Chapters bookstores display the motto: The World Needs More Canada. It’s a clever marketing slogan, appealing to our patriotism. It makes Canadians feel good about their literature and themselves. It reflects a nation- al conceit ”” that as Canadians we are welcomed, respected and needed abroad, the inference being that the world would be a better place if Canadians were more present in it. Even Prime Minister Paul Martin has appropriated the slogan.

The slogan, however, is precisely backwards. The world may or may not need more Canada, but Canada needs more of the world. A lot more of it.

Canadians’ future material well-being in a country of only 31 million people depends vitally and urgently on establishing, by all means and through all available institu- tions, the reality ”” not just the reputation, but the reality ”” of being the most internationally connected country on the planet. In this sense, Canada needs more of the world.  It can only prosper by going global in its thinking and institutions, central to which are government policies to pro- mote human capital.

Canada cannot become the most powerful country in the world, militarily or politically. That would be absurd. Canada need not even become the world’s richest country, in part because the definition of material riches can be so deceiving. Rather, we should have it within our means ”” and we must have it within our policies ”” to connect this country to the world as no other country is connected, because apart from natural resources, only by becoming global in our thinking and actions, and recognizing that in the global world countries with the best-equipped work- forces will succeed, will our best potential competitive advantage lie. In a country often searching for a national vision, there is one that is compelling and clear, waiting for political expression.

We have some of the tools for this success; we lack others. We have as domestic official languages two of the world’s global languages. We have a multicultural society that connects us to many parts of the world. We already have a trade-dependent economy. We have role models of Canadians-as- international-leaders, and we have Canadians at home who understand the prerequisites of making Canada global. We enjoy a positive, if some- what blurry, international reputation, at a time when, sadly for them, our American friends’ standing in world opinion has precipitously declined.

And we have something else. We spent the better part of two decades struggling to line up social and economic policy. When they were not properly aligned, we ran huge deficits that distended public finance and robbed us of our ability to make strate- gic public investments because so much government revenue was being necessarily and sadly shovelled into debt-repayment. Now, however, Canada is the only leading industrial country with a solid balance sheet. So, just as correctly aligning social and economic policy was the great national achievement of the last decade, align- ing domestic policies and institutions for tomorrow’s global reality is the chal- lenge for this and succeeding decades.

”œGlobal reality” means this. We cannot solve environmental issues alone. Our climate, air, oceans and some of our rivers all depend on inter- national co-operation. We cannot com- pete economically if we do not have large Canadian-based and -owned companies, because the fate of a branch-plant company is to remain an appendage, not a leader, in an interna- tional economy. We cannot meet the demands of China, India, Mexico and other countries that want a better life for their people, and whose national ambitions will not disappear, by lowering our wages but rather by improving our skills. We cannot innovate, do cut- ting-edge research, make discoveries and commercialize them unless we retain and attract great brains here and put them in contact with the best brains overseas.

We cannot, in other words, retreat into protectionism, build firewalls or continue with comfortable, old ways of doing things, or else ours will be a gentle mediocrity in a world that does not ”œneed” Canada, no matter what a smug national self-congratulation might suggest.

This new national agenda is not a dog-eat-dog one, survival of the fittest, because the projection of our values ”” what Abraham Lincoln called the ”œbetter angels of our nature” ”” is not inconsistent with the pursuit of our interests. More and better-targeted foreign aid can make for a more stable world, which is in our interest and consistent with our values. Investments at home in sustainable development can make us over time more competitive and assist the global environment. Investments at home in access to learning and skills develop- ment ”” and facilitating the domestic accreditation of foreign credentials ”” is not only consistent with our values, it serves our interests too.

No political party, federal or provincial, grasps this challenge. They are too busy, heads-down, scrabbling for political advantage which means finding out through polls what the people are deemed to want today and trying to deliver it with the taxpayers’ own money, or looking for political gain in yesterday’s news such as the sponsorship scandal. Every day you read another story about political exchanges over the sponsorship scan- dal, ask yourself this question: What good did that exchange do in defining where Canada needs to go in this cen- tury? The same can be said for much of what passes for political debate in Ottawa, and many of the provinces.

