From: clamen+@CS.CMU.EDU (Stewart Clamen)
Subject: GAZETTE: THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY
Originator: clamen@BYRON.SP.CS.CMU.EDU
Reply-To: clamen+@CS.CMU.EDU
Organization: School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1993 19:48:32 GMT


		    THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY
		     How we survived to face 1993

			   by Hubert Bauch

			     The Gazette
		Montreal, Saturday, December 26, 1992

		      [Reprinted with permision]



REFERENDUM, WHAT REFERENDUM?

When we Canadians told pollsters before the Oct. 26 referendum what
we'd had it up to here with the constitution, we meant it.

A curtain has been drawn between the first 10 months of 1992, when the
headlines where saturated by the constitutional wrangle, and the last
two months, when the word was purged from out vocabulary, in both
official languages.

"Woe to him who brings it up now," Pierre Trudeau said.  For once,
every politician in the country heeded him.

Not that this will last.  Parti Quebecois leader Jacques Parizeau and
Bloc Quebecois leader Lucien Bouchard aren't about to let bygones be
bygones.

But for now, this calm that so richly complements the season
represents a triumph of our Canadian character.  In other parts of the
world, the reflect would have been to break out the guns and ammo.

Some would suggest that we're numb, that this calm is really a
collective case of postponing reality.

"I have no doubt that a lot of it was fear of change," Prime Minister
Brian Mulroney said of the resounding No vote.  "The implication being
that there is a way into the 21st century without change."

If he believes this, he hasn't been paying enough attention to the
changes we've been through.  All the polls suggest that one big change
we can't wait to make it getting ourselves a new prime minister.

It could also be argued that it wasn't fear of change so much as our
lack of faith in the people proposing the changes that sank the
Charlottetown accord.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the referendum campaign was the
change it reflected in our traditional attitudes.  Here we were, a
populace otherwise renowned for our docility, massively rejecting a
proposal backed by our establishment in the face of its direst
predictions for national dismemberment.

"There was an overwhelming level of public misgivings that the
referendum was little more than the politicians' latest sell job,"
said pollster Angus Reid.  "Many believed that the elites attempted to
manipulate Canadians in the interests of their own agenda."

For most of the year, our faith in the system has been severely tested
by the recession.

Every week has brought more plant closings and job losses, starting in
January when Canadian Pacific announce it would close its Trois
Rivieres paper mill, eliminating 1,500 jobs.  Last week two Montreal
manufacturers, Metal FL Inc. and Bagatelle Canada Inc., laid off 450
workers after landing in bankruptcy court; plant closings and job cuts
were the most recurrent headlines of the year.

The most spectacular business failure was the downfall of Olympia &
York, which had started the year, as far as most of us knew, as an
international colossus, only to wind up another tattered candidate for
bankruptcy protection.

There was a time when most of us thought we could believe in our
banks, yet it was revealed this year that our leading chartered banks
contributed substantially to the O&Y fiasco by lending hundreds of
millions to the firm's secretive owners, the Reichmann brothers, on
the basis of guarantees that wouldn't have got most of us a used-car
loan.

As of Oct. 31, our six largest chartered banks were carrying more than
$12 billion in non-performing loans on their books.  When the
dimensions of the O&Y debacle became apparent to them, their first
instinct was to cover it up for as long as possible.


There was a time when it was possible to believe that
mega-corporations like General Motors and IBM were either the backbone
of the capitalist system or the all-powerful enemy of the working
class.  This year both have been in the front ranks of the corporate
cripples limping across the devastated economic landscape, dragged
down by their bloated and inefficient organizational structures.

There was a time when Ontario was the reliable engine of prosperity in
Canada.  Those of us in other parts of the country who resented
Ontario's abiding plenty could nevertheless rely on sumptuous Ontario
equalization payments, even as we complained that Ontario was sucking
the lifeblood out of the hinterland.

But it became obvious this year that even this national myth has been
shaken.  More than half the 500,000 jobs lost to the recession that
began in 1990 have disappeared in Ontario.  This year began with the
Ontario government crawling to Ottawa with begging bowl in hand,
asking for $940 million in emergency recession aid.  When he didn't
get satisfaction in the federal budget, Ontario Premier Bob Rae
described the federal government as "basically a burned-out shell."

There was a time when this would have been a most astounding thing for
a premier of Ontario to say.  This year it caused barely a ripple,
perhaps because all reliable polls had been showing for months that an
overwhelming proportion of the Canadian electorate agrees with Rae's
assessment.

There was a time when Newfoundland without a cod fishery seemed
unimaginable, just as for the longest time it seemed as though K. C.
Irving would live forever.

