I concur that the “disdain” for security and defence is at the top of the list that Cdns keep for themselves to show the world (and themselves) that we are not Americans — darn it! Even if, to the rest of the world, that is exactly who we look and act like. The security and defence functions are unfortunately the most critical of requirements for a national govt to get right. We, on the other hand, have been resting on the security eyes, ears and wings of others (mainly them ornery Yanks) for decades. Prior to that we leaned on the Brits. We have never looked after ourselves in this. The closest we came was — paradoxically— the during the Liberal govt of St Laurent 6 to 7 decades ago.
Thank you Jen and Matt for informing me, one of the first “boomers”, and providing your insights into the colossal cockup we now call Canadian politics. I’ve found them depressing for years (decades?) and can truly say the only honest politician I’ve ever met was a British Columbia MLA, Cyril Shelford, and that was in the early 70’s. Guys, you think you’re depressed with todays politics, imagine living with that kind of depression for fifty years. Your reporting is refreshing and, happily, agrees with my point of view. Good luck with your sponsored event.
I don't think there's a monocausal explanation to Canadian disdain for security and defense. If there's a common factor, it's that Canada has been sheltered from any real responsibility or consequences in those areas for a very long time.
Quebecois have long had an insular approach to the world, disdaining any involvement in things they saw as part of the English colonial agenda. Many Canadian nationalists have a reflexive anti-Americanism that prompts them to take a contrary position to anything Americans might do. We've also got a strain of '60s pacifism and anti-militarism that's been able to flourish untouched by geopolitical realities. We've also got a lot of people who sympathize with the other side of the conflicts an American-led Western bloc has faced, partly because we've welcomed so many refugees. Voices of pro-Allende Chileans, Sikh separatists, Palestinians, and supporters of the Tamil Tigers tend to be disproportionately represented in Canadian politics.
To this Western Canadian eyes, there will be no change until the 21st Century version of the Family Compact and Chateau Clique is broken up and put to bed. But I fear that there is no path short of rebellion to get any meaningful change. Because the grooming of the next generation starts at some daycare center at the Glebe, followed by a posh school such as Greys Point Academy or Upper Canada College then a law degree at McGill University, and a MBA at Harvard. A few cushy PS jobs to get a bit of seasoning followed by an appointment as the Executive VP of fuckery at SNC Lavalin and then a safe seat in Danforth, Ottawa Centre or Papineau, or a law career that finishes at the Supreme Court of Canada. And there you have it, the path to the upper reaches of the Laurentian Elite!
I was dismayed to hear about Canada’s lack of transparency. Surprising that many elected officials are so conceited about being part of an inefficient and incompetent system. Possibly because they have never participated in private sector. Another thing that bothers me is how unaccountability and not answering a direct question is normalized. Need a shake up?
Indeed but is this not what you and Jen should rale against (as well as professor Jeffery Dvorkin)...love the Line and your level above the smog.. cheers
So what's with the Globe and Mail---pandering to Johnson and the Liberals by publishing his rebuttal to the critics of his "report" on a page by itself as if its official editorial policy?
Canadians culturally are deathly afraid of confrontation, and that even goes into the security and defence realm with by nature is "confrontational." Perhaps it's a combination of the Francophone pacifism/inward looking culture coupled with Anglophone chattering class obsession with the US/chip on shoulder which demands the opposite of the US.
This is weird and pathetic and our second rate venal Canadian elite are going to kill this country. Big fish in small pond I guess is their comfort zone anyways.
We like to think this is virtuous but no one thinks shirking responsibility or acceptance of a mediocre security network and even health system because "at least the Americans have it worse and Canadians are too cheap to be asked to pay for improvements" is a good look.
What Canadians think the rest of the world thinks is polite is in fact hypocritical, disingenuous, passive aggressive, etc.
Our only hope left is that mass immigration cleans this up. Hopefully they just don't care about the hangups and mediocrity of the old stock elite and just clean it up.
