Canada.

He knew that the external face of Canada then did not have French features. No English Canadian PM could speak French — including its greatest diplomat, Lester Pearson. External Affairs and Defence were not bilingual departments. And nearly all French Canadians felt excluded from their inner ranks. Only 8% of Canadian public servants were francophones during the years of Louis St. Laurent, a time when 26% of the Canadian population was francophone.

Today, on the other hand, 27% of Canadian soldiers are francophones, and all above the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel speak French. The Foreign Affairs department has a similar French presence. Our external face now reflects what we are — principally because of Pierre Trudeau.

Trudeau will not be judged in history by his economic policies or his foreign policy but rather by how he responded to what the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism rightly called, in February, 1965, “the greatest crisis in our history” — the challenge of Quebec nationalism and separatism.

Canada’s dominant political leaders of the 1960s were two unilingual First World War veterans, John Diefenbaker and Lester Pearson, and the political atmosphere was foul and stale. By 1967, when their time ran out, their approval ratings were close to single digits. Canadian politics, in Peter Newman’s words, had attained a profound “distemper.”

Scandals dominated the news and politics. In May, 1966, Joseph Chartier carried a bomb into the Centre Block of Parliament, intending to throw it into the middle of the Commons chamber. Nature called, he went to a washroom, and the bomb exploded. I was working as a summer student in the East Block at the time. An all-too-common refrain in the men’s beverage rooms of the day was: It’s a pity Chartier didn’t get to throw it.

This was the situation when Pierre Trudeau came to Ottawa. Geoffrey Stevens, The Globe and Mail’s Ottawa correspondent, the biographer of Trudeau’s opponent Robert Stanfield, and a strong critic of Trudeau, later recalled what Trudeau meant in those times: “He did what no politician before or since has done. He touched the dreams of an entire generation of Canadians. He made them excited about politics and public affairs. He caused them to believe they could actually change the country and even the world. He inspired them to get personally involved in the life of their nation and community. He changed their lives. He set them off along paths they might not otherwise have taken.”

Very simply, Trudeau changed the character and atmosphere of Canadian politics. Journalists abandoned objectivity in embracing that change. Academics stepped down from the ivory tower and embraced Trudeau. One of them, Ramsay Cook, took it upon himself to prove to Trudeau that he must run for the Liberal leadership. He got four leading journalists — June Callwood, Trent Frayne, Peter Gzowski and Barbara Frum — to sign a scrap of paper encouraging Trudeau to become prime minister. (It said simply: “Pierre Trudeau is a good s–t. Merde.”)

Ultimately, Trudeau came to Ottawa in 1965 with Pearson because he knew Canada was in serious trouble. Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, which began with the election of the provincial Liberal government of Jean Lesage in 1960, was no longer quiet. It was punctuated by bomb explosions in 1963 — which continued, at the average rate of about one every 10 days, until 1969.

Foreign observers reported on the extraordinary internal dynamic in Quebec. Charles de Gaulle sent emissaries, including his minister of culture André Malraux, to determine whether Quebec could become independent. They reported that it could and likely would. He told his cabinet that Quebec would become free by necessity and that it was his duty to advance that cause. He gave the process a historic shove with his famous declaration on the balcony of Montreal’s Hotel de Ville in 1967: “Vive le Quebec libre.” It was truly a call to arms.

Meanwhile, the federal Liberal government was drifting; and the Conservatives had moved ahead in the polls with Stanfield as their leader. Pearson resigned in December 1967, and candidates lined up to replace him. It appeared the Liberal leader would be Paul Hellyer or Bob Winters, both unilingual businessmen. .

Trudeau barely won the leadership. The close runner-up was Winters. Had he won, Canada’s 1968 federal election would have been contested by two unilingual Maritimers, neither of whom could have talked directly to Quebec.

The timing would have been atrocious. The voice of separatism had become much stronger with the formation of the Parti Québécois under the leadership of René Lévesque in the summer of 1967. Only Trudeau could have matched Lévesque’s eloquence, intelligence and passionate commitment. And he did.

Separatism has become an anachronism these days. But it was far from anachronistic in 1976, when the PQ took office, and Trudeau and Lévesque began the battle for Canada. The PQ leader promised a referendum but he knew Trudeau was too strong an opponent. He waited for Trudeau to depart, which he did after an election loss in May, 1979 to Joe Clark, who announced he would not participate in the Referendum that Lévesque has announced as soon as Trudeau was gone. In the Quebec national assembly, Lévesque demolished Liberal leader Claude Ryan’s defence of federalism.

But then Clark inexplicably decided to take on Trudeau again, and was trounced. Trudeau returned to office on the eve of the referendum. He won 74 of 75 seats in Quebec and an astonishing 68% of the popular vote in the province. Separatism began to stumble and, in the referendum of 1980, it was defeated by almost 20 points.

Claude Charron, Lévesque’s favourite minister, later said that Lévesque was the greatest Quebec politician of his generation — the most eloquent and passionate, and the great hope for an independent Quebec. But, Charron added, he confronted the only leader who could defeat him: Pierre Trudeau.

Trudeau left his lasting mark following the Referendum by pushing through, by sheer determination, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Charter has its critics, on both right and left, but it has been a rare source of common agreement among Canadians east and west, north and south, English and French. Approval of it has remained consistent at the 90% level over the last two decades. It has become a symbol of Trudeau’s vision of Canada.

In that vision, individual Canadians possess defined rights, and no province or region has a special status. In this bilingual, pluralist Canada, it would not all turn on Newfoundland’s cod, Alberta’s oil, or, most decisively, Quebec’s language. We would be masters in our house, but our own house would be all of Canada.

It is this vision that makes Pierre Trudeau an irreplaceable leader for his times.

National Post

Historian and author John English served as a Liberal member of parliament for Kitchener between 1993 and 1997. His books include Citizen of the World: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Volume One: 1919-1968, and Just Watch Me: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Volume Two: 1968-2000.

