Ontario is shaping up for a fight with the federal government over the now defunct long-gun registry after Premier Dalton McGuinty said Friday that he wanted stores to keep records of who buys firearms, despite objections in Ottawa.

The defiant statement came on the same day RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson warned all chief firearms officers in the country that they must not to create any semblance of a long-gun registry in their jurisdictions.

“The coming into force of the Ending the Long-Gun Registry Act leaves no doubt that Parliament has sought to eliminate any form of a long-gun registry,” Paulson wrote in a letter.

But Ontario has a different interpretation of the Firearms Act, and it will be up to the federal government to introduce legislation to counter the record-keeping practice, said McGuinty.

“We’re not going to adopt a long-gun registry here in Ontario,” McGuinty said after touring a local website development company.

“But we will maintain a practice that’s been in place since 1978.”

At the same time, Quebec has mounted a legal challenge preventing the destruction of federal long-gun records.

“Let’s not have an exchange between the RCMP expert in this area and the provincial experts in this area,” McGuinty added.

“Let’s turn it back to the feds and say if your intention was to not only eliminate the long-gun registry but a pre-existing practice, I think you need to make that clear.

“Right now there’s obviously some uncertainty.”

Federal Public Safety Minister Vic Toews sent a letter Tuesday to all provincial chief firearms officers, telling them the collection of point-of-sale data is no longer authorized under the Firearms Act.

He asked the RCMP to notify him “immediately” if they learn that chief firearms officers are engaged in “unauthorized data collection.”

Toews’ letter to Paulson added that the RCMP and the Canadian Firearms Program were to provide “no assistance or direction” to any province that may be undertaking measures to create a provincial long-gun registry.

Officials with the Chief Firearms Office of the Ontario Provincial Police have previously said the OPP would continue to maintain records of all firearms sales and who bought them.

While they have insisted this is not an attempt to create a provincial long-gun registry, some observers have complained that Ontario police are flouting the will of Parliament, and creating a new provincial gun registry “by the backdoor.”

Toews said the collection of point-of-sale data is no longer authorized under the Firearms Act.

Paulson reiterated this point in his letter.

“I instruct all Chief Firearms Officers to ensure that the licensing conditions you impose on business records pursuant to the Firearms Act do not facilitate the creation of long-gun registries in your jurisdictions,” he said.

Ontario Community Safety Minister Madeleine Meilleur has written Toews to clarify the province’s position on the issue.

Meilleur says recent media attention created confusion, so she wanted Ottawa to know Ontario does not want a provincial gun registry and will “comply fully” with the requirements of Bill C-19, which killed the federal long-gun registry.

But in an interview, Meilleur said Ontario retailers will continue to take down names and address of anyone purchasing a gun as part of the permit process.

She said the chief firearms officer of the Ontario Provincial Police interprets section 58 of the Firearms Act as giving him the power to impose that requirement.

With files from Postmedia News and The Canadian Press

< http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/05/11/rcmp-boss-warns-provinces-against-backdoor-long-gun-registries/ >

Settling in by the window of a French bistro along the strip of Harbord Street that caters to Toronto’s academic gentry, the psychiatrist David Goldbloom refuses a glass of wine without a second thought. Frankly, he looks appalled at the suggestion, as he will soon be seeing patients at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, where the lingering odour of even the most delicate grape could cause untold problems.

And yet, given the daunting task before him as the new chair of the Mental Health Commission of Canada, whose national strategy launches on Tuesday, one imagines the man could use a drink.

For the casual observer, the parade of news stories about mental illness at the extremes can inspire despair. In Halifax, a gay activist is killed by a man on a one-hour leave from a secure forensic psychiatric unit. In Toronto, a schizophrenic man kills his father at home, and then himself in jail. An Ontario appeals court rules that a man who killed his wife may collect on her life insurance, over their son’s objection, because he was insane when he did it.

And the Ontario legislature vows to review police procedure to reduce the number of mentally ill people hurt or killed in confrontation with police.

With headlines like these, it is tempting to see serious mental illness as the incorrigible problem child of Canadian health, social and justice policy, epitomized by Ashley Smith, the mentally ill New Brunswick teenager whose cross-country tour of Canada’s penal system illustrated its myriad failings and ended with her suicide being videotaped by guards.

But as he prepares to launch Canada’s long-awaited national strategy on mental health, complete with a budget-style media lock-up on in Ottawa, Dr. Goldbloom is much more optimistic, and his perspective is wider than the terrible extremes.

“We do have a problem with perceptions of dangerousness among people with mental illnesses,” he said. But it is only that — a perception problem — and things are changing.

“We know that prisons, jails, are the last great asylums of North America for people with mental illness,” he said over a lunch of steak frites and tap water. “The biggest asylum in the United States is the Los Angeles County Jail. There’s about 20,000 inmates and about 2000 of them are severely mentally ill. We know that people with mental illness are really vulnerable to being victimized in a prison system, and that care in a prison system for people with mental illness is nowhere near where it needs to be.”

At the same time, he said a shift in public attitudes to mental health has opened vast new possibilities for progress all across the spectrum of mental health — from problems that are not illnesses, through the various forms of depression, anxiety and behavioural symptoms, to serious and persistent illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Big philanthropy has followed suit, such as the $10-million donation last week by Margaret McCain, widow of food magnate Wallace, for youth programs at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, where Dr. Goldbloom is senior medical advisor.

Once an aspiring actor, he also chairs the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, and comes from a family of prominent doctors. Energetic and funny, he joked that he recently emailed some Jewish friends about the Stratford Festival’s recent Broadway smash hit production of Jesus Christ Superstar, and included a “spoiler alert” in case they did not know the lead character dies in the end.

“I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” Dr. Goldbloom said about the spike in public and government interest in mental health programs, and the newfound ease with which these topics come up in public discourse — even in death notices that explicitly mention suicide, where once it was taboo. By taking lessons from grassroots advocacy for breast cancer and HIV, Dr. Goldbloom said he hopes to harness and promote this trend, but problems keep coming fast and furious, and he has taken over the commission at a decisive moment in its history

Formed in 2007 with $130-million in arms-length funding from Health Canada, and set to close in 2017, the Commission has always had a dual purpose, first articulated by inaugural chair and retired senator Michael Kirby, whose family experience with mental illness inspired his 2006 report Out of the Shadows At Last.

On the one hand, the MHCC combats stigma, a goal it has pursued, for example, by commissioning research on media archives to show journalism students how frequently news stories that mention “schizophrenia” are negative in tone, and how infrequently they are positive.

