"Neo-Conservatism: How to Wreck a Country Without a Hammer" (Part II) by Dalton Camp Stanley Knowles Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies March 23, 2000

DALTON CAMP:

Ladies and gentlemen I thank you for your reception and I thank my friend for his cordial introduction and for reminding me of my non-degree course of studies at the London School of Economics. I had a very good year there. The chief claim to fame of our class was that, as became known later on, a fellow member of our class was Pierre Elliott Trudeau. I never saw him there. Clearly he found better things to do.

I am delighted and honoured to have been invited to deliver the Kerr-Saltsman Lecture. I said to Bob Kerr, earlier in the evening, that what this country desperately needs is more dialogue and more freedom of speech, in arenas where people feel they can say what they want to say, and that he has done this University and the country a valuable service.

I never knew Stanley Knowles. He was always engaged in that part of politics I knew very little about, which was of course, the House of Commons and the rules of parliament. But I had a great respect for him.

I knew Mr. Saltsman. I was saying, to Bob Kerr earlier, that I recalled Max wrote me a letter, and it’s somewhere in my papers. I can’t find it. I don’t know what it was about, but it was cordial. If it had not been, I would have remembered.

My subject as advertised is Neo-Conservatism or How to Wreck a Country without a Hammer. Our mutual friend, Robert Needham thought the title might appeal to some for its modest presumption. In truth, the title was suggested to me by a colleague in arms, Linda McQuaig, who, once she had proposed it, gave me the strong impression she would have liked to have kept it for herself. So I should begin my discussion perhaps by revising Linda’s title. It could as well be Neo-Liberalism and How to Wreck a Country et cetera. I use each of these interchangeably tonight. I suggest each are very much the same. Either can wreck the country, and both have served to debilitate and weaken Canada.

As Tom Wilson explains in his book No Ivory Tower,

And Viviane Forester, the Parisian economist, journalist, novelist, who wrote that marvelous book The Economic Horror, said:

I just wanted to make clear at the outset that I have the same view. I’m more comfortable talking about neo-liberalism, or as comfortable as I am about neo-conservatism. Because when I talk about neo-conservatism people think I’m attacking conservatives. This is not true. I’ve done that already.

Again quoting Wilson, he says that "the essence of neo-liberalism, it was the step-child of the original 19^th century liberalism, which represented not only hostility to government but to any values and practices which would seek to impede the individual in the virtually unfettered exercise of personal power." This suggests that what is today, neo-conservatism, is in the main, a defense of the values of 19^th century economic liberalism extended. Extended, to include the exploitation of the new conditions of globalization and international competitiveness. I’m not going to use too many more big words like that.

For all that, I am something of an optimist. Optimists are variously described. In the army we used to say an optimist was a man who had incomplete information. A friend wrote to me not long ago. He is a classics professor and he was quoting one of his mentors who once remarked, "Against my better judgement, I’m an optimist."

Eliot quotes Housman saying he’s not an optimist but a ‘meliorist.’ A meliorist, to make it easier, is an optimist who believes something can be done about improving things. A meliorist is the activist. He’s the activist as optimist. One who believes the world can be made better by our human effort.

Now to begin. In the 1920's, when Calvin Coolidge was America’s President -- before your time but not mine -- he characterized his administration by saying, "The proper business of government is business."

Coolidge believed in laissez-faire liberalism, tax cuts, limited government. So did almost everyone else. Coolidge had a very good run. Soon after he left office in 1929, the stock market crashed, which signaled the beginning of the world depression. Today, Calvin Coolidge, or Coolidgism is back. Probably Calvinism is too. The business of government is business. The business of business is profit.

The serious subject for most public discussion is money. When I was growing up, it was considered rude to talk about money. People didn’t talk about money, whether they had it or whether they didn’t have it. Today, half the front page of your daily newspaper is about money.

Sports? They don’t do the scores any more. They talk about money. Gossip is about money. Political parties are obsessed with money. Television is all about money. Have you noticed the Dow, the NASDAQ, and the word from the street? You get more news about the market than you get about the weather. Even today’s heroes, have you noticed, they’re businessmen. I used to think they were just businessmen.

But today they are men of heroic proportions. Some of them richer than the pharos of Egypt. When AOL said it was going to acquire Time Warner, you would have thought someone had invented perpetual motion. The papers, the headlines!

I remember reading Lord Almost’s paper. It said they called Bob Fulford in to explain it. You get into this thing and find the President of Time Warner and the President of AOL are making this deal. And then somebody says here’s what’s in it for them. Stock options. First of all, they buy each other’s stocks. Then they get options. Well the long and the short of it is they both make something around 800 million dollars. But what else? Who cares? Really, who cares?

I own AOL stock. The reason I own AOL stock is because I have to own something. And I want to own something that can’t be fired at anybody. Can’t poison anybody. Although I’m not sure about AOL sometimes. What happened to me on the day Case and Levin made their billion dollar deal? My stock went down.

Why do we hear and read so much about money when so many have so little of it? If money is so important, why has equity become so unimportant?

Neo-liberals and neo-conservatives quote Adam Smith. Well, actually, they don’t quote Smith, they refer to Adam Smith. They say whatever they say and then say "Adam Smith said that" or they say "as Adam Smith would have said -- were he here." The truth is they have never cracked a book written by Adam Smith.

What Smith does say is "wealth is power." They are probably right about that.

Robert Heilbronner, in his Massey Lecture, quotes Adam Smith: "[W]herever there is great property, there is great inequality…. [T]he affluence of the rich supposes the indigence of the many." Heilbronner says "Its Adam Smith speaking not Karl Marx." But our Adam Smith scholars, of course, they don’t say that.

Smith says the three duties of greatest importance for government are:

which, he says, cannot be run for profit. He was referring of course, to the educational system, as well as highways and so on. We have come a long way from Adam Smith and we haven’t done much to improve on him.

In Forester’s book, which is about European politics and European economics -- which is not terribly different from our own except they are a bit further away from the great colossus -- she quotes from an OECD publication, which says:

And Forrester goes on to cite:

How about that! That’s the OECD. Do you know, we’re members of that organization? We sign on to that. Our political leaders believe in that.

As a matter of fact, we’ve done that. We reduced the period of benefit payments, we did put the squeeze on people. We did say to people, ‘you’re going to work on our terms, or you’re not going to work, and tough.’

We lose sight of the realities of our conditions. We fool ourselves about how great things are. We’re misled by the propaganda that’s fed us every day.

I mean, do you realize the DOW went up 152 points yesterday, or whatever it was? That the NASDAQ came back and went up? Doesn’t that make you feel good all over?

Forester writing about her scene from Paris:

Perhaps not.

Violet Bonham Carter, who was the daughter of Asquith, the British Prime Minister, wrote about the turn of the century in England. She talked about how wonderful everything was. Britain was the greatest power in the world, the rich were very, very rich. And they had garden parties, they had teas, and they had the races, and they had the theater, and they had the ballet, and they had concerts. They had everything. Servants.

She also says

Now, what I am saying is that we don’t have a perfect society. We are full of complacency. We do buy into this wonderful world of consumerism and the sort of helium atmosphere of the market. There’s no down, there’s only up.

And sometimes we let them worry us about the things they want us to worry about. They want us to worry about family values and say, "You look after the family, we’ll look after everything else." We worry about our children becoming desensitized to violence. Or, we’re told to worry about that. I’ve had six children; it’s been my experience, that they don’t need any stimulation to become violent. It’s part of childhood to want to resolve conflict by force, if you can’t fix it, break it. It’s a child’s nature to rule over the weak and the smaller, even if it’s the family cat.

Sometimes though, I feel like we should say: Look, never mind violence in television, why don’t you read Euripide’s Medea? There’s enough violence in there for everybody.

Some of you may know the story. Medea meets Jason, who is searching for the golden fleece. In a place called Colchis, Jason finds the golden fleece but the golden fleece (we’re making a movie now, OK?) is surrounded by fire-breathing bulls and dragons. (Think of the production values of that). And Medea helps Jason get his prize by using magic powers and by betraying her father. So then, she and Jason, ‘take off’. They’re lovers by now. And she gets away by sacrificing her two brothers, who had been held as hostages.

Jason and Medea, with the fleece, head for Corinth. By the time they get to Corinth she has two children. Then, there are complications. The ruler of Corinth promises Jason the throne if he will marry his daughter. Jason did what a lot of red-blooded men would do in our time, if we believe what we read, he sells out. So Medea seeks revenge. She sends a garment to the coming bride. Presumably a wedding gift. The coming bride tries on the garment and the garment destroys her. In the process of being destroyed trying the garment on, her father tries to save her and the father is destroyed. So that gets rid of the bride and the bride’s father. Jason goes back and Medea then takes the sword and kills her two children. She leaves town for Athens on a winged chariot and was not seen again. Why would you want to see Chainsaw Massacre, Three when you can see Medea?

Speaking of family life, reminds me of the federal party system. I guess the parties have fallen on hard times even though some times are harder for some than others. Only the Liberals could be assumed to be in some condition of health. Obviously they have a majority and nobody else has. And they lead in the polls and no one else does. I think they’ve all run their writ.

I don’t want to get too deeply into this but it does relate to what I’m going on to say. There is a true alienation. We used to talk about alienation in this country. Somebody else was always alienated. We were never alienated. I’m speaking now of when I lived in Ontario. No one was alienated in Ontario -- until I left. But the westerners! BC was alienated, then Alberta was alienated, Manitoba was alienated -- was it ever alienated! And Quebec, of course, -- terminally alienated. But we’re now into the politics of estrangement.

Since the end of the last war, this past century ago, we’ve been told God is dead, history is dead, and now a lot of people are saying politics is dead. It’s extraordinary!

In this country, there are two major preoccupations, by any poll, any measurement, any conversation, in any bar, as long as it’s reasonably responsible and sober. Do you know what is the problem this country has to face? Not the brain drain -- it’s the dull-witted who leave, right? Not corporation tax levels. Its not even income-tax levels. Its not international competitiveness. Not the national debt. Not the clarity bill.

The Canadian people are most concerned about health care and education for their children.

And the politicians, you cannot get them into a meaningful discussion about either. The politician’s agenda is the media agenda. And the media agenda is not the public agenda. People have come to look upon Ottawa as some other scene in some alien place. And I don’t blame them. They don’t get it. They don’t understand the language. The rhetoric is mysterious to the ear untrained or untuned to nuance and unfamiliar with the narcissism of small differences, to use Onadayje’s all purpose phrase.

The politics of Ottawa might as well be a ritual of the lost tribes of Mesopotamia. As for the parties, they really are more or less the same.

Since the coming of Tony Blair we’re all moderate somethings. We used to say some are more the same and others less the same but nevertheless they’re all the same.

The British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawn writes of the otherness of the past - the past is another country. While we live in the same present we do not live in the same past.

I have a different memory of a different country, which was, is partly still, Canada. Not many knew the country I knew. I mean by that not many here knew the country I knew. Even though much of it has survived and is incorporated, in a sense, in the present.