< http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/03/25/john-english-pierre-trudeau-saved-canada/ >

The struggle for women’s political and economic rights was big news in Old Toronto, 100 years ago. British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Sylvia were drawing sizable crowds to Massey Hall and other venues. And editors at the Toronto Daily Star devoted much of the front page to eldest daughter Christabel Pankhurst’s stunning declaration in London that the suffragists had embarked on a “real war” to claim women’s rights.

“First we talked,” Pankhurst said after a march in London turned ugly on Nov. 22, 1911. “Then we took to peaceful demonstrations. Next we began interrupting public meetings, and to forcing our way into the House of Commons . . . As a third stage we began destroying property. As time has passed we have become more and more violent, and we shall get more so.”

By the time the dust settled, 223 British women were arrested after marching on the National Liberal Club, blocking traffic, scuffling with police and hurling stones at windows. Many showed up at court “badly battered,” with black eyes, scratched faces and torn clothes. They seem to have given as good as they got, using brass knuckles, hat pins and stones on the cops. They certainly weren’t cowed; they vowed to trash the prisons from the inside.

Those traumatic days seem distant, as Canadians mark the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day. But the battle for equality was real, dangerous and waged with passion. The Pankhursts might well argue that even now it is only half-won.

Back then, some in the Canadian establishment shared the British prosecutor’s aversion to such “disgraceful and discreditable . . . organized disorder.” A not-so-funny quip in the Starsuggested that “a fashion note from England intimates that penitentiary stripes will be much worn by suffragette ladies this winter.”

But even in those early days, the Pankhursts were not without admirers here. Dr. Margaret Gordon and the Toronto Suffrage Association were active from offices on Yonge St., across from what is now the Eaton Centre.

In Toronto, more than 2,000 packed Massey Hall to hear Sylvia Pankhurst argue for the vote for Ontario women, as well as equal pay for work of equal value at a time when women were lucky to earn half men’s wages. Late that year, Emmeline Pankhurst made a “magnificent address” of her own at Massey Hall, declaring that “taxation (of women) without representation is tyranny.” Around her, banners read: The time has come to enfranchise the women of Canada and Ontario women need the ballot.

It would be some years before Canadian women got the vote, first on the Prairies in 1916, then in Ontario the following year. But 1911 was a watershed. The suffragist message about voting rights for all women, a fair break for working women, and the need to tackle poverty and hunger was gaining converts here with every passing day. A century later, we honour their courage and their tenacity.

< http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/article/950191–a-century-of-women-s-rights-a-struggle-that-continues >

Modern liberals used reflexively to condemn Adam Smith as the “father of capitalism” (although he had never heard the word). More recently, however, they have been trying to recruit him, switching their emphasis from misunderstanding what he wrote in The Wealth of Nations to misquoting what he said in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

One significant cause to which they have been attempting to sign up the 18th-century Scottish philosopher is combating the “income gap.” The latest big-time policy wonk to attempt to bring the Sage of Kirkcaldy onto the “Inequality Sucks” team is Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund.

In a recent speech, Mr. Strauss-Kahn declared that “Adam Smith — one of the founders of modern economics — recognized clearly that a poor distribution of wealth could undermine the free market system, noting that: ‘The disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful and … neglect persons of poor and mean condition…is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.’ This was over 250 years ago,” Mr. Strauss-Kahn continued. “In today’s world, these problems are magnified under the lens of globalization.”

However, it is Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s lenses than need a new prescription. For a start, Smith’s quote says nothing whatsoever about “a poor distribution of wealth” undermining the free market. Mr. Strauss-Kahn claims that Smith thought that large income gaps would “wear down the social fabric,” but in fact Smith noted (in the part of the quote that Mr. Strauss-Kahn left out) that the attitudes he described towards the rich and poor were necessary to maintain the “order of society.” Far from suggesting that “admiration of the rich” might undermine markets, Smith believed that such admiration was a market driver, even if he didn’t particularly admire it. Smith was writing about admiring fashion, not fascism. And finally — while channelling Smith is always a tricky business — I would venture that Smith’s eyes would pop out were he to witness the level of “poverty” about which Mr. Strauss-Kahn is rending his garments.

The notion of a “welfare state” was utterly alien both to Smith’s political times and his own moral inclinations. Smith lived in an age of personal responsibility. Poor relief was a local, personal affair, as was the “beneficence” that Smith praised as the highest virtue. “Beneficence,” wrote Smith, “is always free, it cannot be extorted by force.” Forced redistribution would have offended Smith’s notion of justice, and he would instantly have spotted that “social justice” is a weasel concept that reverses the notion of justice entirely.

The rich of Smith’s day were nothing like Mark Zuckerberg. They were aristocrats who lived off the backs of agricultural peasants. Moreover, according to “gap” logic, the world would be a better and fairer place if business geniuses such as Mr. Zuckerberg had never been born. Anybody who doesn’t grasp that such an idea is nonsense is incapable of rational thought. But then modern liberals thrive on pressing emotional buttons, not thinking clearly.

Smith would have thought it ridiculous to suggest that a nation might become wealthier or happier by forced “redistribution.” The key to improvement was the universal desire to “better one’s condition” under a regime of secure property rights and minimal government. The division of labour, free trade, and the “natural order” of the market would do the rest.

Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of attempting to recruit Smith is the suggestion that he might be more concerned about Gini coefficients (which measure inequality) than the actual condition of the current “poor.” Smith himself noted that even the poor people of his own day, thanks to the unacknowledged wonders of the Invisible Hand, lived better than had kings of previous times. That’s because they had access — via work — to coats, shoes, kitchen utensils and the odd sack of oatmeal.

As Matt Ridley points out in his book, The Rational Optimist, “Today, of Americans officially designated as ‘poor,’ 99% have electricity, running water, flush toilets and a refrigerator; 95% have a television, 88% a telephone, 71% a car and 70% air-conditioning. Cornelius Vanderbilt had none of these.”