On the other hand, the MHCC was also mandated to prepare a national strategy on mental health from its uniquely independent position outside the federally-funded provincially-administered health system.

It is that duality in the commission’s purpose — between its optimistic orientation against stigma toward empowerment and recovery, and the worryingly frequent system failures on serious mental illness that call out for a comprehensive strategy — that has caused it the greatest grief and put it on the defensive, never more than last year, after the leak of a draft strategy that was long on platitudes, but short on substance.

One psychiatrist observed that the draft version did not even mention “psychiatry,” nor “schizophrenia” or “bipolar,” but “recovery” was mentioned 67 times and “support” 127 times. Advocates for schizophrenia treatment have similarly warned of the influence of anti-psychiatric academics, even anti-medicine conspiracy theorists, on the commission’s many advisory boards.

The draft was so widely criticized that the Commission’s CEO, Louise Bradley, vowed in a letter to Canadians to “correct” its failures of emphasis, because it “does not sufficiently reflect the essential role neuroscience, treatment and psychiatry have to play.”

This is one of the many problems Dr. Goldbloom, a long-time MHCC board member, was promoted to solve. As a front-line expert on the nastiest of mental disorders, he is ideally qualified to quell suspicions of anti-psychiatry from without, while also confronting expressions of it from within. But he is touchy about what went wrong.

“What got released was a draft. The draft was nowhere near a level of reaching board approval. It was a work in progress,” he said. “It’s a better document now. The language has been refined over the course of the last year to try to better communicate the beliefs of the commission and the beliefs of the people who serve on it.”

He said the next few years will be devoted to the critical “translational aspect” of the strategy, in which a national vision is adapted for local application, from provinces, most of which already have strategies, down to the level of municipalities.

Dr. Goldbloom said the board focused closely on the strategy’s terminology, deciding on the term “severe and persistent mental illness” to capture the worst, while also taking the position that not all mental health problems are illnesses. He said “presenteeism,” for example, or being incapable of working while at work, is of major social and economic concern, though not an illness in itself.

“That is not talking about mental health ‘issues,’” he cautions. “I hate ‘issues.’ Nobody with cancer says ‘I have neoplastic issues,’ ‘I have cell proliferation issues.’ They say they have cancer.”

It is a refreshing bluntness. More than any other health problem, mental illness is vulnerable to fuzzy, clichéd thinking. Psychiatry itself has a mixed history in this regard, Dr. Goldbloom said, of being misled by its own metaphors, and forgetting what is proven and what is fanciful theory. Freudian psychoanalysis is the big example, but the same can be seen in theories, false but once widely held, about the origins of mental illness in faulty parenting.

With the rise in understanding of genetics, Dr. Goldbloom said we have shifted to “a much more profoundly biological paradigm” in how we understand mental disorders, but full insight remains elusive.

“We don’t know what causes schizophrenia, but it’s not bad parenting,” Dr. Goldbloom said, pointing out that if you have an identical twin with schizophrenia, your odds of getting it are 50%.

“The point is it’s not 100%. If it was cystic fibrosis, you would get cystic fibrosis,” he said. So there is more going on than just genes, some of which you might be able to control, such as exposure to stress, for example, or marijuana, which in susceptible young people can trigger psychoses. Similarly, if everyone in your family had a heart attack at 40, you would probably take measures to prevent your own,” Dr. Goldbloom said.

“This is about managing risk. You can’t control genes, you can’t pick your parents. But genes are not absolute destiny,” he said. “The extent to which stigma, illiteracy or shame stops people from checking things out is a tragedy.”

At the extremes, the contrasts between normal and pathological are stunning and clear, but Dr. Goldbloom doubts he will ever be able to pin mental illness to the wall, in the way that viruses explain the common cold, or tobacco smoking explains lung cancer.

“What people don’t appreciate is that we draw arbitrary lines in medicine, between health and disease, all the time. There’s been intense focus on this line drawing in psychiatry, in the context of all of the controversy around DSM-V [psychiatry’s diagnostic manual],” he said. “We are inexorably attracted to certainty. We love dichotomous variables. We love lines that we can draw. Unfortunately, the simple conclusions are often the most alluring and the most incorrect.”

He cited the panic over suicide and drug abuse among NHL enforcers as an example of jumping to glib conclusions, but he acknowledges that the impulse to grasp at even a wisp of understanding is unavoidably human.

“How do the parents of any child who has any kind of disorder not wonder about their own genetic contributions to their kid’s illness?” he said. “Every caring parent scrutinizes themselves, their behaviour, their biology, when they see a child of theirs suffer. I think it’s inevitable. We don’t have evidence they could have done something difference when it comes to schizophrenia or autism, so I think one of the comforts we can provide to families is alleviating that sense of blame, castigation, but also not simply blame, but sometimes shame. Those are not the same. And one of the things that magnifies shame is stigma. Because if your child has liver failure or diabetes, the response of the community around you is support. They’re all over you like a dirty shirt… But [in the case of mental illness], for some families the response is social distance. People back away.”

< http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/05/06/a-character-study-of-mental-illness-and-change/ >

The protests today from Occupy Wall Streeters to redistribute income from the rich to the poor are generally based on faulty, convenient and largely undisclosed assumptions about Canadians being stuck in inequality. That is, occupiers and others tend to offer policies that assume the people who face low income today are the same ones who encounter it tomorrow. Thankfully, the reality of Canadian society is that people move up (and down) the income ladder over time as their circumstances change.

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The concept of mobility is fairly straightforward. It suggests that people’s earnings increase and decrease over the course of their lives in natural fluctuations. For example, all current workers were students at one point who likely earned at the low end of the range from a lack of skills and part-time work. However, their earnings increased as they completed their education and began working full time. Their earnings increased further as they gained experience and hopefully promotions.

There are also natural declines in income over one’s life. A spouse may take time away from the labour force to raise children. Workers may experience bouts of unemployment as they move from one firm to another. Workers also reduce their hours of work and their income as they transition to ­retirement. Again, all of these ­fluctuations are ­naturally part of one’s life.

Statistics Canada monitors such fluctuations in order to better measure and understand the economic well-being of Canadians over time. Specifically, Statistics Canada’s Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID) follow 17,000 households over rotating six-year periods. Such data provides researchers and policymakers with powerful information about how Canadians’ income and labour market participation varies over time.