Still, we’re all related by common present experience. You know things which I at one time, could not have imagined. Young people know things I never imagined -- the transistor, the jet, the world of dot com, cyberspace, and a real man on the moon. And on and on. Sometimes I feel I’m fortunate to be taken along for the ride. On the other hand, so that we understand each other, I know through experience the differences between a cyclical recession and a world depression, between a world war and brush war, or a Bush war.

As a result, one sees the present in the light of a remembered past and sees this other country today, which is the present. So, when I think about the major differences between this country and the older one -- my conclusions might surprise you.

What’s so different?

I agree with John Sutherland who wrote in The Guardian recently, that the "single invention -- now obsolete -- that most enhanced our cultural lives over the past one hundred years," was the vinyl long-playing record. The LP made a lot of things possible. One of them was to listen to Ravel’s Bolero in one take, another to listen to Sinatra for a half-hour without getting up every three minutes to change the record. This changed a lot of things. Sutherland believes this not only changed the culture profoundly in terms of the new possibility to hear and enjoy music as a concert, but also the utility of music in courtship and seduction.

Certainly the LP hugely increased Sinatra’s influence on postwar generations. I mean, it was hard to maintain an ambiance with music if you had to get up every three minutes, to change the record. Now you could go almost a half-hour. And a man can get a lot done in half an hour. So I know you’re all thinking, so well, gee, ‘wasn’t the jet big?’ Well not that big, I’ll tell you that. You don’t think people went to drive-in theaters to see the movies do you? So that’s my contribution, the answer to the question, and I deeply, profoundly believe it.

But there are other sea changes between the original Canada and today’s version that affect our culture and our politics and the way we think and behave. And one of these is contemporary journalism, and the other is money and the worship of it, the selling of it is an organic necessity, like air and water. This involves money’s proudest prophet and press agent, today’s journalism, including newspapers and magazines, television, radio, advertising, promotion, hucksterism, and the medium of those tax-free money-idolizing foundations – the American Enterprise Institute, for example, or our own Fraser Institute.

There’s been an enormous change in the editorial direction of Canada’s newspapers. Conrad Black or Lord Almost, as I call him, has been the most significant figure in Canadian journalism since Dafoe, of the Free Press, more significant than O’Leary of the old Journal, or the Sifton family, or Hindmarsh of the Star. Or the Globe’s McCullough.

Just imagine that a leading Canadian national daily would endorse and promote the interests of the Austrian politician, Jeorg Haider, and, at the same time, celebrate the escape from justice of the tyrant, Senator Pinochet. The National Post’s enthusiasm for Haider was impressive: an entire page devoted to explaining that the European opposition to him was an organized socialist conspiracy, world wide. As for Pinochet, well, he had to do cruel things, to authorize terrorism and torture, throwing people out of airplanes, in order to save his country and the free world from communism.

But you know, some third world tyrant on the lam, seeking a compatible country for early retirement, flying into Canada, putting up in a hotel, on reading the National Pest, would see this as a great greeting, this great enthusiasm for Haider and Pinochet, and would conclude: "I should look around here, for property. These are my kind of people."

The moral to the story is don’t judge a country by its newspapers. We didn’t always say that. Today, the fight goes on to become a war against socialism, liberalism, progressive conservatism, patriotism, nationalism, and trade unionism.

There are two deterrents to the neo-reactionary goal of the single tax, the depleted powers of governance and the dominance of corporate interests. One of these is publicly funded universal medical care. And the other is the intellectual sanctuary of the university. And against each there is now a calculated war of attrition.

The Canadian University is in a state of siege. Academic tenure is under attack. Wouldn’t it be great to get rid of all those guys? And recruit their own new faculties? You don’t know how really funny that is, but I do. The traditional role of the arts is under attack in education. Under the attack of Philistines and Pharisees of the new religion of the ultimate power of money. The purpose, of course, is to bring the universities to their knees, to surrender them to the suasion of the private interests and all that this would entail. There is I sense, a climate of unease, if not of fear, in the academy. Attrition is one thing, retribution is another. Noli irratatae leones, as we students of Latin used to say: Let sleeping dogs lie.

The way to destroy the public confidence in public health care is to undermine its services. Starve it for cash. Spread the doctrine of unaffordability. Watch the waiting lines grow. Proclaim the doctrine of two-tier health care, of sickness as a profit center, of the treatment of the ill as though it were NASDAQ stock.

The Globe and Mail is the in-house booster for an American-style medicare. One of their senior columnists, toiling at his word processor last week, informed readers that those of us who support the present system do so because we believe, now I’m quoting him:

How about that! That’s in The Globe and Mail. You see the problem we have? Does anyone really believe that? Of course there are those who want to believe it -- the long-suffering rich want to believe. Having read it in the Globe, now they know it’s true, and they can spread the word around the office and at the club.

Finally, Mr. Thorsell, I’m giving away the name of the author now, asks the question: "Does the next generation fear US assimilation as much as its parents, who accept second class health care as the price of their "independence"?" In quotes independence -- mocking, you know.

Well, speaking for myself, I hope so. US health care is a scandal. Sustained only by strenuous lobbying, the support of a Republican congress, and the irrational fear of socialist medicine. In the US, as you know, 35 million Americans are without any health care coverage. Millions more don’t have enough. America’s children are the worst served and the most endangered by that system.

