The Lost Massey Lectures (32 page)

Complications have their price, but can be worth it. For instance, the human brain, with its incomprehensibly numerous cells for storing, sorting, cross-referencing and retrieving words, and doing so many other things too, is so complicated that my own brain cannot understand its own complications. There are many prices exacted by our brains' large capacities, which animals with smaller brains escape. We must use exorbitant amounts of fuel to maintain our brains and the services for them; we seem to be subject to more mental illnesses than chickens or cows; we have to be born in an exceedingly helpless state in order to emerge before the head is too big for the birth canal; we have very extended childhoods compared with other animals, which can be hard on parents, and so on.

Just so, many jobs in this world can best be done, or can only be done, by large units. It would be too bad, or so I think, if we could contend only with the simplicities of little villages or towns. But there is a price to be paid for the size of big cities: the physical, economic and social complications they require must be respected and constantly kept in working order, on pain of breakdown.

People who don't understand what I'm calling Haldane's principle are forever being disappointed that making big units out of many smaller units does not necessarily save money. They think consolidation will give economies of scale, and will eliminate unnecessary duplications. Sometimes this works, if the consolidated unit is actually rather small. Otherwise, the costs of complication can exact their own high price. When the Metro government of Toronto was formed, combining some of the otherwise duplicated functions of what is now the city and five boroughs, costs of government did not show economies of scale. Costs rose. If all the functions, instead of only some, were to be amalgamated in a single all-purpose Metro government, we may be sure costs would soar.

One of the worst costs of large size is that sometimes the complications it requires become so excessive they're stifling. They interfere with the very reasons for being of the organizations and functions they're intended to serve. A hospital architect has told me that a hospital in Canada can be designed, built and put into operation in roughly two years' less time than a comparable hospital in the United States. The added costs of those extra two years' time and effort are of course large. The differences in red tape, he says, are in large part owing to the fact that in the United States the huge Federal government gets into the act with all its own extremely complicated ways of doing things, and these are added to whatever complications are injected by the state, the municipality and the hospital administration itself. In Canada, the provincial governments, not Ottawa, take responsibility.

An Ontario civil servant told me a few years ago a similar tale about complications, this one concerning the clean-up of Lake Ontario. On our side of the border the work proceeded according to a timetable set up by international agreement. On the American side work fell far behind the timetable. The problem, he said, wasn't lack of money for the American part of the work, nor lack of will. People there had been working, in their own way, quite as hard as the Canadians. They were struggling with red tape. Red tape is the way we commonly describe complications of size that have become stifling.

Many jobs for which we've come to think very large outfits are necessary—just because that's the way they're being handled—can be done just as well by smaller organizations, indeed can often be done better. When the Canadian postal system was smaller, and had less mail to handle, it delivered the mail more swiftly and reliably. I think our postal system has become like the human brain in the sense that the post office itself is no longer able to understand its own complications.

One of the things I look forward to if Quebec ever does separate is two smaller postal systems instead of what we have. Small countries have their own postal systems; we don't see that as economically alarming. Much important Canadian mail is now being handled by relatively small courier services that are reliable and swift.

Many Americans take it for granted that telephone service has to be consolidated in a huge organization to be efficient. When I tell American acquaintances that the province of Alberta has long owned a separate telephone system, and that I can vouch from experience for its first-class efficiency, they're amazed. They become downright incredulous then they hear that within Alberta the city of Edmonton owns yet a different and separate telephone system and that it works with first-class efficiency too.

In New York, people have been pointing out for a couple of generations that the amount of money spent per pupil in the public schools is larger than the amount per pupil spent in many fine private schools with smaller classes. At first thought it's hard to imagine, short of assuming embezzlement, how the discrepancies between what is paid for and what is delivered can be explained. But if you explore the New York public school system's administration and see the vast burden of overhead the vast consolidated system supports, the costs become understandable. These are costs of size, not corruption. Perhaps we can speak of the corruption of size. Decentralization of the school system was undertaken about a decade ago in New York. But in practice, decentralization meant new layers of administration and complication within the central organization, because the central organization was retained too. As Marshall McLuhan has said, you can't decentralize centrally.
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Where national governments are concerned, a traditional way of keeping size and its complications under control has been
federalism. Most large nations have employed federal systems in one form or another, and so have some very small ones, like Switzerland. Of course there have been other reasons for federalism too. But one use of it has been to try to keep big government and centralized government in hand.

Federalism has been falling on bad days in many places. The Soviet Union has federalism in form, but in fact is exceedingly centralized in its management and decisions. The United States has federalism in form, but in fact has been converting itself rapidly into a unitary state where all but the most minor and inherently local matters—and even some of those—must be traipsed through centralized corridors of power.

Centralization of national governments has been gathering force most of this century, and has been intensifying swiftly in our own time. When centralization is combined with increased responsibilities taken on by government, as has also been happening, the result is very big government and thus very complicated government.

Not all countries have embraced this combination. Switzerland and Japan, for instance, have relatively few programs which are the responsibility of their national governments or are paid for by their national governments. Canada has resisted extreme centralization because of insistence by Quebec, Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia on considerable provincial autonomy. Nevertheless, elephantiasis at the centre threatens us too. Ottawa's employees have increased by more than 50% just since 1968.
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Almost everywhere in the world bureaucratic complications are now intractable. Many intelligent, industrious and well-intentioned people in governments are spending their lives creating messes, futilities and waste because they cannot avoid doing so. The mistakes are big mistakes. The complications are labyrinthine. The red tape is stifling. The vast organizations are inflexible,
impossible to put on the right track when they have nosed onto the wrong. Arrangements like this do not seem to me to offer a promising future.

