Stærstu mistökin?

Dagblaðið National Post birti skemmtilegan og áhugaverðan greinarflokk nú nýverið.  Þar fjölluðu dálkahöfundar blaðsins um það sem þeir töldu vera stærstu mistökin sem gerð hafa verið í pólítískri sögu Kanada.  Eins og nærri má geta eru þeir ekki sammála, en þó má sjá nokkrar "línur" í skrifum þeirra.

En það er gaman að velta því fyrir sér hvað væri skrifað um ef svipaður greinaflokkur yrði skrifaður á Íslandi.  Hvað væri skrifað um?

Það sem mér dettur í hug (án þess að það væri það sem ég myndi velja) væri:  Kvótakerfið, landsbyggðarstefnan (líklega í "báðar áttir", þ.e. bæði og lítið og mikið að gert), landbúnaðarstefnan, sambandsslitin, að ganga ekki í Evrópusambandið, Nýsköpunarstjórnin, skuttogara- og frystihúsavæðingin á 8. áratugnum, "útrásin", einkavæðingin, Kárahnjúkavirkjun, álverið í Straumsvík, inngangan í NATO, varnarliðið á Keflavíkurflugvelli, sífelld stækkun ríkisins og hvað? 

Hverju myndir þú vilja bæta við?  Hvað myndir þú vilja skrifa um?

Hér má sjá George Jonas skrifa um aðskilnaðarstefnuna, Bandaríkjahatur og "hlutleysi",  

"Separatism is Canada's malaria. At present it's in remission, but could recur at any time. Succumbing to it would be a big mistake. At various points in the last 40 years, it looked as if we might stumble into it. Or -- just as bad -- our mistake was going to be a union maintained at too great a price.

In the 1970s, Canadians seemed ready to pay for unity by government repression and lawlessness, exemplified by tanks in the streets of Montreal and barn-burning Mounties. Call it the Trudeau Fallacy. (Pierre Trudeau said if it bothered people that the Mounties burned Péquiste barns illegally, perhaps he'd make it legal for the Mounties to burn barns.) Then, in the
years that followed, we courted the flip side of the Trudeau-fallacy by offering needless or ill-conceived concessions for unity, such as Meech Lake (1987) and Charlottetown (1992). Call it the Mulroney Fallacy. Canada narrowly avoided both.

--  Canada's other chronic malady is a temptation to saw off the continental limb on which it's sitting. We often flirt with giving in to anti-Americanism, but have luckily always pulled back (so far, anyway) in the last second. After the New Left faded following the turbulent 1960s, the kind of mindless anti-Americanism that would support the bubonic plague if
the Yanks opposed it, subsided with it. If it were to flare up again, it could be Canada¹s biggest mistake."

hér Lorne Gunter um fjárlagahallann sem lengi tíðkaðist,

"Throughout the late ’60s and early ’70s, university economics professors, politicians and policy-makers were seized by two complementary ideas: There was no limit to the problems governments could solve given enough money to spend on social programs, and there was no reason government shouldn’t borrow all the money it needed.

The dominant fiscal theory was that so long as governments paid the annual interest on any money they owed, inflation would whittle the principal down to meaninglessness. All their social-program dreams would cost them was the debt-servicing costs, which would take up a smaller percentage of annual budgets than paying the full cost for the programs up front. After 10 or 20 years, the principal would have been reduced by inflation to a fraction of its original face value. Paying it back would then involve a mere hiccup on the government’s ledgers.

That might have worked if the borrowing had gone on for only a year or two. But after the 1974 edition, Canada went another 21 years without a balanced budget."

hér skrifar Barbara Kay um fjölmenningarsamfélagið,

"In a speech delivered during the 2006 Liberal leadership campaign, Michael Ignatieff cheerfully remarked: “The great achievement of Canada, and I think we’re already there, is that in Canada you’re free to choose your belonging.”

Mr. Ignatieff continues to astonish me in so many ways. In this instance, I ask myself: How can a man live in a foreign country for — how many was it? Thirty years? — then cast a gimlet eye over the political lay of the land, and in just three little words cut to the very marrow of Canada’s greatest mistake: “Choose your belonging!”

Mr. Ignatieff is not like you and me. Mr. Ignatieff is an intellectual. He believes that the narrow confines of a single national loyalty would cramp his own beautiful mind and, philosophical Lord Bountiful that he is, he shares his hermeneutical largesse with all Canadians.

I must reluctantly concede that he has hit upon a fitting revisionist motto, though, for nowadays “From sea to shining sea” isn’t a patch for succinctness and veracity on “Choose Your Belonging.”"

Yoni Goldstein skrifar um háskólamenntun fyrir almannafé, 

"Now, a lot of you are ready to pounce on me right about now because you think I just implied that some Canadians are too dumb to handle higher learning. That’s a fair assessment — I do think that some of us are quite simply smarter than others. But I’m also arguing that four years at university might be less than optimally valuable for many of us. That, I think, is the obvious impression you get if you spend any time on the campus of a Canadian university.