Those who think they have enough coverage or imagine they do could be terribly wrong. A man from Greenwich, Connecticut (Greenwich is in the high-rent and high-mortgage end of Connecticut), had a health care plan. Of course he did. And he had a hernia. He went to the hospital. Spent six hours there, two of them in surgery, and he was home in time for tea. His surgeon charged him $2,200.00, for the operation. His anesthesiologist charged him $900.00. The hospital charged him $11,865.76. His insurance company refused to cover the bill. The hospital declined to reduce the bill.

The man from Greenwich, Connecticut wrote to the New York Times and he said, "Our health care system [meaning the American health care system] is a joke." A $11,865.76 joke. Some joke.

Cindy Herdrich, is a 35-year-old legal secretary. She and her husband belong to a Health Maintenance Organization, an HMO -- a very common health care adjunct in the United States. She went to her doctor saying she had a pain in her abdomen which she had diagnosed as appendicitis. The doctor said ‘you don’t have appendicitis.’ Fourteen days later her appendix ruptured. She contracted peritonitis and underwent major surgery. She sued the doctor and sued her HMO. Part of the reason she sued the HMO was because the HMO was bonusing doctors who had the least surgical procedures. So, in order to get a holiday in the Caribbean or extra money, you had to say to people, ‘you haven’t got appendicitis. Take an aspirin, go home and call me later.’ And/or if they had too many operations, they’re out of there. They get themselves another doctor. That is the HMO’s way of doing medicine.

Mrs. Herdrich’s case has gone all the way to the Supreme Court. It’s only one of sixteen class action suits brought against the HMO system. And the HMO’s are saying, "look, if you don’t stop suing us, we’re going to have to raise our rates." That’s what the Russians used to say to their people. What the Stalinists used to say -- "You’re happy, damn you." Republicans say we need a law in the United States that limits the money that grievance victims can collect from their doctors and their HMO’s. Democrats want a bill of rights. Not a chance.

Tell me, why would any normally intelligent Canadian, other than the Premier of Alberta, want that system in our country?

It used to be, in the glorious days of Rome, that the soldiers who became famous became so not because of their deeds but because historians wrote about them and then made them famous. Today you can be famous over night. Especially if you are a business man. What’s going on, you see, is that the on-going war between the Globe and the National Pest is being fought for the hearts and minds of readers of the Report on Business and The Financial Post, and for the favourable consideration of advertisers in the business community. Bankers, brokers, computer and software manufacturers, employment agencies, all that industry that has grown up around the new business of business. Not about you or me. Not about people who read the paper to find out what happened, who won, who’s gone. But you know, somebody has to win the race for all that advertising revenue. I know something about that. I’ve been in that business.

Television has been a faithful mirror to all that. Journalism has become a booster of business, a true believer, a promoter, and I think it’s shameless. Because politics has an incestuous and permanent relationship with business, we now have a marriage of convenience. The interests and concerns of business in the disguise of a brain-drain syndrome, falling productivity, and so on -- you know the ritual, the concerns, the inventory of concerns. But there’s a problem with all this. The public agenda is not the same as the board room agenda. Indeed, they must often be in conflict. Ethics in government is at least a possibility. I don’t have to say the rest do I? But I will.

Business ethics is an oxymoron. Face it. The thing they say to physicians is "At least don’t make it worse." That’s the doctors code. The ethic. What the instruction to business is: "Shareholders interest is first." No one else is close. That’s their mandate. This speaks to the difference between the interest of the public and the interest of the shareholders.

I don’t know whether you’ve read Brian Hutchinson’s remarkable book, Fools Gold: the Making of a Global Market Fraud. You should read it if you haven’t. It’s about BRE-X, but it’s about more than that. It really is a marvelous comedy and tragedy. And it tells us a whole lot about the differences between the practice of business and the needs of shareholders and the ethics of public life.

The dictator who ran Indonesia was a general -- they were all generals -- a President called Suharto. Suharto published an autobiography called My Thoughts, Words and Deeds. Let me quote something from this autobiography:

When you read this, or speak it aloud, it has an almost lyrical, poetic quality. It has its own rhythm, which if you are not listening, not hearing it, could be mistaken for blank verse, even poetry, even though these are the musings of a murderous thug. This is how people sometimes read newspapers, as though they were watching a movie, about poverty or genocide or unspeakable corruption.

But Peter Eglin and John McMurtry and Noam Chomsky and many others know, this man has been responsible for the unconscionable slaughter of hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people, as maintained by Amnesty International. You could, as Casey Stengel once said about baseball, "look it up."

BRE-X owned this property and let it be known, through Nesbitt-Thompson, Canada’s biggest and best and greatest and most magnificent brokerage house, that they were sitting on, not a pot of gold, but a vat. A vast hoard of gold. This excited the interest of Barrick’s Peter Munk, and, Munk and Barrick set out to try and acquire BRE-X from its owners.

Now, as you know, BRE-X set itself up in Alberta, and it sold a lot of its stock to Albertans. There were Alberta millionaires all over the place. Pool halls were full of them. They drilled three holes and Nesbitt-Thompson said that the results were eye-popping. Eye-popping! Nobody at Nesbitt-Thompson saw them but they were eye-popping. And of course everybody in the print media celebrated the discovery of this eye-popping stuff. They said the property was on Busang, that it would become a world-class mining operation, likely the world’s single largest deposit of gold. The truth is, and you know this, so we’re not breaking any news, it was a gravel pit. And it wasn’t anything else. But it looked good from where everybody sat. And so, both BRE-X and Barrick proceeded in a time-honoured, conventional way to seek partnerships among the children of President Suharto. Do you know of any other way?

