Quebec protesters have reminded us how much we’ve lowered our expectations

Dear Quebec re-sisters and brothers: What an awesomely inventive laboratory of political resistance you have built. Thanks for taking the struggle against inequality and austerity to a new level and helping the rest of us see what’s really going on.

Of course, looking back, La Belle Province has pointed the way for a good long time, including its Orange Crush rebellion that vaulted the NDP into official opposition.

And now it has outdone itself.

The Casseroles have taken their demand for accessible education and against tyranny (aka Law 78) to the whole world. They have won a laurel wreath from the global “spring” of people’s movements and affirmed the continued ability of these uprisings to confound the powers that be.

We’ve seen how once this public-spirited genie gets out of the bottle, heads do roll.

For his own sake, I hope Jean Charest is preparing for career change. But the ambition of this upsurge goes far beyond that goal. Lucky for us in the ROC (rest of Canada), and particularly here in Ontario, where we share economic woes. We have a lot to gain from courting the powerful spirit that has sustained this amazing outpouring, because we have been losing ground for decades.

Let’s admit the obvious. In progressive matters, we are a little slower than our frères et soeurs. And there are reasons for this even beyond culture and history.

We have neo-liberal psychological baggage. We have suffered from Quebec envy for many years. Cheap tuition, cheap daycare – there’s a list. “We gave it up, so what’s their problem?” Envy messes with our heads and clouds our thinking. It makes us small and stupid and easy to control. It took months of striking and pots a-clanging to clear the bullshit. But thanks to Quebecers’ ability to sustain the action, we got the time we needed to untangle our own disordered thoughts.

Of course, Quebec’s lower tuition fees are not what’s wrong with the education picture in Canada. The debt burden our post-secondary system imposes on students here in Ontario is the problem, and the Quebec example is actually the solution.

If Canada as a whole has grown in affluence over the last three decades, which it has, why is our country less able to afford to educate its young?

And what really makes no sense is the way wealth creation is increasingly showered exclusively on the very, very rich. Come on. That’s a travesty for 99.9 per cent of us.

The numbers tell a very clear story. Quebec students and friends are not suffering from a psychology of over-entitlement. Rather, the passivity of the rest of us is reflecting some weird self-esteem deficit. Quebec’s pot-bangers are sending Canada a loud message to awaken to our own self-worth and confidence in the future.

These times are calling us to abandon our small-minded, narrow selves. This uprising is our opportunity to nourish new dreams for the future with wishes grand enough to serve our true hearts’ desires and those of generations to come.

It’s time to pick up our pots and create some new rhyme and reason in this land of ours.

Finally, it’s crystal clear. When it comes to public spending, it’s the public, not the spending, the Harper government is really out to control.

The budget that came down last week was a defining moment, though not the way anyone expected. Naturally, Conservative Canada widely assumed the new majority would be all about government austerity. That was a misconception.

There will be government jobs shed, of course, but the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and its ilk were quite disappointed, which was the best thing about this otherwise truly disturbing budget. Economists internationally are in near-consensus that drastically cutting government spending is the fast way to halt economic growth.

That old “c” approach that Flaherty and his friends unleashed on Ontario during the Harris days got ditched because the facts just don’t support the acts. And for that reason, slashing wouldn’t sell well across the pond in Davos, where the world’s global corporate and political elite go to confer on the future of humanity.

It was no accident that Harper upstaged the budget by announcing his intention to raise the age for Old Age Security benefits from 65 to 67 over there first, in January, instead of here. It’s all about priorities. Think how much Conservative political capital Harper was willing to spend to follow through on that “Davos promise” in this budget.

But it’s worth it to Harper, because rolling back our population’s sense of entitlement to government support in our older years gets gold stars from international finance and its credit rating agencies. This is the brand of Canada Harper is busy creating and selling to the world. But where does that leave those of us who live outside Alberta when it comes to Canada’s economic and social future?

That was no federal budget last week. It was a Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms for Global Capital. I’m not just trash-talking. Flaherty was unapologetic about the fact that it was an open-arms embrace for the highly globalized resource sector and its deal brokers to come on in and get busy as fast as possible. He repeatedly invoked his cause: the $500 billion in investment over the next decade waiting impatiently to drill and deploy our natural landscapes.

Flaherty couldn’t have made it any clearer. Nothing and no one is getting in the way of the bulldozers on his watch. Least of all the people. That’s why so many of the budget cuts are aimed at institutions that  research or foster citizen rights and information. Nothing will be allowed to impede Big Oil and mining.

Is the idea to become more like autocratic resource-rich Russia so we don’t turn off Chinese-state power investors? History offers an amusing irony here, but not in a good way.

In Harper’s dream Canada, regulatory hurdles to big capital investment get cleared away lickety-split. Charities are land-mined by new regulations to keep environmentally minded and other socially progressive donors away. So our once vibrant civil society that empowered citizens to evaluate the costs as well as the benefits of Harper’s resource rush is starved and withers away under unprecedented government siege.

The Conservative plan calls for a docile public – especially the distracted youth demographic that is facing all the environmental, health and safety risks while reaping few of the rewards – that expects and asks little or nothing from government.

Hey, government spending is great! You can use it for oil and mining company incentives, venture capital funds and subsidizing private firms with the work of our best and brightest scientists. International development money can be used to wrangle up our finest overseas aid workers and force them to partner with mining companies to get funded. There’s a happy face for the costly prison-expansionist crime bill, too, while penny-ante savings are achieved by slicing and dicing the CBC budget and axing the National Council on the Environment and the Economy, and the National Welfare Council.

Really?

What connects all the dots in this budget is not conservatism. It’s the other two c-words that have been the hallmarks of Harper’s prime ministership from the beginning. “Command” and “control.” Now it is we the people who must fall into line.

It’s clear what’s going on. The only question is, what are we going to do about it?

HARPER’S RECIPE FOR CONTROL

1. Handcuff the critics

Crack down on charities’ political action.

2. Stamp out eco controls

Limit environmental reviews.

3. Free the deniers

Ditch the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy.

4. End liberal claptrap

Cut the CBC by $115 mil over three years

5. Delegitimize sharing

Chop 7 per cent from the foreign aid budget