What binds us together, what pulls us apart
An investigation into social cohesion — what binds us together, what draws us apart.
Rick Madonik / Toronto Star Order this photo
Atkinson Fellow Michael Valpy.
This is the sound of a society losing its glue: Middle-aged men with their jobs taken away after 20, 30 years on the factory floor, answering questions in unison in a basement room in Oakville.
Who’s on your side?
Nobody.
Who’s showing solidarity with you?
Nobody.
Like the ritual responses in a mass.
What happens to your world?
Your world gets devastated, they say, because unemployment is not just statistics and a pay cheque. “The majority of your life you spend with your co-workers,” says Charlie Jonczyk, who spent 34 years building buses. Until you no longer belong. Your status in the community, your sense of self-worth, your purpose and reason for going out the door in the morning, the talent you hold in your hands — it all gets taken away.
My project for a year, supported by the Atkinson Charitable Foundation in partnership with the Honderich family and the Toronto Star, has been to examine the state of social cohesion in Canada, the degree to which Canadians demonstrate integrity — wholeness — or division.
The project has been to look at what makes us feel we belong to one another, what pushes us apart and makes us feel marginal, what gives us a public life in common and allows us to trust each other even as strangers because of values we share. Unless we don’t.
It has introduced me to a Canada that that I hadn’t much thought about, paid little attention to, that has not been part of my adult life in the relatively elite Toronto worlds of mass media and the university. It’s not what I started out to look for.
The sound of a society losing its glue is people like the ex-men of Daimler talking about us and them and inequality.
A few blocks away from the basement room in Oakville is a new housing development advertised — these are the words — as a millionaires’ estate. “The rich ones are flaunting it,” says Wally Symes, a welder at the bus factory for 17 years.
Canadians’ trust in their government and their democracy has reached unprecedented lows on the pollsters’ surveys.
The sound of democracy losing its glue is a mouse-click, says the poet Sonnet L’Abbé, who after her first year teaching at University of B.C.’s Okanagan campus spent two months this summer travelling the country, inquiring into Canadians’ thoughts about their land.
“Politics is reduced to pushing ‘share’ on a BuzzFeed,” she says — which, in addition to being an observation on civics, illustrates Canada’s generational fracture: people over 60 won’t know what she’s talking about. (Which doesn’t matter: they vote; the young don’t.)
The sound of generational fracture is UBC professor Paul Kershaw talking this spring to young people in Powell River, B.C., about the aspirations of an advocacy organization he’s founded called Generation Squeeze.
“I stand before you with a simple proposition,” he says when he walks out on stage. “The proposition is this: That Generations X and Y, those under 45, deserve a chance, a chance to deal with lower wages and higher costs of living today without compromising the families they have now or the families they may one day want.”
He tells his audience that governments spend just $12,000 annually on benefits and services for every Canadian under 45 compared to nearly $45,000 for every retiree.
He tells them the Canadian economy has more than doubled in size since 1976, producing an extra $35,000 per household per year on average. “But that average increase in prosperity is simply not trickling down to younger generations today.”
His website declares: What’s been good for the previous generation “is bad for us.”
A call to rise up, that’s what this is.
The sound of something going wrong with multiculturalism — the ethos of Canadians’ pride and their sense of community — is my conversation with Richard Wang early one morning as I drive him from his apartment to maybe his 60th, 70th interview for a temporary job. Wang was a university professor in China before immigrating to Canada.
Since his arrival almost a decade ago, he has worked in call centres, as a doorman, janitor, washroom cleaner, shopping-mall retail clerk and a host of other low-paying, low-skilled jobs.
Since his arrival almost a decade ago, he has worked in call centres, as a doorman, janitor, washroom cleaner, shopping-mall retail clerk and a host of other low-paying, low-skilled jobs.
He belongs to that new word in our vocabulary, the precariat, people in precarious employment that accounts for as much as 40 per cent of today’s jobs, a proportion growing rapidly. The precariat are people who work without benefits, without pensions, without job security, without career futures, they are the shuffling foot-soldiers of temporary work agencies who are becoming the doorkeepers to employment in Canada like the pass-law administrators of apartheid South Africa.
