Why Reject the SPP[2]Our Social Policy Values are Divergent by Janet M Eaton

Why Reject the SPP? Our Social Policy Values are Divergent [Part 2 ]

Canadian values have been comprehensively studied over the past decade and a half by polling companies like EKOS with its ‘citizen engagement’ techniques, Michael Adams of Environics with his popular interpretations of his research for Canadians and public policy makers, the Canadian Policy Research Network (CPRN) research which has undertaken public consultations and dialogue with Canadians; and Professor Neil Nevitte’s who over the years has participated in the World Values Surveys among others. .

It is instructive to examine the results of these surveys to determine if those core values that have shaped us historically continue to do so in spite of campaigns over the past two decades to increase acceptance of economic and trade policies at odds with our social values. It is also useful to note what these surveys show about whether our values are diverging from those in the US or converging as the business community often alleges. Finally examination of these surveys allow us a glimpse of how Canadians view deeper integration with the US and more specifically the SPP.

CPRN’s 1995 Exploring Canadian Values Synthesis Report by Suzanne Peters presented the results of her landmark study of what Canadians hold dear and how these values affect our ideas about social policy. Through a discussion process that took people far beyond the opinions they express to pollsters into a more nuanced, more responsible understanding of core values and social policy, and by showing resonance between her discussion group data and historical analysis of opinion polls, Suzanne Peters was able to show that our core values have remained fairly constant over time. She identified core values as they shape our perspective on social policy and noted that they clustered around the following themes:

· self- reliance

· compassion leading to collective responsibly

· investment in children as the future generation

· democracy

· freedom

· equality

· fiscal responsibility [1]

A YEAR LATER Michael Adams in his 1996 book on Values at the End of the Millennium found that Canadians were rejecting authority particularly of staid institutions like organized religion, and corporate monopolies while noting that others like government would likely be re-invented. The old monoliths, he said, were being replaced by new institutions, organizations and networks that enable people to achieve the fundamental values now energizing our civilization. He described a deeper evolution of social values that tell of a people assuming more control over their lives and who are being shaped by their own attitudes, and voluntary associations , networks and projects they initiate themselves. And he compared this trend to American values:

"Despite their mythological adherence to the ideal of personal freedom, Americans, in fact, harbour a far greater confidence in many institutions than do Canadians. In general, Americans have a greater faith in the family, the state (that is, "America"), religion and the market."

In essence Adam’s analysis, offered his view of Canada’s evolution from an industrial nation state to a postindustrial , postmodern community.[2]

That same year, John Trent, author of Values in Disarray, in a paper entitled “The Dream of Canada explored the nature of our common identity as Canadians which he defined as “a common set of values and a common approach to human relationships” (i.e. the way we treat each other). Trent reviewed various Canadian values surveys including a) Michael Adams reporting on his conclusions after 25 years of public polls, b) Suzanne Peters 1995 CPRN Exploring Canadian Values report referred to above, and c) Peter Newman’s The Canadian Revolution : From Deference to Defiance. He reported that Newman assured Canadians that their defiance and growing lack of deference was not related to those values Canadians really cared about – cooperation, tolerance, genuine gender equality and civility which sprang from their hearts but rather was directed towards their crumbling institutions:

The aspect of deference worth preserving was “the civility that usually accompanied it. While they were firmly set against the old style of leadership, Canadians were determined not to abandon the mutual respect that separated them from the Americans.

John Trent concluded from this varied body of evidence that the

i) Core Canadian values have evolved without being eviscerated

ii) Attitudes to mutuality and reconciliation are still open

iii) Canadians have and do appreciate diversity

iv) The ties which bind Canadians together may well be the tensions between them

v) The value differences between French and English are relatively small and not insurmountable

vi) Cooperation and tolerance are alive in people’s spirits and hence the Dream of Canada is still viable. [3]

In Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values, Michael Adams examined the differences between American and Canadian social values at the close of the twentieth century and challenged what he calls the existing "myth of inevitability" of Canada – US convergence and integration. He advanced the thesis that Canadians and Americans are actually becoming increasingly different from one another and that some very fundamental differences have developed between the two countries over the years. He wrote about the 'revolutionary tradition' in the U.S.A as opposed to the 'counter-revolutionary tradition' in Canada, the contrasting attitudes Americans and Canadians have towards the roles of government, and the quite different beliefs they have about the role of religion in their daily lives. [4,5]

Professor Neil Nevitte, well know for his years of work on the World Values Surveys and for illuminating the uniqueness of Canadian values vis a vis other countries in these surveys, showed that Canadians have surprisingly high levels of national pride in spite of the fact that Canadians typically imagine themselves to have low levels thereof. His work also revealed a decrease in parochial and a rise in cosmopolitan orientations, a propensity for egalitarian spousal relationships ( ranking highest in the world on this factor ) and he reported that Canadians are more prone to protest and more socially tolerant than Americans and resemble Europeans in social values and American in Economic values. [6]

Nevitte also demonstrated that the changing patterns of Canadian values are connected e.g. changing attitudes to authority in the family are connected to changing attitudes in the workplace and to politics and he said they all point to one theme- “the decline of deference’ wherein he defined deference as submission , courteous yielding to the opinion , wishes, or judgment of another . This, he says, represents a post – materialist shift which is not unique to Canada but part of a trend affecting Europe and North America in general.

