Our lives’ inexorable movement through history powerfully motivates us to look to the future. Preferably such regard is a hopeful one, though it won’t always be so. Human history is laden with the results of misjudgments and foolish enthusiasms that failed to deliver planners’ imagined happiness.
Looking to the future is a necessary feature of any political program. Individuals and groups remember our limited knowledge of history, our diverse experiences of the present, and our fantasies of the future, whether joyful or demoralizing.
Those chosen as political leaders, candidates for high office, have often inspired large groups of their fellow citizens by sharing their visions of a better future. Their promises may often be unrealistic, but they are always almost contagious, appealing for the most part to what Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address referred to as “the better angels of our nature.” They help us imagine a positive, fulfilling future, one that is just and prosperous.
As Michael Lewis argues so well in his book The Fifth Risk, a primary mandate of government is to protect its citizens. In a way, government is a massive form of insurance against crime, natural disasters, foreign invasion, and so on.
Visions of the future embodied in political programs can be inclusive (for all citizens!) or exclusive, designed to benefit one group (cultural, linguistic, ethnic, religious, etc.) over the others.
Inclusivity makes for a broadly popular projected ethos, one in which government support of various kinds will be applied to all citizens more or less equally. It may be difficult to achieve, but it’s a laudable goal. It’s the basis for universal social programs like Canada’s Medicare design.
Exclusivity is based on an “us and them” view of the world, one in which enemies (foreign, domestic, or both) are spurned as being unworthy people, if not actually evil. Exclusivity creates and focuses on discriminations that may drift into social division, hatred and violence based on race, ethnicity, social class, or other arbitrary characterizations.
Whatever ends political parties have chosen, they will choose means (hopefully suitable) to achieve them, preferably through programs managed by experts in their various required roles.
Taxation funds these ends. Who pays, and how much, is frequently contentious. Jean-Baptiste Colbert (finance minister to France’s King Louis XIV), joked that “the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing.” Of course, some geese hiss more loudly than others. Alberta comes to mind.
Whatever is collected through taxation or other forms of revenue generation, citizens have a right to its careful expenditure (often characterized euphemistically as “investment").
Governments can’t provide reliable public healthcare, effective policing and sound national infrastructure if they’re unwilling to pay for them. That principle applies to virtually any area of government spending.
Are there trade-offs in fiscal decision-making? I’d argue that funding Pharmacare and dental care can be a more inclusive and beneficial form of spending than building another pipeline with government subsidies (already billions a year), especially when the sale of the oil products benefits oil companies that are upwards of 70 per cent owned by Americans. That latter is an often unmentioned detail. Depleting Canadian resources to enrich foreigners might prove unpopular use of public funds given current international political realities.
One hopes the new parliament will make its decisions wisely.
(Retired teacher Al Lehmann is a novelist living in Terrace, B.C.)
