Calgary Herald Column

Today, my musings about the benefits of a liberal arts education and its connection to our current economic crisis was published in the Calgary Herald. Its conclusion?

Hopefully, enough people reading this will begin to understand that a liberal arts education and philosophers, theologians and moral scholars are not superfluous to economies and markets. Quite the contrary: they are vital to it.

Appropriately, after spending most of the day meeting and travelling, I am now in Hamilton for Redeemer University Board of Governors meetings tomorrow and Saturday.

Headlines that Require more than Blogbites

Three articles that caught my eye this morning, all of which are thought-provoking but none of which straightforward enough that I am able to put together a coherent and thoughtful response in the 30 minutes I allow myself to put together a morning blog-bite….

Niall Ferguson is interviewed in the Globe and suggests that the “Great Recession” may provoke violent political conflict. I would be remiss to note that the concerns he raises about sovereign wealth funds buying our troubled assets was a central feature of Cardus’ Senior Fellow Jonathan Wellum’s talk in Calgary and Toronto last May. However, how the combination of demographics (which will hit parts of Asia even harder than North America), ownership, and foreign policy will effect economic developments is something that I do not yet have a coherent opinion on.

Thierry Chervel in sightandsound.com (h/t aldaily) explores the European left’s reaction over the past twenty years, since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of Islamism. He notes how post-modernism prevented many in the West from recognizing what was at stake, starting with their failure to properly defend Salman Rushdie and the fatwa against him for the Satanic verses.

And then there is a book review on the Claremont Institutes website (again h/t aldaily) which suggests that we are going through a “green fatigue,” that the environmental movement like car alarms that go off incessantly, is being ignored, and like the population control movement of a previous era, the blind orthodoxy of environmental zealots is being overtaken by the rational workings of liberal democracy.

All of these pieces are thought-provoking and make valid points, even though there are aspects to these arguments which cause me pause, if not dissent. However, since blogging is a pastime for me – a 30 minute max writing workout as I prepare for my workday – I will leave those for another time and place.

PS – My next 48 hours will have limited web access as I am travelling the less than conveniently connected route from Calgary to South Bend, Indiana. That will be followed by Redeemer University Board responsibilities in Hamilton during the latter part of the week. In short, I may not be blogging all that much this week.

The Importance of the Church as an Institution

My weekend reading included catching up on various magazines. The December 2008 issue of Banner of Truth contains an article by Sinclair Ferguson entitled: "The Puritans: Can They Teach Us Anything Today?" In it (p 13) he makes some insightful comments regarding the place of the church as public institution.

"Fifty years ago, one individual's conversion made some sense to those who witnessed it -- even if they despised it. The community had some familiarity with the Book that taught how this conversion made sense. That is no longer the case. It is to some extent true today, if someone is converted, that he will hear the supposedly post-modern comment: 'I am glad you are finding happiness there; I find my happiness somewhere else.' The Puritans understood that when the church is really the church (the health of which is described in Acts 2:42-47), then it will make a lasting, evangelistic impresion on the world -- which may envy it but can never reproduce it.

We live in a deeply individualistic society. That is, sadly, all too often true of the evangelical world. Many have been over-burdened by being told they need to be 'personal witnesses' without being offered the context of a church family that supports and shares in evangelism with them. The Puritans had a vision of a whole congregation shining for Jesus Christ as a city set on a hill, a light that can never be hidden. When that is the fruit of the faithful preaching of the Word of God, then unbelieving men and women begin to look to this new Mount Zion and wish they could climb the hill that would bring them there."

Bob Rae on Foreign Affairs

I was in Hamilton yesterday and had the unexpected opportunity to join a colleague at the Canadian Club luncheon, where Bob Rae, Liberal Foreign Affairs Critic was given opportunity to wax eloquent on Canadian foreign affairs matters. The forum and title created the expectation for a serious speech. I sketched a few notes as I listened.

Rae outlined three objectives for Canadian foreign policy:
1. Promoting sustainable social justice;
2. Focus on most effective ways to prevent,reduce and resolve conflict;
3. Steady practical promotion of the rule of law and liberty in the world.

He suggested three reasons why foreign policy should matter to Canadians much more than it actually seems to.
1. We are a trading nation so our relations and ability to trade with othe countries affects our standard of living.
2. "We are in the world and the world is in us." As a multicultural country of immigrants, our citizens care about what happens elsewhere.
3. Our history is one of international involvement, from the wars in which made a disproportionate sacrafice to our legacy of peacekeeping. "Its in our DNA" Mr. Rae suggested, implying that Canadian leaders because they have figured out how to govern a country that has French and English roots, are somehow inherently wiser when it comes to foreign affairs issues than are leaders from other countries.