As for the bigger global picture, “[I]n 2005, compared with 1955, the average human being on Planet Earth earned three times as much money (corrected for inflation), ate one-third more calories of food, buried one-third as many of her children and could expect to live one-third longer.… She was more likely to be literate and to have finished school. She was more likely to own a telephone, a flush toilet, a refrigerator and a bicycle.… It is, by any standard, an astonishing human achievement.”

When it comes to the relative poverty of underdeveloped countries, Smith would quickly see that it was rooted not in insufficient “aid” (which has been a disaster), but in kleptocratic governments that keep the Invisible Hand in chains. Meanwhile, he would hardly fail to notice that the taxation system in developed countries is “progressive” — that is, geared towards taking a disproportionate amount from the rich — to a degree inconceivable in his own day.

The vast wealth created by the success of the Smithian system has inevitably attracted the predations of power seekers and their fatally conceited bureaucratic courtesans, who perpetually seek moral justification for their pursuit of other peoples’ earnings. They won’t find it in Adam Smith.

< http://opinion.financialpost.com/2011/02/01/peter-foster-imf-chief-twists-adam-smith’s-view-of-inequality/ >

American economist Emmanuel Saez has painstakingly assembled a century-long statistical series on U.S. income distribution. On two occasions, the share of income captured by the richest 1 per cent reached about a quarter of the national total. The first time was in 1928, the second in 2007. As we all know, both peaks in wealth concentration were followed by financial catastrophe and depression. Indeed, maldistribution clearly contributed to both meltdowns.

But there’s a startling difference in the political reverberations that followed the two conflagrations. In the 1930s, outrage at the pre-Depression extravagance of the rich, contrasting with the dislocation experienced by masses of Americans, sparked a decade of left-leaning foment. Government expanded income security, directly hired millions of unemployed, and actively supported a new generation of unions to fight for the common folk. Meantime, it reined in business excess through tough financial rules, anti-trust policies, and high taxes on the rich.

This time around, there’s been plenty of populist anger – but (so far) it’s been steered in exactly the opposite direction. Social supports and public employment are being cut dramatically (especially by U.S. state and local governments). Barack Obama’s election promise to modernize labour laws and rebuild unions was dead – even before he lost Congress. And several state governments are now preparing a full assault on union rights: Recent proposals in Ohio and Wisconsin would virtually outlaw collective bargaining across broad swaths of the public sector.

The richest 1 per cent almost tripled their share of U.S. national income since 1978, gobbling two-thirds of the income gains generated in the whole economy over the past decade. With numbers like these, highlighting the incomes of the ultra-rich is no longer an idle, envious pastime. The concentration of wealth at the top has become macroeconomically significant.

Recession or no recession, the gravy train at the top hasn’t paused for breath: Executive bonuses keep rising, and the top 25 hedge-fund managers made a staggering $1-billion each in 2009. Nevertheless, the trend in U.S. politics is not to challenge the contrast between the top and the bottom, but to reinforce it. The Tea Party portrays government itself as the problem. And rather than empowering average workers to improve their lot (like the Wagner Act did in 1935), America’s rightward lurch in labour relations will reinforce the stagnation at the bottom.

Canada is a kinder, gentler, fairer place. So the numbers aren’t as extreme. Or are they? Here, the richest 1 per cent (less than 250,000 tax filers) capture 17 per cent of total income, and that share has merely doubled (not trebled) since the egalitarian 1970s. A full third of all income gains across Canada since 1987 have gone to that lucky group. For the ultra-ultra-rich (the top 0.1 per cent of families, 25,000 in total, with average income of $1.5-million), their share of national income has trebled to 6.5 per cent.

Despite this largesse, in Canada, too, the political bandwagon lurches to the right. There’s been infinitely more hot air expended since the financial meltdown over the salaries of unionized garbage collectors than those of high-flying financiers. Our home-grown plutocracy, meanwhile, keeps raking it in. Bonuses at the Big Six banks alone reached $8.9-billion in 2010, the highest ever. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives recently documented that the typical Canadian CEO made as much by 2:30 p.m. on Jan. 3 as the average worker makes all year long.

Imagine a city the size of Saskatoon hogging a third of all the new income generated by the entire country. Imagine folks who earn as much in a few hours as the rest of us do in a year – yet still lecture us on the need to tighten our belts. Imagine 25,000 families earning as much as the bottom seven million tax filers put together. How long will these excesses fly under the public’s radar, while we bicker over wage gaps between unionized garbage collectors and non-union fast-food workers? Not long, I hope.

Jim Stanford is an economist with the Canadian Auto Workers union.

< http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/redirecting-our-rage-at-the-real-gravy-train/article1871148/ >

This is the text of the Charles Bronfman Lecture delivered at the University of Ottawa on Oct. 14, 2010:

It’s a pleasure to give this year’s Charles R. Bronfman Lecture in Canadian Studies. And for this honour I am most appreciative to the University of Ottawa. I said it’s a pleasure to give the lecture because it gives me the opportunity to say something about current Canadian politics — by which I don’t mean the daily fluff of Question Period, but rather the broader, more alarming trend of contemporary thought and practice.

It’s become a truism to say that we are living through the most serious economic crisis since the 1930s. Clearly we could have used the past two years to rethink current assumptions about politics and economics and go in a new direction, as did happen in the aftermath of the Great Depression and the Second World War. Have we done this? On the contrary, the evidence is that Canada plans to stay put. Once the current stimulus package is completed next spring, the 2008 pre-crisis status quo will be re-established. How did we get there?

Writing in The New Yorker magazine two years ago, David Frum, the Canadian born speech-writer for George Bush, asserted that the conservative revolution launched by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s had as its specific purpose the rolling back of “social democracy” in the Anglo-American world. That’s probably not how the Thatcher-Reagan project would have been described by an American, for whom, as we saw in the debate last year on health-care reform, social democracy is largely an alien concept. But it’s not surprising that Frum would think in these terms. He was, after all, born and raised here in Canada, in a political culture where the broad social and economic values established after the Second World War have commonly been described as social democratic; and I think his formulation does capture what that conservative revolution of the 1980s and ’90s meant, in its attack on all the great advances of the postwar era. The idea, as Nobel Prize winner in economics, Paul Krugman, has pointed out, was to get government down to the size where it could be drowned in a bathtub. (Krugman was quoting another conservative.)

