Bob Rae
Canadian politician.
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As I grow older, I have had to discard some ideas and policies because they no longer make sense. This strikes me as entirely healthy. I would invite others to do the same.
We do not yet have a politics that is equal to the economics around us.
Politics is about the persuasion required to move people to judgement.
We spend the vast bulk of money in the health, welfare, and education systems in the later years of life. Yet it is in the earliest years that life chances are moulded and set.
Constitutions do not emerge perfectly formed from the brain of the philosopher king, as Mr. Trudeau himself discovered in 1980 and 1981. They are always messy processes that are easier to knock down or tear apart than they are to construct.
Self-interest is a necessary but hardly a sufficient basis for a decent society.
The major cuts in federal and provincial transfers to social service agencies, health care, education, and social housing over the past several years have not bee matched by an explosion in private giving. Nor will they ever be.
Like sailors, we cannot change the weather or the direction of the wind. But we change the direction of our sails.
If the rising tide fails to lift all boats, resentments will increase.
The premise of neo-conservatives is that markets left to their own devices will produce the best possible result, and that political interference is not required. This defies the human reality that people are not commodities, and simply refuse to behave as if they were.
To suggest that the global market-place of the twenty first century there will be no role for the state and the public sector is clearly nonsense.
The idea of politics is in need of defence.
Change is the cliché of our time. It also happens to be the prevailing truth.
History has only ended for those caught inside the Marxist hothouse. For the rest of us the argument is just getting interesting.
Governments steer better than they row.
" many on the right confuse the "is" of globalization with the "ought" of simply accepting all its effects. They preach a political quietism that is really just a cloak for greed.
The emergence of the market model in Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Asia is no accident. It is not the product of a corporate conspiracy. It is the consequence of hard lessons learned from cold experience.
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