People, as they experience prosperity, become less preoccupied with security and less preoccupied with making money. It’s part of the theory of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to become more preoccupied with quality of life issues.[7]

Ronald Inglehart and others working with the World Values Survey data have tracked this significant post–materialist shift in core values which has accompanied the structural transformation from industrialism to post-industrialism. These researchers found that post-materialists consistently have: a) significantly higher levels of formal education than materialist counterparts, b) exhibit higher levels of interest in politics as displayed by a wider range of political action strategies in which they are likely to engage, c) are more motivated to seek out information in order to make reasoned arguments, and d) have the greatest capacity to organize information in meaningful ways. They also noted that post-materialist orientations of Canadians increased significantly between 1981 and 1990 from 16% in 1981 to 25% in 1990 and results from the World Value Survey 2000 indicate that further increases have occurred. They conclude that Canadians are more post-materialist than ever before, are more post-materialist than their American counterparts and in this respect are more like the West European pattern; and that Canadians have significant cognitive and participatory capacity and place a higher value on more open government. [8]

Judith Maxwell, speaking at Couchiching, August 2003, drew upon data from CPRN’s Citizen’s Dialogue on Canada’s Future and polling evidence by Matthew Mendelson, Michael Adams and Frank Graves to demonstrate that Social Canada is coming of age, and in this case Canada and the US are diverging. She noted that some key social and political issues are crystallizing in a direction which is very different from the United States and that there is a new confidence about whowe are as Canadians and that we are distinctive.

The CPRN’s Citizens’ Dialogue on Canada’s Future found that while people are more comfortable participating in a market economy and value what business can bring to society, their conception is very different from that in the US. They still want to put the brakes on market forces in the public interest and they are beginning to clarify what is unique about Canada and the values and principles we wish to see in the actions of individuals, institutions and business. Maxwell offers four examples:

People and organizations must be accountable for their own actions;
We live in a shared community and therefore have a mutual responsibility to help each other in times of need;
Our core values are based on equality, justice, respect for diversity, accountability and transparency;
We want to be more involved in policy discussion before decisions are made.

Maxwell set out four big differences between Canadian values and American values as defined by Daniel Yankelovich, an American authority on public opinion and social trends, who worked with CPRN on the Citizen’s Dialogue:

¨ Government and the market. Canadians see the government as a partner, facilitator and guarantor of protections, while Americans see government as the cop and the watchdog.

¨ Individual and community. Canadians share a sense of community and they reject gross inequalities between people. Americans pursue a more assertive individualism which tolerates more inequality.

¨ Social morality. In Canada social morality is based on a common set of shared norms. American social morality is linked to legalism and religion.

¨ Attitudes toward other countries. Canadians have a deeper sense of obligation to other countries – they see their interdependence. In contrast, Americans use their power to be independent of world opinion.

Maxwell concluded that given the pace of change, our leaders will only be successful if they have engaged in sustained two-way communication with the Canadian people and she noted that good decision-making and social cohesion will demand a well-informed and fully engaged public as well as good leadership. She then reiterated the kind of Canada we want based on the findings of the Citizens Dialogue and asked rhetorically if there was room for that kind of Canada within a politically integrated North America. Her answer:

It seems inconceivable now Let’s just say that the fit does not look good today. [9]

Mary Pat MacKinnon, also of CPRN, in a presentation Bringing the Public into Public Discourse delivered at the CBC News World / Canada and the New American Empire Conference, 2004, shed light on the perspectives that citizens bring to the issue of closer economic integration with the United States.

The overarching issue for citizens in thinking about closer economic integration with the United States would be to ensure that the pursuit of market access and maximization of economic benefits does not sacrifice our capacity to make our own policy choices about the kind of Canada we want. And those policy choices, based on the values citizens articulated in our dialogues and elsewhere, would continue to look different than those made by Americans.