So what was the situation here in Canada, in the U.S. and the U.K. that so disturbed these new conservatives? I will try to put it in context. Virginia Woolf once said that following WWI, there was a widespread yearning for the pre-war years. That was certainly not the case following World War II and the Great Depression of the 1930s. There was no such atavistic desire for a rerun of the past. On the contrary, throughout the advanced democratic capitalist economies there were virtually unanimous calls for “social reconstruction.” A young English soldier writing home from Italy just before the war’s end, had this to say:

“We have almost won the war, at the highest price ever paid for victory. If you could see the shattered misery that once was Italy, the bleeding countryside and the wrecked villages, if you could see Cassino, with a bomb-created river washing green slime through a shapeless rubble that a year ago was homes, you would realize more than ever that the defeat of Hitler and Mussolini is not enough, by itself, to justify the destruction, not just of 20 years of fascism, but too often of 20 centuries of Europe.

He concluded by saying, “Only a more glorious future can make up for this annihilation of the past.”

That young soldier was Denis Healey, who went on to be a distinguished MP and chancellor of the exchequer in a postwar Labour government in Britain. Again, at the war’s end, another Englishman, this time an architect, illustrated what this “glorious future” meant even in architecture. It meant, he said, the broader claims of democracy, not merely the counting of votes, had to be taken into account. “If democracy means anything,” he wrote, it means deciding (in housing, for example) — for a change — to pay some attention to the expressed preferences of the majority.” What these and so many other postwar people were saying was that, in Abraham Lincoln’s accurate and precise phrase about democracy, there was at last to be a government not only by and of but also for the people. Virtually all aspects of the pre-war conventional political thought about the role of government were opened for serious discussion. Subsequently, a broad new political development took place throughout the North Atlantic democracies. Much to the chagrin of David Frum and his ideological cohorts, Canada, the U.K., and to a lesser extent, the U.S., were among them.

For four decades after the war Canadians joined with citizens in other North Atlantic democracies in creating the most productive and equitable societies in history. Although poverty was by no means eliminated, for the large majority this was the Golden Age. It was during this period that I came of age. When I graduated at the end of the 1950s, my personal debt was merely a few hundred dollars. The world, I believed, was my oyster. High economic growth rates were accompanied by a wide-ranging set of new social entitlements. Led by social democratic ideology in North America and Britain, as well as by many Christian Democrats in continental Europe, it came to be understood that, left to its own devices, capitalism was not only inherently unstable but would also produce a distribution of goods and services that was profoundly unfair. If citizens in the North Atlantic democracies were to have half a chance at a life of dignity — the stipulated goal of the newly established Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 — governments believed they had to act. As I have said, in Canada we were part of this citizen-driven but government-implemented widespread political and economic change. While pushed by the CCF and the NDP, both the Liberals and the Progressive Conservatives in varying degrees came to share in this shift in ideology and practice. For both ethical reasons and the functional need for stability, an expanding role for government and increasing equality came to be taken for granted. Left behind was the belief that individuals and the economy should be left to fend for themselves. In its place was a new model of democracy, or rather an idea retrieved from ancient Greece, that democracy meant more than the right set of procedures for selecting and maintaining governments. It also meant government action for the people.

What emerged from this thinking was a Canada characterized by a wide range of new social and economic entitlements: government pensions, universal health care, trade union rights, comprehensive unemployment insurance, the expectation that every boy and girl with ability could go to university — and all were paid for by adequate levels of progressive taxation. What were once considered benefits appropriately provided by charitable organizations had become rights guaranteed by the state. Achieving more equality in their everyday lives, we Canadians also became a nation of greater social cohesion, and for the first time in history we started to describe ourselves as “sharing and caring.” This higher level of social and economic equality, symbolized by the signing on to the legally binding International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in 1976, also produced greater tolerance and a reaching out to provide new freedoms, to women, to First Nations, to gays, to the artistic community and to ethnic minorities. Multiculturalism, still so much a matter of contention in Europe, would become, as it remains today, an accepted reality in Canada. These new freedoms were best illustrated by the civil society activism and political leadership that led to the broad-ranging rights provisions for individuals and groups included in Canada’s new Charter of Rights and Freedoms adopted in 1982.

Whether put in place by political parties self-described as social democratic or by other political formations, the postwar combination of political, civil, social and economic rights aimed at citizens’ equality came to be known by many social policy experts and the general intellectual community as the social democratic alternative to the pre-war minimal-state, market-based democracies. Its principles were nicely summed up by John Humphrey, the Canadian who wrote the first draft of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, when he wrote in his autobiography that “Human rights without social and economic rights have no meaning for most people.”

The kind of Canada I’ve just been describing was the experience of my generation. We knew from our parents what had gone before. They had lived through depression and war, and we could see very clearly how the changes were working to our advantage. The generation after us — the so-called baby boomers — had the benefits of those changes, and more, here in Canada. But in their historical moment, it may not have seemed to them so obvious where those advantages had come from. You might say that, while Canadians of that generation were born on third base, many of them grew up thinking they had hit a triple. Some, to be sure, went on to fight other battles for social justice, but in general there was a loss of historical memory, which made them and their successors much more susceptible to the neo-liberal shift that followed.