The precariat are primarily older workers like the laid-off Daimler bus builders, they are the young who are fodder for exploitation as unpaid so-called interns like Krista Brown, they are Canada’s racialized immigrants like Richard Wang.
The sound of the permanently marginalized in Canada are the words spoken by Marlene McKay, a Cree-Métis anthropologist in the final stages of completing her doctorate at University of Saskatchewan. Her dissertation topic is why, for indigenous women, marginalization and powerlessness and insignificance have been internalized as normal.
In a Saskatoon interview that fills a summer morning, she talks about who really colonized aboriginal people in Canada — not the Mounties or the fur-trading companies or the politicians in Ottawa or whoever else gets the blame in the blogosphere but the Christian church and its patriarchal teachings of male dominance and female subservience and idealized sexual relationships that, as she puts it, “seeped through the wall of aboriginal culture.”
You will meet these people and others in the pages that follow. They are articles I think represent the primary issues of social cohesion in Canada — or, more accurately, represent where social cohesion is fraying and we are losing our attachment to one another and to our identity as Canadians.
As John Biles, a specialist on social integration with the federal Department of Citizenship and Immigration, has written: Discussions of social cohesion, he says, invariably are accompanied by an assumption “that the social element of a previous era is crumbling and that we are being cast adrift in a world where the previous rules of social interaction and social integration no longer apply.”
Judith Maxwell, the last chair of the Economic Council of Canada before then-prime minister Brian Mulroney dismantled it, wrote in 1996: “Social cohesion involves building shared values and communities of interpretation, reducing disparities in wealth and income, and generally enabling people to have a sense that they are engaged in a common enterprise, facing shared challenges, and that they are members of the same community.”
That has been my idea of Canada.
Throughout my life I’ve been an Anglo-Canadian nationalist. I left my home in Vancouver after university because I wanted to be at the centre — hold the jokes — of pan-Canadian life in Toronto.
I’ve immersed myself in the mythology of Canadian Red Toryism, what Star columnist Richard Gwyn called “state nationalism” in his book, Nationalism Without Walls: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Canadian, the idea of a national identity shaped by public institutions and communal actions like building transcontinental railways and the CBC, medicare and state pensions, military peacekeeping and good-fixer diplomacy.
I was, like Sonnet L’Abbé, “a Trudeau (the father) kid,” sharing his bicultural and multicultural vision of a country with a muscular central state.
I violated journalistic orthodoxy in 2000 and ran for Parliament (and lost) because I was alarmed by the number of young Canadians rejecting parliamentary democracy in favour of extra-parliamentary opposition on the streets.
I wanted to know how the Canada I believed in could elect a Mike Harris government in Ontario, a Stephen Harper government in Ottawa and a Rob Ford in Toronto. It seemed so heretical.
When I started teaching at University of Toronto and became a senior fellow at U of T’s Massey College, I wanted to know even more how young Canadians defined their collectivity and their Canadian identity in the 21st century. I was intrigued one night at a meeting of Massey’s junior and senior fellows when then-law student Sabrina Bandali asked if the preceding generation was leaving behind enough social capital for her generation of Canadians to use — and one of Ontario’s most senior jurists replied, “No.”
What did each of them mean?
What was happening to Canadians’ values? I liked British sociologist Michael Mann’s idea that a society’s cohesion could be determined by how well it tolerated conflicting values. How well was Canada doing that in the Harper government era?
To build a portrait of what holds Canadians together, or is driving them apart, I worked with EKOS Research president Frank Graves and senior consultants James McKee and Jeff Smith; was given access to EKOS’s detailed analysis of Canadians’ values and outlook on their lives, their future and their country; and at one point designed my own poll administered by EKOS to probe Canadians’ political values.
I had advice from one of the wisest people in the country, U of T professor emerita Ursula Franklin, who politely let me know (relatively early on in my quest, fortunately) that I wasn’t asking the right questions.
