"Travers"-ing the Nation

At my request, I had lunch with Jim Travers, national affairs columnist for the Toronto Star, in Ottawa a couple of months ago.  I had some questions to ask him about Africa and Canada.  Prior to the meeting, I had been advised by other media types that he was a seasoned and wise purveyor of the political scene.  The fact he had worked in Africa for a number of years made him an obvious choice as the object of my questions.

The lunch itself was delightful and informative, but throughout, I got the sense that he was troubled – almost as if he was lamenting our influence as a nation.

Well, yesterday, in a featured column in the Star, he laid it out for all of us to read and he took no prisoners. He surveyed the nation from his seasoned perch and couldn’t help but reflect on the irony that, while Africa is overall faring better on its path to true democracy, Canada is heading in the other direction.  Though sparing the media from his judicious eye, Travers summoned leaders, cabinet members, political parties, weakened bureaucrats and professional henchmen, to the bench and cross-examined them until there was little left in the way of defense.  Words such as the following have a solemn condemnation to them and very few in Ottawa would argue with the premise:

Here, power and control are increasingly concentrated and accountability honoured more in promise than practice. Canadian politicians flout the will of voters and parties. Once-solid institutions are being pulled apart by rising complexity and falling legitimacy. Scandals come and go without full public exposure or cleansing political punishment. If not yet lost, Camelot is under siege."

He speaks of broken institutions, severed links between voters and their elected representatives, and the reality that Parliament is “patently dysfunctional,” as we have said in these pages from the beginning.  He favors no party or leader – we are all found wanton.  It’s clear how bad things have gotten when a key cabinet minister says it’s time to go over the Governor General’s head.

Perhaps the reputed columnist will at some point include the media itself in this diabolical shift towards elitist power, but the reasonings he laid out this weekend are, for now, sufficient.  Check out his column at http://www.thestar.com/article/613535 and see if you can’t help but agree with his last words: 

Appealing as it sounds, advocacy requires effort. It's so much easier to go with the flow, to let situational democracy evolve with each reflex, stopgap, jerry-rigged response to every new policy demand and political threat. But that leads away from accountability and toward the Big Man culture that Africa is finally throwing off and has no place in Canada. If war is too serious to leave to generals, then surely democracy is too important to delegate to politicians."

Here is a serious writer calling us – politicians and citizens alike – to a serious task.  Our lack of attention got us into this mess and only our focused understanding can restore Canada to its rightful place in the world.