It takes leadership of a rare kind to raise sights beyond the travails of today and frame a vision of the future that will be ridiculed by many, sloughed off as irrelevant by others, dismissed as twaddle by still others, and derided for not dealing with the potholes of today. Needless to say, that kind of leadership is nowhere to be found. Except that anyone who travels across Canada, and marries what is heard here with what is happening in the world, knows that there is a con- stituency for this kind of national vision, especially among the young, and that a political leader who articu- lated these kinds of ideas would, in due course, find a receptive audience.

It can be said with considerable certainty that our competitive advan- tage and a better future do not lie in federal-provincial negotiations. They do not lie in plowing tens of billions of additional dollars into a health-care system that is extremely difficult to change, at the expense ”” and it is at the expense ”” of other important pri- orities. Indeed, the vast sums poured into the inexhaustible maw of the sec- ularly sacred health-care system impedes preparing this country for success, because that maw sucks money from all other areas of public spending. No politician has had the political courage to explain this self- evident truth to Canadians, so fearful is the political class of the anticipated public wrath.

Nor does success lie in discussions of asymmetrical federalism. It does not lie, for Ottawa, in intruding into provincial areas of jurisdiction, where it has little expertise, making demands that provinces behave in cer- tain ways in grateful recognition of the federal cash. It does not lie, in other words, in the kind of poll-driven agen- da of the Martin government whose interventions in areas of provincial jurisdiction are producing all these useless and counter-productive feder- al-provincial debates; nor in the knee- jerk, disappointing reactions of the Conservative opposition. And it cer- tainly doesn’t lie with the Bloc Québécois that wants to break up Canada and create two smaller, more self-absorbed states.

Rather, this internationalist vision lies largely within federal jurisdiction, is appropriate for a national govern- ment that can speak for all of Canada and is therefore uniquely capable of rallying the disparate parts of Canada into a new national project. All discus- sions of a ”œfiscal imbalance,” inspired by provincial governments that have more than adequate taxing power if they choose to use it, should cease were Ottawa to pursue an internation- alist agenda, because that agenda requires real investments of new feder- al money for research, training, post- secondary education, foreign policy, climate change.

This internationalist project lies in understanding the way the world is rushing in upon us; how our indus- tries and economy, our air and water, our forests and fields, our universities and colleges, our governments, our sci- entific research and cultural producers ”” how almost every aspect of our daily lives and our future ”” is increasingly tied to the pressures, drives, treaties, negotiations and sheer weight of the world upon us. And either we let that weight shape us ”” and some of it will regardless what we do as a country of a mere 31 million ”” or we can shape ourselves to prepare for it and to turn at least some of it to our advantage.

Connectedness means re-thinking domestic arrangements, asking our- selves individually and collectively: How will this decision today allow us to thrive in a competitive global world of tomorrow, and to influence, one hopes for the better, not just the mate- rial well-being of ourselves and the world, but the justice, fairness, sustain- ability and equity of that world, because connectedness means not just the enhancement of our interests but the projection of our values.

And we have an unexpected opportunity to excel in a great nation- al effort, even though ”” or should per- haps because ”” we live next to the United States. The US is the world’s most powerful and affluent country; it is also, alas for it, now one of the world’s least-admired countries. Evidence from a variety of worldwide surveys and the reaction of foreign governments underscores the point that the Bush administration has made the US extremely unpopular all around the world, except in a few places. The recent US election put in power, in the White House and Congress, leaders from inland and inward-looking parts of the United States, whose moral val- ues, patriotic truculence, unilateralist instincts and domestic policy prefer- ences are estranging their country from the world.

