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Resistance is Not Futile
Gandhi humbled an empire and sacrificed his life for his ideals; pressing "like" on a Facebook protest page does not quite measure up. My first televised essay of 2012 for TVOntario's The Agenda discusses the democratic imperative to stand up for justice, and the ethical imperative to do so in a meaningful way. The broadcast is available via streaming video through my YouTube Channel and via podcast through iTunes, as well as directly above. My original text is below. * * * In any democracy worthy of the name, it is not merely the right, but the responsibility of every citizen to resist unjust laws. In Canada - a nation that defines itself through the comparatively docile pursuit of peace, order, and good government - we have too often suffered from a national impulse to defer to authority. Yet, I believe Canadians would still agree that those who do the greatest good in the world are those who are least willing to yield before evil. Mahatma Gandhi responded to colonial oppression through a massive campaign of civil disobedience, striking a non-violent blow that would lay low the largest empire in the history of civilisation. Rosa Parks refused the command to move to the back of the bus, with a quiet dignity that would sweep away American segregation laws. Vaclav Havel set his intellect and artistry against the bullets and barbed wire of Communism, and breathed life into the bloodless Velvet Revolution that would end two generations of bloody tyranny. Each was a person of profound humility, but each found the courage to live out his or her convictions, and each had the strength to change the world by refusing to submit to injustice. All three were vilified. All three were imprisoned. And this Monday’s anniversary of his assassination is a stark reminder that Gandhi paid for his non-violent ideals with a violent death. The credibility, virility, and nobility of their struggles lay in their willingness to suffer the consequences from those their lives defied. It was their example more than their words that inspired hundreds of millions of others to follow where they led, creating irresistible movements for justice. Today, the rise of online communications has enabled information to outpace distance and censorship, and made it far easier to create vast virtual communities of interest. At this moment, there are probably more self-described dissidents opining in chat rooms than have manned all the barricades in all of history. But the very speed and ease with which modern protests can erupt, is frequently complemented by the speed and ease with which they disappear. It takes little courage and still less personal investment to languidly press “like” at a Facebook page. When that is their full extent, such protests are nothing more than consequence-free, self-indulgent exercises in soothing the consciences of individuals unwilling to make the sacrifices necessary to effect real change in the real world. Although times have changed, the fundamental principles of civil resistance have remained timeless. There is a contrast between making a scene, and making a difference. There is a choice between the comfort of self-righteous illusion, and the peril of self-sacrificing commitment. There is a hard journey between railing against unjust laws, and living out a life that models justice. Fundamentally, everyone who aspires to be a person of conscience faces a deeply personal challenge: if we truly wish to change the world, are we prepared to begin by changing ourselves? |
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Riding Off Into the Sunset
After meeting with Equine Canada's staff this morning, I issued the letter below to the federation's Board, Councils, and Committees. I have served as Chief Executive Officer of EC, Canada's national governing body for equestrianism and the executive arm of the Canadian Equestrian Team, since 2008. * * * This is certainly one of the most difficult letters I have had to compose since Equine Canada did me the honour of inviting me to serve as Chief Executive Officer. I am writing to let you know that I am standing down as CEO of our federation. When I accepted the post in 2008, I did so committing to serve for one quadrennial cycle. The time has slipped by too quickly, but nevertheless, the time has come for me to make good my pledge. Few people find a vocation that allows them to combine their ideals, passions, and profession, and fewer still discover it amongst friends. I know, therefore, what a rare gift I was given, in having the opportunity to strive alongside each of you in the service of our sport, our sector, and our country. It is an honour I have always tried to be worthy of, and now, at the end of the path, I can only hope that you feel I justified the faith of our federation in choosing me. Although I know many people find it quaint to the point of absurdity, I believe deeply that each of us is nothing if not a living memorial to the generations of men and women who came before us, and that if we are to be deserving heirs and worthy stewards of our heritage, then our first responsibility is to build upon our inheritance. My work at Equine Canada has been a passionate effort to live up to that creed, to leave Canadian equestrianism stronger – howsoever modestly – than when I arrived. There have certainly been dark moments, times when this job felt like one of the trials of the damned, when a great national institution seemed beset on all sides, and when high ideals were assailed by low pettiness and vulgar jealousies. If I ever had any doubts before, I certainly have none now, that not every horse’s ass is connected to the front of a horse. But the moments of light have been far greater. I have served with professionals in the Equine Canada office whom I am proud to call my colleagues. I have worked with athletes who have taken an unsuspecting world by storm. I have witnessed our federation emerge as a leader in the international equestrian and national sport movements. I have had the extraordinary good fortune to live through a golden age of Canadian equestrianism. And I have enjoyed it all with new friends and kindred spirits. It is hard to leave all this behind. In many ways, leaving is the last thing I want to do. But I always knew that leaving would be my final debt of honour to Equine Canada. All institutions stagnate and wither if they do not deliberately rejuvenate themselves. A culture of regular renewal is not only essential to bring in new perspectives, new talents, and new ideas; it is also vital to ensure that serving leaders do not become locked in a jealous embrace with the status quo. An over-long tenure for a CEO in a federation like Equine Canada would surely be a mark of failure, because it would suggest a love of office rather than of service, a hesitancy to expend political capital in pursuit of important goals, and an excessive willingness to suffer fools gladly. I am guilty of many, many faults – but not these ones. I envy my successor, because I know what a glorious opportunity awaits him or her: to look upon an established institution with new eyes; to perceive its future with a new imagination; and to work towards new triumphs with new zeal. It is the gift I received from my predecessor; it is the gift I now pass on with a happy heart. The Equine Canada Board has been directing the CEO transition process through its Executive Recruitment, Retention, and Review (ERRR) Committee. Although the timing and timelines the committee has chosen are certainly eccentric and astonishingly compressed, they assure me of their confidence that they have matters well in hand, to prevent any undue disruption or loss of institutional memory. In the immediate term, they will be delegating the CEO responsibilities to our CFO Mike Arbour and our COO Craig Andreas. I know that each of you will be as supportive and helpful to them as you were to me. Equine Canada will be issuing a public advisory to our members and our partners later today, formally announcing that I am relinquishing my post as CEO. I am looking forward to seeing as many of you as possible at the Equine Canada convention in St John’s, Newfoundland, in February, and offering you my thanks in person for your confidence and kindness during my tenure as your Chief Executive Officer. |
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Hope for the Holidays
My 2011 Christmas broadcast on TVOntario's The Agenda touches upon slavery, global war, and the scourge of land mines. It may, therefore, be something of a surprise that my message is that hope and optimism are the threads that have bound Canada together since our foundation. The broadcast is available via streaming video through my YouTube Channel and via podcast through iTunes, as well as directly above. My original text is below. * * * At its heart, Canada is a glorious paradox. We are a warm people, fostered by a cold climate. We take our greatest pride in our reputation for modesty. And we have been at our very best when the world has confronted us with its very worst. Canada is possible only because ours is a nation where hope triumphs over experience. At this moment, Canadians from across our land are being drawn together by ancient traditions about the kindling of hope. Certainly, some of the most committed Christmas and Chanukah celebrations will be in homes with the least commitment to any faith. But just as certainly, we can still be of one conviction in our desire to join hands with our fellow human beings, to see the best in them and to want them to see the best in us, and to believe that we have it in ourselves to make the world a better place. Yet, many of us will come home for the holidays worried about the world we will have to return to in the new year. Dire economic warnings abound. Democracy is being tested across the globe. Insecurity seems to be the only certainty. But Canadians have always found ways to master our fears rather than be mastered by them. When slavery surged in the United States, George Brown and his generation of Canadians responded by gathering during the Christmas season to breathe new life into the Underground Railroad, and the world became a better place for it. When the threat of global war erupted in the Suez Canal, Lester Pearson and his generation of Canadians responded by meeting in the weeks before the holidays to create international peacekeeping, and the world became a better place for it. When the carnage wrought by landmines became too grievous to bear, Lloyd Axworthy and his generation of Canadians responded by assembling the community of nations on a cold December morning to sign the Ottawa Treaty, and the world became a better place for it. By comparison, the worries that plague us today will surely bore the students of tomorrow. Instead, when the eyes of future generations are upon us, they will inevitably ask of us, "What did you do to make the world a better place?" I believe we will be able to hold our heads high before the judgement of history if we can reply that in our season, we held on to hope, we put aside our doubts, we came together believing in our better selves, and we remembered that we have always burned brightest as a nation during the darkest hours. Because throughout our long and storied history, the actions born of our hope have always been Canadians’ greatest gifts to the world and to one another. I can certainly do no better myself than to follow our country’s tradition and offer you and your family my hopes that however you celebrate it, the season will bring you every happiness. |
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To Lead or to Serve
Waves of rebellions and revolutions are washing over the world, as long-repressed peoples from a vast array of cultures choose to risk their lives for freedom, rather than continue dwelling quietly under tyranny. Yet simultaneously, established democracies are drowning in cynicism and popular disengagement from our own political insitutions. In my broadcast essay for TVOntario's The Agenda with Steve Paikin, I make the case that active participation in the political process is the price that each of us must stand prepared to pay if we wish to be citizens rather than merely subjects. The broadcast is available via streaming video through my YouTube Channel and via podcast through iTunes, as well as directly above. My original text is below. * * * It has always been my conviction that public service is the secular reply to the yearning each of us feels to be part of something greater than ourselves, to live life in pursuit of ideals more noble than the satisfaction of personal appetites. And yet, there is no denying that there is a crisis of cynicism in our country, about politics, politicians, and even the ideal of public service. While this would be a misfortune for any country, it is a catastrophe for ours. Unlike Old World states, Canada was not created by accidents of history or the determinism of geography; indeed, with the vastness of the land and the sparseness of the population, our very existence is a triumph of hope over reason. Canada exists because, and only because, we have willed ourselves into being as single nation bound together by a set of shared political values. In this context, Canadians’ loss of faith in the political process imperils the national enterprise itself. Why are Canadians turning an increasingly sceptical eye and deaf ear to the politics? I find it difficult to believe that it is because politicians of the past were any more noble, or those of the present any more corrupt. Instead, I believe that a great chasm has opened between the governors and the governed in our respective understandings of the meaning of leadership in a modern democracy. Over the past quarter century, political parties have too often lurched away from being mass movements of individual Canadians sharing a common vision of the public good, and towards being backdrops for individual party leaders who speak the language of democracy while wielding near-absolute power over their elected caucuses. At the same time, Canadians have lost any appetite to huddle in the shadow of one great man who would carry us to the Promised Land. Instead, we crave an opportunity to exercise leadership in our own lives, to share in the authorship of the social contract that binds us together and defines us as a nation. Canadians instinctively remember what the machinery of politics appears to have forgotten: that election to office is a contract to serve us, not a licence to rule us; that the wisdom of society lies in the many, not the few; that if it is to be real, democracy must be a way of governing ourselves, not just a way of choosing governments. But the chasm can be bridged. In our recent federal, provincial, and municipal elections, a surprising number of younger Canadians and Canadians from other fields of public service have stepped into the political fray. Most of them have come seeking to change politics, though doubtlessly, many will instead be changed by politics. But not all. For those of us outside Parliament, we must have the courage to live out the creed of our age: that the greatest guarantor of the public interest is an engaged and watchful population standing between its leaders and the levers of power. Ultimately, active participation in the political process is the price that each of us must stand prepared to pay if we wish to be citizens rather than merely subjects. Because in a democracy, we never receive the nation we deserve; we only receive the nation we demand, and the nation we dare to create. |
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Liberalism of Conviction and of Convenience
Until recently, the Liberal Party of Canada was arguably the most successful political party in the democratic world. Needless to say, the world has changed for the Party. My most recent broadcast essay for TVOntario's The Agenda with Steve Paikin examines how the Party that once bestrode the nation like a colossus came to this pass, and what the future might hold. The broadcast is available via streaming video through my YouTube Channel and via podcast through iTunes, as well as directly above. My original text is below. * * * Until its defeat in 2006, the Liberal Party of Canada had been in government for 71 of the previous 100 years: longer than the PRI of Mexico, longer than the Maoists of China, longer indeed than virtually any party, of any country, on any continent, under any system of government. How the mighty have fallen. Perversely yet predictably, the Liberal Party became a victim of its own success. Its long association with government made the party a magnet for individuals drawn to power rather than to public service, a tool of Liberals of convenience rather than Liberals of conviction. After its catastrophe in the General Election, the question confronting the party is not whether it can rebuild its fabled political machine into one capable of waging an effective campaign; it is whether it can rediscover its ideals and return a party deserving of our country's trust. If it is to have any hope of doing so, it will need to find the courage to resist the lure of comforting self-deceptions and easy answers. Its decline at the polls has not been due to some lapse in judgment by a rueful electorate that yearns to repent at the next election. It has not been a want of resources that can be remedied by bagmen or ward heelers. It has not been the absence of an imagined messianic leader whose charisma could substitute for policy or grassroots renewal. The Liberal Party instead received a calculated rebuke from Canadians against the hubris they saw gnawing at it. The irony is that the tenets of liberalism remain as resonant with Canadians today as during the Liberal Party’s salad days. It is why in an effort to capitalise on its electoral successes, the NDP is debating stripping the word “Socialist” from its constitution; it is why the Conservative Party leader describes himself as a “Classical Liberal”. The ideals of liberalism are founded upon a single article of faith: that liberty is the highest political good, and