State capacity. Matt and Jen keep coming back to it. The concept that this country has built, said and done big things in the past with fewer people and less technological know-how, and yet there is some unspoken black hole *somewhere* preventing us from doing and achieving things that ought to be doable and achievable. Where's the gap? We've seen the analysis issue by issue whether it's been foreign interference or military procurement. The thesis tends to be technocratic ambivalence.
I take it a layer deeper. It's somewhere deep in the culture, and I think we all see it in our mundane day to day. My thesis is that the same inertia the Line reports on in the halls of supposed power is the same inertia you see in the rest of your daily life. I hope a cultural anthropologist can put a finger on it soon. Or perhaps we need to get Gerson and Gurney in a room with Malcolm Gladwell and Dave Chappelle to accurately define it.
Here is my stab at this - start with the Neverending Story. What was destroying Fantasia, leaving the Childlike Empress to cry out pleading for the boy Bastian to "Say my name?" The Nothing. This unspoken apathy - not a true nemesis as much as an absence of belief or care.
Emile Durkheim wrote about this concept as "anomie" - a moral confusion and lack of social attachment.
Somewhere between Fantasia's Nothing and Durkheim's anomie lies my rough thread of a thesis - that in Canada today we approach public life too often as a hobby. A fucking hobby. And one that you're thinking of ditching like that dusty Dremel in your garage you meant to carve a duck with during the pandemic.
There is almost nothing in the life of the country that convinces me that senior bureaucrats, politicians and thought leaders would literally kill and die to achieve.
Think about an actual but unwritten Constitutional convention in this country - ministerial responsibility. The idea that a Minister of the Crown runs a serious department of state and is personally politically responsible for its administration and failure. The minister took the fall for serious policy failures under this convention. Today? Ministers fall because they didn't act as effective spokespeople or they literally blame their own bureaucracy in public as was done to explain away the failure to brief MPs about foreign interference.
Structures are put in place to make sure decisions cannot be made. In public life we see intel briefings going to email addresses that stakeholders can't or don't read. The ultimate 'cover-your-ass".
But in private life, don't we see the same phenomena?
I work in the area of workplace investigation. A trend we are seeing is a move to create more channels of communication to ensure employees can express concerns in an environment of complete psychological safety. Sounds healthy, progessive and responsive to employee concerns, right?
So here's what happens. We set up a whistleblower hotline. The supervisors, being in a status of power, can't be trusted to resolve problems appropriately. So we accept complaints anonymously. Those complaints are collected by a third party. We don't want to out the whistleblower, so we hire a third party to accept and compile the concerns. We offer a chance for the employee to confidentially express their concerns. But since we don't want to reveal anything that might be identifying, the supervisor is simply coached to be more empathetic and trauma-informed. Ms. Supervisor has no fucking clue how to improve or what they did wrong. But they know they're on thin ice.
I attended a two week session on how to restore workplaces experiencing conflict. When I raised discipline or termination as a possible outcome of a departmental assessment, I was nearly given the boot. The correct outcome, as we learned, is always communication training, and this can be pre-populated in your consultant's report. I was tut-tutted that discipline itself must be approached in a trauma-informed way, meaning in a way that acknowledges that discipline itself (being told you goofed, on paper) is itself traumatic and to be avoided.
I don't think this is merely a personal-professional axe to grind - it's the same whispering Nothing that wrecked Fantasia. Sometimes, we do need to learn to communicate better. But sometimes, we need to move the factory line output ten feet to the right, or finally replace those Sea Kings. Sometimes the thing causing conflict on the team is not just communication about the thing - the problem is the actual thing. Or it's Bob - and Bob needs to go.
So we can talk about disdain for security in our public service. That's likely apt. But I submit that the disdain is deeply cultural, influenced by the Nothing, entrenching that our working lives are a hobby and nothing is worth getting too fussed about.
Now, this thesis is not an Ayn Rand novel. I don't believe that there are a few brilliant and hardworking saviours for whom the rest of us just need to get out of the way. I mean, I shed a tear for Atrayu too, but the hero can't solve the Nothing alone. Politically, I'm not here for the Great Man theory that leads to tyranny.