Speaking of family values once again, the Suharto family was worth a total estimated double digit billions. Not for nothing was the President’s wife Seethy called "Madam Ten Percent." Barrick, believing it needed friends, a Canadian company, right, in high places, in order to acquire BRE-X, or take them out of play, hired the eldest Suharto daughter, Tutu, who owned a billion dollars worth of interests in broadcasting, construction and electronics. Her husband, the old slug-a-bed, owned the national Coke-a-Cola franchise. Barrick had Tutu, so BRE-X bought Suharto’s oldest son, Sijit, who had created the Indonesian national lottery, which had failed. Sijit was between jobs. Still he was a member of the family. And when BRE-X heard about Tutu, they offered Sijit 10% interest in the Busang property and a monthly consultant’s fee of one million dollars for forty months. We’re talking about a gravel pit. Then, there was a letter. Just let me read you the letter (dated September 1996):

George Bush -- who is that guy? He’s the former President of the United States. He’s the former director of the CIA. He knew more about this man than any person in North America could have known.

What’s funny about this is that the idea of having Bush write Suharto came from Henry Kissinger. What kind of world are we living in?

On the 14^th of November the Indonesian government called Munk and Walsh together and they said, here’s our deal. Take it or leave it. Walsh goes in the room owning BRE-X which has Busang. He comes out of the room he has 25% and Munk has 75%. What I want you to remember about this is that the Canadian media were absolutely transported. On the moon! In awe and admiration.

McLean’s magazine did a cover story on Munk, crowning him "the king of gold." They said of him: "Munk played his imperial hand beautifully. His moves have been absolutely stealth-like. Through it all, Munk has been his sleek, reserved self." Peter Newman, whom you may know as the chronicler of the rich and famous, called Munk "a vaguely supernatural" leader endowed with "the sophistication of a skilled swordsman knowing precisely when to feignt and when to thrust." So, Barrick won the gravel pit. The media feigned when it should have thrust, and thrust when it should have feigned.

Last week the federal government of the United States announced that a drug company, a pharmaceutical company, had paid a generic drug company thirty million dollars to keep its generic product off the market, for a while. In the mean-time, consumers have had to pay three hundred million dollars more for the drug than they would have had to pay had the generic drug been on the market. And the government said, any more of this and we’re going to take action. Does anybody here wonder why people want less government? No? Less regulation, less consumer protection, a weaker political system, make parties a public joke, make politicians public jokes. A new culture of money and power and influence and corruption and a free hand in the free markets throughout the world. Why not?

Bertrand Russell once said that the two things one needs for survival is skepticism and animal faith. I suppose the skepticism is the hardest, to learn to doubt and to question, to say, "Why do you say that? Why are they saying that? What is this really about?"

The Globe and Mail? Well, the Globe and Mail is trying hard but the other paper, they’re on to something good. They think they’ve found a leader for the country, Mr. Day. And I mean they’re serious. It’s unbelievable. But we live in the golden age of hot air. A lot of us are blessed by our innocence. And those who have no memory, have no fear. They have a lot to learn.

The Americans today feel as the Egyptians once felt. As the Romans once felt. As Bonaparte must have felt. As the Victorians once felt. As Laurier once felt. The world was theirs to conquer and hold and to keep forever. But the man nearest to being right was Laurier. We have a great chance but we have to be tougher. When someone says, well, you know there’s something to be said about two-tiered medicare. There’s no reason why the rich can’t have their own doctors and we can have private hospitals. Competition’s good you know. Competition’s great. Does great things. Just like the airlines, for example. Perfect, if you don’t eat.

I want to close this with a doxology, a poll, just the way you should end things like this, a public opinion poll. Just above the poll it says: "Liberals try to picture life without Martin" It was this that in fact attracted me to this poll. "Life without Martin would mean that new candidates for the leadership might emerge on the Liberal Party’s business friendly wing." Did you know the Liberal Party had a business-friendly wing? What’s the other wing?

Then, underneath, is the headline, three column, and it says: "Trust in government down, poll finds." You ought to believe it. I wouldn’t trust them. Not because they’re who they are, but I have no reason to trust. I don’t mistrust them. I’m un-sided. The other thing is when you say you don’t trust the government the answer is, "compared to who?" You know, I trust the government compared to Barrick Gold. Not to be personal. I trust them compared to Conrad Black, yes, yes, yes. I trust them compared to the editorial board of The Globe and Mail. I mean, the government is all I’ve got. You know, if something happens, in my life, there’s no sense my going to Imperial Oil.

A dear girl from Imperial Oil called me one time. I owed them $137.50 for something. This is a true story. And, I hadn’t paid it, I lost the envelope. So, she reminded me of my indebtedness and asked me when I was prepared to pay it. I said, "Tell me something, when is Exon going to pay those poor Alaskans the sixteen billion dollars they own them. …… Then why are you bugging me for a few dollars when the people you are working for are in the hole, billions, to the fishing industry, and so on, in Alaska?" She wrote down, "Nut" I’m sure.

Back to the poll, which asked about health care. They say, how good a job is the government doing preserving our health care system? 14% say: Very good/good. 56% say: Poor/very poor. There are a lot of people left out of that survey.

The poll asks about Tax Money. It says "Spending taxpayers money wisely?" This is a very big thing. In the Globe and Mail this is really terribly important. Well, you don’t have to hold your breath any longer. 50% of the people surveyed think they are doing a Poor/very poor job of spending the taxpayers money wisely. I don’t ever remember a time when people thought the government spent the taxpayer’s money wisely. I think that’s a pretty good score.

