SATURDAY,OCTOBER19,2019 | THEGLOBEANDMAILO OPINION | O11
I
’m a reader of mainstream
newspapers. Whatever their
foibles, at least we know where
they stand. They must try to re-
port accurately and check their
facts on pain of being sued, so I
tend to rely on what’s in them.
But lately, reading about our
upcoming election, I can’t quite
believe my eyes. Has Conserva-
tive Leader Andrew Scheer been
quoted correctly? He wants to
build a “national energy corri-
dor” from sea to sea, through
which he’s going to “move oil,
gas, hydro, telecommunications”
and “other linear infrastructure?”
It sounds so efficient! But we’ll be
footing the bill, Fellow Taxpaying
People, so maybe we’d better dig
out our specs and read the fine
print.
So wait a minute. You run the
highly flammable hydrocarbons
through the same pipeline-
shaped item as the “hydro,”
which I guess means a lot of elec-
trical wires. And alongside all of
that you run “telecommunica-
tions,” which I guess means fibre
optic cables or something simi-
lar? Sea to sea, and bingo, we’re
connected. How unifying. Am I
the only person thinking “One
terrorist bomb and there goes the
whole shebang?”
And suppose the corridor is
rendered bomb-proof along its
entire 5,000 or so kilometres.
Who will control the off-on
switch that regulates the flow – of
gas and oil, of electricity, of digital
information? Would that be a
Darth-Vader-suited Energy Corri-
dor Master in – let me guess – Al-
berta? While turning off the lights- not to mention the heat and the
television – for some perceived
transgression by, say, Ontario or
Quebec, will this shadowy per-
sonage exclaim, “Bwa ha ha! Let
those eastern bastards freeze in
the dark!” Or worse: “Kiss my toe,
craven Easterners, or no more
Netflix for you!” Am I being para-
noid?
Even if I am, how much will
this thing cost and how long
would it take to build? Mr. Scheer
won’t tell us, most likely because
he doesn’t know. A hundred bil-
lion, according to one estimate,
and decades at the very least.
Needless to say, we’ll have to rip
up that pesky environmental leg-
islation. That’s a given; premiers
like Jason Kenney and Doug Ford
have already done it. While you’re
at it, any First Nations that stand
in the way will have to be brushed
aside; Mr. Scheer has already
made it clear that he will not re-
spect the United Nations Declara-
tion on the Rights of Indigenous
Peoples.
Why would we wish to commit
to this megalomaniac pipe
dream? Because it will make us all
rich? Because it will cure male-pattern baldness? About the
same hope of the former as of the
latter. The dream of fabulous, ev-
erlasting wealth through fossil
fuels is already receding, for the
simple reason that the climate
crisis is real. If allowed to proceed
unchecked, and especially if the
oceans die, thus cutting off our
oxygen supply, it will doom the
human race.
More and more people in the
financial world are recognizing
that fact. According to Mark Car-
ney, thegovernor of the Bank of
England, industries that aren’t
“part of the solution ... will be
punished” and “companies that
don’t adapt will go bankrupt
without question.”
And unless we start the global
transition soon, that transition –
when it comes – will be abrupt
and could trigger a world finan-
cial collapse. Viewed from this
perspective, Mr. Scheer’s Magic
Drainpipe looks like a very ex-
pensive piece of obsolete tech-
nology.
That’s certainly the perspec-
tive the people of the huge inter-
national movement called Ex-tinction Rebellion are taking.
Their badge looks similar to an
hourglass, and it means time is
running out. They want politic-
ians to get serious about revers-
ing the bioplanetary crisis, and al-
though some of them aren’t yet of
voting age, they will be soon.
They’ll be coming to a foyer or a
roadway near you, soon.
“But what about us?” Canadian
adults ask. “We can vote, but who
should we vote for? We don’t like
any of them.”
I feel your pain. But we’re not
crowning Miss Congeniality. We
aren’t living in the land of Best.
The most you can hope for is the
least worst. So start at the bottom- the bottom being the one who
denies there is even a problem –
and work up from there. Vote for
the party that knows there really
is a climate crisis, that has even a
semi-viable plan and that might
actually win in your riding. You
can’t afford to be squeamish. A
while ago people were urging you
to consider your grandkids, but
things are moving faster. It’s not
just your grandkids you need to
worry about now. It’s you.
Voteinthenameofclimatechange
Thecrisisuponusis
real,andifallowed
toproceedunchecked,
willdoomtheentire
humanrace
MARGARETATWOOD
OPINIONAuthorofTheTestaments,
co-winnerofthisyear’sBookerPrize
A
week ago, Spain marked its
national holiday in the usu-
al fashion. King Felipe VI
presided over a military parade in
Madrid that delighted Spanish na-
tionalists, who appear to have in-
creased in number in recent years
as the country faces a growing
challenge to its unity from Catalo-
nia.