Long before the crash in the global economy two years ago this month, Canada and many other Western democracies had undergone a significant ideological and material reversal. Serious dissatisfaction with the governments at the end of the 1970s in the U.K. and the U.S. was used by incoming political conservatives and economic elites on both sides of the Atlantic to portray short-run difficulties in the economy as systemic failures in the relationship between the economy and government. Government, president Reagan proclaimed, is not the answer; it’s the problem. Hence, the attack on postwar social democracy so frankly described by David Frum. In Canada, the revision first took place in open ideological form here in Ontario. Rejecting the traditional Toryism of Bill Davis and of Progressive Conservatives like Robert Stanfield, Mike Harris’s new Conservative government portrayed government itself as an enemy of progress and eviscerated the equality building projects of the welfare state. This ideological approach was brought to federal politics by the right-wing populism of Preston Manning’s Reform party. Reform soon morphed into the Alliance and has since emerged in full bloom as Canada’s Conservative party. No longer self-described as “progressive” and no longer having the support of Conservatives like Joe Clark, Flora Macdonald and the late Senator Norm Atkins. But, significantly, this approach to government was also embraced by Canada’s Liberal party, which became market-driven in the 1990s.

This ideological shift became particularly pronounced in the middle of that decade, after the deficit had been overcome and surpluses restored. Under the Liberals and then their Conservative successor, federal programs were not fixed. They were abolished. Budgets were not simply reduced. They were slashed. Artists and the CBC were cut loose and encouraged to rely more on the market. Income taxes needed for the restoration of social programs were not only cut but also made less progressive. Not surprisingly then, during the period 1995-2005, the rich continued to get richer and the percentage of poor children remained virtually where it was in 1989 when Parliament had voted unanimously to eliminate it by the year 2000. We have no universal child care, national housing programs disappeared, unemployment insurance benefits were radically reduced, post-secondary education spending was slashed, and environmental reform never got off the ground. One of the dictionary meanings of “barbaric” is “rough and unrestrained.” Another is the “absence of civilized standards.” Such is the new barbarism in Canada.

Reflecting the ideological shift at the time, the Liberal minister of finance (Paul Martin) actually boasted that government spending as a proportion of GDP had been reduced to the level of 1951. Slashing social budgets, including health care and post-secondary education, the federal government’s new emphasis on the market virtually guaranteed that all the benefits of the economic boom of the 1990s went to the top 10 per cent of Canadians. During the same period in the United States, while Bill Clinton did deregulate the financial sector, he changed few social programs. Instead of such slashing, he increased taxes on the rich and relied on economic growth. It worked. The American deficit turned into a surplus. More than anything else, it was this American boom that pulled our economy into real growth during this period. Meanwhile, after our deficit disappeared, the federal government moved in the opposite direction. Instead of restoring the social programs — except for health care — the Liberals reduced capital gains taxes and provided income tax reductions which went disproportionately to the rich. This was far from what liberalism had meant in the era of Lester Pearson.

It’s been said that this return to a 1920s view had such an impact in the Anglo-American world partly because of the appeal of its leaders and partly because they won the battle of ideas. It is true that Thatcher and Reagan were forceful leaders. However, it’s laughable to pretend that the neo-liberalism that came to characterize the new conventional wisdom in Canada and the rest of the Anglo-American world, among both politicians and the press, in any sense reflected a triumph of critical thinking. Quite the contrary. We got the simple-minded clichés of an ideology, the kind that the great conservative thinker, Michael Oakeshott warned about when I was a student of his at the London School of Economics 45 years ago. Instead of arguments we got slogans. Instead of policies reflecting the complex interconnected roles of government and the economy, we got right-wing nostrums attacking the state. Instead of a robust sense of democratic citizenship, we heard much less about “citizens” and more about “taxpayers” and “consumers.” These nostrums plus potboiler summaries of editorials taken from the Economistcontinue to provide the social and economic guidebook of a whole generation of politicians and journalists. There can be little doubt, however, that they believe them, proving once again that there is no necessary correlation between conviction and truth.

What are these commonplace nostrums proclaimed so frequently as self-evident truths?

1. To have higher national productivity we must have lower taxes and less government.

2. To attack poverty and lessen the impact of inequality — once the current stimulus has ended — we must simply let the market grow on its own, and all will benefit.

3. To improve our competitiveness in an increasingly global marketplace we must reduce or eliminate our costly universal social programs.

4. To improve the level of voluntary participation in civil society, the level of government must be cut back.

Not a single one of these claims is true. When you look at the evidence in Canada or abroad, a very different picture emerges.

During the 1990s, Austria, Germany and the Netherlands (among other so-called high-tax countries) kept the level of taxes needed to maintain strong social programs. Did their productivity go down? No. It equalled or exceeded that of the United States and Canada. Indeed, within the United States, contrary to what establishment economists forecast at the time, when Clinton increased taxes on the rich, we now know productivity actually began to improve.

In spite of claims that poverty and inequality would be looked after by leaving the economy to grow on its own, during the 1990s, as I have pointed out, the opposite occurred. High levels of economic growth in Canada were actually accompanied by a widening gap between poor or average families and the rich. During this 10-year period, while the high percentage of poor children remained static, the Nordic countries virtually eliminated child poverty. According to the OECD report for October 2008, child poverty in Canada is now at a 9.5 per cent, down only 2 per cent from 1989, much worse than the global leaders Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway, who range between 3 and 5 per cent. Instead of universal social programs reducing a nation’s economic competitiveness, they often improve it. Not only the continental European countries today but also some of the so-called “Asian tiger” nations decades ago had carefully applied this understanding in building their dynamic economies. In Canada, our own public spending on universal health care costs the economy much less per capita in comparison with private spending on health insurance in the United States. Even after President Obama’s reforms are fully implemented, their per-capita spending will remain much higher than ours, much of it to ensure profits to insurance companies, and several million Americans will still remain uncovered by insurance. During the recent debate in the U.S. about health-care reform, many U.S. economists pointed out, on efficiency grounds alone, that a public single-payer form of health insurance is less costly than having a plethora of profit-making insurance companies offering essentially the same service.