Some functions and responsibilities taken on by governments seem to do more harm than good. But many are functions we have come to require or desire. If we take Haldane's principle seriously, as I think we must, increased centralization should not be combined with added or multiplied responsibilities. On the contrary, added governmental responsibilities should be combined with looser federalism, or else with separation.

Perhaps the only workable arrangement for busy governments is smaller nations. If that reasoning is correct, then sovereignty-association is a valuable idea, quite apart from being a possible way of dealing with the problems and discontents of Quebec.

Sovereignty-association. The phrase has two elements meaning “independent” and “connected.” Thus it is a thumbnail description of the human condition itself as we are born and brought up in it. As we all know, it's not easy for us as individuals to juggle those elements “independent” and “connected,” juggle our individual natures and our social natures without doing unacceptable damage to either. Customs, traditions and philosophies of innumerable sorts help us in this juggling act. Even so, we have to practice and work at it as long as we live, forever trying to keep some balance between our independence and connectedness.

The organizations we have, including our governments and nations, are like all the rest of life in needing ways of being both independent and connected. If we were to try to find a synonym for René Lévesque's phrase, sovereignty-association, we might easily hit upon this rather neat translation: Allied Powers. But that phrase is already used up; it was once appropriated for a different
association of sovereignties. Or we could try other synonyms, United States, United Nations or United Kingdoms. All appropriated already. It is the same with League of Nations. We might try Group of Independents, except that it sounds like a society of separate and connected artists or perhaps an organization of retail grocery stores. Or we might try Canadian League except that it sounds like a hockey association; or simply Confederation, except that in Canada, and some other places too, this already has its own meaning in the juggling act.

We seem to be running out of ways of saying “independent and connected governments.” But we can always invent new names for new kinds of ties, as René Lévesque has done with the phrase sovereignty-association.

Governments, like the rest of us, have the help of customs and traditions too: practices already worked out for carrying on federal relationships and international relationships. But governments, like the rest of us, need constant readjustments. Otherwise, their relationships are liable to do unacceptable damage either to independence or connectedness. Governments aren't good at this juggling act. Mostly, they do not make readjustments and corrections successfully, when they make them at all. Their connections with one another often break down, usually very messily. Or the connections are drawn too tight. Then damage is done to independence and we get the insanely overcomplicated, highly centralized governments I used as examples in discussing the built-in hazards, wastes and weaknesses of great size.

An association meant to balance independence and connectedness of governments, and to keep that balance, must have two main attributes. First, it must have some means of feeling its way to that balance and some way of trying to keep it thereafter. In federal systems, constitutions are often meant to serve that purpose. But in the case of a sovereignty-association, such as René
Lévesque proposes for Quebec, the appropriate means is negotiation followed by treaties. Second, the basic framework aimed at must be suitable for the purpose of achieving
both
independence and connectedness. This is the point of view from which I am going to look at Lévesque's proposals and reasoning. My chief source is his book,
My Quebec
, published in an English-language edition in March of 1979.
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His ideas, with little change, are incorporated in the Quebec government's white paper on sovereignty-association.
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What does he propose as connectors? He suggests five of them. I will say, right off, that four of them seem to me to be right on the mark. But the fifth seems so ill-considered and unworkable that I am convinced it would give rise to frictions and new hatreds, and would also undermine any actual independence for Quebec. I think I see a possible way of overcoming the difficulty, which I will suggest. First, let's look at the four connectors that ought to work.

The first connector Lévesque proposes, and by far the most basic, is free trade between the associated sovereignties.

We are much preoccupied in Canada with the subject of foreign export and import trade. We have far more statistical data about our foreign exports and imports than about our own internal trade. That is true of most other countries too. But Statistics Canada has made two surveys of internal trade. These were analyses of the destinations of Canadian manufactured goods. One survey was made in the late 1960's, the other in 1974.
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Here is what they tell us.

By far the chief markets for Canadian manufactured goods are within Canada itself. Taken overall, in 1974 more than half the goods found their markets in the same provinces where they were made. In addition to that, more than a quarter found their markets in other provinces. Only 21% of Canada's manufactured goods were exported, chiefly to the United States. But to most provinces,
the foreign exports were of little importance, because the lion's share of manufactured exports were produced in Ontario. Ontario alone accounts for 82% of all Canadian manufactured goods exported to the United States and for roughly comparable proportions of Canadian-made goods exported to other countries too. But even for Ontario, Canadian markets are vital. They absorb two-thirds of the province's manufactured goods. Much of that market, of course, is within Ontario itself.

The trade among provinces follows just the pattern one might expect from looking at a map. Neighbouring provinces tend to be each other's best inter-provincial customers for manufactured goods. Beginning at the west, British Columbia and Alberta are each other's best inter-provincial customers. The central west is split down the middle. Saskatchewan's best customer for its meagre production of manufactured goods, apart from itself of course, is Alberta. Manitoba's best customer is Ontario. Ontario and Quebec are each other's best customers. Nova Scotia is the best customer of Prince Edward Island, Ontario the best customer of New Brunswick, Quebec the best customer of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia.