By Jonathan McQuarrie
Sneers extinguish far-reaching ideas. Such was the fate of the recent Leap Manifesto, a document that emerges from the conviction that “Canada is facing the deepest crisis in recent memory.” It’s easier to dismiss an idea that calls for a radical rethinking of Canada and energy regimes, indigenous policy, and social programs than it is to actually engage with the ideas, to actually develop criticisms that explain precisely why radical rethinking isn’t necessary. Banal dismissal is all the easier when one writes for the Globe and Mail, a paper that, for all its considerable merits, tends to slant towards the complacent and comfortable, to people with money and influence. (This is hardly a criticism—we all enjoy being comfortable. But comfort tends not to encourage substantial risk).
Of course, it is too early to write a post-mortem on the Leap Manifesto. It was released just over two weeks ago, and signed by well-known people who will, in all likelihood, continue to advocate for clean, community-based energy regimes. Naomi Klein, David Suzuki, Charles Taylor, and Thomas King are hardly people without audiences. However, like most radical documents, it begins at a disadvantage. Some disadvantages come from economic context—globally orientated trade governed by privately-orientated capitalism has, for all its flaws, created staggering wealth and prompted unparalleled growth in incomes and goods (distinct, of course, from distribution). Frankly, too many people do well by the revenues produced from global capitalism to seriously consider locally orientated alternatives.
The reception of the Leap Manifesto brought to my mind reception of the Manifesto for an Independent Socialist Canada. The latter manifesto, issued by the so-called Waffle Movement in 1969, was spearheaded by Mel Watkins and James Laxer. The Waffle Manifesto, emerging as it did from a Cold War context where the United States loomed large and Canadians of various national stripes fretted about their national identity (cf. Grant’s Lament for a Nation), called for total divestment from the “American Empire.” For the authors, the United States essentially was capitalism, a point the manifesto made clear when it claimed that Canadian capitalists were simply dependent on Americans and that “Capitalism must be replaced with socialism.” Pointing to the “alienating” nature of capitalism, the Waffle Manifesto asserted that a socialist economy would contribute to healing the rift between English and French Canada (indigenous people are conspicuously absent for the modern reader, a flaw common for older socialist critiques that foregrounded class as the terrain of politics). Statist planning of a national economy was presented as a viable alternative to capitalism.
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At a 1923 meeting of the Great War Veterans Association (GWVA) in Ottawa, General William Antrobus Griesbach, former Member of Parliament for Edmonton West and Senator for Alberta, remarked on the expected role of the ex-soldier in Canadian political life. “I had an idea at one time,” he explained, “that after the war over half of the Canadian parliament would be men who had served in the war. I had an idea it would hardly be possible for a man to be elected to parliament who had not served his country in the war on active service.” To his disappointment, at the time of this speech, only a handful of sitting MPs had fought in the Great War. Although he cautioned against organized political action by veterans’ groups, Griesbach argued, “I say that the ex-service men should be active in politics, active on all sides.”[1]