His prescription for change was also threefold:
1. "Its easier to get things done when we know what we are trying to do." He implied that we lack clear enough objectives for Canadian foreign policy. Deep poverty in the world is "the dry grass that fuels extremism" and (rather remarkably in my view) tried to argue that the challenges that Islam is presenting the world is due to the poverty and lack of opportunity in which so many young men of Islamic background grow up in.
2. The devotion of our trooops need to be matched by political and diplomatic efforts.
3. The economy really matters and it requires the "trust, faith and credit" that a restructuring and empowering of our international economic institutions (e.g. IMF / World Bank)can provide.

His closing appeal that we not compartmentalize our lives, that foreign affairs and domestic economies do impact each other, and that we need a more holistic approach to politics was bang on at a rhetorical level. I found it a bit rich, however, when in a politically correct careful manner, Mr. Rae managed to skip over all sorts of obvious factors that throw complications into his formula.

The challenge of Islam extremism is going to be overcome simply be increasing the standard of living among Islam youth. Really? Islamic teaching (on which I am hardly an expert, but it would seem to me that western materialism is part of the evil against which Muslim teaching warns)has nothing to do with it?

We can't compartmentalize and our international values affect our domestic realities. But should we not then at least acknowledge the role of our domestic values? It is nice and good to appeal to John A. MacDonald, Wilfrid Laurier and Lester Pearson and their legendary leadership in these golden ages of Canadian internationalism, (although I suspect there is some nostalgia and romanticism of the actually history in Mr. Rae's claims) but Canadian support for these intiatives did come from a broader consensus about the morality of the causes they engaged in. There were good guys and bad guys in these wars and there was a readiness not just to rely on Canadians sense of fair process, but also to stand up for what is right in an international arena because we believed in certain things. Is it really valid to talk about our contribution to international values without noting the comparative decline in consensus in our domestic values? If domestic economic policy is linked with international affairs, so is domestic social policy. And simply working harder to increase world GDP and having it more fairly distributed isn't quite the panacea that Mr. Rae implied it to be.

I always get a bit wrankled at talks like this (and Mr. Rae isn't the only offender, but it is just his speech provided such an obvious opening that he neglected, that I find him especially guilty) that ignore the contribution of non-governmental organizations. Mr. Rae cited numbers in terms of development and diplomacy and suggested that if government numbers did not increase (which he had to admit, was not actually the case - foreign aid had risen contrary to his point, but why let facts get in the way of a rhetorical flourish?) then we were failing as Canadians. Yet, I know that when it comes to foreign aid, many Canadians are active in supporting all sorts of organizations whose budgets and contributions are not captured in government numbers. As I returned to Calgary airport last night, I met acquaintances from the Lethbridge area who had just returned with a workteam of several teens from a relief project in Mexico. When it comes to the world hotspots, it is relief organizations, many of them religiously motivated, who do a significant amount of the heavy lifting. Why do our political leaders continue to pass over these facts as if because government isn't directly involved, we are by defination failing? Might it be that the motivation of "loving your neighbour" in word and deed that inspires so many of these volunteers might not be as politically correct, but perhaps a bit closer to reality than the only way to summarize Mr. Rae's basic thesis yesterday: We need to pay more attention to international affairs because economics is at the root of solving international tensions as well as our domestic happiness.

Ah well, at least the lunch was tasty.

PS Since it is probably clear from the above, that Mr. Rae did not particularly inspire me yesterday, let me try to provide at least one redeeming feature of his visit. Mr. Rae shook President Obama's hand on Thursday at about 4 p.m. I shook Mr. Rae's hand at about noon yesterday. I allowed one of my colleagues who suffers from a minor case of Obama-fanitis to shake my hand at about 2 p.m.. His delight was a bit more restrained than the CBC reporter who shrieked "I saw him, I saw him" (and had her shriek not only carried live, but repeated a couple times in the snippets of nauseating coverage of Obama Day in Canada that dominate the air waves on Thursday), but it at least deserves some media coverage. So to my esteemed colleague whose knowledge of international affairs and things Obama far surpasses mine, this blog is for you.

Meeting for the Sake of Meeting not all Bad

The news this week is going to be dominated by President Obama's working visit to Ottawa on Thursday. Besides the fact that it is going to happen, don't expect much of substance to occur. That doesn't mean it isn't important. Building personal relationships is essential to getting business done, and having the leaders of the two countries who share the world's largest unprotected border, not to mention the world's most comprehensive trading relationship is important, even if it a pretty expensive proposition, However given the lack of substantive news likely to come from the summit, expect lots of coverage of the "inside details" which, if nothing else, can be quite interesting.

