Canadians crave a reason to hope « Social Policy in Ontario

Canadians crave a reason to hope

Posted on July 20, 2020 in Governance Debates

Source: NationalPost.com — Authors: Sean Speer

NationalPost.com – Full Comment
Jul 17, 2020. Sean Speer

The coronavirus has cast a pall of uncertainty over our society. We don’t know when a vaccine will be ready or when the economy will recover or even if schools will be open in the fall. Given so many uncertainties, people can be forgiven for feeling unsure about the future.

But what’s interesting is that a large majority of Canadians were already feeling pessimistic before the pandemic. A recent paper authored by pollsters Frank Graves and Jeff Smith found that only 13 per cent think future generations will have a better quality of life than we do now. It’s a striking expression of individual and collective self-doubt. As Graves and Smith put it: “for many, we have reached the end of progress.”

The question, of course, is why?

Canadians were already feeling pessimistic before the pandemic

The authors’ explanation is weaker than their diagnosis. Their paper makes a series of debatable assumptions. They treat the conservative preference for order in society as a proxy for an inherent authoritarianism. They interpret an individual tendency toward traditionalism as somehow manifestly “unsympathetic to equality and gender issues.” And their primary policy prescription to raise taxes is standard-fare progressivism that one gets the sense would have been put forward irrespective of the findings.

But, more fundamentally, their case for greater redistribution makes the same mistake as so much other political commentary. It assumes that politics are transactional, voters are narrowly self-interested, and the future is heavily discounted relative to the present.

This perspective fails to account for the natural human desire for a vision of the future. Psychologists refer to this impulse as “prospection” or “future mindedness.” Leading scholars have shown that it’s “a core organizing principle of animal and human behaviour.”

The problem is no one is really articulating a future-oriented vision these days. We seem stuck in the monotony of the present. We’ve lost the capacity to imagine a new and different horizon.

Investor and public intellectual Peter Thiel often argues that the only two futuristic options currently on offer are Greta Thunberg’s Malthusian-inspired environmentalism or Silicon Valley’s technology-enabled dystopia. No wonder people are feeling down about the future.

Political scientist Francis Fukuyama actually foresaw this development nearly 30 years ago in his book, The End of History and the Last Man. He wrote then: “Today we have trouble imagining a world that is radically better than our own … We cannot picture to ourselves a world that is essentially different from the present one, and at the same time better.”

The source of our diminished prospection is complicated. One factor is that the great promise of technology has proven underwhelming. Although we’ve witnessed innovation in certain parts of the economy, it’s hard to argue that Facebook posts and YouTube videos are fundamentally transformative.

Another is the transition from the goods-producing economy to a service-based economy that has increasingly led to job polarization in our labour market. We now have an economy that produces a lot of low- and high-skilled jobs but is creating fewer opportunities for the median worker.

And a final factor is demographic. Canada’s birth rate has fallen to 1.5 births per woman and the 2016 Census showed that seniors now outnumber children for the first time in the country’s history. In such a society, it seems intuitive that the future would have less appeal.

COVID-19 has undoubtedly made things worse. Businesses have been shuttered, jobs have been lost, weddings and classes have been cancelled, and the next steps are “inherently unknowable” as the Bank of Canada recently observed. For the 87 per cent who were already ambivalent, the future seems even bleaker than it did roughly four months ago.

It’s important therefore for policy-makers not just to focus on short-term recovery. They also need to start articulating a compelling vision for the future. Such a vision ought to be bold, ambitious, and inclusive. It should aim to inspire. It should be the contemporary equivalent of president John F. Kennedy’s famous “we choose to go to the moon” speech.

The public is readier for such a challenge than it we give it credit for. People have grown tired of politicians bidding for their votes with their own monies. They’re fed up with microtargeting and talking points and social media memes. My sense is that they’re prepared to be called to something bigger. They want to believe in the future again.

Progress hasn’t ended. But, as Thiel argues, “for the future to have power over the present, it has to be different than the past.” It’s time for our political leaders to set out a better and different future. Canadians are ready to follow them there.

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/sean-speer-canadians-crave-a-reason-to-hope/wcm/db3f9e31-7ec8-4611-872d-09b69a13947e/

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/sean-speer-canadians-crave-a-reason-to-hope/wcm/db3f9e31-7ec8-4611-872d-09b69a13947e/

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Canadians crave a reason to hope

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