Instead of going up when governments slashed billions of dollars from social programs during the 1990s, levels of trust and voluntarism in Canada underwent a serious decline by the end of the decade. The scale of the increase in inequality in Canada beginning in the last decade of the 20th century is immense. Remember that for most Western economies, including Canada, the 1990s were the best decade of economic growth in 40 years, a period which the trickle-down soothsayers said would benefit everyone. Between 1998 and 2007 the average wage of full-time workers went up less than the rate of inflation (from $33,000 to $40,000). In contrast, during the same period the top 1 per cent increased by 100 per cent their share of total wages and salaries, and the compensation of the top 100 CEOs went from an annual average of $3.5 million to $10.4 million — up 300 per cent. Today we have 55 billionaires and thousands of multi-millionaires, none of whom pay any inheritance tax. Meanwhile, the majority of Canadians continue to see a downward shift in their share of the national income that they worked to create. Seventy per cent of Canadian households have a smaller share now than they had at the end of the 1990s. A final statistic: excluding the elderly, the bottom 50 per cent of Canadians actually have lower after-tax incomes than their equivalents in the 1970s. And, by the way, it’s worth asking whether changes in the census will mean we no longer will have reliable data to make such comparisons.

The present Conservative government has simply continued its predecessor’s onslaught on equality. As a consequence of the continuing underfunding of social spending and irresponsible tax cuts disproportionately favouring the rich, for many Canadians it came as no surprise when we were criticized by the United Nations in 2007 for failing to live up to our obligations under the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. This was followed in 2008 by an OECD report showing that growth in inequality in Canada is now among the worst in the OECD. This march to inequality was confirmed last year by the Conference Board of Canada. In contrast, in continental western Europe, where increases in inequality in general have been less severe, six months before the crash in October 2008, finance ministers at the European Union meeting in Brussels at least committed themselves to taking action to deal with inequality. It was the same group of continental Europeans who recently took the lead to curb outrageous salaries and bonuses of the super-rich. Even the Labour government in Britain, an early convert to deregulation, in the months just before this year’s defeat in the polls finally increased taxes on upper income groups.

This then is the legacy of neo-liberal ideology. While we Canadians did not deregulate our financial institutions, we must not allow this to continue to obscure the other, deeper democratic problem, the alarming increase in inequality created in large measure by politicians for whom the priorities of the market must trump all other considerations. In fostering this inequality, what recent Canadian federal governments have done is not only to reject the political legacy of the CCF and the NDP but also that of prime ministers Lester Pearson, John Diefenbaker and Pierre Trudeau — all of whom came to see the importance of fiscal policy and social programs as stabilizing and equalizing forces in the economy.

Under the leadership of the post-WWII generation, Canadians began to transform themselves in the 20th century. As I have already suggested, part of this transformation was picked up by my generation of politicians and was reflected to some extent in all of our parties. Under various political labels, as a nation we had embarked on the social democratic journey which combines a regulated and efficient market-based economy with strong social and fiscal policies aimed at overcoming poverty and achieving greater equality. It is this journey — so brilliantly described in the late Tony Judt’s Postwar — that has been dangerously undermined not simply by inherent forces in the economy but by wilful decisions made by politicians. Ideology matters. Values, good and bad, have consequences.

I also mentioned earlier that, as a consequence of becoming more equal in economic terms, we Canadians had also become more tolerant and more cohesive. Sharing and caring was not merely a slogan. Surveys showed that it was characteristic Canadian behaviour. The progressive politics of my generation were driven to the equality agenda because of ethical considerations and also concern for macroeconomic stability, both of which were the outcomes of war and depression in the 1930s and ’40s. However, we now have recent and clear evidence that more than stability and ethical concerns about equality is at stake. More equal societies are not simply more stable and just, they are also healthier in virtually every respect for everyone in them. Bringing together data from a large number of international studies (UN, World Bank, U.S. Census, Statistics Canada) two leading British social epidemiologists,Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in their book, The Spirit Level, published last year, show the society-wide positive social consequences of more equality. As a result of their comprehensive analysis of data from dozens of comparatively rich countries, we now know that ethical concerns and practical benefits come together: equality works.

Their research has shown that more equal nations, as well as more equal states within the United States, are better off in almost every way. Their citizens are healthier, live longer, have fewer teenage pregnancies, are more law abiding, participate more in civic projects and are more trusting of their neighbours. Contrary to those who claim freedom is sacrificed with more equality, for the great majority the opposite is true. With more economic equality, there is a greater flourishing of the kind of responsible individualism and citizenship favoured by the great liberal, John Stuart Mill. A basic truth must be understood: a substantial level of real equality is necessary for equality of opportunity to work. Transcending any differences in religion, language and culture, it is the higher degree of equality that makes those nations so much better off than the U.S. or the U.K., which are the most unequal. I repeat and emphasize that once a certain minimum level of wealth is reached in a country, their accumulated evidence shows it is not more growth but more equality that leads to a better quality of life for everyone.

Wilkinson and Pickett’s work demonstrates that unequal societies are not only unfair, they are also dysfunctional. The status-related insecurity and anxiety produced by unequal societies promotes more isolation, social estrangement, and negative health outcomes than in societies that are more equal. Not just the poor but everyone is worse off. Rich and highly educated British and Americans do worse than their equivalents in more equal societies.

As a country Canada is somewhere in the middle of the pack of wealthy nations, but as I have said, we are moving backwards. We’re becoming more unequal more rapidly than most OECD countries. The implications are clear. Once we are firmly out of the current crisis, by promoting only more growth and not more equality we will continue to foster only more negatives in health and social behaviour. Such a policy could hardly be more dysfunctional. Low wages, low social benefits and regressive tax policies are not only ethically unfair for the poor whose market-based incomes are the lowest and whose human potential to flourish they reduce. Because such policies maintain or increase inequality and exacerbate social tensions and anxiety in general, they are also bad for everyone else. In contrast, more equality benefits all classes: lower, middle and upper. More growth alone won’t fix Canada, but sharing our wealth as many European countries have demonstrated, can make a huge difference.