Yet most Canadians refuse to accept this possibility because our system of publicly funding universities and colleges has ingrained in us the message that going to college is a right, not a privilege and responsibility. So we pretty much all go. And why not? It’s cheap (yes, even at $5,000 a year), it’s fun and there are virtually no expectations placed on you — just do what you please, study (or don’t) what you want and we’ll see you in four years. Maybe you’ll have gained a skill, maybe not, but either way at least you’ll have “experienced” university. "

Jeet Heer og Dimitry Anastakis skrifa um Meech Lake samkomulagið,

"The Meech Lake deal, made between Mulroney and provincial and territorial leaders in 1987, promised to end Quebec’s alleged exile from Canadian constitutional politics. In exchange for Quebec’s recognition as a distinct society and a few other reforms, La Belle Province was set to sign on to the constitution. It all ended in disaster in 1990 when the accord failed to get the necessary unanimous support of the provinces.

Indeed, so grand was Mulroney’s Meech Lake fiasco that it can actually provide the definition of what constitutes a truly great Canadian policy failure.

Such an immense policy disaster should fulfill three criteria. First, a policy has to be poorly conceptualized and executed. Second, to be truly horrible, a policy should fail in a visible and public manner, so as to discredit the political process itself. Finally, and most importantly, a truly devastating policy failure has to have long-term consequences. "

það gerir einnig L. Ian MacDonald,

"And over what? Trudeau’s relentless opposition to Meech, from its adoption in 1987 to its death in 1990, was based mainly on the recognition of Quebec as a “distinct society” for purposes of interpreting Canada’s Constitution (including his Charter). Because Trudeau was the father of the Charter, and an orthodox federalist who had always fought any suggestion of special status for his home province of Quebec, his campaign against Meech had unique resonance in English-speaking Canada. As Bob Rae later observed, Trudeau legitimized opposition to Meech.

Trudeau’s famous newspaper article of May 1987, dripping with scorn for Brian Mulroney and the provincial premiers (“snivellers” who should be “sent packing”) was a return to his intellectual origins as a pamphleteer at Cité Libre magazine (where he once dismissed Lester Pearson as “the defrocked prince of peace”). Previously, Mulroney had discussed the April 30, 1987, agreement in principle with Trudeau, and sent two senior officials, including Trudeau’s own former speechwriter, Andre Burelle, to Montreal to brief him. "

Colby Cosh telur að stærstu mistökin hafi verið að taka Nýfundnaland inn í Kanada,

 "Whose interests were served by the merger of Canada and Newfoundland? The smaller (but senior) partner is still debating the question.

Newfoundlanders often ponder that alternate world in which they drove the “Canadian wolf” from the door. The bitter truth is that those who came closest to being right about joining Confederation in the referendum fight of 1948 turned out to be the most extreme, most paranoid of the anti-federates. They said that Confederation would lead to an exodus of Newfoundland’s young and most talented. They said that Ottawa would run the cod fishery short-sightedly and perhaps destroy it. They said, long before Churchill Falls, that joining Confederation would leave Newfoundland at the mercy of French-Canadian interests. Can history offer any retort?

The pro-Confederation forces, for their part, promised that a “yes” to Canada would bring a wave of social programs and debt relief — and that prediction, too, was borne out. Union led to immediate improvements in Newfoundland’s infrastructure and in the social indicators, like tuberculosis, that played such a role in shaming the province into voting the way it did. "

Robert Fulford skrifar um andstöðu og hálfgert hatur á fyrirtækjum.

"For generations, Canadians have regarded free enterprise as a necessary evil at best. In private, we may regard it as a positive good, but just about no one outside the business world takes that position in public. This seems to me a fundamental mistake. It distorts the operation of governments, the use of tax powers, the treatment of disadvantaged regions and much more.

Capitalism creates most of our jobs and we would all be desperately poor without the entrepreneurs who keep the economy alive and the financiers who invest in our corporations. But that's no reason, as Canadians see it, to look upon business with anything but suspicion.

Of course, only a few Canadians will declare themselves anti-business, and an even smaller minority will argue for replacing free enterprise with a command economy directed by bureaucrats and politicians. But we tolerate business rather than admiring it.

We do not rejoice in the successes of the business class. We applaud them not for what they do best, building the corporations that make us relatively rich, but for what we see as commendable activities, the donation of money
to hospitals, universities and other good causes.

We believe passionately that we must control business and we act as if business will flourish no matter how much we burden it with regulations -- or how much we tax it. In the Canadian view, business exists to be taxed. We
assume it is a cow we can milk forever. Business will always be there, will always succeed and therefore will always be available to provide us with jobs and money for whatever social purposes we decide."