She concluded:

We should be thinking in terms of the concrete consequences and impacts on peoples’ everyday lives flowing from different policy options. We should also be explicit about the underlying values that permeate different policy choices (too often policy is presented as neutral or value free when in reality this is rarely the case). [10]

Neil Nevitte’s findings also resonate with the themes that MacKinnon and Maxwell pull from their CPRN data. In a seminar presentation World Values Survey: Canada-US Integration, March 2004, he indicated that Canadians are willing to consider closer economic ties with America, but are resistant to eliminating borders or having closer political ties. He drew upon results of the 2000 World Values Survey and what these data indicated about the possibility of Canada-US integration. [11]

Polling has also shown that Canadians reject specific policies related to deeper integration including those that further military integration, entry into US missile defence, export of bulk water, among others. A more recent survey by Environics conducted for the Council of Canadians in April of 2008 examined how Canadians felt about directions and initiatives being taken under the secretive NAFTA-Plus, Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (the SPP): 87% of Canadians surveyed agreed that Canada should maintain the ability to set its own independent environmental, health and safety standards even if this might reduce cross border trade opportunities with the United States. It also found that 89% of Canadians agree that Canada should establish an energy policy that provides reliable supplies of oil, gas and electricity at stable prices and that protects the environment even if this means placing restrictions on exports and foreign ownership of Canadian supplies. [12 ]

The results of these studies show that while there has been a shift away from deference towards authority and a trend toward post- modernist or post – materialist values, the core values which have shaped us historically continue to do so today. These surveys also reveal that our core values continue to shape our perspectives on social policies in spite of globalist and neo-conservative continental economic integration agreements and policies at odds with our social policy values. In other words as Murray Dobbin has noted: Canadians have not lost their values ; they have just lost faith that governments will do their job [13]

The studies also demonstrate that Canadian values and social policy values are widely divergent from those in the US contrary to comments made by the big business community that often confuse their own values with those of the general citizenry. Surveys specifically concerned with further integration with the US also indicate that Canadians do not want further economic integration if it usurps our political sovereignty and a very recent survey on the SPP specifically showed that Canadians overwhelmingly reject the deep integration policies of the SPP.

Bruce Campbell, as noted in Part 1, warned Canadians about going down the deep integration road with Uncle Sam. It appears that Canadians have heeded that warning, are rejecting the deep integration ‘supercorridor’ road, and true to our founding myth are opting for the ‘road less traveled.’

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence

Two roads diverged in a wood

And I took the one less traveled by

And that has made all the difference.

- Robert Frost

REFERENCES:

[1] Suzanne Peters. Exploring Canadian Values - A Synthesis Report . CPRN 1995 http://www.cprn.com/en/doc.cfm?doc=149

[2] Michael Adams. Sex in the Snow: Canadian Values at the Millennium. Toronto : Viking, 1997 .

[3] John Trent. The Dream of Canada. http://www.uni.ca/livreouvert/trent_e.html)

[4] Michael Adams. "Fire and Ice : The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values." Toronto: Penguin 2003

[5] W.S. Neidhardt. Review of Michael Adams. 2003. Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values. Canadian Social Studies Volume 39 Number 2, Winter 2005. http://www.quasar.ualberta.ca/css/Css_39_2/BRNeidhardt_fire_ice.htm

[6] Neil Nevitte. The Decline of Deference: Canadian Value Change in Cross National Perspective. 1996

[7] CBC Interview May 2004 on Nevitte’s World Values Survey

[8] Access to Information Review Task Force Report 2 – Citizen’s Values, Information and Democratic Life. March 2001 http//www.atirf0geai.gc.ca/paper-citizne-e.html; Ronald Inglehart 1990. Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society. NJ: Princeton University Press; Neil Nevitte. 2000. Value Change and Reorientations in Citizen – State Relations. Canadian Public Policy 26: S73-94 )

[9] Judith Maxwell. "What do Canadians Want in North America: Coming of Age in Canada." Couchiching Summer Conference, August, 2003.

http://www.cprn.com/en/doc.cfm?doc=386

[10] Mary Pat MacKinnon. "Bringing the Public into Public Discourse by Canada and the New American Empire". CBC News World / Canada and the New American Empire Conference . August 2004

http://www.globalcentres.org/can-us/economic_macKinnon.pdf

[11] Neil Nevitte. Institute on Governance: An Insurmountable Opportunity Roundtable “The World Values Survey: Canada-US Integration” Notes on a Seminar Presentation by Dr. Neil Nevitte March 14, 20021 http://www.iog.ca/publications/Nevitte_Summary.pdf ]

[12] "Not Counting Canadians: The Security and Prosperity Partnership and public opinion."

http://www.canadians.org/integratethis/backgrounders/notcounting/index.html

[13] Murray Dobbin. Paul Martin CEO of Canada? Toronto: James Lorimer & Co. Ltd. 2003

[14] Robert Frost "Road less Travelled " http://www.geocities.com/Paris/LeftBank/2940/frost8.html

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