One Small Trick To Save A Nation

If you want to build a country to stand the test of time, invest in the welfare state.

Priceless. Photo by Matthew Waring on Unsplash

We’ve reached a point in global history during which it feels like just about anything might happen, and Canada isn’t exempt. For a few recent decades, it seemed like we might be approaching a convergence, and a stable one at that. If we were, we got knocked off course. But we probably weren’t. The supposed convergence was likely illusory, a fever dream. The death of history, the nation state, and conflict were greatly exaggerated. Now they’re back. Boy, oh boy, are they ever back.

One who is theologically inclined might wish to say I told you so. A long time ago, First Corinthians warned us that “everything is permissible.” That was less permission than warning. Nearly two thousand years after that, Fyodor Dostoevsky shared a similar concern by way of the Brothers Karamazov with the worry that perhaps “Without God and immortal life, all things are permitted then,” an anxiousness shared by G.K. Chesterton and those who looked around and saw us becoming unmoored.

You don’t need a god or a belief that it takes a deity to ground oneself or one’s society to worry that something has gone awry. Today, we’re speed running a course to map the limits of what indeed counts as “everything” and we’re doing it without sufficient supports to help us through the worst of what we might induce. Like the sense that we’ve entered a dodgy alley in our collective journey, it shouldn’t take a deity of the omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent variety to guide or restrain us. I doubt that any reasonable reading of history would offer up the eras of any sacred text as a necessarily and inherently gentler and more stable time. But at some point in the story of humankind, you start to expect that we’d come to know better.

Without laying down odds, it’s fair to say that we could lose democracy during the lifetime of a child born today. We might find borders redrawn or erased without the blessing of those who dwell within then. We may witness the rise of an automated society owned by oligarchs that drives working populations to the brink, replaced by machines at just enough of a rate to discipline labour into powerlessness. If that sounds ominous, there’s always a chance climate catastrophe will shatter societies and remake the world for the worse. None of these risks are mutually exclusive, and, indeed, any of them might intersect with and exacerbate any other. It’s all permissible.

In Canada, I worry about our future. The nationalist fervour of them moment has rallied the country, but to what ultimate end is to be determined. This week, we hit the customary NATO spending goal of 2% of gross domestic product on defence. One wonders if that is in service of maintaining the old order led by the United States or preparing for its demise. The Liberal government, up in the polls, has the support of a plurality of electors, nearing a majority, who want Ottawa to sort it all out and who are willing to give the government the benefit of the doubt, at least for now. The Mark Carney ministry is looking around for new trade and security partners, removing some eggs from that one big basket and distributing them as best as it can. Many observers are watching this unfold and wondering why we didn’t do all of this sooner. Some muse about the country going nuclear — and they’re not referring to energy production.

Lost in the flag-waving and wide berth given to the government is the one small trick that builds social trust and encourages national buy-in while supporting Canadians in their day-to-day lives: the welfare state. Poll the country and you’ll find Medicare ranks towards the top of what Canadians value from this joint, believing at once that it brings us together as a nation and sets us apart as a country. For all the grumbling we see about spending, people tend to like knowing someone’s in their corner when push comes to shove, as it always does.

Last fall, I argued in the Globe and Mail that the new Liberal government’s first budget was a chance to affirm a commitment to social welfare and define what Canada was to be about. The welfare state didn’t feature prominently in plans at the time as defence spending and cuts to the public service, among other targets, took precedence. But in the long term, the thing that will tie us together isn’t cuts, but spending on ourselves and one another, on what we traditionally and narrowly define as medical care alongside dental care, pharmacare, disability supports, unemployment benefits, and more.

These services define and unite us because within them we find a there and a why. Spending on the welfare state is spending on a promise to take care of one another, the sort of thing many Canadians believe a country exists for in the first place. As we face democratic decline, geopolitical instability, climate crisis, and affordability struggles, our inclination and that of our government ought to be to huddle closer together and watch each other’s backs. If we wish to protect and preserve Canada, our first task ought to be establishing and protecting a shared purpose and sense of belonging, which is to say, we ought to unify.

You can unify in different ways, including mobilizing against a shared enemy — a classic if there ever was one — but the virtue of uniting by way of a robust welfare state is people tend to be happier, healthier, and better off when you choose to support them with the material resources they require to live and participate in society.

To put it in corporate terms, we ought to invest in ourselves. Investments are good because done correctly they yield a return. Set aside the fact that helping one another out is the right thing to do and you still find that structural aid and assistance at scale builds a nation and supports all the other things we might wish to accomplish, including making it through the work day, navigating fallow or crisis periods, supporting a family, or stepping up to fight for the country should such a necessity arise.

The best way to behave is to do the right thing for the right reason; the second best way is to do the right thing for the wrong reason. Right now, we ought to be satisfied with either. And the right thing is to go all-in on a renewal of the Canadian welfare state.