Conrad Black: Of warplanes, the homeless, teachers’ unions, oil, drugs, immigration and monetary policy
Conrad Black | Dec 1, 2012 12:01 AM ET | Last Updated: Dec 1, 2012 12:02 AM ET
More from Conrad Black
Thanks to readers for their responses to my suggestions for a new range of federal policies appropriate to Canada’s enhanced stature in a world altered by the retreat of Europe and the United States — which will remain my theme for this week’s column. This includes Robert Sciuk, whose letter was published here on Wednesday, who urged that Bombardier be incentivized to produce a better warplane than the F-35. Such a move may be late and uneconomic, but Bombardier could be incentivized to join an international syndicate, presumably with Europeans (if the Spanish and Swedes can do it, Canada can) to build the next generation of advanced fighter plane.
All serious countries need some proprietary position in the advanced aviation and automobile industries. In 1979, prime minister Pierre Trudeau’s talented chief of staff, Jim Coutts, and I were the only people I knew of who advocated Canada taking over Chrysler Corporation, when it could be had for almost nothing. (Lee Iacocca subsequently brought it back to life with government loans he repaid ahead of schedule.)
Canada has thoroughly outgrown the branch-plant status it necessarily had for most of its history. As our percentage of GDP represented by trade with the United States has declined from 43% to about 34%, where market forces and the national interest intersect, a similar trend should be encouraged in critical industries, without reminding anyone of the Foreign Investment Review Act of the Trudeau years.
It is scandalous that there really are homeless people in a rich country such as this. While many panhandlers may be charlatans, and medical problems may be at the root of much of what is real, it is disturbing to see people living in tents on each side of Toronto’s Don Valley Parkway as winter approaches.
Traditional methods of taxing peoples’ incomes and cycling the proceeds through the horribly expensive governmental apparatus to fund over-staffed assistance programs cannot get us any further toward the elimination of poverty. This should be the objective of welfare policy. Our society should not be in the business of leveling the outcomes in peoples’ lives, only ameliorating very bad outcomes. Thus, my suggestion of a self-eliminating wealth-tax as an extension of the regime accorded charitable contributions.
While education is not a federal matter, it receives a great deal of federal assistance, which should be conditionalized on countering the negative influence of teachers’ unions. Teachers cannot expect to be accepted indefinitely as a learned profession while intermittently behaving like an aggressive industrial union.
I accept that the labour market requires, and the importance of their work justifies, that teachers be well-paid. But people in public service must not strike, and teachers should be compensated in some reference to the performance of their students, who have to be tested disinterestedly, and not in a self-serving re-enactment of a children’s sports-day, whereby everybody wins to make the teachers look better than they are.
I think the outspoken financier Wolfie Shaw was correct when he wrote me that some civilized measure of corporal punishment could be reintroduced in schools and the penal system; and that parents shouldn’t fear police raids and being dragged into court for lightly smacking the rear of a bratty child. Obviously, this must not become a license to give a child a hematoma whenever a parent or teacher is in a bad mood. There was too much of it in the piping days when the rod was not spared, and much of that was deviant, but an absolute prohibition is excessive.
Now that the U.S. administration has killed the Keystone XL pipeline (at least for now), the smart move is not squabbling with the B.C. eco-militants and native peoples, but to ship the tar sands oil east and thereby eliminate the importation of foreign oil in eastern Canada. As American production increases and its oil imports decline, world oil prices are almost certain to fall; and Toronto and Montreal are better and more accessible markets than China. Anything that reduces oil revenue to Iran, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela and their fanatical protégés, is a commendable geopolitical move.
Drugs cannot really be defeated by the criminal justice system, and should be legalized. Hard-drug users would have to register and submit to some treatment. Education and treatment will cure many users; criminal penalties only generate ruined lives and more ancillary crime.
On a loosely related note, Canada must accept private medicine. Patients and doctors who wish to opt out of public medical-care plans should be free to do so. If this does not shorten waiting lists, then starting doctors should, to be fully licensed, be required to contribute up to six months to emergency clinics and medical care to the disadvantaged. They will make it back later.
The objective is to assure a baseline of adequate and affordable care for everyone, not an absolute equality of standards of medical care for everyone regardless of means. The present system has shrunk hospital capacity and denied care to the public and every adult in the country knows that the country needs some measure of private medicine.
Canada needs more people, and large numbers could be attracted now from Europe and even, I suspect, the United States, partially reversing the tremendous drain from Canada to that country of bygone years.
As this influx of non-Francophones will further aggravate the antediluvian sensibilities of French Quebec, which wishes to have the collapsed birthrate of its post-Catholic hedonistic nirvana while still having the demographic numbers to blackmail the country, it would, again, be sensible to develop a special developmental status with Haiti, to apply particular attention to improving the lot of that benighted country, and to admit increasing numbers of people, without draining Haiti of its productive population.
Thus would French-speakers (albeit none of them likely candidates for the presidency of the Alliance Française or Société du Bon Parler) be enlarged with people not overly concerned with Quebec’s constitutional tractations, but who would reduce Quebec’s paranoia in regard to language and non-French immigration to English-speaking Canada.
Having provided Britain with its first foreign governor of the Bank of England, we should have stand-by authority to raise taxes on elective spending, and eliminate taxes on the proceeds of saving and investment as a first line of defence against inflation, rather than simply following other countries in inducing a bone-cracking recession by raising interest rates every time inflation impends, which is itself inflationary. And, as one of the world’s few remaining hard-currency countries, we should bring back a standard of measurement for currencies; I suggest one-third gold, one-third oil and one-third the basket of consumer indices, but these currencies have to be valued against something other than each other or ultimately, none of them will be worth anything.
I can’t get into the terribly difficult issues involving native people here, but they need fresh thinking more desperately than anyone.
Canada can show the way out of the cul-de-sac of the traditional armed camp of opposing reflex liberals and traditionalists, who between them over-imprison, wear the blinders of universality and monetary inflexibility, and resist original thinking. Why, other than a lack of imagination, are we waiting?