There is no better time for Canada to go international than while the US goes parochial. While respecting and nurturing the economic space we share with the United States, a space upon which our livelihood depends, we should become more international in our gov- ernment policies and domestic arrangements, while they revel in their own triumphal excep- tionalism. Our competitive advantage does not lie in becoming more American, if by American these days we mean becoming more like Kansas or Dallas, but rather by becoming more Canadian, if by that we mean more internationally con- nected, better-trained, more outward and therefore more confident in ourselves, without falling victim to the Canadian trap of moral superiority.

Moreover, whereas Canada lined up properly its social and economic policies and so stabilized its finances, the US has gone in the opposite  direction, amassing huge federal and state deficits. Attention has been neces- sarily focused on the country’s $430-bil- lion federal deficit, but dozens of states too are facing large deficits that they are constitutionally obligated to eliminate. States have run out of tricks ”” using tobacco settlement money, issuing new bonds, rolling over debt. Because there is such aversion in so many places in the US to paying more taxes, these states are going to have to cut spending, and that means cutting ”” it is already happening ”” for universities, schools and health- care. While they contract, therefore, we should be expanding, as long as we do so in ways that increase our capacity to compete globally. Our high school stu- dents are already bettering theirs in international tests. US health-care spending is rising even faster than ours, incredible as that might seem. Our Canada Pension Plan is fully vested; their Social Security is not. Our govern- ment debt is declining, theirs is rising. In other words, our fundamentals are sound; theirs are not. This gives us an opportunity ”” if we use it wisely.

We do lack some of the tools need- ed to succeed in connecting Canada to the world, and competing successfully in it. One of these weaknesses is human skills development. By some accounts, a quarter of our high school students don’t graduate, and perhaps another quarter graduate but go no further. Studies of all kinds show that three-quarters of all new jobs depend on some form of higher education and that the job market for those with lim- ited education or skills is bleak.

Our private sector doesn’t do a very good job promoting or financing skills development and training. The latest Conference Board report under- scored this fact, but many other reports have also done so. The smaller the firm, of course, the smaller the com- mitment to training; but even many large companies fail to deliver much training, which is why Quebec got frus- trated and imposed a 1 percent payroll tax for training. Our country’s produc- tivity depends, in part, on that kind of training, because higher-value skills mean an improved ability to compete, and compete we must, better than before, in this intercon- nected world.

Everyone these days is transfixed by China and its low wages. How can we compete with that? We can’t. But what is more important for us to understand is how the Chinese are churning out thousands of engineers, scientists, techni- cians, mathematicians and other highly educated individ- uals as part of their great national awakening. So before we acquiesce in the usual, insis- tent demands from big busi- ness and their newspaper acolytes for lower taxes, we might ask of them: Why is the Canadian private sector, by world standards, so poor at human capital development? Fix that problem first; then we’ll discuss tax cuts.

The high degree of foreign ownership of key sectors of the Canadian economy militates against investments in skills, training and human resource development. Branch plants breed branch-plant mentalities. Head offices are where the very best jobs usually reside in companies. We just don’t have enough world-class compa- nies headquartered here in Canada. About half of Alberta’s energy-industry is foreign owned. In British Columbia, the biggest forestry company and the big energy company, Duke Energy (for- merly Westcoast Transmission), are for- eign-owned. Noranda and Stelco might be sold to foreign interests. We can’t and shouldn’t bring back the days of the Foreign Investment Review Agency and build walls around Canada, but govern- ment policy has got to be focused on what it takes to build and sustain world- size Canadian companies as part of this international agenda. And that agenda, in turn, might involve allowing compa- nies we already might think too large to get bigger ”” such as banks.

There are two other human skills questions of great national importance. The first is the emerging evidence of an immigrant underclass. The second is aboriginal under-achievement.