The salvation of this country is in every B+ middle manager in the land. At Fortinos, Magna, CSIS and the RCMP. Where on Earth did that come from, you ask? Our country's B+ middle managers are at the greatest risk of becoming part of the Nothing if they don't get things done and don't say what they know is true and right. They can decide not to manage Bob, because why would he if he's just going to get told he was too stern at the last team meeting and here's your new leadership coach? Let Bob fuck around and irritate his team. There's no point solving it.
We need to support Mr. B+ over there because whatever he does, it's not a hobby - he has a duty and he's god-damned honour bound to do it. Manage Bob, B+ guy - and I'll have your back in his grievance meeting and when he accuses you of harassment. If B+ guy doesn't have that assurance, Bob's going to poison the team and B+ guy won't do a damned thing about it. Organizationally, we've told him to mail in the next 10 years, keep his head down and wait for his pension.
My theory is that this workplace malaise, this Nothing, or this sense that important things are just a hobby - it's deeply embedded in all our lives and not just in the unachieved promise to get clean water to all indigenous communities. It's why you can't get the donut you want at the drive-through, and it's why Bob (that jerk) is still a couple seats down from you at the office.
I suspect Johnston's report will only.increase the leaks from CSIS and demand for a full inquiry. Telford will likely take the fall and exit with the remaining half of Trudeau's brain :)
The Alberta election is a choice between herpes (NDP) and ghonerra (UCP). The NDP is likely to drive health and education spending to even further levels of unsustainability that will harm the province forever. The NDP is too in bed with public sector unions and therefore the status quo. I actually welcome some of the experimentation that the UCP might take with public services. Piling on more funding hasn't worked so new approaches must be tried. Both the health and education systems are too complex and entrenched for any politician to "destroy" them as incrementalism is the only change possible.
Much better than mandatory referenda to raises taxes woukd be mandatory referenda to table budgets with operational deficits. Governments can't do everything and deficits allow them to avoid prioritization.
I am excited about the prospect of a Line event. Too bad it would be in Toronto.
I concur that the “disdain” for security and defence is at the top of the list that Cdns keep for themselves to show the world (and themselves) that we are not Americans — darn it! Even if, to the rest of the world, that is exactly who we look and act like. The security and defence functions are unfortunately the most critical of requirements for a national govt to get right. We, on the other hand, have been resting on the security eyes, ears and wings of others (mainly them ornery Yanks) for decades. Prior to that we leaned on the Brits. We have never looked after ourselves in this. The closest we came was — paradoxically— the during the Liberal govt of St Laurent 6 to 7 decades ago.
Thank you Jen and Matt for informing me, one of the first “boomers”, and providing your insights into the colossal cockup we now call Canadian politics. I’ve found them depressing for years (decades?) and can truly say the only honest politician I’ve ever met was a British Columbia MLA, Cyril Shelford, and that was in the early 70’s. Guys, you think you’re depressed with todays politics, imagine living with that kind of depression for fifty years. Your reporting is refreshing and, happily, agrees with my point of view. Good luck with your sponsored event.
I don't think there's a monocausal explanation to Canadian disdain for security and defense. If there's a common factor, it's that Canada has been sheltered from any real responsibility or consequences in those areas for a very long time.
Quebecois have long had an insular approach to the world, disdaining any involvement in things they saw as part of the English colonial agenda. Many Canadian nationalists have a reflexive anti-Americanism that prompts them to take a contrary position to anything Americans might do. We've also got a strain of '60s pacifism and anti-militarism that's been able to flourish untouched by geopolitical realities. We've also got a lot of people who sympathize with the other side of the conflicts an American-led Western bloc has faced, partly because we've welcomed so many refugees. Voices of pro-Allende Chileans, Sikh separatists, Palestinians, and supporters of the Tamil Tigers tend to be disproportionately represented in Canadian politics.