There are a number of ways to analyze mobility. A recent study by Statistics Canada divided the population into five equal groups (quintiles) based on income. Statistics Canada then followed these individuals over time to assess how their incomes changed relative to the initial income thresholds used to divide the population.

To get a sense of the income levels for these five groups, the average income (after tax) for individuals in 2005 was: $14,100, $25,400, $34,700, $46,100, and $76,600.

The latest one-year data, 2008-09, shows quite a bit of mobility, despite the marked economic slowdown of the period. For example, 25% of those who started in the bottom 20% had moved up at least one group within a year. Similar upward movement is observed for the second quintile (26%) and the third quintile (24%). Put differently, for each of the bottom three income groups (each composing 20% of the population), roughly one in four people moved up at least one group in just one year.

The rates of mobility increase when the period is extended to five years, covering 2005 to 2009. Forty-three percent of those who started in the bottom 20% moved up at least one grouping over five years. Rates of upward mobility were again strongest for the bottom 60% of earners over this period. These results are also remarkably similar to analyses completed in the 1990s.

In both the annual as well as the five-year data, Canadians also moved down income groups. However, the net effect over time was an increase in earnings — more people moved up than down. Contrary to the conception offered by the occupiers, it’s a not a zero-sum game where someone has to lose for someone else to win.

Mobility data can also examine the degree to which Canadians experience low income. Over the period 2002 to 2007, which is the latest available data, 80% of Canadians did not experience low income, defined as falling below Statistics Canada’s low-income cutoff. Roughly 8% experienced low income for one of the six years covered in the period. Only 2.1% of Canadians experienced low income for each of the six years.

Explaining the persistency of low income for this 2.1% is an important goal. We know it includes, to some degree, the attainment of education and family composition. Specifically, the data tell us that single parents and those who didn’t complete high school have a much higher chance of experiencing low income.

Canada is a mobile society characterized by both increases and decreases in income that are largely connected with natural changes in one’s life. Thankfully, the data have consistently shown an upward path for incomes and increasing opportunity for workers.

This is not to say that inequality should be discarded as an issue, but rather that it needs to be fully and completely understood. Simplistically presenting the data to support pre-existing preferences for more taxes and redistribution would likely impede the very mobility that is so critical to overcoming low income.

Financial Post
Jason Clemens is the director of research at the Ottawa-based Macdonald-Laurier Institute and the author of the recently released “Income Inequality: Oversimplifying a Complicated Issue,” available atwww.macdonaldlaurier.ca.

< http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/04/30/few-people-stay-poor/ >

You know, this is the sort of thing people used to make quite a bit of a fuss over.

Bill C-38, introduced in the House last week, calls itself, innocuously, “An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 29, 2012 and other measures.” The bill does implement certain budget provisions, it is true: for example, the controversial changes to Old Age Security. But “and other measures” rather understates matters — to understate the matter.

The bill runs to more than 420 pages. It amends some 60 different acts, repeals half a dozen, and adds three more, including a completely rewritten Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. It ranges far beyond the traditional budget concerns of taxing and spending, making changes in policy across a number of fields from immigration (among other changes, it erases at a stroke the entire backlog of applications under the skilled worker program), to telecommunications (opening the door, slightly, to foreign ownership), to land codes on native reservations.

The environmental chapters are the most extraordinary. Along with the new Act, they give cabinet broader power to override decisions of the National Energy Board, shorten the list of protected species, and abolish the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act — among “other measures.” For much of this the first public notice was its inclusion in the bill.

So this is not remotely a budget bill, despite its name. It is what is known as an omnibus bill. If you want to know how far Parliament has fallen, how little real oversight it now exercises over government, this should give you a clue.

Omnibus bills are not unknown: indeed, every budget is a kind of omnibus bill, bundling a range of different measures under the general rubric of “supply,” the ancient prerogative of Parliament to approve or withhold funds to the Crown to carry out its program of government. The omnibus crime bill, likewise, collected a number of different pieces of the Conservatives’ law and order agenda under one heading.

But lately the practice has been to throw together all manner of bills involving wholly different responsibilities of government in one all-purpose “budget implementation” bill, and force MPs to vote up or down on the lot. While the 2012 budget implementation bill is hardly the first in this tradition, the scale and scope is on a level not previously seen, or tolerated.

Not only does this make a mockery of the confidence convention, shielding bills that would otherwise be defeatable within a money bill, which is not: It makes it impossible to know what Parliament really intended by any of it. We’ve no idea whether MPs supported or opposed any particular bill in the bunch, only that they voted for the legislation that contained them. There is no common thread that runs between them, no overarching principle; they represent not a single act of policy, but a sort of compulsory buffet.

To be sure, a government with a majority would likely have little difficulty passing them separately, so obediently do MPs now submit to the party whip. But there is something quite alarming about Parliament being obliged to rubber-stamp the government’s whole legislative agenda at one go.

Moreover, it utterly eviscerates the committee process, until now regarded as one of the last useful roles left to MPs. How can one committee, in this case Finance, properly examine all of these diverse measures, with all of the many areas of expertise they require, especially in the time allotted to them?

My point is not that any of the bill’s provisions are good or bad in themselves (that’s the kind of thing committee hearings and debate often help to clarify). Nor is there anything unlawful in any of this, so far as I’m aware. According to House of Commons Procedure and Practice, “it appears to be entirely proper, in procedural terms” for a bill to amend more than one act; Speakers have generally refused appeals to divide them.

But there’s a limit. What is lawful may nevertheless be illegitimate, especially where fundamental issues of Parliamentary government are in play. For, in combination with so many recent abuses, from prorogation to the F-35s, that is what is at stake here.

That Parliament has lost control of the public purse is now a commonplace. Governments routinely spend billions more than they were budgeted. Estimates are voted through without serious scrutiny. Funds that were approved for the construction of, say, border infrastructure end up being spent on, say, gazebos hundreds of miles away.

But the increasing use of these omnibills extends Parliament’s powerlessness in all directions: it has become, if you will, omnimpotent — a ceremonial body, little more. What is worse, it cannot even seem to rouse itself to its own defence.

Once upon a time such insults could be relied upon to produce unruly scenes in the House, obstruction of government business and whatnot. The packaging of several pieces of legislation into one omnibus energy bill in 1982 provoked the opposition to refuse to enter the House to vote. The division bells rang for nearly three weeks until the government agreed to split the bill. The insertion of a single change to environmental legislation in the 2005 budget bill, a note from the Green Party reminds us, so enraged the then leader of the Opposition, Stephen Harper, that he threatened to bring down the government.