As I prepare to catch another plane in the morning for some "working meetings" with partners on some new projects, I am reminded as how important face-to-face meetings continue to be. With a blackberry, emails, teleconference and even video-conference facilities accessible and used with relative regularity, it would seem that the need for travel would lessen. Yet, I find myself needing to travel as much as ever before. In some ways, technologies makes it possible to enter into more relationships with more people further away, but one can only take things so far without a face-to-face connection. I even find working with colleagues who all are 3500 km away from me, that when I have extended absences away from face to face meetings, misunderstandings are far more likely to occur. There is something about looking each other in the eye and reading body language that provides understanding in a way that goes beyond words.

So we wish our leaders well, and will watch with some bemusement as the media try to find enough material to fill the pages of text and hours of airtime they believe the Canadian public, mesmerized as they appear to be by the new American President, are looking for. In the meantime, they will accomplish the objectives of the meeting simply by being in the same room at the same time for a long enough period of time to be able to get a measure of each others character. In the long run, that will mean more than anything that is said or written about the events of this week.

PS Among my appointments on my Ontario trip this week is the Thursday edition of the Michael Coren show, where I will be opining on the political news of the week alongside Conservative MP Patrick Brown, Liberal MP Martha Hall Findlay and NDP MP Joe Comartin. Undoubtedly what Mr. Harper and Mr. Obama talk about that day will be one of the topics we discuss.

Political Parties, Interest Groups and our Political Discourse

Yesterday I did an interview with a University of Toronto PHD candidate doing her thesis on the effectiveness of Canada's election laws. I suppose it is as much a testimony to my somewhat obscure and eclectic interests and specialties that I would even be asked to participate in a study of this sort, but the details of these not-well-understood provisions actually do matter and shape the sort of society we all get to share in.

We ended up chatting about the effectiveness the three changes made in Canada's election laws since 2000: Bill C-2 in 2000 which restricted the involvement of third parties in campaigns; Bill C-24 in 2004 which changed the limits of election contributions and provided public funding for political parties; and Bill C-2 in 2006 which again lowered the limits of election contributions and banned businesses and trade unions from making such contributions. The purposes of these changes were supposedly to increase the level of trust in our political processes and to ensure equity for participants. I suggested that using those objectives, these measures have not been great successes.

A few points that were made during our conversation...
- It is a mistake to structure our political discourse as if politics only belongs to political parties. Other civil society institutions also have a role to play and "skin in the game" in political life and to deny them the opportunity to participate is a mistake and results in a dimunition of public discourse.
- Given that political parties have become political marketing machines with increasingly centralized structures and controls,I wonder if an effective counter-balance might not be to give all of the public contributions / tax credits only to local riding associations and make central political parties dependent / accountable on those riding associations for their financing. It would fundamentally change the nature of political parties and their accountability.
- In response to the question posed if interest groups might begin taking on political party status in order to get around the restrictions on third parties, I responded that it had already occurred and pointed to two examples. Is not the Green Party essentially an environmental lobby group that masquerades as a political party (with significant help from the media, which provided a platform for Elizabeth May to get into the leaders debate and get a tonne of free publicity, well in excess of the political support she was (not) able to demonstrate in the polls. Also, now that the BQ has ditched sovereignty from its agenda, what is it except a lobby/interest group for Quebec interests? And given its success in getting a good deal for Quebec, why would other provinces not follow suit? If enough of them do, minority governments will be a permanent situation in Canadian politics and then the influence of narrowly focused parties will have even more leverage. If its your narrow self interest that trumps the national interest, not an unreasonable strategy to pursue.

Not all of these matters can be solved by administrative changes to the Elections Act, but certainly how we structure our rules regarding elections does impact and shape the way our political institutions look and the manner in which our public conversation ends up occuring. And given that by most measures we are heading in the wrong direction in these matters, it may be time to rethink some of our approaches.

Turning Crisis Into Opportunity

Yesterday I titled a presentation to a client using the crisis into opportunity theme, quoting from Rahm Emmanuel , President Obama's Chief of Staff. Tonight someone sent me a copy of Jim Collins recent interview published in Fortune, in which he picks uses the same theme. A few excerpts:

...it turns out that 1952 to 2000 was an aberration. We had a combination of tremendous stability brought on by two monolithic superpowers – danger, yes, but stability, combined with unprecedented prosperity. Very rarely in human history – maybe the Egyptian empire or 200 A.D. in Rome – only a few times you can go back and find those. So my own view is that the possibility of seeing this again in our lifetimes is very, very low. What we’re experiencing now, get used to it! It’s life, and it’s the normal life.

...The right people don’t need to be managed. The moment you feel the need to tightly manage someone, you've made a hiring mistake. The right people don’t think they have a job: They have responsibilities. If I’m a climber, my job is not [just] to belay. My responsibility is that if we get in trouble, I don’t let my partner down. The right people do what they say they will do, which means being really careful about what they say they will do. It’s key in difficult times. In difficult environments our results are our responsibility. People who take credit in good times and blame external forces in bad times do not deserve to lead. End of story.

