Canadian Perspective

I got a real chuckle out of this NY Times op-ed by Thomas L. Friedman:

It’s always great to see the stock market come back from the dead. But I am deeply worried that our political system doesn’t grasp how much our financial crisis can still undermine everything we want to be as a country. Friends, this is not a test. Economically, this is the big one. This is August 1914. This is the morning after Pearl Harbor. This is 9/12. Yet, in too many ways, we seem to be playing politics as usual.

Our country has congestive heart failure. Our heart, our banking system that pumps blood to our industrial muscles, is clogged and functioning far below capacity. Nothing else remotely compares in importance to the urgent need to heal our banks.

Yet I read that we’re actually holding up dozens of key appointments at the Treasury Department because we are worried whether someone paid Social Security taxes on a nanny hired 20 years ago at $5 an hour. That’s insane. It’s as if our financial house is burning down but we won’t let the Fire Department open the hydrant until it assures us that there isn’t too much chlorine in the water. Hello?

Meanwhile, the Republican Party behaves as if it would rather see the country fail than Barack Obama succeed. Rush Limbaugh, the de facto G.O.P. boss, said so explicitly, prompting John McCain to declare about President Obama to Politico: “I don’t want him to fail in his mission of restoring our economy.” The G.O.P. is actually debating whether it wants our president to fail. Rather than help the president make the hard calls, the G.O.P. has opted for cat calls. It would be as if on the morning after 9/11, Democrats said they wanted no part of any war against Al Qaeda — “George Bush, you’re on your own.”

Why do I find this funny? Because this behaviour is exactly the same behaviour US authorities showed post-9/11. There were too many stories in Canada where fire trucks rushed to the US border to put out a fire on the US side but where stopped by border guards insisting on "proper documentation" while the building burned down. So the complaint of Friedman is about 7.5 years too old. This has been common practice in the US. Your country's bureaucracy is unable to distinguish real threats from idiotic bureaucratic red tape. It is sad. It shows a deep flaw which, unfortunately, there has been little or no attempt to fix.

The deep political divide is another problem. It is dysfunctional. Canada, sadly, is aping the US and moving toward politics over pragmatism with the current Conservative leadership under Stephen Harper. This is tragic for Canada, just as the idiot right wing ideologues are a tragedy for the US.