But today’s Parliament is so accustomed to these indignities that it barely registers. It has lost not only the power to resist, it seems, but the will.

< http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/04/30/andrew-coyne-bill-c-38-shows-us-how-far-parliament-has-fallen/ >

The rise and fall of the Wildrose Party confirms a truth about Canadian politics, political strategists say: Social conservatism has become an “electorally toxic” Pandora’s box that parties should actively avoid on the campaign trail.

“It’s the social conservatism that does them in,” said Faron Ellis, a Lethbridge College political scientist who authored a book on the rise of the Reform party. “Until you draw a clear line in the sand over which you’re not going to let social conservatives drag your party, it becomes electorally toxic.”

The sort of social conservatism that believes in traditional marriage and condemns abortion, among other issues, obviously still has a place in Canadian politics — social conservatives make up the ruling federal Conservative party’s base, even though Prime Minister Stephen Harper has vowed not to legislate controversial moral values. But political strategists say lobbing those issues to the fore of an electoral campaign is a risky, and oftentimes losing, proposition.

A series of polls suggested Danielle Smith’s fledgling party was poised to topple the Progressive Conservatives’ 41-year dynasty, but her Wildrose fell flat after what became known as “bozo eruptions” by inexperienced candidates that suggested the party would wage culture wars.

“The lesson here is that the Alberta voter, and certainly I think the Canadian voter, has decided that issues that have already been settled are best left alone, particularly social issues,” said Goldy Hyder, a senior vice-president with Hill+Knowlton Strategies who knows both Ms. Smith and Premier Alison Redford from his 25 years living in Alberta.

“You’re not going to get a [far-right, socially conservative] Tea Party president in the United States, are you? There’s probably a realization here that if you couldn’t elect one in Alberta, where could you elect one?”

Prof. Ellis said the Wildrose Party was doomed the moment it tread into social conservatism without assuring voters it had limits. Ms. Smith chose not to draw a “clear line in the sand” and instead espoused free speech and freedom of religion, refusing to condemn candidates for making bigoted and racially charged comments: One pastor wrote in his blog that gays would burn in a “lake of fire,” while another MLA-hopeful said he had an advantage as a white candidate in an ethnically diverse Calgary constituency.

“Once you get started talking about [morally divisive issues], you’re just one set of loose-lips away from a disaster like ‘lake of fire,’ ” said Geoff Norquay, a public policy and communications specialist with Earnscliffe Strategy Group. “Once you start linking lakes of fire with public policy, you’re lost. Gone. It’s over. I can’t look into the future, but I think parties would be well-advised to stay away from those issues.”

When Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives last fall found themselves answering questions on the campaign trail about a Christian political website that called leader Tim Hudak “solidly pro-life,” the party chose to emphatically declare it would not reopen the abortion debate. His attacks on a proposed Liberal tax break for businesses who hired immigrants — Mr. Hudak called such newcomers “foreign workers” — was seen as contributing to the Ontario PCs’ defeat.

Link Byfield, a longtime social conservative activist who lost his bid as a Wildrose candidate on Monday, said it is “too early to tell” whether most Canadian voters are turned off by social conservatism on the hustings, but said the so-called bozo comments “won’t have helped” his untested party in the quest for its first mandate.

A year ago, Mr. Byfield said Mr. Harper’s promise not to open the debate on abortion or gay marriage made social conservatives appear “eccentric” and conceded that politicians today tend to avoid “whatever makes people angry.”

Conservative strategist Tim Powers said Monday’s election confirmed for Mr. Harper’s Conservatives that politicians “can’t split hairs” on socially divisive issues, and that parties have to take definitive positions on matters that could cause social outrage. “There can’t be any wiggle room,” said Mr. Powers, vice-president at Summa Strategies. “There can’t be any doubt. People want to have a level of comfort the person they’re going to elect is a competent, fair individual and they’re not going to do any great social engineering.”

Mr. Powers said that is especially true for a new party such as the Wildrose, which has never governed and therefore has no track record proving it will not wage culture wars in Alberta. Mr. Powers said took Mr. Harper four elections to win a majority, but not before his party stumbled in 2004 when former Tory MP Randy White suggested using the “notwithstanding” clause in Canada’s Constitution to protect the traditional definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman.

“I think the Alberta election says a lot to politicians in general: People want them to focus on economics and government services,” Mr. Hyder said.

< http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/04/24/alberta-election-2012-wildrose-loss/ >

The federal government is delivering on a promise to crime victims by doubling and making mandatory the surcharge convicts are required to pay upon sentencing.

Justice Minister Rob Nicholson introduced legislation Tuesday that, if passed, would require convicts to pay an additional 30% on any fine imposed by the courts.

If no fine is imposed, they will automatically be charged $100 for a summary conviction or $200 for an indictable offence.

The fines are generally collected and retained by provincial and territorial governments to help cover the cost of programs and services for victims of crime.

Sentencing judges are currently able to waive the surcharge should an offender demonstrate it would cause undue hardship — the new bill will also put an end to that.

Those who can’t pay will instead be able to participate in provincial programs that allow offenders to earn credits for work performed in the region where the crime was committed in lieu of financial penalties.

The bill makes good on a Conservative election promise and also responds to a request by Canada’s federal ombudsman for victims of crime, who called for a doubling of the surcharge in a February report.

< http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/04/24/tories-to-double-make-mandatory-100-200-surcharge-for-convicted-criminals/ >

Our voting system weakens Canada’s cohesion. It artificially amplifies the regional concentration of political party support at the federal level. With 50% of the vote in a given province, a federal party could end up taking almost all the seats. But with 20% of the vote, it may end up not winning any seats at all. This is how Ontario appeared more Liberal than it really was, Alberta more Reform-Conservative, Quebec more Bloc, etc.

I do not see why we should maintain a voting system that makes our major parties appear less national and our regions more politically opposed than they really are. I no longer want a voting system that gives the impression that certain parties have given up on Quebec, or on the West. On the contrary, the whole spectrum of parties, from Greens to Conservatives, must embrace all the regions of Canada. In each region, they must covet and be able to obtain seats proportionate to their actual support. This is the main reason why I recommend replacing our voting system. The issue now is to come up with an alternative.

I propose the “proportional-preferential-personalized vote,” or “P3” for short (not to be confused with P3 construction projects!).

We would elect three to five MPs per riding rather than one. The number of seats would remain the same; what would be reduced is the number of ridings. This would provide moderate proportional representation, which corrects the regional distortions of the current electoral system.