The centrifugal forces threat-
ening the country’s future were
evident two days later, after the
Spanish Supreme Court convict-
ed nine former Catalonian leaders
on charges of sedition, sentencing
them to prison terms of between
nine and 13 years. Their crimes in-
cluded organizing a 2017 referen-
dum on Catalonian independ-
ence and allocating public funds
to the effort.
La sentencia, as it is known, pro-
voked outrage among Catalonia’s
current crop of secessionist lead-
ers. Students went on strike, shut-
ting down the main streets
around the Universitat de Barce-
lona for several hours each day
this week. Nighttime protests or-
ganized by groups calling for a
Catalonian republic turned messy
and chaotic, adding a dangerous
new dimension to independence
demonstrations that until this
week had remained resolutely
non-violent.
The sentencing of the nine pol-
iticians and civil-society leaders
for what they and their supporters
consider to have been the exercise
of their democratic rights has in-
jected the independence cause
with a new sense of urgency. Cata-
lonian secessionists have come to
see the Spanish Constitution as a
straitjacket imposed on their dis-
tinct society that has been weap-
onized by politicians in Madrid
unwilling to consider any form of
further decentralization.
In a way, Spain today looks sim-
ilar to the Canada of 1990.La sen-
tenciamay go down as the Spanish
equivalent of the collapse of the
Meech Lake Accord, which was a
shot of adrenaline for Quebec’s
independence movement. Otta-
wa struggled to come up with a re-
sponse to Quebec’s traditional de-
mands that didn’t provoke a back-
lash in the rest of the country.
Quebeckers came within a whisk-
er of voting to leave Canada alto-
gether in 1995.
Canada managed to pull
through the crisis. Quebec sover-
eigntists overplayed their hand in
the postreferendum period, ex-hausting even many of their own
supporters with schemes to drum
up the “winning conditions” for
yet another kick at the can. The
1998 Supreme Court reference on
Quebec secession and the subse-
quent federal Clarity Act defined
the terms of negotiation for any
future attempt to break up the
federation.
There was plenty of disagree-
ment over what level of support
would constitute the “clear ma-
jority to a clear question” that the
court decreed would be needed to
negotiate Quebec’s departure in
the future. But Quebeckers may
have settled the matter by making
it clear ever since that they do not
want another referendum.
Spain now is where Canada was
in the pre-Clarity Act era – exceptthat none of its national leaders is
interested in lending the slightest
hint of legitimacy to the Catalo-
nian secessionist movement by
recognizing the region’s right to
self-determination. They prefer to
take a legalistic approach to Cata-
lonia’s demands for more autono-
my, fearful that any concession
would provoke a backlash in the
rest of Spain outside the Basque
country, whose residents share
many of the same gripes as Cata-
lonians about a centralgovern-
ment that sucks their regions dry.
Instead, Spanish politicians, es-
pecially those on the right, paint
Catalonian secessionist leaders as
radicals and anarchists, or the an-
tithesis of democrats. They insist
that this week’s violence, which
Catalonia’s secessionist PresidentQuim Torra initially refused to
condemn, lends credence to such
claims. People’s Party Leader Pa-
blo Casado and Ciudadanos (Citi-
zens) Leader Albert Rivera have
both called on acting Socialist
Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez to
invoke special powers under the
Constitution to take control of the
Catalonian government, as Ma-
drid briefly did following an ille-
gal unilateral declaration of inde-
pendence by the regional parlia-
ment in 2017.
The entry onto the political
scene of Vox, a far-right party that
has drawn support away from the
centre-right People’s Party, has
forced the latter to ramp up its na-
tionalist rhetoric.
Vox spurns any dialogue with
Catalonia’s leaders and has called
on Madrid to show zero tolerance
toward separatists.
Mr. Sanchez has promised
“firmness and moderation” in
dealing with the postsentencing
violence in Catalonia. But he will
be under increasing pressure in
coming days to escalate Madrid’s
response if the violence continues
and if the Catalonian parliament,
the Generalitat, further challeng-
es his authority.
One wrong move could be fatal
to either side. Spaniards will go to
the polls in their fourth national
election in the past four years on
Nov. 10. The Socialists won a plu-
rality of seats in the previous vote,
in April, but were unable to form a
government.
Mr. Sanchez had sought to form
a progressive coalition but was
unwilling to cede key cabinet
posts to members of the far-left
Podemos party, which favours al-
lowing Catalonia to hold a legal
referendum on independence.
The stakes in next month’s na-
tional vote have been driven infi-
nitely higher byla sentenciaand its
fallout. There is no guarantee that
Spain will get through its unity
crisis in one piece.AswithQuebecthreedecadesago,CataloniahasdrivenSpaintothebrink
KONRAD
YAKABUSKI
OPINIONASpanishSupremeCourtverdictconvictingnineformerCatalonianleadersfororganizinga2017independence
referendumhassparkedunrestamongseparatists,includingprotestssuchastheoneseenabove
inBarcelonaTuesday.JONNAZCA/REUTERSBARCELONA
O
ne of the things I like about
living in Europe is the low
cost of high tech. Cell-
phone service, for example, costs
a fraction of what it does in Cana-
da or the U.S. – we get a data plan
for our whole family, from one of a
dozen providers, for considerably
less than an individual plan in
Canada. Same with home broad-
band, which costs US$37 a month
in Germany and US$31 in France
on average, compared to US$58 in
Canada or US$68 in the United
States. And airline tickets are
much cheaper here than in North
America.
