Right to Community - Perils of Political Distance

I learned in my five years in politics that most MPs are privileged to see the best of our communities – festivals, concerts, plays, elite fundraisers, beautiful venues, plush offices. Foreign travel introduces you to some of the most remarkable locations, only at the higher levels that are characteristic of international conferences – palaces, UN assemblies, parliamentary chambers. Gradually, imperceptibly to most politicians, you recede from the most basic activities in community life, leaving the nitty-gritty appeals to your staff. You end up representing your constituents, but only at rarified levels. Cities, communities, become “Ottawa-fied,” if I can use that term. You come from a constituency, but in so many ways you view it from afar.And so you lose your ability to get bent out of shape by what’s happening to our communities today. You fail to comprehend the quiet despair, the sense of loss your constituents feel everyday. You see a group of people who elect you; they see streets, parking lots, strip malls, downtowns in decline, line-ups outside social agencies, bankruptcies, and empty buildings. Almost every social malady we can imagine exists in our communities, side-by-side with some of our great strengths and accomplishments. With so many roads and cars, our mobile communities only add to our sense of loss of “place.”My encounters with citizens revealed this same troubling sense to a degree that I have now come to the conclusion that it is real. We don’t so much feel collectively victimized as we do helpless. It used to be small towns and family farms that experienced this sense of loss; now it infiltrates even our major cities. This is significant, for more than 50% of all Canadians live in just six large metropolitan areas, with millions more living in mid-sized communities. Put simply: more than ever before we have become a nation of communities.You would assume, with certain merit, that our communities would be occupying far more space on the various political agendas of this country. You’d be wrong. Ottawa has shown little interest in urban policy-making. To be sure, stimulus funds were helpful, but hardly formed a new wave of interest in the communities where we live. To no avail has the Federation of Canadian Municipalities pressed for a national transportation or housing strategy. Environmental initiatives, badly in need of senior level funding, have remained moribund. Canada’s equalization formula is effectively broken, leaving provinces with increased responsibilities for education and healthcare and the federal government with fewer standards to have to maintain. Governments chase international investment as though it’s our only hope.All this leaves our communities with massive loads to bear and no possible way to raise the revenues that come commensurate with downloading. Yet we don’t live in Parliament or any provincial capital’s legislature, but in our own home communities where we presently have the least likely chance of affecting our way of life. This is a fully unsustainable model but we accept it in our own locales because we feel there is no other choice.Perhaps there is. Canada has been good to us, with one of the highest standards of living in the world and a way of life to die for. But to compare ourselves to Africa or India is fruitless. We must compare ourselves with our ideals, our history, our present predicament. I have spoken with many foreign ambassadors and ministers who fear Canada is failing by its own standards, but we don’t have to look there for proof: we feel it within ourselves. Yet most of us aren’t looking for revolution; we just want things to be successful again. We merely want Ottawa to live up to its responsibilities, and for our provincial leaders to cooperate in a kind of federalism that works. At present they are lost in their own designs and problems and are too distracted with such things to sincerely listen to our communities.In so many ways we are like those living in America just prior to the days of the famous Revolution. So much has been written about that political era, with much of it sentimental ideology, that we forget it was a movement of local communities and colonies to gain rightful recognition. Its leaders were primarily businessmen and farmers, landholders and lawyers. It wasn’t so much based on a universal ideal but a means of highlighting local concerns. As former Librarian of Congress, Daniel Boorstin, was fond of saying, “The American Revolution didn’t produce in America a single important treatise on political theory.” Why should it have, when the brilliant minds in charge of the cause were more concerned with issues like taxation than developing a new political paradigm?These were a people living a long way from the centre of the British Empire, yet they remained faithful to the genius of the British system – trial by jury, representation before taxation, habeas corpus, the independence of the judiciary, free speech, free assembly, and the rights to property.There was only one problem: They were no longer being treated as valid communities within a system that had once recognized them. It took years to develop, but things reached a point where they used the British Parliament’s own failure to live up to its ideals to strike their own deal for independent recognition. Perhaps its time our communities considered something similar.