Indeed, the party that gets the most votes in a riding would probably win three seats out of five or two out of three. Thus, seats would be truly up for grabs in all ridings, even in the most Conservative ones in Alberta and the most Liberal ones in Toronto and Montreal.

However, using this moderate proportional voting system would be less likely to result in one-party majority governments. And should a coalition government prove necessary, it should be stable and coherent. One way to prepare parties to such eventualities would be to use preferential voting. Under this system, voters are invited, when casting their votes, to rank the parties in order of preference.

The great advantage of preferential voting is that it promotes cooperation among the parties. It is actually in each party’s interest to persuade those who support other parties that it represents a second acceptable choice. The parties are thus encouraged to highlight similarities in their objectives and platforms.

By seeking out the transfer of subsequent voting preferences from their respective voters, parties would better prepare themselves to govern together. Thus, these coalitions would be predictable for voters, and even influenced by them, and, as a result, likely coherent.

Finally, voters should be allowed not only to rank parties by preference, but also to select a candidate. They would choose the candidate they prefer from among those put forward by the party they select as their top preference. In other words, voters would choose only one candidate in the party of their first choice. This would allow Canadians to continue voting for real live candidates, not just for parties. Hence, voting would remain personalized.

This is how the ballots would be counted: First, the voters’ first party preferences would be tallied. If one or more parties failed to obtain enough first choices to win a seat, the party that got the smallest number of votes would be eliminated and its voters’ second choices would be transferred to the remaining parties. The second and subsequent choices of the eliminated parties would be allocated until all of the parties still in the running obtain at least one seat. This would produce the percentages of votes that determine the number of seats obtained by the various parties.

Then, the voters’ choices as to their preferred candidate among those attached to their preferred party are counted. If a party obtained two seats, that party’s two candidates who received the highest number of votes would win those two seats.

We would thus get a voting system that enhances our political parties’ Canada-wide presence, reinforces the level of cooperation that should exist between parties, makes every vote count and ensures that there are seats truly at stake throughout Canada. P3 voting is a perfect fit for Canada, a great tool to promote cohesion in our vast, decentralized and diverse country.

Stéphane Dion is the former leader of the Liberal party and federal Liberal MP for St-Laurent and Cartierville.  A longer version iof this text is available on www.ideefederale.ca

< http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/04/22/stephane-dion-canada-needs-a-new-voting-system/#more-75406 >

Decentralize where necessary, but don’t necessarily decentralize. That appears to be the motto of the federal government, in light of its decision to stop sending $136 million a year to British Columbia and Manitoba to manage provincial immigration settlement programs. According to a government source cited by Postmedia News, “We’re ending it (Thursday) because we think that the integration services are about nation-building and we want to make sure that every region gets its fair share of funding and that immigrants across the country get consistent services regardless of where they live.”

Nation-building through government programs? Consistent services through centralized delivery? Aren’t those, uh, Liberal principles? Aren’t the Conservatives supposed to be about decentralization, local-knows-best, respecting the BNA act, and not treading on provincial jurisdiction?

In some areas, such as health care, the answer appears to be yes. But in others, it’s been a case of Ottawa-knows-best: scotching BHP Billiton’s proposed potash takeover in 2010, downloading prison costs on the provinces via Bill C-10 this spring, proposing to have a “one review” policy encompassing both provincial and federal standards for environmental approvals in the recent budget. Not to mention the Tories’ attempt to create a national securities regulator, rejected by the Supreme Court last year, butrevived in the budget as a “co-operative” venture between willing provinces and the federal government.

In other words, the Conservatives are prepared to invoke the concept of “national interest” when it suits them. From a purely political standpoint, it should be no surprise that immigration is in their crosshairs: immigrant votes hold the key to retaining a Conservative lock on power. For years the Liberals successfully courted the “ethnic” vote, until a combination of their complacency and Tory Immigration Minister Jason Kenney’s tenacity reversed that trend in the 2011 election. This feat so impressed the British Conservative Party that it is sending an emissary to meet with Mr. Kenney to ask just how he did, and how the British Tories can replicate his success over the pond.

The immigration file also plays into the government’s build-up-the-west agenda, since the western provinces are predicting serious labour shortages in the coming years. But the West is also the bastion of Conservative support; for it to remain so, newcomers will need to have or adopt small-c conservative values. Ensuring that immigrants do so is obviously easier if a Conservative government is designing policy from Ottawa, rather than leaving it to local NDP or Liberal governments such as those of Manitoba and B.C.

Politics aside, however, in this case Tory policies also serve Canada’s interests. Immigrants represent our country’s only bulwark against falling birthrates and an aging population, but they have to be successfully integrated, and gainfully employed. On that note, last week Mr. Kenney announcedchanges to the skilled worker program designed to better match immigrants and jobs, and clear a massive backlog. 240,000 skilled worker applications will be returned and applicants obliged to reapply. Those with a job offer will head to the front of the line, similar to policies enacted in New Zealand and Australia.

But could there be a fly in the federal government’s centralized immigration ointment? The 1991 Canada-Quebec Accord on immigration allows Quebec to set its own admission criteria, which include proficiency in French. As per the Accord, the province also provides for the “reception and the linguistic and cultural integration of permanent residents”, as well as “specialized economic integration”. Canada provides compensation where “those services, when considered in their entirety, correspond to the services offered by Canada in the rest of the country.”

Would Ottawa refuse funding if the services don’t match up to the ones the feds will now provide in other parts of Canada? Technically, the Accord can be reopened with six months notice by either side, but this is a hornet’s nest the Prime Minister likely doesn’t want to poke. And he may not have to: with regard to the upholding of values, Quebec politicians are further to the right than their counterparts in the rest of Canada, having proposed to ban the hijab and recently calling for halal meat to be labelled so Quebecers don’t “unwittingly” consume it.

Furthermore, the Quebec government recently made its own changes to eliminate its backlog, restricting the number of applicants in the skilled worker class and narrowing its selection criteria.

So it appears that on immigration, at least, there may be some common ground between Ottawa and Quebec, even if other issues such as prisons and the national securities regulator continue to fester. As for the rest of the country, it remains to be seen how immigration changes are received and implemented, but one thing is certain: by the time the Tories head to the next election, they want to make sure they are the party of New Canadians – even if they need a big central government to do the job.

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In her response to the release of a report that called for supervised drug-injection sites in Toronto and Ottawa on Wednesday, provincial Health Minister Deb Matthews said the McGuinty government was happy to receive good advice and that “we make our decisions based on evidence.”