Then the poll gets to "Providing honest and trustworthy government?" Very good/good, 26%. That’s the best yet. Poor/very poor, 35%. You know, I think that’s astonishing, furthermore tells you something. It tells you that a lot of people are reluctant to give up on this thing about government. And as imperfect as it is, it could be better, but it’s better than nothing. It’s better than having it reduced to a skeleton. It’s better than shutting it down. It’s better than trusting to conglomerates and corporations and to multi-nationals that say, we’ll look after you. Hah!

If you ever take your car to the dealer and say it’s not working the way it should — "I’ll fix that" the dealer will say. You get your guarantee, then you get your car and the guarantee -- all looked after. They check the tires which are under your guarantee, and then there’s $464.00 in bits and pieces that they found under the hood when they looked at it, and you’re dead. We have a system of accountability and responsibility and its all we have. And its true. It’s hard to find in Queen’s Park. But the one thing that God did for us is make none of us immortal.

What I’m saying is, and I’ll finish, Churchill said to the schoolboys in Westminster School, "Never give up. Never give up. Never. Never. Never. Never give up."

And never give up on government because it’s the only thing you really own to get you through this world.

Thank you.

Question and Answer Session:

Question:

I would like to make one exception to Mr. Camp’s admonition not to judge your country by its newspapers. I would make the exception in the Toronto Star on Sunday’s and Wednesday’s. I will say Dalton that four, or five or six weeks ago, I had an anxiety attack. I opened my Sunday paper and no Dalton Camp. No explanation at the foot of the page. Dalton Camp is on assignment. Dalton Camp is in Timbuk’tu. Dalton Camp is taking a nap. This went on for some weeks. Then one day, why, at the bottom of the page it said, "Dalton Camp will return"?

Dalton Camp:

You have no idea what a crushing blow that was to some people.

Well, I thank you for that and I don’t want to be misunderstood, the Toronto Star has endured me for a long time and we’ve had some bad feelings from time to time. I’ve quit them twice and gone back to them because they are unique in the sense that they’re prepared to endure contrary opinion.

My policy is, and everybody knows it, I don’t read the Star because I don’t want to know what they think. I want them to know what I think. And so I’m under the count there and I have a lot of friends there and a lot of them are very professional people. Or, the ones that I know are very professional people. But I thank you for the implication. Now, what I did was take a month off because I have a contract to write a book, and I wasn’t writing it, because I was writing columns. You know I do three a week, two for the Star and one for another paper. So, I thought the Star would cover, you know, would say. But apparently a lot of people called up and said, "Where’s the funeral." And, of course, the paper hated that, because if I knew it, I might ask for more money. You know what people are like. So, finally, just at the end of my absence, they put this little line in. It made them feel better.

Audience:

I did have a serious question. It’s clear in this culture, everything’s for sale [CAMP: with some exceptions] including business. Can’t students be forgiven for being preoccupied with money? They leave university, ten, twenty, thirty, forty thousand dollars in debt. Can they not be forgiven for thinking money is what it’s all about.

Dalton Camp:

My youngest child is at Queen’s. He’s my sixth child. So, I’m not ignorant of this and I think it’s absolutely shocking. Education in this country is a scandal. You can talk all you like, but the people who are getting the worst deal, in this society, this terribly affluent society, are children. And where I come from, the schools are a disgrace. The teachers are over worked, and they’re under paid and suddenly they discover, ADD. We didn’t have that. And I’m not going to be clever about it because I know it’s a very difficult problem.

We have this terrible crisis in our schools, and this terrible morale in the teaching profession. The schools are falling apart. I mean, literally, rotting out. Then you get to the thing that really galls me. This is that Canadians were told, for months, we couldn’t leave the debts of this country to our children and our grandchildren. You know what that plea was for? To get taxes down. Once they got the debt down they set up another cant. "We have to cut taxes now so we can produce more," and da-da, da-da, da-da, so people won’t leave and go to the United States, or where ever they go off shore.

So, then what happens? We have a whole generation of kids in school, who will come out of school, with, I guess, an average of twenty-five thousand bucks in debt.

That the costs of education have increased by 118% since 1982, is shameful. Only until the last budget, if you were a very good student, and a very able person, you got a scholarship, went to Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar, and dear old Rhodes money kicked in, the Canadian government wanted you to pay tax. Well, you know, they stopped that, partly.

When I got out of the army, I went to the University of New Brunswick, the Columbia School of Journalism, and the London School of Economics. I had my appendix out. Didn’t cost me a dime. And they got their money back from us, because we did damn well in life. And we paid it back, in spades. But you can’t talk to them about that now. There’s no reason at all why young people can’t go to school now, borrow the money, pay no interest, until they’re out and get a job.

We used to say, "If the New Zealanders did it." "If the Scandinavians do it," then that’s what we do. You know, we buy their furniture and see their movies. And when the Scandinavians kind of wore thin, the New Zealanders became the treasured people. We have to go through these fads. And the New Zealanders knew that, but then they kicked out the New Zealand right wing government and brought in a new government which says it’s going to do something about students’ fees. Now Ireland is the ideal country. Any Irish here? Why are you here?

Audience:

Using historic perspective…… it is my impression that the bureaucracy of leadership today, has it always been the same or has it ……

Dalton Camp:

Well you know in the 19^th century the British philosopher, I think it was Spencer, said "Man is bound to improve." And then he said when he saw Gladstone he started to change his mind. But my problem with my generation is we did indeed, grow up with great men. Roosevelt and Churchill, for example. And King. King was not dynamic, King didn’t have much charisma, but he held the country together, and built it for a long time. And I consider that a remarkable achievement. We haven’t had anything like them since.