that as a result, the first duty of government is to seek the greatest liberty for the one that is compatible with liberty for all. It holds that every right is balanced by a corresponding responsibility. It believes in the equal dignity of all citizens and in equality of opportunity, but it rejects equality of outcome, insisting instead that people of unequal talent and industry should reap as they sow. It celebrates individual initiative and looks towards a vision of society as a meritocracy, and expects those who benefit the most from society to bear the greatest responsibility to society. Ultimately, liberalism holds that a nation is bound together by a social contract, because the interests of each individual are inextricably linked to the well being of every other member of society, making prosperity and social justice inseparable. The 20th century began as the age of the dictator. It ended with liberalism having come of age as the ascendant political philosophy across the world. Yet liberal parties everywhere are in crisis. Can they grow with the success of liberalism, or have they been outgrown by the success of their own political philosophy? The Liberal Party of Canada has four years to decide. |
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Faith in Secularism
My June broadcast essay for TVOntarion's The Agenda with Steve Paikin was on the democratic imperative of the separation of church and state, a phrase much honoured in word but requiring more than we might suspect in deed. The broadcast is available via streaming video through my YouTube Channel and via podcast through iTunes, as well as directly above. My original text is below. * * * In Canada and around the world, anxieties about religious fundamentalism are leading democratic governments to limit the right of their citizens to public expression of private faith. In France, recent laws ban public school students from wearing prominent religious attire, including Jewish skullcaps, Christian crucifixes, and Muslim headscarves. In Canada, Quebec’s Bill 94 would ban Canadian women wearing Muslim face veils from receiving services from public institutions. Though promoted as the high-minded defence of modernism, these laws are grave errors in judgement. If history has one lesson, it is that when religion and politics mix, both are degraded. The democratic ideal of separation of church and state is as much in the interests of the church as it is in the interests of the state. It demands freedom of worship without political interference, as much as it demands a civil society free of religious compulsion. A secular democracy ensures that governments can not intrude into the relationship between the individual and his God, and that no tyranny of the majority can curtail the most personal exercise of private conscience. Simultaneously, it guarantees that public institutions answer to the expressed will of the people, instead of to particular groups claiming a privileged insight into the interpreted will of God. Crucially, a secular society is not one that is hostile to religion. It is one that is blind to the religious choices of its citizens. Laws limiting personal religious expression play upon the cheap political capital to be gained from marginalising small, awkward, and unpopular groups, at times when insecurity ripples through society. But these laws also corrode and undermine the very principles of tolerance and inclusion they purport to defend. When the state takes an interest in regulating religious expression, it invites religious institutions to reply by using their force of numbers to remake government policy. More seriously still, excluding people of faith from the mass of society is the surest way to isolate and drive them into the arms of radicalism. No matter how jarring, alien, or even distasteful we may find particular practices, the suppression of voluntary religious expression by informed adults is a far greater evil. It is not secularism. It is atheism as a coercive state religion. It is no more acceptable in a free and democratic society than sectarian persecution or forced conversions. I believe that we, as Canadians, understand this instinctively. Our country was first forged out of a colonial accommodation between Protestants and Catholics, later out of an amalgam of Abrahamic faiths, and today encompasses a society that is largely disengaged from formal worship. As much as any other people in the world, state secularism and religious tolerance are at the heart of the ideals that bind us together and define us as a nation. There is no denying that we are living through an age when our ideals are being tested. To what extent do our values of tolerance require us to tolerate practices that may emanate from intolerant philosophies? If demographic changes in our liberal democracy cause our cultural centre of gravity to shift away from our established social values, which should prevail: our identity as democrats or our identity as small-l liberals? These are not easy questions, but the answers certainly do not lie with those small minds who would trade upon our most unworthy fears. State suppression of free religious expression by free citizens is unacceptable in any secular democracy, and it is an offence against the free society that is the birthright of every Canadian. |
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A Party of the Many “A week is a lifetime in politics,” runs one of the oldest clichés in the field. Yet, in the week since the Liberal Party suffered its worst defeat in Canadian history, there appears to have been insufficient time for light, though there has been plenty of time for heat. As long as I have been involved in the Liberal Party, it has been my conviction that for all its strengths, its one fundamental weakness has been an unhealthy obsession with the identity of its leader. This impulse has taken us from being a party of the many, towards being a party of the few. It is a view that I have expressed during recent election coverage, some of which I have linked to below.
