Colour It Beige

Lawrence Martin doesn't expect much from the upcoming throne speech. He predicts that it will be a pretty bland document:

If the leaks are to be believed, this Throne Speech will be a bean-counter’s delight, with vote targeting evident in every paragraph. It will feature all kinds of consumer-friendly initiatives, such as addressing excessive telecom charges. There will be support for families. There will be a sermon on how proud we should be to be Canadians – especially under this government.

The speech will have new offerings in areas such as military procurement and greenhouse gas regulation, but the Conservatives are probably right in thinking that there’s no widespread demand for major change.

In the midst of growing income inequality, global warming and no opportunities for youth, the Harper government will offer more of the same. Why? Martin says it's because we ageing boomers rule the roost. We have become complacent in our old age:

The atmosphere is closer to complacency: “It’s come on Canada, let’s go out and paint the town beige,” said pollster Frank Graves. And that suits the government just fine, he says.

Then Martin writes something curious:

There’s the reality that, on a comparative basis, these are relatively good times. There are serious problems: energy markets, falling middle class, collapsing manufacturing base, aboriginal peoples, deteriorating democracy and so on. There’s the usual anxiety about the future. But to stand back from the daily headlines is to see a country in a rare comfort zone. Maybe only in the 1920s and 1950s were conditions comparable.

It may be true that we face no FLQ crisis. And we are no longer officially at war. But good times? We are led by a petulant, small minded prime minister who has the support of 25% of the population. Obviously, the times are out of joint.

Beige is the colour of a country that is going nowhere.

On an entirely different note, I just read that Alice Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize. Like Chekhov, she is a master of the perfect little story. Today is a great day for Canadian literature. And it reminds us that even beige countries are capable of brilliance.

Consumers First. Really?

John Ivison recently reported that the Harper government is going to announce a "Consumers First" agenda in the upcoming throne speech. Rick Smith writes that, if there is one person the Harper government hasn't stood up for, it's the consumer:

Guided by the idea that Ottawa needs to get out of the way of business, Harper has been trumpeting the mantra of red-tape cutting since first elected in 2006.

What this has really meant are cuts to safety inspections and costly adherence to the wisdom of deregulation. Hardly the building blocks of a “consumers first” agenda.

The Harper years are riddled with examples of business making victims of consumers:

Take food safety. Who could forget Canada’s largest-ever beef recall last fall. People across the country became sick from the E. coli outbreak after consuming tainted meat produced at a federally regulated facility in Brooks, Alberta. The government’s own post-mortem of the XL Foods Ltd. recall shone the light on a food-safety system that had failed.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency failed to notice during routine inspections that the plant had not properly implemented or regularly updated its own plan to control risks. The massive facility — 430,000 square feet in total — slaughtered between 3,800 and 4,000 cattle daily.

The beef recall came months after the Conservative government tabled a budget that cut $56 million from the food agency’s operating resources over a three-year period.

And there is the matter of rail safety:

Though more the inheritors than the architects of Canada's reckless rail-safety deregulation, the Harper Conservatives ignored repeated warnings about the folly of allowing the railway industry to police itself.

A Canada Safety Council report issued in 2007 called the deregulated industry "a disaster waiting to happen" and criticized the government's abrogation of its responsibility to public safety and the environment.

And disaster did strike, when aging rail cars with inaccurately labeled hazardous materials exploded in Lac Mégantic, Quebec claiming 47 lives, eviscerating the core of the town at immeasurable cost to the community and at a monetary cost of close to a billion dollars.

With their single-minded focus on getting oil to market, Canada has seen massive increases in the amount of oil being shipped by rail — from 500 carloads in 2009, to a projected 140,000 this year. The Harper government is apparently content to continue to expose Canadians and our environment to unnecessary risk.

Mr. Harper is desperate to take the focus off his wayward senators and the sputtering economy. So, like the practised magician he is, he will try to create a diversion.

Will we sit through this act again?