The next sentence: “Experts continue to be divided on the value of the sites.”

Do they, now? Here’s the Canadian Medical Association: “the evidence shows that supervised injection reduces the spread of infectious diseases and the incidence of overdose and death.” Or the Canadian Public Health Association: “The results of more than 50 peer-reviewed scientific articles provide irrefutable evidence that [Insite, Vancouver’s supervised-injection facility] has a positive impact on the health of the people who use its services and a positive impact on the surrounding community.” And then there’s the unanimous decision of the Supreme Court of Canada, which said last fall of Insite: “Its benefits have been proven. There has been no discernible negative impact on the public safety and health objectives of Canada during its eight years of operation.”

That the justices reached that conclusion after hearing evidence before the country’s top court about a year ago was not all that unexpected: when a lawyer representing the federal government, which had been trying to shut down Insite for years, was asked if it disputed the notion that “lives are being saved, diseases are being prevented,” the lawyer conceded that was a “fair observation.”

Which makes it hard to square the accuracy of Ms. Matthews’ statement about a division among experts. Asked by theNational Post on Thursday if the minister could provide an example of a study that found negative impacts after the opening of such a clinic, a spokeswoman for Ms. Matthews offered this explanation: “As the Minister said in her statement, experts continue to be divided on the value of the sites — these experts include police, medical experts and other community leaders.”

Well, yes. If one expands the definition of “expert” to include police and other community leaders, then indeed there is a noticeable division among them on the subject of supervised-injection sites. Ottawa’s mayor and police chief are resolutely against them. It’s not a big leap to imagine that Toronto’s mayor would be similarly disinclined to pursue one in his town. And if we include, say, newspaper columnists under the definition of community leader, then division abounds — just one Toronto Sun column alone on Wednesday referred to a supervised-injection site as a “free drug club” and “hedonism for lazy drug addicts” while warning that the clinics would be a “crazy party centre” that would attract drug tourists from all corners.

And it’s that type of blowback — reasoned and otherwise — that is surely driving the McGuinty government’s response to a report carried out by researchers at the University of Toronto and St. Michael’s Hospital and funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Ontario HIV Treatment Network.

The report, which called for three supervised-injection sites in Toronto and two in Ottawa, could have been met by the Liberals in a number of ways. They could have taken tentative steps toward a pilot project, exploring whether there was community support in either city for such a trial run. They could have formed a committee or struck a task force. They could have just said they were going to give the report a serious mulling over. Instead, within moments of the thing being tabled, Ms. Matthews was out to squelch it. “We have no plans to pursue supervised sites at this time,” said her statement.

Is it a surprise that the Premier and his health minister, with a budget yet to pass, a deficit still to wrangle with and a minority government hanging in the balance, would take a pass on the messy business of shepherding the proposed injection sites into reality? It is not. Even the report’s authors noted that residents who were supportive of such a site in theory “did not necessarily want to see a supervised facility in their own neighbourhoods.” It’s easy to imagine a local controversy over an injection clinic blowing up into an election issue, too. Remember the Mississauga power plant?

But, “we make our decisions based on evidence”? Not in this case, they didn’t.

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If you ask me, what the fundamental difference between a liberal and a conservative is in this day and age, I would suggest that the liberal and conservative differ over the individual’s relation to society. This is an old distinction, and no doubt you’ve heard it before. But it’s still a useful distinction to make.

Let’s begin with the contemporary or neoconservative position, from which we shall depart to consider historical and geographical variations. Margaret Thatcher said that there is no such thing as society; there are only individuals. At its simplest, this assertion tells us society is an abstraction. There is no concrete object to which a person may point and say, “there is society.” To speak of society, in other words, is to speak of something that exists only in the mind. Society is a mental construct. Thatcher, however, was not interested in philosophical matters. Her statement reflects a fundamental and practical current conservative principle, that the basis of the good society is the good behaviour of the individual.

For the conservative, society is the word we apply to aggregated individuals. From this follows certain conclusions. The acts of government ought to be limited in such a manner that the individual is free. Conservatives want to remove limitations on free, responsible and productive citizens. To achieve this end, certain preconditions are necessary. There must be stability and order, so that the individual is protected from the harmful actions of others; this calls forth the rule of law. The rule of law, set forth and enforced by the state, must be as extensive as is necessary for order, and as limited as necessary for responsible individual freedom. Law-bound individual freedom and responsibility constitute the basis of a conservative society. The end of conservative political philosophy is the free, but responsible individual.

Conservatives have tended to approach the public good through the back door of pessimism. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, in his political treatise Leviathan, put the conservative case for the rule of law nicely. He argued that people are by nature selfish and acquisitive and that unless law constrains them, they will engage in “a war of all against all,” each person struggling against all others for personal advantage. His chief concern was that acquisitiveness would lead, in a lawless society, to theft of private property. And indeed, for both liberals and conservatives, one of the chief purposes of the state is to protect property rights. But for now, we should note that the basic fact of life for Hobbes was that it is, in its natural state, “nasty, brutish and short.”

The good society, which for many conservatives means above all else a lawful and orderly one, must overcome human nature with force, or the threat of force. Conservatives, in other words, have a rather pessimistic view of human nature and the potential of human beings to evolve. Thus, the conservative does not speak so much of “social problems” as of individual crimes and failures of character. The conservative may prefer to treat homelessness as a criminal matter and urge the passing of laws to clean the streets of undesirable people. Poverty may be seen as a failure of the individual, in which case the solution is to provide incentives and disincentives to the poor. The good society comes about when the individual obeys the law, acts responsibly and takes advantage of the system’s incentives. Conservative government is limited in its scope to securing the optimal conditions for individual advancement, and the individual is limited only by the rule of law and by economic incentives and disincentives. Conservatism is the philosophy of conservation, in the sense that it regards the natural world as static: Human nature does not change, and neither do the basic laws of society and economics. This does not constitute a denial of the need for reform; rather, reform is seen as a gradual accommodation of changing social conditions to fundamental economic laws. The best of all possible worlds will come about not because of reform, per se, but because individuals act freely within the channels established by law and convention.

Some of what I have said needs clarification, for the conservatism I am describing is an abstraction. We may distinguish between many particular kinds of conservatism — for instance, contemporary American and classical British conservatism. There are variations both of geography and history, and even within a specific time and place, we should expect a diversity of thought. The progressive conservatism of Benjamin Disraeli and the social Darwinism of Charles Sumner are both placed under the heading “conservative.” Yet, in many ways, these philosophies are at odds. Furthermore, classical British conservatism is closer in many ways to modern American liberalism than it is to British neoconservatism. Classical British conservatism tended toward a collectivist view of society and perceived individualism as a challenge to the “social contract.” In general, however, conservatism is the ideology of natural law, and its prescription for the public good is the strong interventionist state, at least where individual moral conduct is concerned.