If the Liberal Party is to recover from this setback, we will have to demonstrate the humility to recognise our errors, the courage to correct them, and the strength to draw wisdom from this electoral rebuke. I hope that in the coming weeks, months, and years, Liberals across Canada will join hands to rebuild our party on a foundation of genuine mass participation. |
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Democratic Disenchantment
As Canadians went to the polls for our 2011 federal General Election, TVOntario’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin convened its four broadcast essayists to discuss the state of Canada’s democrac. The broadcast is available via streaming video through my YouTube Channel, as well as directly above. After a long campaign notable for bitter partisan attacks and for exalting low politics over high policy, I found the debate with my colleagues Tony Keller, Carla Lucchetta, and Jordan Peterson both enjoyable and personally enlightening. Ultimately, the results of the election were, in my view, a calamity for Canada and for our better political traditions, but that is a subject for another day! |
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East and West and the Arab Spring
TVOntario's flagship current affairs programme, The Agenda with Steve Paikin, televised my essay on why Canada owes it to ourselves and to the people of the Middle East to enforce the no-fly zone over Libya. The broadcast is available via streaming video through my YouTube Channel and via podcast through iTunes, as well as directly above. My original text, which I abbreviated slightly for the broadcast, is below. * * * The Arab Spring, which bounded in like a lion, is in peril of being led out like a lamb to the slaughter. Throughout the Middle East, millions of young people were intoxicated by the perfume of freedom wafting through their countries for the first times in their lives. Today, hundreds of them lie in early graves, and thousands more are sure to follow. Many of us in Canada were swept up by their optimism, in awe of unarmed youth who seemed ready to stare down despots with little more than the force of their ideals. First came Tunisia, then Egypt, and it seemed inevitable that Libya and others would follow. As dictators lose their hesitation to fire on their own people, Canada is faced with a brutal question of our own: what is our responsibility to these nascent democrats, and what, if anything, can we or should we do. For most of our history, Canadian governments have been beguiled by Middle Eastern tyrants and their apologists into believing that as cruel as their regimes might be, they were somehow better than the alternatives lurking in the populations they held down. The tyrants told us that their people had no cultural interest in democracy; that ordinary Arabs lacked the intelligence, the character, or the moral fibre to govern themselves democratically; that the only alternative to despotism was fundamentalism or anarchy; that our best interests as a western country lay in turning a blind eye to their abuses. And we blithely accepted this short-sighted bigotry in the name of sophisticated realpolitik. Like so many western countries, we happily made deals with the devils, to trade justice for stability in the Middle East, and were then surprised to find that the world was left with neither. The uprisings across the Arab world have given the lie to the despots and to our own self-deception. The Algerians who committed acts of self-immolation so yearned for dignity that they gave up their lives instead of their autonomy; they were no one’s sheep. The Tunisian youth who toppled Ben Ali were amongst the best-educated and bravest people of their generation; they were no one’s fools. The Egyptian coalition that brought down Mubarak were led by secularists; they were no one’s cartoon fundamentalists. As the uprisings spread, yet another lie came tumbling down: that Arabs in wealthy states are so stupefied by their riches, that they have no thought for their freedom. But gathering in town squares across the region were people of wildly differing economic classes, who all understood that a gilded cage remains a cage. We can take pride in the fact that Canada answered the call of the Libyan people, and that Canadian jets are enforcing the no-fly zone to protect unarmed civilians from Qaddafi’s bombs and to cut off his supply of foreign mercenaries. As the people of the Middle East reshape their own political landscape, we have recognised that our best interests as Canadians lie in valuing their freedoms as much as we value our own. Canada may not have the military capacity to cast our shield further afield than Libya, but we can refuse to remain silent, and not allow people throughout the Middle East to be dragged into the night. We can refuse to continue giving despots an honoured seat at the table in the community of nations. We can give comfort to those they would harm and give voice to those they would silence. As the uprisings unfold in the coming weeks and months, I suspect that some will end in triumph, while others will end in tragedy. In any one country, today may not be freedom’s day. But that day will inevitably come. And when it does, Canadians will want to be able to hold our heads high in the knowledge that even in the darkest hours, we put aside our deals with the devils, and instead stood with the angels. |
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Privacy
Policy
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Equine Canada |
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Standing down as Chief Executive Officer |
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TVOntario's The Agenda |
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My broadcast on democratic civil disobedience |
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CBC Radio One |
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On the passing of Canada's greatest stallion |
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Globe and Mail |
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My article on the national imperative to pursue excellence |
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