Among other cherished articles of faith that were jarred this year was
the notion that a decent day's work should earn a decent wage.  The
Canadian Labour Market and Productivity Centre reported this year that
a family with not one but two minimum-wage earners is still close to
$7,000 below the current $27,000-a-year poverty line for a family of
four.

The conviction that our society is on the upward curve that will
forever produce a better way of life for future generations has also
taken a beating.  Statistics Canada issued figures this year showing
that family income in Canada is proportionally what it was a dozen
years ago.

Whether we want change or not, we Canadians have been cast adrift from
the past, wrote Peter C. Newman, one of the country's leading
political commentators for three decades.

"Our religious institutions have been tainted by revelations of
clerical child abuse; the chartered bank, which once acted as our
financial father confessors, turn out to have thoughtlessly shovelled
billions of dollars into the coffers of a company too arrogant to show
them any of the balance sheets.

"Nothing and no one is sacred any more."

This may not be a reassuring state of affairs at the dawn of a new
year, but it is far from the worst that could happen.  At best it
offers a splendid opportunity to take a fresh, clear-eyed look at the
way our country is run and the people who are running it.

The wholesale banishment of the constitutional issue from the public
agenda has allowed other pressing matters to come to the fore, notably
the state of the economy and what are often inappropriately called
women's issues --- like gender equity, single-parent poverty, family
violence and violence in general.

There were signs late this year that serious consideration is finally
being given to the possibility that pumping a diet of glorified and
gratuitous violence though the most powerful communications medium
known might have a warping effect on unformed minds.

Family-support policies will have to be rethought entirely; the
traditional family has gone the way of a secure industrial job.  Late
this year, Statistics Canada reported that more than one-fifth of
Quebec families are headed by a single parent, and almost half the
Quebec women giving birth for the first time are unmarried.


It might be coincidence, or it might be of considerable consequence,
but the politician who has cut the widest swath in the politics of the
post-referendum period has been federal Justice Minister Kim Campbell,
heavily touted as the likeliest successor to Mulroney as Conservative
leader.

The effective abolition of the constitutional debate has also cleared
room on the front pages for more international news.  In this respect
we Canadians have reason to feel somewhat reassured, if not altogether
smug.

There is, after all, nothing in Canada to match the level of economic
collapse in the Soviet Union.  Here there have been no race riots, as
there have been in the U.S. and Germany.  Cultural frictions here have
not led to full-scale butchery, as in the former Yugoslavia.  We don't
have to live in fear of terrorist bombings, as in London.  The anarchy
and starvation in Somalia are confined to our TV screens.

Though he has overplayed it to the point where it is becoming
counterproductive, it was not Brian Mulroney's government or any of
its agents, but the United Nations, no less, which this year declared
Canada the best place in the world to live for quality of live and
social stability.

After three years of grinding recession, there is nevertheless a glow
of sorts on our economic horizon this year-end.

A report this month from the Organization for Economic Development,
whose members include two dozen of the world's leading industrialized
nations, noted that the unemployment tide in Canada has begun to
recede, and forecast that Canada's economic growth rate will lead the
industrialized world for at least the nest two years.

This will no doubt be a threadbare comfort to the hundreds of
thousands of us who are unemployed this Christmas, but it nevertheless
suggests that we Canadians still have a lot to believe in and build
on.

In some circles it is the height of political incorrectness to compare
ourselves with the Americans.  even so, this year's U.S. election
campaign could well provide some clues to where we are headed.

Since the beginning of this hardscrabble decade, observers have made
much of the growing cynicism toward the political process among the
electorate, both in Canada and in the U.S.  Yet there was an unusual
level of interest and participation in this fall's U.S. campaign.

The consensus is that voters responded enthusiastically to the fresh
faces on the scene, like Bill Clinton and Ross Perot, who ventured
into unconventional forums and conveyed at least the impression that
they were willing to speak frankly, offer new approaches and respond
directly to voters' everyday concerns.

"Maybe the most important thing about 1992 is how intent the voters
themselves were in making this an election about things that are
important to their own lives," said Democratic Party pollster Stanley
Greenberg, one of the architects of Clinton's campaign.  "People
cleared away a lot of rubble for themselves.  They didn't have time
for the bullshit."

Canadians cleared a lot of rubble away by sweeping the constitutional
issue off the table and serving notice that they are hardened to
political bull.  All the backroom boys, spin doctors and media wizards
from the three major parties --- not to mention the pols themselves
--- could not persuade us Canadians to buy the Charlottetown accord.

Canadians in general may have put the referendum firmly out of mind,
at least for now, but politicians who forget this underlying message
will be in trouble this coming federal election year.


--
Stewart M. Clamen			Internet:    clamen@cs.cmu.edu
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