Classical British and American liberals, unlike their modern counterparts, were the advocates of “laissez-faire” economics, that is, the theory that individuals ought to be left alone in their market dealings. This is usually thought of today as a conservative position, but it was not originally so. Classical liberalism and laissez-faire economics were based upon a profound mistrust of the state: Liberals felt the state, if left unchecked, would lead to autocracy. The British liberals who established the United States of America opposed the absolute powers of the monarch, as well as the exploitative arrangements of mercantilism. Instead, the founding fathers sought ti create a constitutional government with limited democratic representation.

We should note, however, that not all classical liberals were democrats, and that none of them proposed universal suffrage. For many, representative democracy meant that owners of property (that is, the white, male bourgeoisie) and not the nobility should be in charge. In some limited ways, liberals and conservatives have switched positions on the question of state intervention, and this exchange tells us important things about the respective ideologies. Laissez-faire meant something different to the market-anarchist Adam Smith, than it does to the contemporary corporate CEO who calls for wholesale deregulation. Unfortunately, our technical terms have not kept up with historical changes. I shall return to the matter of these changes a bit later. Right now, I shall try to articulate the liberal principles which have evolved over time.

We begin with the classical liberal view that human nature is contextual — that it evolves over time. The liberal may not even believe in human nature as such, but may argue that people will behave differently in differing contexts. In short, human nature is culture; it is a social creation. This explains the liberal interest in social reform. Liberals often see crime, for instance, as social in nature, by which they mean to say that the individual is not the sole cause of his or her behaviour. The root of crime is felt to be the prevailing social conditions, and social reform is typically the proposed solution. Imprison all the criminals you wish, the liberal will say, and you will still have crime and criminals, as long as the social conditions that are responsible for these behaviours are maintained.

Indeed, the penal system shall only make crime worse (prison is simply another culture informing, or misinforming, the indivdual). The source of the crime is external to the individual. The liberal would likely regard Hobbes’ description of savage nature, and the theory of the state to which it leads, as inappropriate to the modern society. Classical liberals and conservatives disagreed, not only about the use of state power, but over the punitive functions of the state as well. Capital punishment was seen as especially repugnant by liberals, because it gave to the state the ultimate right: To choose who lives and who dies. The liberal view of capital punishment was based upon a mistrust of the state, in combination with an optimistic approach to the good society, which claimed that social reform is a better means of achieving harmony, than punishment or threats of punishment.

You’ll recall that I have set two matters aside for later comment. The first was the observation that conservatives (and often liberals) argue that one of the chief purposes of the state is to protect the property rights. The second was the observation that, in some limited ways, liberals and conservatives have traded positions on the matter of government intervention. I claimed that this exchange — which I shall substantiate — tells us important things about the respective ideologies. I shall now say what I mean by all this.

The rights of private property are thought to be important for a number of reasons. Plunder is not consistent with the good society. There must be some means by which to prevent, or at least discourage, robbery and other forms of injustice. In the absence of such means, we would likely see the war of all against all described by Hobbes. Without state protection of private property, the economic system would be sustained only by the private use of force. This was indeed the case before the emergence of the constitutional state. The rich hired private armies to protect their economic privileges. Later, the owners of private property (who came to be called capitalists) found it advantageous to exchange their private armies for state armies. They lost private control of their soldiers, but were able to pass the costs of maintaining an army along to the state. The result was that the costs of protecting private property could be broadly distributed among the social classes; they would no longer be confined to the capitalist class. Security of private property rights gave investors the confidence they needed to conduct business activity. Again, without state-supported private property rights, either private provisions for these rights must be made, or else the capitalist economic system must collapse. From this fact emerged the capitalist state.

The preceding paragraph establishes the terrain on which liberals and conservatives have both agreed and fought many battles. Some classical British conservatives argued that private property carried with it, not only privileges, but responsibilities as well. Their ideology was rooted in the “organic” conception of society — the view that society was an organism in which all parts depended upon one another for their survival. This view balanced (at least in theory) privileges and responsibilities. Classical British conservatism was paternalistic — it regarded individuals as bound to one another in the manner of a family. Corporeal metaphors were also common; hence, the nation was like a body and the King was like the head of that body. Classical conservatives did not challenge the authority of the head of the family, but neither did they believe that the strong could use their strength in any manner whatsoever.

Classical conservatism was profoundly moral, profoundly rooted in the idea of a natural moral law. We may note in passing that contemporary conservatives tend to have kept the classical notion of a natural moral order, while discarding or underemphasizing the classical belief in the organic society; in other words, they have privatized natural law. Classical liberals, as we have seen, rejected not only natural law — they believed law is rational and created by man — but the paternal model of social relations as well. Their hatred of the monarchy led them to reject the “strong state.” The paternalistic state seemed to the classical liberal synonymous with tyranny. The conflict between classical liberals and classical conservatives was thus over the nature and responsibilities of the state, at the heart of which stood the individual. Both argued in a specific manner for limited government, and yet there was disagreement over the character of the ideal state.

I now return to historical change. The social and economic influence of the modern industrial corporation had been anticipated both by classical liberals and conservatives, yet it is largely this development that led to the modernization of these ideologies. Liberals had always argued that government must be kept as limited as possible to leave larger scope for the individual. Conservatives, however, felt that the state had a responsibility to keep human nature in check, especially when it threatened the propertied minority. Even today, conservatives call for less government and more state power: More police, more military expenditure, tougher laws and more prisons. In other words, classical conservatives were the supporters of the activist state and classical liberals were opponents of big, tyrannical government. (By the middle of the 20th century this had reversed somewhat, as liberals called for an interventionist foreign policy and conservatives argued the isolationist position.)

Gradually, however, the capitalist economic system produced considerable concentrations of private wealth and economic power. This was defended by the social Darwinists, who saw wealth as an expression of moral and biological superiority. For classical liberals, however, the notion of unimpeded individuals meeting face to face in the free market to compete with one another as buyers and as sellers was becoming outmoded. Classical liberals, such as Thomas Jefferson, had been deeply suspicious of corporations and believed they would distort the economic system and make a mockery of democracy. Jefferson considered the private business corporation as an aristocratic instrument, a way of establishing and extending private privilege at the public’s expense.

