There is a saying in Dragon Boating that if as a paddler you are not ‘in stroke’ you are slowing the boat. The paddling crew stay in stroke by watching each other or listening to the coach/steer calling out the beat. The dissention at the current Premiers meeting in St John’s is a perfect example of the players being out of stroke. And the boat – the Canadian Economy – is showing the result.
As in any enterprise such as a dragon boat team or a country, we need leaders and pace-setters. The two paddlers at the front of the boat are the de facto pace setters but in our country we seem to be changing the pace setters quite often. It used to be Ontario who set the pace, then Alberta and British Columbia. Other provinces tried to keep up, some more successfully than others as the economic tides ebbed and flowed. Now Premier Brad Wall is trying to rally the other premiers around his resource-based economy. With little luck, it seems now. Some of the paddlers want to pause and talk, some just keep their heads down and paddle as if in their own one-person canoe.
Part of the problem is that we have lost our coach and steersperson. King Harper is off wandering the world thinking he is a ‘player’ by pontificating to the real world leaders; meanwhile, his little boat back home is struggling to stay in the economic race. The currency manipulators have seen the rudderless nature of Canada and are putting their money on other participants. The result is the stumbling, falling loonie. The Bank of Canada is shrugging its shoulders saying a valueless dollar must be good for somebody (but not Canadians who travel or buy foreign goods).
Some of what Brad Wall is saying makes good sense. Are we a nation with national goals or a consortium of small states with different and perhaps conflicting objectives? If we are a nation we need to get in stroke or in the vernacular, on the same page. We need to get back to some basics. We are a large land mass with many natural resources, some renewable, some not so much. We are not unique in having educated workers or ideas. We are among many who have manufacturing capabilities. We need to take advantage of our resources and turn them into products that others want and need. We cannot sustain ourselves on eco-tourism and games.
Yes, we ought to worry about pollution and conservation and do our best with our technology to promote those causes. However, we do not need to cripple our resource-based industries with taxes – carbon or otherwise – or with regulations that will strangle our very lifeblood. As a nation we will not survive with only the forests of British Columbia, the oil from Alberta and the territories, the grains of the Prairie Provinces, the auto industry of Ontario, the hydro exports of Quebec or the fisheries of the Maritimes. We need to park some egos and combine our resources for the benefit of all of us.
We need to drop our silly provincial barriers to workers and trade and start paddling together. Perhaps in our upcoming national election we can find a real team leader who will request and attend team meetings, and even call out the stroke beat to get us back on the race course.
All together now: 1, 2, 3 . . .
