A Conference of Ideas but No Vision

Canada at 150 was full of liberal rationality, but had little to inspire the nation.

The two-and-a-half day Canada at 150 conference was hardly a warm and fuzzy affair.

Certainly no one came away from the conference disappointed and many, including myself, thoroughly enjoyed most of the panel discussions and the very large number of keynote speakers. But no one, or at least no one I spoke with, came away elated either.

Blame it on the nature of the thing – a conference created by Liberals and filled with liberalism.

The latter manifested itself in a deep need to restrain passion for the sake of rationality. So many speakers, including the extraordinarily lively former Canadian Ambassador Jeremy Kinsman and the always sobering director of the Munk Centre Janice Stein seemed relentlessly committed to exploding the spirited, if skewed, myths surrounding Canadian values and identity.

On literally dozens of occasions both Kinsman and Stein, as well as many others, went out of their way to remind Canadians that we are not who we are in our dreams – that we neither share with nor care about each other quite as much we think we do. Nor have we proven that we care about the planet nearly as much as many of the younger people in attendance might imagine.

In this regard, the message from the podium was clear: there is no intrinsically good Canadian gene. And if Canadians do manage to start doing more good then they are currently, it will be mostly because our leaders decide that this is what needs to be done. “As prime minister, I am only one small part of the picture,” Michael Ignatieff declared at the end of the conference. “But if I am not the prime minister, then lots of what we spoke about over the past two-and-a-half days will not get done.”

But Ignatieff also wanted us all to understand that he has decided that Canadians will “never again… never again” (he repeated it) be asked to leave the room as they were in Copenhagen. Of course, it remains unclear what inner resource Ignatieff plans on drawing from when the going gets tough.

With Trudeau we knew – it was his character shot through with insouciance and his “just watch me” charisma. With Chrétien we also knew – it was the stubborn insistence and integrity of the “little guy from Shawinigan.” But from where will Ignatieff draw his resolve?

There was at least some indication of a character shining through when he announced that he was proud to have represented Canada abroad. This declaration comes after years spent apologizing for living out of the country for several decades. Here was the glimpse of a new and significant re-evaluation – a real person peeking through the clouds of impersonal rationality. A young Quebecois sitting in the next seat turned to me and said, “Finally they’ve decided to give up trying to make him seem like an ‘everyman’.”

But when Ignatieff tried to tell us why he wanted to be a different kind of leader and where his vision for Canada came from, all he could come up with was a kind of categorical imperative. He declared that the fixes he would champion were not simply desirable, were not just the right thing to do, but were, in fact, “musts,” necessities with something of divine command built into them. We must attend to these things lest we regress into a Sodom, lest we fall behind the rest of the first world that is far more aggressively pursuing the future.

What was missing from Ignatieff’s talk was to whom these musts are ineluctable. The answer here can only be to him – now as a fully formed political character.

The liberal rationality was further on display as many speakers put forward their ideas on just how the Canada they envisioned might be paid for. Obviously cognizant of the Conservative agenda, speakers avoided talking about big tax and spend policies. Again and again, they brought up Lloyd Axworthy’s notion of “network governance,” the idea of doing what we do in more efficient, collaborative, coordinated ways.

It was in this spirit that Janice Stein put forward the idea that our embassies could act as “one stop shops,” attending not only to routine consular duties, but also serving as hubs for foreign student recruitment and pushing the strengths of Canadian culture.

It was in this spirit that Dr. Alan Bernstein recommended that we begin thinking about the 11 provincially run health care systems not as competitors for federal transfers but as “11 distinct experiments” that can share their findings and work in cahoots with the feds to create a workable health care system out of the chrysalis form we currently have in place.

It was in this spirit that the country’s declining productivity, its quickly aging population, energy and the environmental issues, the difficulty with maintaining a creative and competitive economy, and how we can strengthen Canada’s presence in the world were tackled.

The conference was billed as non-partisan, but I think I would have liked it even better if each of the five “challenges” addressed would have been followed with a response from a very partisan Liberal to translate the discussion into future policies to be collected into a new and improved Red Book.

As it was, the question of “how does all of this come together?” hovered over the proceedings. Indeed, many of my peers began to worry that they would not be able to come away with a single story to move forward with.

The tension created by the failure to tie up and connect each section meant that everything fell to Ignatieff and his final speech. And, to a large extent, Ignatieff met the challenge head on. His speech was good, but no cigars were handed out.

“I have heard the term ‘networking’,” he said. “We came to a conference and we emerged as a community,” he said. There was truth in these words. But the scope of that truth did not have sufficient oomph to explode out of the room and spill out into the streets of Montreal, spreading to the far reaches of our vast country. To have done that, Ignatieff would have had to be more resolved and decisive with respect to his vision.

But then, liberalism and the Liberal party have always been more about the means than the end. They tend, in principle, to shy away from the vision thing which always limits the size of the tent.