Social cohesion is not really about values, or even countervalues.
Values shift glacially, says Graves, and the values of Canadians have changed very little over the decades. Most Canadians, now as before, reject the social conservative values of the Harper government.
But what is happening is that the legitimacy of our democracy has inched toward crisis, with the great majority of Canadians under the age of 45 withdrawing or having withdrawn from formal participation in it.
It has resulted in government by gerontocracy, in government determined by that portion of the population, about 25 per cent of the total, that votes en masse and is wedded to the Harper Conservatives, in government by those who favour moral certainty over knowledge and reason, who are suspicious of science.
It is a gerontocracy, says Graves, that reflects “the exaggerated and imagined fears of older Canada precisely at the time when we urgently need the more optimistic and innovative outlooks of the relatively scarcer younger portion of our society.”
Canadian society is fractured by age and by education, the latter a long-time proxy for social class. Both fractures are complicated — but, as John Ralston Saul once said, the purpose of mythology is to simplify complicated stories — and in Canada the central mythology is that the place is complicated.
Social cohesion is not about values, says Franklin. It is about excommunication. Who do we excommunicate to the margins of mainstream life, who do we not let through the door to share in the good life?
Go look at the workplace, she said.
The workplace, the crucible of our sense of personal meaning, is being rapidly devalued.
The young are excluding themselves from democracy but are in turn being excluded from easy access to the labour market regardless of how hard they try to appropriately prepare themselves through education and deferring of major life decisions like marriage and child raising. There are now more Canadians in their 20s living with their parent than in couples.
The Quebec student protests over tuition increases were dismissed by media commentators, mainly in English-speaking Canada, as the tantrums of spoiled brats already paying the lowest fees in Canada.
What media critics didn’t point out, says Martine Desjardins, president at the time of the Féderation Étudiante Universitaire du Québec, was the high percentage of first- and second-generation Canadians taking part in the protests and the statistic that Quebec students worked longer hours at part-time jobs to help pay for their schooling than students elsewhere in Canada.
The union men of Daimler Bus who gathered around me in that basement room in Oakville talked about themselves as trash, forgotten people. — We can’t turn back technology and globalization but can we ruin the lives of our fellow Canadians that easily?
Can we let immigration become the convenient instrument for creating an underclass in Canada under the glowing label of diversity?
We may, in fact, be forgetting the purpose of multiculturalism, something that occurs to me early one evening, sitting in a Tim Horton’s in Toronto’s Thorncliffe Park, home to 25,000 newcomers, and listening to Nadeem Siddiqui, a social researcher and businessman before immigrating from Bangladesh, describe how difficult it is to meet Canadians.
Multiculturalism is not about putting brown women on stage as nice diversity. It’s not as irrelevant as granny’s knickers. It’s about not leaving people excommunicated.
As the middle class gets more economically squeezed and more and more good jobs disappear, Graves’s research finds, not surprisingly, that Canadians’ enthusiasm for immigration is showing signs of dampening.
Three years ago, Britain’s Financial Times newspaper reported that Moody’s, the powerful sovereign debt rating agency, had assigned some of its smartest thinkers to the task of coming up with a social cohesion indice to apply to a country’s credit-worthiness.
No one from Moody’s would confirm this for me and the FT reporter didn’t respond to my queries but I found an academic who knew the inner workings of Moody’s and who agreed to talk to me so long as I didn’t quote him by name because then, he said, no one at Moody’s would ever talk to him again.
And, yes, he said, Moody’s had a social cohesion rating system.
The sons and daughters of immigrants have rioted in France. The young have rioted in London. The middle class has rioted in Brazil.
What might happen down the road if all three groups in Canada decided they didn’t like what was happening in the country and didn’t trust democracy to make a fix. EKOS, in a poll done for this series, asked Canadians if they’d be prepared to break the law if they didn’t like how the government was governing and a big majority said yes.
Award-winning journalist Michael Valpy is this year’s recipient of the Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy.
