CKNW Editorial
for August 3, 1999

Post hoc ergo propter hoc … I’ll bet you haven’t heard or read many pieces starting with that now, have you. Roughly it means just because the rooster crows when the sun comes up doesn’t mean the sun comes up because the rooster crows. So be it with Donald Guttstein’s concerns about the right wing bias of the print media.

Don’t get me wrong … there is a very unhealthy concentration of ownership of newspapers in this country and there is unquestionably the bias of ownership on the editorial pages and in the selection of columnists. In fact, it’s very good that Benjamin Yetanyahu was ousted from the Prime Ministership of Israel because I was bound to write a column in the Province criticizing Israel and as Greg Felton found with the Conrad Black controlled Vancouver Courier, you write other than puff pieces about Israel in a paper controlled by David Radler at considerable peril.

But sincere as I have no doubt Mr Guttstein is, I thing he’s proptering his ergos here. I don’t think any editor has to consider what his version of the left is saying because they’re simply not saying anything worth printing. The Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives, decent folks all, are chasing issues of yesteryear. We hear all about Free Trade, Nafta, how corporations are not good citizens accompanied by the usual socialist rhetoric… and no one is listening.

The problem Donald has is that he and his are no longer the left … they are as marginalized in the new arrangements as Trotskyites and Marxist-Leninists were when Communism reigned supreme in much of the world. The left today is the Liberal Party in Canada, the northern Democratic Party in the United States and the New Labour Party in Britain. To which list one might add the NDP government of Roy Romanow in Saskatchewan.

The globalization movement has presented new and very substantial challenges and the old left ought to be playing a role in dealing with those challenges. But the answer isn’t just to take on MAI – and many of the non left did this too – but present ideas how a future MAI can be put into place. There is a terrific challenge in the world to all countries – how do you get a piece of the world action without losing your industries and your identity? Now, the far right has been no better than the old left at this for they tend to take every new corporate exertion as made in heaven and untouchable.

The problems remain the same as those constantly raised by the left in former days but the solutions have changed.

What is it we’re facing? Essentially it is a liberated pool of capital – really hundreds of pools – which because the computer age has made them hard to control has obliterated the government’s ability, under old ways, to exercise fiscal power. In 1993 a single man, George Soros, fought the Bank of England and the UK government, beat them to the ground, and pocketed a billion dollars in the bargain. This is pretty heady stuff and think tanks must help us deal with the obvious national and community problems arising out of these huge changes globalization has brought. What doesn’t help are seminars led by yokels like David Orchard calling for the repeal of Nafta. This isn’t going to happen. What we do need is all the thinking we can get on how to attract capital to our corner of the world, keep it here when the going gets a bit tough – as it always does – and minimize the threats to our nationality this investment brings.

The old left was very, very good at one thing – listing all that’s wrong and screeching it from every available soap box. What they’ve never been able to do and can’t do now is come up with any workable answers – lots of glitzy buzz words but no answers.

No, I would argue that the “new” left in the world generally and Canada particularly are getting lots of press.

It’s the left wing voices from the distant past, that is to say prior to 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down, that aren’t being heard … and that’s because no one wants to listen any more.