We have known for a long time that poverty and inequality are bad for those directly affected by it — the unemployed, poor kids, anxious seniors, overburdened families. But, in thinking beyond the current crisis, we now have evidence that inequality harms us all. In recent decades in Canada, many who have become members of the middle class in income and expectations have not readily seen themselves as beneficiaries of new social initiatives aimed at equality. On the contrary, many have an apprehension that they will pay but that only others will benefit. For those of us who believe in equality as a core democratic value, the task is perhaps easier now than it once was. Because of the new evidence we can show middle class Canadians that equality-building measures do directly benefit them and their children. Such societies are characterized not only by better health outcomes for everyone but also by less violence, more citizen engagement, fewer teenage pregnancies, more voluntarism, and less consumerism. Surely this is what we all desire.

Yes, the evidence is on our side, but we must never forget what Louise Arbour said in herLafontaine-Baldwin lecture a few years ago (2005). The elites in our country resist such change, she said, “precisely because it threatens . . . to rectify distributions of political, economic or social power.” She stressed it was a struggle in the past to overcome such resistance. That struggle remains today.

From Periclean Athens to the 21st century liberty and equality have been seen as the core values of democracy. Given that we now know the positive impact more equality can have on the quality of freely chosen lives for everyone, all democrats should speak out. Instead of worship of the market, we should recognize its benefits but underline its limits. Instead of seeing government as the enemy, we must reclaim its possibilities. And instead of restoring the pre-2008 system, the federal government should join with the majority of provinces and launch the anti-poverty program that both the House of Commons and the Senate have called for. We must reclaim for the 21st century the ancient democratic goal of more equality.

< http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/article/876138–equality-or-barbarism >

Upon John Diefenbaker’s death in 1979 it was one of his successors as prime minister who summed up the Prairie populist’s greatest achievement.

“I was struck,” Pierre Trudeau said, “by his vigorous defence of human rights and individual liberties. The Bill of Rights remains a monument to him.”

August 10 is the 50th anniversary of the proclamation of the Canadian Bill of Rights. Had this lifelong dream of Diefenbaker’s not become a reality, one could argue that Trudeau’s own Charter of Rights might not have come into being.

It is indeed a monument to Diefenbaker. Quite rightly, the statue of our 13th prime minister on Parliament Hill portrays Diefenbaker staring defiantly forward as he clutches his Bill of Rights.

Thanks to the tireless work by Diefenbaker — a former defence lawyer, a Canadian of non-French or English origins, and a child of the Prairie west who knew discrimination and had witnessed injustice far too many times in his life — who began calling for a declaration by Parliament of the fundamental rights, freedoms and responsibilities of Canadians from the moment he was first elected in 1940, these crucial issues were put on the nation’s agenda.

“I believe the time has come for a declaration of liberties to be made by this Parliament,” he thundered in the Commons in 1946. “Magna Carta is part of our birthright. Habeas corpus, the bill of rights, the petition of right, all are part of our traditions . . . freedom from capricious arrest and freedoms under the rule of law, should be made part and parcel of the law of the country.”

Diefenbaker made those comments at the dawn of the Cold War and the shocking defection of Ottawa-based Soviet clerk Igor Gouzenko. It was an era of Royal Commissions being held in secret and a draconian Official Secrets Act holding sway. Entering into the “Red Scare” period — perhaps akin to the United States right after 9/11 — it took a brave politician not to pander to public opinion in the emerging ideological war against communism and the USSR. Instead, the future prime minister stood on principle and fought for the civil liberties of his generation of Canadians.

“The issue was genuine,” Diefenbaker biographer Denis Smith wrote in the 1990s. “It was a subject that suited his individualism, his sense of tradition, his sympathy for the voiceless, and his rhetorical genius.”

The declaration that Diefenbaker bequeathed us 50 years ago this summer was far from a perfect document by the standards of post-Charter Canada. It was, of course, an Act of Parliament and not entrenched in the Constitution as the Charter is today. It also only applied to areas of federal jurisdiction.

Seeking perfection, many legal experts at the time dismissed and belittled Diefenbaker’s Bill of Rights. Smith’s biography of Diefenbaker, Rogue Tory, again describes the reaction of experts when the government first publicly floated the idea.

“The challenge was instantly taken up at the annual meeting of the Canadian Bar Association, where delegates, attacking on all fronts, called the bill “downright dangerous,” “window dressing,” “a political show,” “a useless piece of paper unless it was entrenched in the Constitution,” Smith wrote.

Dief forged ahead despite the criticism. Smith continues: “The bill was a politician’s tentative step onto a high wire — but a step that no other federal politician had dared to take.”

Trudeau’s brilliant principal secretary during the 15th prime minister’s final term (1980-1984) was Tom Axworthy. He was at Trudeau’s side throughout the constitutional negotiations that led to our Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Axworthy once wrote the following concerning the crucial role he believed the Bill of Rights played in our constitutional evolution:

“In 1982, the Constitution was finally amended and the Charter came into force,” he wrote. “But this would never have happened if John Diefenbaker had not lit the way with his lifelong dedication to human rights.”

On this, the 50th anniversary of the proclamation of the Bill of Rights, it will do all Canadians well to remember John Diefenbaker’s words from the summer of 1960 as he described his duty: “I am a Canadian, a free Canadian, free to speak without fear, free to worship God in my own way, free to stand for what I think right, free to oppose what I believe wrong, free to choose those who shall govern my country. This heritage of freedom I pledge to uphold for myself and all mankind.”

< http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/845783–diefenbaker-s-bill-of-rights-an-act-worth-remembering >

BERKELEY, CALIF.—A man in an iron lung, who fought to be educated and live independently here, was one of the early activists for disability rights.

This month, the late Ed Roberts is being honoured for work that helped lead to the Americans With Disabilities Act, one U.S. law which has helped change the world for the better.

Against much Republican opposition, the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law July 26, 1990, by a Republican President, George H.W. Bush.

The landmark law bans discrimination against people with disabilities, including in employment, and requires employers make “reasonable accommodations” for disabled workers. It effectively ended America’s de-facto segregation of people with disabilities, and prompted similar laws in 52 countries, including Canada, as well as the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disability.