Those three observations – the
lower costs of cellphone service,
broadband and air travel in Eu-
rope compared to the United
States, and the fact that all three
were cheaper in North America 25
years ago – were the starting point
for years of study by Thomas Phi-
lippon, a French economist at
New York University.
His conclusion, in his forth-
coming bookThe Great Reversal,is
that it’s true across most of the
economy: In general, Europe has
become a place where capitalism
is much more competitive, and
markets much more free and
open, than in North America – to
the benefit of both consumers
and workers.
Dr. Philippon asks: “How did
Europe, of all places, become
more of a ‘free market’ than the
U.S.?” His answer has important
long-term implications for voters
and policymakers in both the
United States. and Canada.
North Americangovernments
have come to believe that big,
market-dominating companies
should be allowed to flourish and
survive under all circumstances –
to create internationally compet-
itive winners, to secure jobs in
their provinces and states or just
because they donate generously
to political parties.
Europe, as everyone knows,
has a bigger roleof government in
business – but that role, for a long
time, has been to prevent the for-
mation of monopolies and ensure
that capitalism is competitive,
open and easy to enter. “The fight
against market dominance,” Dr.
Philippon writes, “has been part
of the DNA of the European pro-
ject from the very beginning.”
And that distinction has made
Europe a place with a lot more pri-
vate-sector competition – for pric-
es, for better customer service, for
higher wages, even, in some sec-tors, for more ecological and sus-
tainable products.
“Starting around 2000,” he
concludes, “profit rates and con-
centration ratios [that is, monop-
olies] increased in the U.S. but re-
mained stable or decreased in Eu-rope.
“Prices relative to wages in-
creased by 8 per cent more in the
U.S. than in Europe despite simi-
lar productivity growth. As U.S.
markets experienced a contin-
uous decline in competition, Eu-
ropean markets did not. Today
many European markets appear
to be more competitive than their
American counterparts.”
In a profound change in Eu-
rope, it’s become a lot easier forpeople – including recent immi-
grants – to start small businesses.
If you wanted to open a small
business in France in 1999, it re-
quired 15 procedures and 53 days.
But by 2016, it required only a cou-
ple procedures and four days.
Over the same period, however,
the time to open a small business
in the United States rose from four
days to six. The same pattern ap-
plies across many other business
indicators. The French, it turned
out, did have a word for “entrepre-
neur,” but the Americans forgot it.
In the United States, he con-
cludes, “the consequences of a
lack of competition are lower
wages, lower investment, lower
productivity, lower growth and
more inequality.” By Dr. Philip-
pon’s calculation, the lack of com-
petition in the U.S. has cost work-
ers US$1.5-trillion in income, or
about six years of wage growth.
In Canada, there are very few
barriers to creating a small busi-
ness (it takes two days). On the
other hand, the way Canadian
governments treat and regulate
big corporations is a lot closer to
the American model.
You won’t see European Union-
style antitrust actions against
Google or Microsoft taking place
in Canada. In Dr. Philippon’s ini-
tial three cases – mobile phone
service, home broadband and air-lines – Canada is often less com-
petitive or consumer-friendly
than the United States. Canada’s
cable and telecom giants are given
extraordinary latitude to exploit
and neglect their customers in a
near-monopoly setting. Its trans-
portation sector is closed and ex-
pensive. Resource and engineer-
ing companies are frequently
seen as “too big to fail” and bailed
out or permitted to have competi-
tion-crushing market share. The
SNC-Lavalin scandal, which rup-
tured the federal Liberal Party this
year, was at its root a govern-
ment’s alleged effort to protect a
huge company’s uncompetitive
practices for electoral gain.
North Americans decided to
make a choice between big corpo-
rations or big government, and fa-
voured the former; Europeans re-
alized that big government was
the pathway to keeping corpora-
tions competitive and was good
for consumers and society.
We should not be looking at life
as a choice between big, activist
government or a successful mar-
ket economy. To achieve the sec-
ond, we need more of the first.DougSaunders,theGlobe’s
international-affairscolumnist,is
currentlyaRichardvonWeizsaecker
FellowoftheRobertBosch
AcademyinBerlin.Biggovernmentisthesecretingredientforacompetitivecapitalisteconomy
DOUG
SAUNDERS
OPINIONEurope,aseveryone
knows,hasabiggerrole
ofgovernmentin
business–butthatrole,
foralongtime,has
beentopreventthe
formationof
monopoliesandensure
thatcapitalismis
competitive,openand
easytoenter.