Canada is changing – subtly, profoundly, and without a public conversation. It's time we start to shape that change, before it's shaped for us.

Without question, Canada is changing – change is a given, pervasive and accelerating. But the kind of change we are now undergoing, the kind not driven by a vigorous public debate, but by drift and barely perceptible incremental action, is profoundly risky. When we take stock on Canada's 150th birthday, in 2017, what will we see? Will we find a country firmly on a path we helped to choose or will we ask what happened – how did we get here?

We know the challenges – how to ensure good jobs for our children and theirs in a hyper-competitive, global economy, how to conserve our natural bounty for future generations and play our part in addressing climate change, how to restructure our health and social programs in the face of the demographic crunch, how to define our common citizenship in the global era, how to earn our place at the international table – and fundamental to all of this, understanding the role of government and how governments can rise to fill that role. So why aren’t we talking about these issues together?

The answer has to do in part with Ottawa’s failure to meaningfully engage Canadians around any of these challenges. Many look back with nostalgia at the big collective policy decisions that shaped post-war Canada - patriation and the Charter or Canada-U.S. Free Trade, for example – as moments where government was able to rise to the challenges, where, for better or worse, government mattered. But even in the absence of any “big bang,” a country does change and, whether it seeks to shape that change or simply let it play out, government does matter.

Much change in Canada happens without much talk. It happens through entropy, selective inattention, and incremental action – and it is no less profound, only less visible. It sneaks up on us and, unless we are paying attention, it shapes us far more than we shape it. Given the current stakes and stark choices, whatever our views, we cannot afford to turn our backs on the political process or throw up our hands at Ottawa. If growing distrust or cynicism about government leads us to withdraw into our private lives as though the public sphere were irrelevant or impossible to influence, we will ask too little of our leaders and that’s what we will get.

Global and domestic forces don't wait for Ottawa to take note. Drift has direction: environmental degradation accelerates, inequality deepens, the productivity gap widens, our population ages, and health and social programs that served us so well fray.

How do we explain government’s inattention to issues that ought to be impossible to ignore? For one, Ottawa’s policy capacity has been in decline for some time, a result in part of cuts to research and in part of a growing divide between elected officials and public servants whose advice is less often sought or trusted. The federal public service, long a major, if largely invisible, Canadian strength, is increasingly described as in crisis, trying to serve in a climate of blame and mistrust masquerading as accountability.

No doubt governments, and minority governments in particular, are reluctant to take on the big issues because they inevitably raise thorny jurisdictional questions and highlight deep conflicts of interest and regional divides. Nowhere is this truer than of the challenges around education, energy, and the environment to which a Canadian approach would have to reconcile competing visions of the country and the profoundly different economic interests of our provinces. In these cases, as in most, inattention is easier than policy.

Kim Campbell was being forthright, if impolitic, when, during her election campaign, she said that such times are no time for talking about policy. Today, our minority governments and their opposition are in perpetual campaign mode, giving us an Ottawa that is all politics all the time. And so, instead of issues, we get partisan tactics, slogans, and slinging, sending the clear message that they care more about their survival than ours.