“It’s the gold standard for disability rights,” says Andy Imparato, president and CEO of the American Association of People With Disabilities, largest organization of its kind in the U.S.

In Canada, the Americans With Disabilities Act helped spark the Accessibility for Ontarians With Disabilities Act —this is still the only province with specific legislation — and continues to be “a model for many other countries,” says Penny Hartin, CEO of the World Blind Union. The union, whose headquarters are in Toronto, has members in 190 countries.

As they lobby for improved Canadian legislation, Accessibility for Ontarians With Disabilities Act architects are still emboldened by the work of U.S. pioneers, Hartin says.

Zona Roberts, 90-year-old mother of pioneering Ed, laughs when she recalls a local newspaper headline after her son became the first to win the right to attend the University of California at Berkeley in his wheelchair.

“It said, ‘Helpless cripple goes to college,’ ” she recalls. “We were tickled by that. He started the whole program.” That was in 1962.

Roberts, paralyzed below the neck from polio at age 14 in 1953, was required to take physical education and driver’s education classes to graduate high school, but had only slight movement in one finger. The school board ignored his good marks and still insisted he couldn’t graduate without these mandatory classes.

Zona used her clout as PTA president to browbeat education officials into granting Roberts’s hard-earned diploma.

“They told Ed, ‘You don’t want to cheapen your diploma, do you?’ ” she says. “That was one of the pivotal, I-can’t-believe-it moments. I wasn’t going to take that. It was easy (to fight) after that.”

Roberts finished high school by going to classes one day a week in a non-motorized wheelchair, and taking courses at home, by telephone and speakers set up at school.

His lungs were so weakened by polio that he lived part of the day in the family’s dining room in an iron lung, an enormous contraption designed to “breathe” for him.

Later, Roberts attended classes at Berkeley with aides pushing his chair over the hilly campus, and slept in an iron lung every night at the university’s medical centre.

Roberts’s campaign to live independently, with paid attendants, began California’s groundbreaking policy of supportive services for people with disabilities.

He turned Berkeley’s medical centre, for awhile, into a mini-dorm for students with significant disabilities. They became disability rights activists known as “The Rolling Quads.”

Today, the campus and city are recognized as world leaders in improving accessibility, inclusion, and equality for people with disabilities.

Berkeley was the first city in the U.S. to create curb cuts for wheelchairs—a design change so historic that the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. has a hunk of curb broken by activists protesting public space designed only for the able-bodied.

Roberts founded the world’s first Center for Independent Living in Berkeley in 1972, spawning hundreds of such centers in the U.S. and worldwide.

Once told by a state Department of Rehabilitation counselor that he couldn’t be trained for anything because he needed a respirator and wheelchair, Roberts got a Master’s degree at Berkeley, and was later appointed by then-California Governor Jerry Brown to run the state’s Department of Rehabilitation.

Zona became a Center for Independent Living counselor, then director of Berkeley’s disabled students program. Roberts died from a stroke, aged 56, in 1995.

The Ed Roberts Campus under construction here will be an independent living centre, owned and operated by people with disabilities, equipped with the most advanced technologies to assist its users.

In the 1960s and ‘70s, political muscle meant protests.

People in wheelchairs padlocked themselves together, and took over streets and government buildings across the U.S., agitating for their rights.

That included a “creep-in” when disabled youth crawled up the steps of Congress, disturbing then-Republican Senator Bob Dole, who said such stunts did little to help advance the cause.

(Dole is partly paralyzed from World War II injuries. He co-sponsored the Americans with Disabilities Act in the Senate, along with the late Ted Kennedy, and current Republican Senator Orrin Hatch.)

One of the most famous protests was in San Francisco in 1977, where people ranging from the Black Panthers to severely disabled activists held a 25-day “sit-in” at a federal building, urging Washington to end discrimination against people with disabilities.

“It was a revolution,” says California state assembly member Tom Ammiano, a long-time civil rights leader. “The United States was backward on any kind of accessibility issues, on equal access . . . (protests) started to change the way people with disabilities were treated, as second-class citizens, and seen, instead, as productive contributors.”

Ammiano, who marched in San Francisco as a special education teacher, took along his students, so the newest generation could fight for their rights too.

“We were not hiding people any more. Their anger was totally justified.”

The return of wounded Vietnam War veterans made the public more aware of disability rights, Ammiano recalls.

“It was a sweet irony” that an unpopular war helped bring together Republicans and Democrats over the civil rights of people with disabilities, he says.

“It made some people uncomfortable,” Ammiano recalls, noting that then-San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein, now senior Democrat senator for California, initially resisted building ramps and other improvements that would change the historic city hall.

Yet the Americans with Disabilities Act required such structural modifications, along with changes to public education, transit and communications, to boost access for people with disabilities.

Today, Act-inspired design such as talking computers have helped improve accessibility for everyone from toddlers to elders.

“Legislative changes had a big impact in leveling the playing field,” says Carol Glazer, president of the National Organization for People With Disabilities, headquartered in Washington.

After following other civil rights movements for gender, ethnic and racial minorities, the disability rights movement “could still be 20 to 25 years behind” the progress of others, she adds.

“The legislative victory was very significant, but as with any legislative victory, it takes time for society to change its practices, expectations and assumptions,” Glazer says.

Public attitudes about disabilities have changed, but discrimination persists, says Hortin, who still encounters prejudice and ignorance while traveling the world with her guide dog.

But as Baby Boomers age, understanding of disability is increasing, and myths and fears about people with disabilities dissolving.

“We estimate there are 54 million Americans with disabilities, or one in five, and that number is growing with the Baby Boomers, who are living longer through advances in medical technology,” Glazer says.

But, “We want to see advances all across the board. We’re impatient.”

Kathleen Kenna, the Star’s former Washington correspondent, is a rehabilitation counselor and writer living in Nevada.

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