Multiculturalism is an advantage in Canada’s quest for global connectedness. Multiculturalism stems from immigra- tion. Four different studies ”” by the Immigration Department, Statistics Canada, the Canadian Labour and Business Centre, and the C.D. Howe Institute ”” have pointed to an emerging immigrant underclass. The low-income rate for recent immigrants that was 23 percent in 1980 is now 35 percent. In Canada’s cities, general incomes are not becoming more unequal ”” unless you factor in these low-income immigrants.

Rather than Ottawa drilling a spigot into its own revenues and letting them flow to the municipalities ”” a pol- icy that defies every elementary notion of accountability ”” Ottawa should spend that kind of money on the inte- gration, language training and skills development of immigrants, whose numbers Ottawa keeps pushing up and whose problems Ottawa keeps pushing down on municipalities, school boards, welfare agencies, settlement houses.

Canadian aboriginals have made strides in the last generation. The number with college or university degrees has increased sharply. Many are now employed in natural resource industries. We need a Marshall Plan for educating and training aboriginals for jobs in the modern economy, because you can wax nostalgic for traditional ways, you can even write a multi-vol- ume royal commission extolling these ways, but on-reserve employment prospects, no matter what form of self- government you dream up, are going to be thin to non-existent, except for public sector ones. Reservations are dead-end employment streets in most cases, even though the entire thrust of aboriginal policy for three decades has not acknowledged this brutal reality and has wandered around in search of treaties and land claims agreements and court cases affirming rights, while aboriginals have steadily drifted to urban areas.

Finally, there is post-secondary edu- cation ”” colleges and universities ”” whose role is critical for interna- tionalizing Canada and preparing for the future.

Universities have been underfunded in Canada for at least a genera- tion. This under-funding can be demonstrated in myriad ways. Here are only three. Between 1980 and 2002, government investments in public, four-year universities in the US rose 25 percent in real terms; in Canada, again in real terms, government investments in universities declined by 20 percent. From the mid-1980s to 2003, health- care as a share of total provincial spending rose from 30 percent to 37 percent, and in some provinces to more than 40 percent. During that same period, post-secondary educa- tion’s share of total provincial spend- ing declined from 7.5 percent to 6 percent. Twenty years ago, therefore, the ratio of health-care to post-second- ary education spending was about 4 to 1.Itisnow6to1.Ifweputabillion dollars into hiring more professors to increase teaching and access at post- secondary institutions, we would be doing more for our future than spend- ing another billion dollars on health care. Indeed, it is curious that we talk about a shortage of doctors, but not of a shortage of professors. We lament waiting lists but not huge classes. We refuse user fees for seeing a doctor, as in Sweden and other countries; we accept ever-higher fees for students seeing the inside of a university classroom. We’ve got our priorities wrong if we want to prepare ourselves for the future ”” an international and learning future.

Universities are among society’s incubators of ideas, innovations and notions of social responsibility. If Canada is to pursue the path of becom- ing the most globally connected coun- try on earth, as it must, then these incubators, the universities, must be in the forefront of this connectedness. And there are many ways in which this  can be done, and even measured.

For example, Statistics Canada reported at the end of July that the number of foreign students enrolled in Canadian universities continues to rise. The news sounded better than the real- ity. Although the raw number edged up to 52,000, the proportion of foreign students remained relatively low, at just under 6 percent of the total. Relative to our total student body, nationally speaking, our universities’ student population is not more inter- national than six or seven years ago, although in absolute terms the number of foreign students has increased.

But this is just one way of measur- ing internationalization. There is the curriculum. Is it as globally-minded as students will need it to be? Are we designing programs that will allow our students to live and work outside the country during their academic years? Are these institutions sufficiently tied to other universities?

Global success will depend, therefore, on brains, inter-connectedness and an outward approach to the world. Every policy, at home and abroad, should be measured by the degree to which it moves Canada toward that success. We need national leaders to articulate that vision, and policies that flow from the vision to make it happen. Who will be the first to understand the urgency and frame the vision? Whoever does will be the domi- nant politician of the next decade.

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