To this Western Canadian eyes, there will be no change until the 21st Century version of the Family Compact and Chateau Clique is broken up and put to bed. But I fear that there is no path short of rebellion to get any meaningful change. Because the grooming of the next generation starts at some daycare center at the Glebe, followed by a posh school such as Greys Point Academy or Upper Canada College then a law degree at McGill University, and a MBA at Harvard. A few cushy PS jobs to get a bit of seasoning followed by an appointment as the Executive VP of fuckery at SNC Lavalin and then a safe seat in Danforth, Ottawa Centre or Papineau, or a law career that finishes at the Supreme Court of Canada. And there you have it, the path to the upper reaches of the Laurentian Elite!
I was dismayed to hear about Canada’s lack of transparency. Surprising that many elected officials are so conceited about being part of an inefficient and incompetent system. Possibly because they have never participated in private sector. Another thing that bothers me is how unaccountability and not answering a direct question is normalized. Need a shake up?
Indeed but is this not what you and Jen should rale against (as well as professor Jeffery Dvorkin)...love the Line and your level above the smog.. cheers
So what's with the Globe and Mail---pandering to Johnson and the Liberals by publishing his rebuttal to the critics of his "report" on a page by itself as if its official editorial policy?
Please comment as journalists
Canadians culturally are deathly afraid of confrontation, and that even goes into the security and defence realm with by nature is "confrontational." Perhaps it's a combination of the Francophone pacifism/inward looking culture coupled with Anglophone chattering class obsession with the US/chip on shoulder which demands the opposite of the US.
This is weird and pathetic and our second rate venal Canadian elite are going to kill this country. Big fish in small pond I guess is their comfort zone anyways.
We like to think this is virtuous but no one thinks shirking responsibility or acceptance of a mediocre security network and even health system because "at least the Americans have it worse and Canadians are too cheap to be asked to pay for improvements" is a good look.
What Canadians think the rest of the world thinks is polite is in fact hypocritical, disingenuous, passive aggressive, etc.
Our only hope left is that mass immigration cleans this up. Hopefully they just don't care about the hangups and mediocrity of the old stock elite and just clean it up.
State capacity. Matt and Jen keep coming back to it. The concept that this country has built, said and done big things in the past with fewer people and less technological know-how, and yet there is some unspoken black hole *somewhere* preventing us from doing and achieving things that ought to be doable and achievable. Where's the gap? We've seen the analysis issue by issue whether it's been foreign interference or military procurement. The thesis tends to be technocratic ambivalence.
I take it a layer deeper. It's somewhere deep in the culture, and I think we all see it in our mundane day to day. My thesis is that the same inertia the Line reports on in the halls of supposed power is the same inertia you see in the rest of your daily life. I hope a cultural anthropologist can put a finger on it soon. Or perhaps we need to get Gerson and Gurney in a room with Malcolm Gladwell and Dave Chappelle to accurately define it.
Here is my stab at this - start with the Neverending Story. What was destroying Fantasia, leaving the Childlike Empress to cry out pleading for the boy Bastian to "Say my name?" The Nothing. This unspoken apathy - not a true nemesis as much as an absence of belief or care.
Emile Durkheim wrote about this concept as "anomie" - a moral confusion and lack of social attachment.
Somewhere between Fantasia's Nothing and Durkheim's anomie lies my rough thread of a thesis - that in Canada today we approach public life too often as a hobby. A fucking hobby. And one that you're thinking of ditching like that dusty Dremel in your garage you meant to carve a duck with during the pandemic.
There is almost nothing in the life of the country that convinces me that senior bureaucrats, politicians and thought leaders would literally kill and die to achieve.
Think about an actual but unwritten Constitutional convention in this country - ministerial responsibility. The idea that a Minister of the Crown runs a serious department of state and is personally politically responsible for its administration and failure. The minister took the fall for serious policy failures under this convention. Today? Ministers fall because they didn't act as effective spokespeople or they literally blame their own bureaucracy in public as was done to explain away the failure to brief MPs about foreign interference.
Structures are put in place to make sure decisions cannot be made. In public life we see intel briefings going to email addresses that stakeholders can't or don't read. The ultimate 'cover-your-ass".
But in private life, don't we see the same phenomena?
