As I write this, large parts of Canada’s maritime provinces are either on fire or waiting to catch fire. Lots of people are understandably scared about the potential loss of lives and property, but one extremely loud group of people are upset about something else: the emergency orders in both New Brunswick and Nova Scotia prohibiting people for entering forests on Crown lands. For some, including the Canadian Constitution Foundation, this is an intolerable infringement of Charter rights.
The CCF or someone else could challenge the bans in court; given how various court challenges aimed at COVID-19 measures fared in Canadian courts (badly) I suspect that the odds of prevailing are slim — although a court might reduce some of the fines Nova Scotia has imposed without attacking the underlying emergency measures. COVID-19 is relevant here, too, because for many of the plaintiffs-to-be, this is the latest example of the creeping expansion of state power to control people’s private activities.
The latter concern is factually wrong: Nova Scotia has implemented similar bans on activities in Crown forests going back at least to 2001. This isn’t a case of governments getting too cozy with the powers the pandemic afforded them and now overusing them; if extensive fire bans are becoming more common, it might be because Canadian fire seasons are becoming more dangerous thanks to climate change.
There is another aspect to this controversy that has caught my eye, however, and that’s an intuition among some observers that this would all be avoidable if governments had adopted some basket of policies to be better prepared. Maybe that’s more aggressive forest management, maybe that’s hiring a substantially larger wildland fire service. Either way, there’s an implication that the conflict between my right to use a public forest and the government’s need to protect lives and property wouldn’t even be a conflict if the government would just do its job properly. Even as the government actually oversees the hard, dangerous work of fighting fires, there’s also a deep mistrust that it couldn’t be done better.
Fighting fires in difficult-to-access areas is always going to be a difficult job, more so when a hot, dry summer turns the forests to kindling, so it’s not clear to me that in this specific instance the intuition has any merit. But once you recognize it, you start to see that basic lack of trust in all sorts of conflicts in our current politics, from the hyper-local to the national in scope.
Here in Toronto, there was a recent controversy about the specific route of some bus-only lanes being proposed in advance of the city hosting some World Cup games next year. The city's original proposal had lanes on Bathurst and Dufferin running north of Bloor. Nobody who’s ridden these routes could possibly deny that they badly need measures to improve both their speed and reliability. But on top of the usual gripes from business owners being asked to part with “their” on-street parking spaces, some argued that local residents were being asked to bear a real cost while the TTC has failed to deal with its own operational issues both on its surface routes and elsewhere — a charge that’s on a more solid footing than much of the recent wildfire debate.
From the hyper-local, we could go national: one of the biggest concerns about expanding access to medical assistance in dying (MAID) in Canada has been that for many already-marginalized people, MAID will be easier to access than the supports that would otherwise allow them to live in relative comfort. MAID advocates can reasonably say this is a problem with provincial funding of health and social services, not with federal MAID legislation itself — but no policy is implemented in a vacuum, and it’s absolutely fair game to take the broadest possible view when we’re talking about literal life and death decisions.
Whether it's wildfires, transit operations, or MAID — and frankly, more examples than I have space for in this column — a lot of our political conflicts are at least partly informed by either the belief or the observable facts that individuals are being asked to bear the costs of government inaction or inadequacy. Some conservatives have recently begun talking about the need for “state capacity,” a wonkish term for the more commonsense notion that a) there are real, important things we broadly agree the government should do and b) the government should be able to do those things competently and efficiently. An easy-to-grasp comparison: if Toronto could build subways as efficiently as some of the world’s best cities, the cost of the Ontario Line could build four times as many kilometres of track.
That’s the obvious, tangible benefit of a government that can execute on its promises efficiently. But I can’t help but think that if Canadians saw a government that worked more often in their everyday life, it might also take some of the poison out of our politics. The government can’t, at the end of the day, avoid all of the hard choices. But people might be more forgiving of those choices if they saw public services in their community that worked reliably, effectively, and efficiently more often.
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