The economic man of classical theory was now forced to contend with the economic corporation of modern reality, both as a buyer of goods and as a seller of labour. In this exchange, the corporation could exercise many unfair advantages. The transformation took many decades, but by the middle of the 20th century many liberals had abandoned laissez-faire economics, in favour of a limited activist state. They reasoned that since the conditions of the economy had changed, the conditions of government must change as well. The New Deal was essentially a conservative impulse, being an attempt to keep the capitalist economic system from collapsing. Government was called upon to restore balance and health to the economy. Notice, however, that the state has also been used by liberals to protect the individual from the potentially tyrannical power of the private corporations.

Conservatives took a differing course during the development of the private corporation. Generally, they were supportive of the judicial decisions that constituted private corporations as legal persons. Three strains of conservative thought informed this support. The first was the conservative faith in the rule of law, the second was the idea that special responsibilities are conferred upon the powerful, and the third was that the idea that the economy is grounded by the law-abiding individual. Conservatives advocated the entrenchment of property rights in law, as a necessary precondition to economic development, and they furthermore assumed that from these rights would follow responsibility. The same laws that constrained the citizen would constrain the investor. Corporate laws were unnecessary, since the corporation, like society, did not exist; the corporation was only an abstracted manner of speaking about individuals engaged together in a co-ordinated business effort. The incentives and disincentives necessary to guide the corporation were already in place at the level of the individual economic agent. This was enough assurance for most conservatives.

Liberals may agree that society is a fiction, a thing invented, without conceding the conservative position that it does not exist. The point for them is that it is a practical fiction. Consider public investment. An individual citizen cannot alone cause a highway to be built, but a society can. Government is the instrument by which individual contributions are mobilized in the service of social ends. While it is true that society is an abstraction, it is not the case that it is merely the sum of its parts. We shall discover the same if we regard the private corporation. Here also we find an institution designed to mobilize resources toward a collective end. Not only is the private corporation not the sum of its parts, it is designed not to be and derives its utility precisely from this fact. The corporation is an autonomous instrument, in the sense that it supersedes its constituent individuals; it is a legal fiction endowed with certain rights and privileges, including immortality. Indeed, the corporation came into being as a way to obviate the legal, economic and social limitations faced by the individual investor. In this sense, a corporation does for capital what a union does for labour. Both would be quite pointless inventions if they were only a collection of individuals and not a legal fiction endowed with special properties. And the same, liberals argue, is true of social institutions and the society that it serves. Society is more than the sum of the individuals from which it is abstracted, and only with the broad view that the concept of society offers can grand projects in the public interest be launched.

Well, a conservative may say, that’s precisely the problem with society. Modern liberalism is based on the false assumption that things can be made better with a little manipulation at the top — a little more government intervention. Conservatives prefer to let individuals manage reform themselves, by creating the conditions in which they can exercise their law-abiding freedoms. In practice, this means state intervention in order to present the individual with incentives and disincentives. Conservatives do not accept the proposition that society (or racism, sexism, exploitation, structural poverty and so on) is to blame for dysfunctional behaviour. They admit certain disadvantages, such as physical and mental disability. But beyond this, they place sole responsibility on the individual for his or her fate. Liberals, conservatives may argue, are wrong on a number of points, but these especially: They are wrong about people being victims of society, they are wrong about human nature and because of this, they are wrong about reform.

As in the past, there is a continued disagreement about the role and nature of government. Liberals insist that government is often in the pocket of the capitalist class, and conservatives insist that government is (in the words of the 1995 Common Sense Revolution website) “a captive to big special interests,” meaning people on welfare, the homeless, feminists and unions. It is interesting to note that both sides are engaged in a battle on behalf of social and economic justice. For one side, justice means advancing the rights of people of colour. For the other, it means income tax cuts. We should note that both sides feel the injustice deeply; neither is, I think, insincere.

Contemporary government is complex enough that both sides can support their case. When we talk about the government, we are talking about a motley collection of interrelated, but also contesting, arrangements. One part of government saves the taxpayer money by firing staff or causing others to, and another promptly spends that taxpayer money helping these folks find jobs elsewhere. One part of government serves the rich, and others serve the so-called special interests. Then there are the many other parts of government serving other ends and getting in the way too. In a diverse society with many competing interests, we should expect just such an arrangement. The behaviour of modern democratic governments reflects the complexity and conflicts of the modern world. This does not mean that a particular government cannot lean either in the direction of liberalism or conservatism. The point is that government is heterogeneous,and there will always be contradictory efforts within a representative democratic government itself. Even within a single ministry, you will find that public policy often highlights illogical of contradictory mandates. Once we understand the heterogeneous nature of representative democratic government, we are better able to explain the endurance of the debate between conservatives and liberals. Each group describes an aspect of political reality. And that reality as a whole is diverse and complex enough to render each perspective compelling.

Does this mean that liberalism and conservatism are both equally correct? This is a difficult question to answer. Consider the competing views of human nature. The conservative has little patience for the liberal view that criminal behaviour should be regarded as a symptom of a deeper social problem. The liberal tends to believe that criminal behaviour can be prevented, or at least lessened, with an improvement in social conditions. Even the notion of crime puts the liberal ill-at-ease, for much of what is criminalized by the conservative is felt by the liberal to be no fault of the individual. The conservative usually doubts that crime is produced by the “system,” or by society; instead, crime is seen as a matter of individual character. Who is correct? The liberal can reasonably argue that in a perfect society, one without social inequality and injustice, there would be no crime. But this is a circular argument, for a perfect society presupposes the absence of crime. In any case, there is no empirical basis for the liberal claim because there is no perfect society for us to observe. The conservative can reasonably argue that crime is a failure of character, for one’s character is always one’s character, whether it was shaped by individual will or by social conditions, or more likely, by both. The conservative social and economic systems are based upon the Hobbessian belief that individuals are selfish and acquisitive; since the systems are designed to reward these traits, they tend to produce them.

Is the economic man thus an expression of human nature, or is he a self-fulfilled prophecy? The world as it is does not allow us to test theories of human nature under the controlled conditions of a laboratory. All we can do is observe the messiness. Human nature and human culture are integrated one into another. Perhaps no political philosophy has adequately represented the complexity of this integration, and perhaps no political philosophy ever will. It is precisely the limitations of political ideologies that has ensured their survival as ideologies. The limited nature of our political ideologies is not likely to change any time soon.

National Post

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