I work in the area of workplace investigation. A trend we are seeing is a move to create more channels of communication to ensure employees can express concerns in an environment of complete psychological safety. Sounds healthy, progessive and responsive to employee concerns, right?
So here's what happens. We set up a whistleblower hotline. The supervisors, being in a status of power, can't be trusted to resolve problems appropriately. So we accept complaints anonymously. Those complaints are collected by a third party. We don't want to out the whistleblower, so we hire a third party to accept and compile the concerns. We offer a chance for the employee to confidentially express their concerns. But since we don't want to reveal anything that might be identifying, the supervisor is simply coached to be more empathetic and trauma-informed. Ms. Supervisor has no fucking clue how to improve or what they did wrong. But they know they're on thin ice.
I attended a two week session on how to restore workplaces experiencing conflict. When I raised discipline or termination as a possible outcome of a departmental assessment, I was nearly given the boot. The correct outcome, as we learned, is always communication training, and this can be pre-populated in your consultant's report. I was tut-tutted that discipline itself must be approached in a trauma-informed way, meaning in a way that acknowledges that discipline itself (being told you goofed, on paper) is itself traumatic and to be avoided.
I don't think this is merely a personal-professional axe to grind - it's the same whispering Nothing that wrecked Fantasia. Sometimes, we do need to learn to communicate better. But sometimes, we need to move the factory line output ten feet to the right, or finally replace those Sea Kings. Sometimes the thing causing conflict on the team is not just communication about the thing - the problem is the actual thing. Or it's Bob - and Bob needs to go.
So we can talk about disdain for security in our public service. That's likely apt. But I submit that the disdain is deeply cultural, influenced by the Nothing, entrenching that our working lives are a hobby and nothing is worth getting too fussed about.
Now, this thesis is not an Ayn Rand novel. I don't believe that there are a few brilliant and hardworking saviours for whom the rest of us just need to get out of the way. I mean, I shed a tear for Atrayu too, but the hero can't solve the Nothing alone. Politically, I'm not here for the Great Man theory that leads to tyranny.
The salvation of this country is in every B+ middle manager in the land. At Fortinos, Magna, CSIS and the RCMP. Where on Earth did that come from, you ask? Our country's B+ middle managers are at the greatest risk of becoming part of the Nothing if they don't get things done and don't say what they know is true and right. They can decide not to manage Bob, because why would he if he's just going to get told he was too stern at the last team meeting and here's your new leadership coach? Let Bob fuck around and irritate his team. There's no point solving it.
We need to support Mr. B+ over there because whatever he does, it's not a hobby - he has a duty and he's god-damned honour bound to do it. Manage Bob, B+ guy - and I'll have your back in his grievance meeting and when he accuses you of harassment. If B+ guy doesn't have that assurance, Bob's going to poison the team and B+ guy won't do a damned thing about it. Organizationally, we've told him to mail in the next 10 years, keep his head down and wait for his pension.
My theory is that this workplace malaise, this Nothing, or this sense that important things are just a hobby - it's deeply embedded in all our lives and not just in the unachieved promise to get clean water to all indigenous communities. It's why you can't get the donut you want at the drive-through, and it's why Bob (that jerk) is still a couple seats down from you at the office.
I suspect Johnston's report will only.increase the leaks from CSIS and demand for a full inquiry. Telford will likely take the fall and exit with the remaining half of Trudeau's brain :)
The Alberta election is a choice between herpes (NDP) and ghonerra (UCP). The NDP is likely to drive health and education spending to even further levels of unsustainability that will harm the province forever. The NDP is too in bed with public sector unions and therefore the status quo. I actually welcome some of the experimentation that the UCP might take with public services. Piling on more funding hasn't worked so new approaches must be tried. Both the health and education systems are too complex and entrenched for any politician to "destroy" them as incrementalism is the only change possible.
Much better than mandatory referenda to raises taxes woukd be mandatory referenda to table budgets with operational deficits. Governments can't do everything and deficits allow them to avoid prioritization.
I am excited about the prospect of a Line event. Too bad it would be in Toronto.