Canada moves beyond its past - We are developing unique set of values
By: James Travers, Toronto Star, 12/27/03

Scott Brison is not Canada's newsmaker of the year. But in ways he never intended, the young, bright and gay Nova Scotia MP provides the perfect bookends for a remarkable period in federal politics.

In the first month of 2003, Brison announced he would contest the Progressive Conservative leadership, a contest eventually won in the heat of controversy by the also young Peter MacKay. In the year's last month, the country's oldest political party died, a victim of ennui as well as a merger that feels like a takeover, and Brison is now a Liberal as well as the parliamentary secretary responsible for U.S. relations in Paul Martin's government.

Between January and December, the country changed as much as Brison.

It lost a prime minister who had been in politics longer than most Canadians have been alive, and found another one only five years Jean Chrétien's junior but light-years younger in leadership style and ideas.

It lost a separatist government in Quebec and found in Jean Charest the first unequivocally federalist premier that province has known since the Quiet Revolution became loud and then threatening.

And along with the Tories, it lost Joe Clark as well as the strangely ineffectual Alexa McDonough and found Reformers rebranded as the Conservative Party and, moving fast from right to left, the glib yet strikingly effective Jack Layton.

Despite that action high on the political pyramid, despite a merciful end to Chrétien's achingly slow retirement and to Martin's ambitious 10-year quest for the job that eluded his father, 2003 was less about politicians than it was about shifting political plates. After a decade that in some ways could be mistaken for stasis, Canada is at year-end a country in motion.

Statistics Canada first pointed it out back in January with a census that found that the sense of a nation changing fast is no illusion. As it pushes deeper into a new millennium, this country, more than at any time in the last 70 years, is a multi-ethnic, multicultural home to immigrants.

Even more to the point, working-age migrants mostly from Asia are heading for the big cities -- Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver -- contributing to an already rich mosaic and helping move traditional municipal issues to the top of the federal agenda.

What is painfully apparent as one year morphs into another is that cities and their complex problems are now at the political epicentre. Along with fuelling the economic engine, they form an increasingly obvious line of demarcation in a country with some deep and worrying divisions.

Less familiar than the old divides of English and French, East and West, Canada's new solitudes think differently, work differently, vote differently and embrace change differently. By and large, city dwellers are more cosmopolitan, wealthy, Liberal and sanguine about rapid evolution than their rural counterparts.

The significance of those differences is multiplied by a single fact that contradicts the folkloric notion of Canadians as jolly, winter-loving lumberjacks who can't resist the call of the wild: A clear majority of those who pay taxes, use social services and cast ballots now live in the country's five largest urban centres.

That inescapable new reality is forcing alterations to the way federalism functions.

Ottawa can no longer afford -- not economically and not politically -- to let municipalities live or die on the scraps that fall from provincial tables. It must find ways of working with the premiers to satisfy the mayors by meeting the growing needs of those who, after all, elect all three levels of government.

So it should be no surprise that Martin says cities are a priority. What is a surprise is that he is staking his prime ministerial prestige and perhaps even his political future on the issue by making it his personal responsibility.

That's a watershed movement in national politics, but it's not the only movement.

In the warmth of spring, the federal government found itself stickhandling two hot issues that would ultimately lead to the influential, wonderfully iconoclastic Economist magazine declaring Canada cool. Those issues are same-sex marriage and the decriminalization of recreational use of small amounts of marijuana, and they plague the government still.

Nothing else in 2003 measures how fast the country is evolving. And nothing else measures how difficult high-speed evolution can be for citizens as well as for politicians.

After nearly tearing itself apart on extending marriage rights to gay and lesbian couples, after testing its own mettle and Washington's patience over softer soft drug laws, the Liberal government is at year-end tip-toeing through an emotional, philosophical and electoral minefield.

Martin's responses are instructive.

A practising Catholic committed to defending the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Martin is broadening the federal government's Supreme Court reference to include civil unions as a potential cure-all for a problem that pits human rights against traditional sensibilities. At the same time, a Prime Minister who never inhaled, but did eat hash brownies, is cautiously moving ahead with a slightly tougher iteration of Chrétien's marijuana law.

As much as that smacks of backsliding, it doesn't reverse the perception or the reality that this country is on a distinctly different -- many would say more modern and enlightened -- course, than its powerful, increasingly conservative neighbour. From same-sex marriage and a "who cares?" approach to smoking, if not growing or selling dope, Canada is developing its unique set of defining values.

Those values manifest themselves in many ways. They are evident in the way Canada stayed home from America's war with Iraq, its different approach to the environment and the Kyoto accord and in the easy, confident and uncontroversial way a gay man could contest the leadership of a national political party and, in losing, emerge a winner.

But if Canada and Canadians in 2003 seemed more willing and able to create a distinct continental space, they were also more open and vulnerable in a global village that now often seems more like a rough neighbourhood. With alarming regularity, this country is now being reminded that it doesn't stand alone, or immune, in a world crowded with virulent troubles.

Each in its own way, SARS, mad cow and a power outage that turned lights off from the eastern United States to Ontario proved that health, economic and even utility crises now cross borders as effortlessly as terrorists. More worrying still, each in its own way exposed the federal government and its emergency preparedness as embarrassingly unprepared.

It falls to Martin to clean up after the passing Chrétien elephant.

After making it clear leadership rivals and Chrétien loyalists Sheila Copps, John Manley and Allan Rock would have no place in his government, the new Prime Minister announced mid-month a new cabinet and a new administrative framework structured for new priorities. Close to the centre of all that newness is another attempt at creating a public security department -- Kim Campbell's effort was as short-lived as her stay in the Prime Minister's Office -- that under Deputy Prime Minister Anne McLellan is intended to reassure Canadians as well as Americans that this country is ready for anything.

If nothing else, McLellan's sprawling, omnibus department signals that Canada, still trying to shake the memory of Ahmed Ressam's scheme to slip explosives into the U.S., is serious about security. That dovetails neatly with one of Martin's three priorities: to improve and make more sophisticated Canada's relationship with Washington.

The priorities should now be familiar to Canadians who watched as Martin first remade the Liberal party in his own image and then, at the Air Canada Centre in November, formally seized the leadership. Along what proved to be a flat and easy campaign trail, Martin repeated a mantra that hasn't changed now that he is in power: His government will focus on social policy, an innovative economy and restoring Canada's place in the international community.

Martin's popularity suggests that message is being well-received by an electorate that has now given his party three consecutive majority mandates and will soon be asked to endorse a fourth. But a few straws blowing in the winter wind are cause for at least mild concern among Liberals grown accustomed to ruling unchallenged.

Driven more by fear of Martin than mutual affection, a political right divided for more than 15 years has buried the hatchet -- albeit in the Tory party -- and is struggling to unite around a new leader in time for a spring election. At the same time, Layton, even without a seat in Parliament, is giving the NDP some spark as well as the priceless gift of hope.

While still no great threat to Liberal dominance, that realignment offers an early warning to Liberals that virtual one-party rule is coming to an end. That alone would make 2003 memorable, but so much more crossed the country's path this year that its place in history is assured.

When that history is written, it will surely find that in these 12 months Canada moved beyond its familiar, comfortable past to embrace a future that may be uncertain but is certainly not unexciting. There will be more Scott Brisons, more policies that force Canadians to look deep into the mirror and there will be more political drama as the federal government moves from Chrétien's cruise-control to Martin's full engagement.

All those things are deeply rooted in a year when change was the norm.