Links and reading, listening and viewing recommendations for February 2025
If you scour the pages of LinkedIn, it won’t take long before you begin running into folks from the corporate sector who are attempting to rationalize Elon Musk‘s current approach to organizational change within the US federal government. Many of them are drawing on their experiences, or their veneration of, startup culture, and I have seen posts lately, that I’m not going to bother to link to, which talk about the principle of “move fast and break things“ being worth a shot when it comes to government. Treat it like a startup. That way you get more innovation.
It shouldn’t even require a response. But here we are.
Governments are not businesses. They don’t resemble businesses in any way. From a business perspective, the job of government is to provide a stable social substrate of policies, and predictable regulations and legislation that makes it possible for businesses to operate. On top of that government picks up the costs that businesses externalize onto society as a whole, like education and safety and health care and basic research and infrastructure.
A few blunt examples for these corporate shills.
- When companies are starting up, Society provides them with educated talent, and serviced environments in which they can establish their operations. Companies never have to pay for the investments that all of us make in an educated workforce.
- Companies largely don’t have to worry about how their employees get to work. Roads, public transportation, and a well-regulated telecommunications system provides the predictability and ease that companies require for their employees.
- When economies change or companies go bankrupt, governments are the one that care for the aftermath. Workers are paid compensation, communities who are suffering, are provided resources and local governments take on the work of creating climate for sustained economic activity.
The many functions that governments provide to communities and regions, require them to operate with a continuity of care, especially to those that are the most vulnerable and require special assistance, like children, folks who are ill or disabled, elders requiring long-term care and others. Governments take on the collective responsibilities that are beyond the scope of any of us to care for on our own, including regulating our food supply, managing, and protecting the environment, and our natural resources, ensuring that we have a stable and predictable dispute resolution systems.
It is absolutely ridiculous to me that I’ve had to repeat these points to people that should otherwise know better.
A government‘s obligations are to provide stable and predictable continuity of care to a citizens. A business’ obligations are to provide an ever-increasing return to its shareholders. In fact, many of those advocating for a startup mentality to be applied to “government efficiencies“ don’t even see the irony of the fact that a startup’s purpose is to generate nearly unlimited growth. “Move fast and break things“ is a principle used to maximize profits and expansion in the early years of a startup. And yet some folks are unironically, wanting to apply this principle to government operations, where the thing that gets broken is people and communities and where moving fast threatens the very stability upon which businesses rely. And the cost of repairing those things arenot going to be covered by shareholders.
For my whole life, and especially during the years in which I work for the public service in Canada, I have had to constantly make this argument. It is so simple to understand the differences between business and government, and yet it is those who should know better but who like to project airs of confidence and confidence who seem so willing to conflate the two. I now look upon these folks as pure charlatans.
Understand the difference. The same nonsense may be coming to Canada again too. The metaphors of managing government like a business or, God forbid, a household budget, are not only unhelpful, but they are fundamentally dangerous, and if used to guide actual policy making will result in long-term damage from which people, communities, businesses, and countries may be unable to recover.
A report today from Bowen Island’s marine steward extraordinaire, Adam Taylor:
2025 Herring Spawn started today in Squamish accompanied by Whitesided Dolphins feeding.
Herring spawn in Snug Cove was last observed in the +/- 1960s but you never know when nature decides to return.
Please keep an eye out for enthusiastic seabird or marine mammal activity along Bowen’s shoreline.
Will report back when I hear from folks monitoring Coal Harbour as that’s a bit closer to us.
A sure sign of spring! Slhawt’/Herring spawning season is the first big ocean activity to take place after the winter. So although it is cold and there is an Arctic outflow blowing for another few days, spring is just around the corner.
I did hear reports of about 20 dolphins way up the inlet yesterday. The first thing I thought of was that they were after the herring. The herring population in our inlet has made a remarkable recovery over the past 25 years. Well worth paying attention to.
In the past few weeks, the President of the USA has issued explicit challenges to the sovereignty of Canada, both political and economic. In response to these challenges, some of my Canadian friends who lie on the more progressive and of the political spectrum have expressed a slightly disconcerting attachment to feelings of nationalism.