But I noticed in the Globe and Mail the other day, not to pick on the Globe an Mail, but on the other hand, why not, the Globe and Mail had an editorial about the age of mediocrity. The blight of mediocrity. I read it eagerly. I thought, oh boy, they’re going after Paul Martin.

The Globe said, look at the United States. I mean, those two, the Vice-President And this other guy, son of the great father, the friend of Suharto’s. But the next day they have an editorial about the great leadership possibilities of Stockwell Day. I mean, can you believe that? Can you believe that? It’s a travesty.

There are two things to be said. They’re not as bad as they look. And they’re not good enough for the age that we’re coming into. We have some very, very serious changes, things to make our minds up about that impact upon our culture, our lifestyles, our future, the world we live in and how we’re going to live in it.

I don’t know whether we’ve got anybody who can communicate with the Canadian people. Get their attention. Educate, inform, inspire, encourage. That’s what we have to have.

Trudeau was a great teacher. There were other things about him that weren’t so appealing, I guess you can’t get everything. But in him at least we got someone who had intelligence. But we’re not going to be saved by leaders anyway, that is the false god in this. We need good parties. And we need good people in them. We need them to take over the role in society that lobbyists have seized from the parties. That’s asking a lot. But that’s what we have to do.

We have to reactivate the citizen in politics. I guess if times get bad enough and tough enough, if the steam went out of the stock market, we’d have an entirely different society than we have now. And it might be not much worse but we would be a lot more involved.

Audience:

Mr. Camp, do you see the religious right wing as a threat in Canada to the power of government as it seems to be in the United States?

Dalton Camp:

Not really. People ask what are the differences between Canadians and Americans? Well, we have different methodologies, and the Americans are obsessed with this -- how shall I call it -- television evangelicism. It makes me uncomfortable. My father of course, was a clergyman. A Baptist clergyman, a northern Baptist.

Don’t think there’s not a big difference: I learned at his knee. He did not like southern Baptists. He said they try to convince you you are going to hell.

I saw one of them on television last night. He was talking to a Jewish Rabbi, and to a Catholic priest, and to somebody else. And everything he said was insulting. Because he said "some of you are gonna meet each other in hell, because you haven’t been saved by me, by my church, my way." Well, you know, I don’t think that we [Canadians] are made that way. It’s still a very private business for us and we live and let live.

We did have a Catholic-Protestant thing that went on for some time and was very hard, especially in this province, and in my little province. You know, people were beating each other up and killing each other. There was injustice over this caused by the influx of the Irish. Stirred up by the Orange Order, and so on. But that’s gone now, and we survived it. Too cold up here to get all stirred up about those things.

Audience:

Can the Conservative Party survive its present leader?

Dalton Camp:

What newspaper do you represent? Well, look who its survived so far. Next question.

Audience:

Short question, Mr. Camp. Do you vote?

Dalton Camp:

Do I vote? Every chance I get. As often as I can. Of course I do.

The first vote I ever cast I voted Liberal, for James Lorimer Ilsley. In those days in the army you could vote for anybody you liked. Just by saying, well, "I went through there on a bus a few days ago." And you could vote there.

In one election, the ‘45 election, the war election, I voted Liberal and then I voted Liberal once again when I was a student in New Brunswick. Then I voted Conservative for a long time.

Once, in my own riding, I voted NDP because I would not vote for a candidate who was in favour of capital punishment. The only one I could find was an NDP candidate and I voted for her.

Audience:

As a representative for the students here and those of us already in university and entering university and entering this bleak world of future debt and so on and so forth, I’d just like to say I really enjoyed your words so far. I just wondered what kind of hope or advice you can offer us, those of us ready to enter as the next generation of leaders and the next generation of party members and, just I guess, the future.

Dalton Camp:

Thank you for that question. I am flattered you think I would have an answer.

I got into politics because I became editor of the college paper and I wrote an editorial defending the interest of the province of New Brunswick in federal-provincial relations, which bored the hell out of everybody on the campus. But, the Premier’s office called me and asked if I’d like to go to Ottawa, and meet some people. And I went and began a career in Liberal politics. What I found it did for me, and it is a lasting influence, I learned about this country. I don’t think there’s a better way to find out about this country than to get active in party politics. The first priority, I think is to find out what you want to do. And while everyone should be a thinking citizen, I think that you can get into politics too early, and get too smart too soon. I’m talking about politics now. And, don’t forget, when I got into it as a student I’d been in the army for 3 and a half years. So, I was an old guy. I was a father by that time.

But, you get to know the country. Otherwise if you don’t know the country you end up being parochial, or you end up being regional, or you end up being provincial and you miss the full opportunity to contribute and serve. But the first priority is to take full advantage of experiences that you have.

When I first went to college, I don’t want to be too anecdotal and self-indulgent about this, but just to make the point. When I first went to Acadia University before the war, I didn’t look at a book, if I could help it. I just played football. And basketball. And dated. And they were all equally important.

I did well in English because I could write. My professor said about my report card, "he writes nothing extremely well."

When I got out of the army I went to the nearest university, the University of New Brunswick and lived in an army hut. I just absolutely filled myself with it. I couldn’t get enough of it, of people teaching and people talking and reading and sitting in the library. And it had this whole range of stuff that just filled your head. I got into poetry in a really serious way. I just loved it. And that’s what it should be. Make the most of that and then, get a job. That really scared the hell out of me: I thought, how will I ever get a job? Well, you do; somehow it works out.