Change is to be expected. Character matters. Worthwhile things to think about from one of the leading business theorists of our day.

Young Restless and Reformed Update

I have referenced Collin Hansen's 2006 Christianity Today article as well as his 2008 book by the same title on several occasions, including my article on "Can we hope for a Neocalvinist - Neopuritan dialogue" in the current print edition of Comment.

I notice on the REformation21 blog that Hansen has blogged some "update reflections." For those interested in the following the Reformed movement and influence today, Hansens work is well worth following.

Redeemer in Macleans

This weeks Macleans magazine contains the annual university ratings and Redeemer University (to which I am partial for obvious reasons) comes out very well.

Based on CUSC surveys filled out by students, Redeemer....
- is ranked top at 80% very satisfied with class sizes
- is ranked second in having professors encouraging student participation
- is ranked top in having professors treating students as individuals and not as numbers

and has a whole bunch of other very positive results.

As a board member, I am very committed to the mission and wonderful success stories that are associated with Redeemer. I am also as aware as any of the challenges that Redeemer faces. In fact, a disproportionate of board time is inevitably dealt with the challenges faced by an organization and how these can be addressed in ways to make the institution even better. However, every time I set foot in Redeemer I am impressed by the commitment and dedication of those involved in providing a solid Christian undergraduate education to its students. It is nice to see external verification of these facts.

Sunday Reflections

After a 12 day road trip, it was a delight to be back home in Calgary and worshipping with our young congregation. In addition to our regular two services and adult Sunday School study of Acts, we had a fellowship supper and singsong following the evening service which was attended by most. Enthusiastic singing together creates a sense of unity and warmth within.

Our services today were led by Pastor Hans Overduin of the Chilliwack FRC. In the morning service, he preached from Ephesians 5:8 under the theme "Walking to God's Praise." After an extended introduction in which he highlighted how the imperatives of scripture must always be understood in the context of the indicatives that preceded them -- what we do must come from who we are and not out of a legalistic self-righteousness -- he highlighted five features of the Christian walk drawn from the context of Ephesians 5 using the acronym LIGHT.

L ove to God and Neighbour - "When God measures a man, he puts the tape around the heart, not the head."
I ntegrity - "Our lives need to make the gospel attractive to others."
G odliness - "The opposite of godliness is minimizing sin. We must be zealously godly"
H appily walking in the joy of the Lord - "Nor the artificial noise that comes from the crackling of thorns in the fire which provides no heat but the warm joy that allowed Paul from his prison cell to write to the Phillipians, Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say rejoice.
T ruth - Especially in an age where so many are indifferent to any precision in truth and confession, we need to be lovers of the truth and the church needs to be what she is called in Scripture -- the pillar and ground of truth.

The afternoon service focused on the name Jesus using the Heidelberg Catechism Lords Day 11. Pastor Overduin focused on the fact that name Jesus
Was Preferred by the Father
Was Prized by the Son
Was made Powerful by the Spirit.

All in all, a wonderful Sabbath day of rest and worship.

Blogging Hiatus...

My good intentions of regularly updating this blog are not being realized this week. Its been a week of meeting and travel with a Cardus board meeting about to take up the rest of the time. Check back next week as I hope to be in a more normal routine at that time.

Protectionism no Way to Protect the Economy

I am in Michigan overnight on Cardus business and so it seems as good an occasion as any to comment on the protectionist debate that is stewing on both sides of the border.

It seems that President Obama is realizing from the pressure of his allies that implementing protectionist measures is a short-term focused solution that will have long-term negative consequences. In Canada, the NDP seems to be advocating similar protectionist measures.

I won't pretend to be an expert economic historian but my impression is that in the twenties and thirties, it was the protectionist response, closing borders, and thinking short-term that made the Great Depression worse and lasting longer. The challenge with free trade is always that the benefits are more diffuse while the costs are more concentrated however on balance, free trade benefits economies as the past twenty years has certainly demonstrated for Canada.

Canada is a trading nation. Closing our borders in a short-sighted attempt to protect some short-term jobs is, in my humble opinion, a sure way to make the economics work. The basics of economics are trade and efficiency. I do the things I am efficient at and exchange the surplus of what I am able to produce with someone who is able to more efficiently provide me with other things that I need and value. It seems to me a recognition of the basic facts that we are created with different gifts and that the fair exchange of goods and services is by far the most efficient and even stewardly way to organize an economy.

What I find interesting is why those who tend to come from the left of the political spectrum have such a hard time coming to grips with this. Although, as one of my colleagues insightfully asked this evening, given some of the recent history of protectionism, we might ask whether protectionism is a right-wing or a left-wing idea. Maybe it's better described as just a shortsighted one.