I understand where they’re coming from. Over the past five days Canadians have been engaged in a nationwide conversation about what it means to be Canadian, what our country stands for, and in some cases, whether we shouldn’t just join with the United States anyway. Ironically, it’s voices on the far right, who, over the past several years, have been loudly, proclaiming that they are “defending the integrity of Canada from Justin Trudeau and the woke mob” who are now saying that perhaps we should join the United States. So for the moment, we’re going to ignore those voices in this conversation because they have nothing to offer but to sow chaos, short term, outrage, and serve the interest of those who would seek to exploit this country’s resources and markets.
Instead I think it’s important that we think about what these feelings of national defensiveness mean and how they can translate into action.
My attachment to the idea of Canada is complicated. I’m not a nationalist, but instead, I would say that I believe in the project that Indigenous nations sought to co-create when they signed the original treaties. In other words, the people whose traditional lands Canada was established upon had, in most cases, a strong curiosity and sense of what might be possible with a co-creative relationship between different peoples, who offered different gifts to one another. Despite the subsequent centuries of dishonourin the treaties from the Crown side, Canada was nevertheless founded upon a set of fundamental relationships between the Crown of England and the Indigenous nations who were recognized in 1763 as the rightful owners of these territories.
The reason for protecting Canada as a separate container of collective effort is not that we have the best public health care or proper gun laws or a well regulated banking system or a generally more progressive attachment to equality and justice. These are outcomes of the kind of things we are working on. It isn’t perfect but here in this country we are running a different experiment in living together than the US is, and I, for one, prefer it.
In its most ideal form it looks like this: Our country is a federation of two levels of government established on the basis of relationships negotiated between the Crown and First Nations governments in most places. We are a treaty country, and in places where we have not concluded treaties with First Nations, Canadian law recognizes Aboriginal title as an existing layer of jurisdiction on the land. Our governments are supported by democratic and civil institutions which , in general are set up to work for the public good.
As a treaty country, the implication I have always taken is that we have to constantly work on the relationship not only with First Nations but with each other as well. The values that we have enshrined in our Constitution are related to what’s known as Peace, Order and Good Government. Again, problematic in many ways (not the least of which is that we have discovered that it is entirely possible to build a colonial state based on these principles), but if we take these as generative principles, a Constitution that sets out the powers of the federal and provincial government focused on Peace first of all is pretty cool. Order, while seeming like the need to control things, is nevertheless a value that enshrines stability and equality and access so that what happens in the country is predictable and stable enough that people can run businesses and work together and receive services. It enshrines equality and care before the law and in our social safety net. In the early days it was often freely exchanged for Welfare, which gives you a sense of what that value could embody.
And Good Government to me means one that is free of corruption, that has integrity, that stewards the public good for the benefit of the people. As a former public servant, I always took that role very seriously. When I was out doing third part consultation on the BC Treaty Process, I was acutely aware that I was at the working coal face of democracy participation. It was my job to make spaces for voices to participate in the act of nation building and active reconciliation through treaties with First Nations who wanted to enshrine their relationship with Canada in that form. Good Governance to me meant doing that work that left good relations on the ground.
I take these values to be the aspirational directions of travel we are moving in together. We disagree about how. We violate these principles constantly. There is no easy way to do it, but if you are Canadian, you live under a Constitution that is based on these values.
I just want to say that we have done this with mixed results in Canada through our history. We have some cool things here and we have also done some truly horrible things in Canada under the laws and principles enshrined in our Constitution. But this is the project and Canada is the container that I’m interested and committed to working within.
I distrust nationalism in any guise. Even in it’s progressive forms where I can see benefits (like the way Quebec nationalism has created incredible co-operative movements, credit unions and social safety nets) there is, very close to the surface, a vein of exclusion that can press differences into otherness and foster mistrust and hate. It is easy to take what has happened over the past week and generate a pro-Canadian stance that is also anti-American and also sublimates the real challenges we need to struggle with in this country. We don’t have to do that. I am not anti-American. My American colleagues and I have common cause in the world. We don’t need to adopt any kind of nationalist rhetoric or approach to defend the best of what this Canadian project is and to keep the vultures away so we can continue the hard work of trying to fulfill the promise of this place. We need only remember what we are trying to do here, and maintain the container of shared purpose, and double down on our efforts to show what is possible.
Bowen Island winter problems: strong winds and cancelled ferries.