It’s a toxic trend: people seem intent on dividing the country into regions of virtuous “givers” in the West and parasitic “takers” in the East. Now, this wouldn’t come up if Canada were less diverse and every part had equal populations, resources and markets. But it’s not set up that way.
Regions, like Quebec and Ontario in the recent past and the mighty West now, wax and wane in economic and political power. They are not equally endowed with resources. But people forget that. They lose perspective.
Take the example of Gwyn Morgan, business leader, corporate director and distinguished Canadian. He wrote a slashing piece in the Globe and Mail that directly equated Quebec’s fractious student movement and Tom Mulcair’s NDP with Greece, Europe’s economic basket case and bastion of entitlement.
In Morgan’s easy-to-understand world, there are givers and takers, here and in Europe. In Canada, the givers are the good folks of Alberta whose sweat and toil gets washed down the drainpipe of federalism to support cheap tuition for slacker students in Quebec. They’re the takers.
It’s true Quebec gets billions from equalization. But that money comes from taxes raised in all provinces, including places Morgan would frame as “takers.”
What set off the former EnCana CEO and Conservative backer was Mulcair’s ill-considered commentary about western oil wealth inflating the dollar, creating “Dutch disease” and damaging the economy. Whether that’s true is a debate more suited to economists. But Mulcair has the right to be wrong.
Morgan has the same right and he is definitely exercising it to cast equalization as a morality play between givers and takers, between the doughty free-marketeers of the West and the socialist hordes in the East.
He suggests Quebec’s takers have turned against the givers and claims Alberta’s resources “pay the lion’s share of Quebec’s $7-billion annual equalization payments.” But it’s not that simple. Canada is a complicated place and Morgan should be accustomed to complications.
As chairman of SNC Lavalin Inc., Morgan is coping with the complications arising from two major corruption investigations involving his firm. Along with its questionable dealings with the fallen Gadhafi regime in Libya, a separate investigation is probing bribery allegations against company executives and government officials in Bangladesh.
Morgan is also a board member of HSBC bank, which has been linked to the U.K. interest rate-fixing scandal. Life does tend to get complicated.
So it’s simplistic at best to compare Quebec, Mulcair and the NDP, as Morgan does, with past totalitarian regimes of Eastern Europe or the culprits who drove down Greece. It’s like the Cold War never ended, it just morphed into a confrontation between givers and takers.
Not only that, but the global corporate and banking world, of which Morgan is a prominent figure, has certainly done its full share of “taking” over the years.
So we should recognize Morgan’s rant for what it is: partisan political bashing, because he definitely is a partisan opponent of the NDP. You might recall how the party led the parliamentary opposition in blocking a prestige appointment for Morgan in 2006.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper wanted Morgan as government appointments overseer, or patronage czar. It was a dollar-a-year job that would have made Morgan a very influential man, especially within the Tory party.
There’s a difference between bashing a political opponent and trashing parts of the country for some supposed mass character defect. Calling one region virtuous because it is wealthy and another part contemptible because it is less so suggests that even the privileged and distinguished, like Gwyn Morgan, are not immune to disrespect and poisonous calculation.
Original Article
Source: the chronicle herald
Author: DAN LEGER
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