Audience:

Yes, I was wondering Dalton, what your feelings are about living in a country at a time when the population mix is perhaps, unprecedented in the history of our nation, and maybe of our western world. …… I just wonder if you have any thoughts about the composition, the cultural composition of our country. The great mix that we have. It’s almost unprecedented, the global perspective and condition of our nation and does it colour at all the character of the leadership?

Dalton Camp:

I think it’s a very good point because obviously we had enough trouble raising politicians who knew something about the country. Because we were always a walled-in people, Maritimers, Quebecers, Central Canada and then the prairies. You could travel the country and it was like traveling Europe, the train stopped and you wait for somebody to go through and check your passport.

These people going to school now, have a sense of a wider world than we ever had. I was very fortunate in the sense that I was raised in the United States. I went till grade nine or ten in the States. And I knew American history. That’s all I knew. When I got to Canada and went to school, I learned British history. I was ready for the wider world, if I’d only known something about my own country. That took me a while. But we are getting on to what the rest of the world is about. And I think we have to have leadership that has an awareness of the implications of that, and the need for nations to adjust and avoid the danger of turning away and retreating from it. So that takes a kind of leadership. I sometimes wish that the Prime Minister of Canada would talk to us about that. Although he said something the other day, to his caucus, if we can believe the leaks, that one of the things he wanted to do, he said, was to fight against the Americanization of Canada. Damn near time!

Audience:

I was wondering, earlier you were discussing how you felt that the media acted as the boosters for the business class and the wealthy. It seems to me that now we watch the television media or read the newspapers, it seems that journalism has been almost reduced to commissioning opinion polls or attending press conferences and basically just acting as a conduit ……I wonder if you could comment on this.

Dalton Camp:

I think you have a point. But what occurs to me, is that what we cover, and this is not so much in the Canadian experience because we don’t do that as often as the Americans do. But the interest of the American media, say CNN, in a press conference, that doesn’t involve interns in the White House. It involved substantive issues. They start to cover the meeting of the FED, that is the people who set interest rates, raise them or lower them. They start that about 48 hours before they meet. And then 48 hours afterwards, they explain the impact of it. If the President has a news conference their attention begins to wane once he becomes too informative and less general and once it seems be about something a little too arcane for television. But if he’s talking about taxation, for example, or compromising on something like tobacco or guns, they’ll stay with him forever. That has that dynamic.

So I don’t relate that to my own point which is that the encroachment of what we used to call the business section into the front page of the newspaper and the editorial page, and the op-ed page and the sports page, is incredible. Its just happening and everybody takes it in course and thinks well this is the world in which we live. So you arrange your sense of who’s important and who isn’t based on the fact that it must be damned important because it’s always in the newspapers. And some of the stuff is not worth reporting, unless you’re a big-time investor. I hope that’s somewhat related to your question.

Audience:

I was just wondering perhaps the reason why the media seem to be more interested in commissioning opinion polls and reporting more about news conferences or press conferences is because it costs a lot of money to do real investigative journalism. Is that a reason?

Dalton Camp:

I do know it costs a lot of money. But it’s interesting what they do. CNN and Time poll together. CBS and somebody else go together. They share the investment. You can’t be in journalism today if you’re not in polling because nobody cares about your opinion. They really want to know what everybody else thinks. Everything is a horse race. It’s part of making entertainment out of news. It’s participaction at another level. My mother used to say she never believed in polls because no one ever asked her anything. But there are people today who don’t think that way.

Audience:

Our political, justice and economic systems are based on a competitive model. Recently the Harris government announced that funding to universities in Ontario is going to be tied to their ranking. As far as top rank, "How many graduates are getting jobs." So they bring this competitive model into university funding. Where do you think we should draw the line between one system in which we allow competitive modeling and one in which we don’t?

Dalton Camp:

I think there’s a difference between having a value system and having priorities in public services, and having a competitive economic environment. That’s for business. Let them go ahead and compete as long as its above board and lawful and that the usual rules of the game apply. But I don’t think the state had any business in the bedroom and I don’t think Mike Harris has any business running a boarding school, much less a university system. The reason this is important to people who aren’t in Ontario is that people outside Ontario are watching this struggle between the government and the education system.

You can’t have a government that is solely motivated by ideology but has never really told the Ontario people about what it thinks. They ought to say what they believe. And what they believe, you see, is what we call neo-liberalism. They really do believe that Ayn Rand was a saint. And they really do believe that the individual comes first. They really do believe in first-come, first-served. They do believe in winner-take-all, that’s their theology.

But they won’t talk about that. And that’s what fuels their engine. Of course, you must never give Harris credit for that. That’s not what he thinks. Nobody knows what he thinks. But somebody does his thinking for him. All this stuff is scripted for him. We know that, $650.00 an hour is paid to speech writers. I’m jealous. I never …… ah, never mind.

Thank you.

10. Violet Asquith Bonham-Carter, Lady, Winston Churchill: An Intimate Portrait, (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), 106-107.
11. Soeharto, My Thoughts, Words, and Deeds: An Autobiography. (As told to G. Dwipayana and K.H Ramadhan) English translation by Sumadi; edited by Muti´ah Lestiono. (Jakarta: Citra Lamtoro Gung Persada, 1991). ASIN: 9798085019
12. See: Brian Hutchinson, Fools’ Gold: The Making of a Global Market Fraud, (A.A. Knopf: November 1997), 171.
13. Brian Hutchinson, Fools’ Gold: The Making of a Global Market Fraud, 174.
14. Paul Adams, "Liberals try to Picture life without Paul Martin," The Globe and Mail, Saturday, March 11, 2000, A4.

A Partial Bibliography