Posted 21th August 2001

World's Apart by Gordon Barthos
Toronto Star (Photo shows Pierre Pettigrew)

APierre Pettigrew can muster a kind word even for his harshest critics. Most of the anti-globalization activists who created such a ruckus at the recent Group of Eight summit in Genoa "have valid points," Canada's international trade minister told the Couchiching Institute's summer think-tank this past week. "They have legitimate concerns and pertinent questions" about the cost/benefits of globalization, the ever-freer and speedier exchange of ideas, information, skilled workers, capital, goods and services that defines our era.

Pettigrew respects political activists who can make themselves heard across the anarchists' chants, the police barricades and the tear gas. But the global skeptics are on the wrong side of history, he believes. They oppose a process that has boosted Canada's growth and prosperity. And he doesn't shrink from saying so. Most activists seek in vain to "turn back the clock," Pettigrew told the seminar. Indeed, many seem perversely driven by nostalgia for "the epic class struggles of the past, the welfare state of the 1970s ... in a sense, for an idealized world that never existed." They lack coherence, and practicality, he suggested. By forcing politicians like Jean Chr*tien to defensively scale down summits and hold them in remote places, they hinder the very people who are trying to tame globalization's wilder side. Certainly, that's the politicians' mantra, neatly expressed.

But the politicians are rattled by this fast-growing challenge, and their reaction shows it. Tempered though Pettigrew's remarks were, they did a disservice to many if not most of the 100,000 hardy souls who descended on Genoa last month. Most wanted to get some publicity for progressive, alternative agendas, not to physically disrupt the meeting. Nor can they be written off as Luddites, or hopeless dreamers. Prominent Canadian activists, for example, want Ottawa to think twice before surrendering yet more political sovereignty to corporate interests, for marginally faster growth. Can that be construed as seeking to turn back the clock?

Is it retrograde to demand that Ottawa preserve some capacity to craft labour, social and environmental policies that reflect Canadian values and needs? Does globalization mean we must consign 3 million Canadians to live in fear of hunger, as yesterday's Star reported? To accept Ontario's new "voluntary" 60-hour workweek? Ever smoggier air? Is it "class struggle" to maintain that policy-makers could do more to ease child poverty or the corrosive rich/poor gap? Is it misplaced nostalgia for some idealized "welfare state" to favour investing in publicly funded income programs, social housing, universal medicare and education in preference to tax breaks? Is it intellectually incoherent to demand more effective measures against planetary warming, air and water pollution and unsafe foods? Is it impractical to dismantle barriers to developing countries' exports? To boost aid? To write off debt?

These are not the wacko demands of a lunatic fringe. Millions of Canadian churchgoers, social activists, trade unionists, environmentalists, community workers and others endorse them. They may be idealistic. They unquestionably are costly. Some conflict with others. But they are front and centre on the public agenda today, in part because protests beginning in Seattle in 1999 have put them there. Indeed, Pettigrew rightly pointed out that Ottawa is starting to act on some of these fronts.

If the activists continue to press their case at the summits, it is because they want to keep up the pressure. This may be inconvenient, even tiresome, for complacent politicians' including some of Chretien's Liberals and most of Mike Harris' Tories' who are more eager to trim taxes and shrink government in the name of globalization, to shed troublesome files and to download responsibilities, than they are to shoulder new challenges. But as Pettigrew noted at Couchiching, no debate should be off-limits. "In this globalizing world we must have confidence, we must be flexible, inquisitive and open to new ideas, no matter where they come from or who suggests them," he said.

So let's hear no more about young Canadian activists being lost in woolly pipe dreams for a welfare state that never existed. They are talking about their hopes and fears for tomorrow. This country hands out awards from time to time. The Order of Canada is one. Its motto: Desiderantes meliorem patriam, from the old Latin Bible. It can be translated They seek a better country. That's what the big noise is all about. People seeking a better country, and world. We'll hear more of those "valid points" that Pettigrew talked about when we host the G-8 summit in Kananaskis, Alberta, next year. Let's hope our easily rattled politicians are listening. * Gordon Barthos writes The Star's editorials on foreign affairs..

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