THE CASE FOR CANADA
Just because he joined a big law firm doesn’t mean Brian Tobin
is going to start pulling his punches

By Mike Dojc

Photograph by Yuri Dojc

I was number five of nine, the middle child in a family of nine children, and I’ve often made the joke that I was about 12 or 13 before anybody figured out I was there. But it was terrific. Growing up, we had a very close family and it remains very, very close today. It is a large support network of parents and brothers and sisters and extended families. We all root for each other. It gives you a great sense of being centred and being solid with respect to your place on the planet.

I think that Canadians are by instinct culturally almost modest. It’s not that we lack confidence but we think that it is inappropriate to demonstrate it too boldly. It’s not that we lack ideas but we think it is rude to shout them from the rooftops. In Canada, one of our cultural attributes I would say is a degree of moderation, a degree of caution, a degree, dare I say, of conservatism about how we manifest our own personalities day to day in our communities, in our offices and within our families. That’s a very attractive Canadian attribute, but it’s one that often leaves us looking a little bland in the eyes of much of the rest of the world. Perhaps we should learn a little more from our friends south of the border about how to be less reluctant to express our own self-interests and to demand a greater measure of respect for what we define as our own self-interests.

I grew up with Americans. I lived on an American air force base. One thing I know about Americans is that if an American pushes you and you move back a foot, the natural instinct for most of them is to push and take another foot. Until you push back, they’ll keep taking ground. It’s a lesson Canadians might learn.

We’re still too heavily taxed in Canada. We’re still over-governed in Canada. We’ve got three big layers of government—municipal, provincial and federal—and, by the way, I share, for example, here in Toronto Mayor [David] Miller’s view that we need to look at how cities are empowered to govern themselves.

What Canadians should do when they think about health care is go back and look at what Tommy Douglas said. When Tommy Douglas introduced health care, he introduced a system that was far less complex, far less generous, far less comprehensive than the system we have today. And certainly, Tommy Douglas never argued for a health-care system where you would spend 40 or 50 cents of every tax dollar you collected delivering health care. I think there probably is a role for governments to sit down and courageously and bravely and truthfully have a dialogue with Canadians about how we maintain the public health-care system. And how do you do it? Probably by making smaller the range of services now being offered and by inviting the private sector to help deliver not a private health-care system but to deliver more efficiently portions of the public health-care system.

Canada is a country that is a virtual warehouse of resources and we haven’t even figured out where half the warehouse is yet. The riches of this country—offshore oil and gas, mineral resources, natural gas resources, forestry resources and rich agricultural lands—are stunning, almost incomparable in the world. It is a country that increasingly, in particular over the past decade, has invested in its human resources and in research and development. Ten years ago, we were talking about a brain drain constantly. Every second article in every newspaper was about the brain drain. We don’t talk about it anymore. We’ve invested in our universities again, we’ve invested in R and D, we’ve had federal governments, provincial governments and the private-sector partner, and so we are the incubator for a lot of the great new ideas and knowledge that are being discovered. We are the country that is taking that new knowledge, revealing it and quickly adapting it to private-sector opportunities. We’re the first adapter in many cases.

Anybody who believes that the world, this global economy, is static, or that the status quo can be counted upon, is being foolish. We’re seeing a large chunk of the manufacturing base of the Western world being moved to China, India, Vietnam. You now have voices in the U.S. Senate and Congress calling for the United States to stop that drift to keep these jobs at home in the States. The truth of the matter is you can’t.

If you are going to have a global economy, you are going to have a wide-open trading system that allows the whole world to participate. You can’t stop growth of a new manufacturing base in parts of the world that are just developing that base. So what do you have to do? If you’re going to succeed in the future, going to create the new jobs of the global economy, you have to be a country that is expert, that is proficient at revealing new knowledge and being an early and first adapter of that new knowledge. And even as you lose some of the traditional manufacturing jobs that you’ve had, you’ve got to create a whole new layer of opportunity on the knowledge side. That is Canada’s challenge.

Brian Tobin works a senior business adviser to the law firm Fraser Milner Casgrain LLP in Toronto.
The former premier of Newfoundland and Labrador spent 26 consecutive years in politics, serving
as Minister of Fisheries and Oceans (1993-1996) and Minister of Industry (2000-2002).
He was interviewed by Mike Dojc.