The Global Greens Charter lists six guiding principles — ecological wisdom, social justice, participatory democracy, nonviolence, sustainability, and respect for diversity.
Examining these green principles, a case can be made that, by its extant values, Canada already aspires to be a “green” country. Imperfect, slow, with miss-steps, we have evolved as a diverse country, struggling sometimes toward social justice, against a background of an almost defining awareness of our vast natural context.
A country can be defined by lines on a map or fences and border guards. A nation is defined by a sense of common identity — a shared history, vision, and values . . . The freedom of open space. Wilderness. Mountains. Prairies. “We the North.”
The Green Party represents those of us, or even those parts of many more of us, that want do more to protect and preserve our natural context and create a sustainable society.
As a democracy — government by the population — we are able to debate on these issues and choose whether to act on them. We have agency.
Agency, the freedom to act in accordance with our chosen values, presumes that we are “masters in our own house.” It assumes that we, as a nation, are free to make choices in keeping with our values.
For so much of our history — certainly the last 80 years — we have assumed that we have, and will always have, this freedom to debate and define ourselves as a nation. A freedom that has become so taken for granted as to be invisible to most of us.
Some would say we have been naïve — living in a fool’s paradise — a mirage, an illusion. We have now begun to recognize that our freedom to make our own choices can be taken away.
If we cannot maintain our own national integrity and identity, then we will not be able to live by the values we choose. That choice will not be up to us.
Just as strong boundaries are important in human relations and even immune systems, they are essential for societies. The maintenance of those boundaries can be considered defence (or, the “fence”).
Defence is about maintaining what we are, what we have, and what we want. To be clear, defence isn’t only about guns or bombs. And it is not about aggression. It is about strength, and that takes many forms, including economic, societal resilience, rapid and accurate information flows, or knowledge, and the inherent deterrence of an agile and responsive society and system of government.
This nation-building requires us to invest resources in infrastructure — both physical and intangible. It is about making the country, which contains this nation, stronger in all ways.
This requires intelligent choices. At any moment in time, our recourses are FINITE. We might be able to have anything we want. Guaranteed we can’t have everything we want. We may not be able to have both a particular social program and better roads. We can invest in choices that make our society stronger, wealthier and, therefore, with more options in the future. Wealthy countries have more options. The “richer” we are — the more resources we have and have access to — the more choices we can have.
There is much we can do to make our nation stronger, more resilient, with the greater range of choices that greater wealth (resources) would allow. There are examples, both past and future.
A few examples from the past include . . .
• The very act of Confederation itself — pooling our resources and our people made us stronger.
• The construction of the transcontinental railway, the CPR, created opportunities to trade and movement of goods.
• The discovery and development of the resources of the land — from beaver pelts and timber to agriculture, iron, nickel, and oil, all helped create this wealth we take for granted.
• The development of enormous amounts of hydro-electric power.
• The participation in the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway that opened up great potential trade with the whole world.
• Universal health care that lets us focus on working hard and living good lives.
• The National Research Council and even the CBC.
Yes, we have damaged the environment in the process, but the prosperity created has allowed us to create a society that now has the luxury of caring about that natural environment and doing better. We have options.
If we don’t protect our freedom to choose, someone else will make choices for us that we might not like. The freedom to choose requires that we are able to protect that freedom. That implies allocating more resources to a stronger defence, a stronger military, and maybe the concepts of “civilian defence.” Finite resources means that those resources must be taken away from something else — unless we can “grow the pie.”
A few examples of “nation-building” things we might do:
• A single road connects eastern Canada to western Canada. One. Road.
When a design flaw in the new bridge at Nipigon made the Trans-Canada Highway unusable the country was cut in half. How many other countries would accept the necessity of travelling through a foreign country to communicate internally?
Furthermore, that road — the TRANS-CANADA HIGHWAY! — is only a two-lane road for many hundreds of kilometres, encouraging travel on better roads through the United States.
Upgrading the TCH and building alternate routes is clearly a nation-building project.
• Canada’s electrical power grid is incomplete. Both Quebec and Manitoba have renewably-generated electricity to spare, but Ontario’s connection to Quebec is inadequate and to Manitoba almost non-existent. As a result, Montreal’s residential rate and Winnipeg’s are both substantially lower than Toronto’s.
• The removal of interprovincial trade barriers and the harmonization of many regulations that make us a country of tiny, disjointed markets. Arguably, we should never have signed the 1988 Free Trade Agreement before developing our competitiveness domestically.
• Similarly, the various uncoordinated provincial securities commissions create an unnecessary burden on businesses trying to raise capital to grow, causing some, and their employment, to go elsewhere.
• Streamlining the quick approval or denial of all kinds of regulatory permits to make us more responsive while protecting society and the environment.
• Believe it or not, pipelines! Oil and Gas! Heresy!
Yes, we want off of fossil fuels, but we are not there yet. Meanwhile, unable to transport our own oil to the eastern half of the country, Canada imports over 1 million barrels of oil. As a result, the eastern refineries are not even built to process the oil from the west.
Meanwhile, we export to the U.S. and are captive to that buyer, so they set the terms. Canada receives a discounted price relative to the world market. That discount ranges from $10 – $20, but has a times been more. We are held hostage by our own lack of infrastructure. That lost income could, potentially, be used to make our own society, our own country, stronger.
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We can choose to do some of these things and many more, if we accept that development and the resulting benefits can give us more options and freedoms to live by our values.
If we can’t defend our identity, we may not preserve our integrity and values. We face a crisis — an existential threat. The positive in this is, if we survive it as a nation, it may well become a “nation-building” moment.
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“When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.’ — Samuel Johnson