Chandra is reading... A Fair Country

A Fair Country: Telling Truths about Canada by John Ralston Saul is a fabulous book. CPJ board member Maylanne Maybee is reviewing it for our Spring Catalyst book review supplement, and I don’t want to scoop Maylanne.

However, I can’t resist highlighting two excellent passages of this book. Ralston Saul argues at the beginning of the book that we often profoundly misunderstand and represent our origins as a Métis nation, constructed around an ethos of fairness or welfare (in its 19th century meaning – not social assistance). He then examines how our failure to recognize these fundamental truths about ourselves has left our country flailing, unable to come to grips with many of our realities as a country. He also offers a scathing indictment of Canada’s elites – political, intellectual, and business – for their leadership.

One of these scathing attacks is directed at the lack of leadership on poverty. “We may talk about dealing with poverty, yet we act as if it is normal,” he points out. “Why? Because we have normalized poverty by agreeing to live with it in its modern form for a quarter century.”

Action on poverty has been limited to civil society, while governments have actually made the situation worse by refusing to invest in housing, playing statistical games with unemployment and poverty and implementing tax cuts that render the government incapable of acting.

“Why has our elite not taken action? The solutions are not complicated. Why do they seem paralyzed before this poverty? Why are they unwilling to engage in a public discussion about what this failure means?” he asks.

Ralston Saul also challenges us to see people, rather than statistics. “These are not mysterious, abstract, generic questions. Every child in a food bank is the direct result of specific actions or inactions by real individuals in positions of authority.” He argues that one of the reasons for this failure of leadership is that our elites can’t see the people behind the statistics – they are isolated from the effects of their actions. The poor are invisible to them.

The fourth and final section of A Fair Country considers the way forward, embracing our real roots and intentionally pursuing our collective goal of fairness. One of the solutions Ralston Saul advocates is a guaranteed annual income (or a guaranteed livable income).

He points out that it cuts across partisan lines, to satisfy fiscal conservatives, socialists and social democrats, calling it “a policy that treats citizens with dignity. This is the opposite of the nosey managerial desire to dissect the details of the life of the poor.” He also argues that “it bears a family link to the long Canadian history of egalitarianism as a civilizational goal.”

A Fair Country offers interesting insights into Canada’s history and collective consciousness. It highlights the extent to which fairness is part of our “national DNA,” and yet how far we’ve departed from that commitment. Ralston Saul also provides the inspiration that we need to find our way back.