The Big Empty

Phil Burpee, Columnist

Phil Burpee

The Empty Quarter they call it - Rub al Khali - that great, drifting wilderness of shifting sands and harrowing winds that constitute the trackless interior of the Arabian Peninsula. Down in Montana they call it the Big Empty - the huge swatch of disorienting antelope prairie that runs from not-quite Dakota all the way over to not-quite the Rockies - a place of no place in particular, where every hopeful rise in the landscape just delivers you to another vista of heat-shimmer and dust-devils. The barrens, the moors, the scrub, the bogs, the frozen wastes, the island-less seas, the nether reaches, the Land of Ghosts - many are the names we give to those places where life itself is of no value, and the snuffing out of the flickering flame of hope is a precursor to a terrible nothingness and the Void. 

The Big Empty

There is a Big Empty up here north of the Medicine Line too, no less oppressive than the most soul-chilling of geographical wastelands - it is called the Economic Action Plan of the Government of Canada. And be of no doubt - it is a place of fearsome emptiness, where only the disembodied spirits of lost and forlorn bean-counters, jaded and confused policy wonks, and fiscally-prudent ex-bureaucrats wander wraith-like amongst the sad ruins of long-term, socio-economic cost/benefit analyses. "Woooo-oo-oooo-ooooo....." they cry - pitiful wailings soon lost in the devouring winds of governmental lethargy and indifference.

We're in the middle of the slo-mo car crash scenario in this country. It's a hackneyed sort of truism that time seems to slow down as you enter a wreck, but I've been in enough tipping-point type incidents over the years in cars or on horses, or just almost losing your footing in that spot where you probably shouldn't have been scrambling in the first place, to say that it's true - it really happens. Everything starts to look like the commercials for Alberta Tourism where water-droplets seem to take forever to fall, or that girl's hair just seems to drift across the camera for ever and ever - a dreamy state where the conventional laws of time and motion are suspended, and your brain is warped into a drug-like space - the better to believe what you're seeing must be pure magic. But the high-speed cinematography of our national decline into single-commodity slavery is quite another sort of dream-world - more along the lines of the attenuated screech of rubber on pavement and the terrible clattering of gravel in the wheel-wells as the bus begins its long, ugly lurch off its drive line and starts to pitch hippopotamus-like over the edge of that forty-foot embankment - and all the while those pathetic little monkey faces glued to the windows with their fingers outstretched, and their eyes saucer-like and uncomprehending.

There was a bit of feather-ruffling a while back in the news when Tom Mulcair, leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition in Ottawa, observed that there were certain structural imbalances in our current national economy which, if not carefully recalibrated, would cause increasing harm and place the country as a whole in increasing jeopardy. The much-deployed term Dutch Disease is used to quantify this type of economic malaise. The term stems from an episode some decades ago when Holland's economy became suddenly overwhelmed by the fruits of an off-shore hydrocarbon play, which resulted in the guilder suddenly morphing into a petro-guilder and, owing to the high volatility and ever-increasing value of oil products on the world market, caused the apparent value of Holland's currency to rise dramatically. And when a currency rises in value arbitrarily against the dollar standard based purely on an extractive industry, and in isolation from actual broad-market valuations, then the rest of the economy suffers accordingly and in a predictable fashion. As the currency appreciates, so do the concomitant costs of production (cost of living, wages, supplies), especially and particularly in the export sector. So, in short, the Dutch priced themselves out of both the European and world market and suffered a significant collapse of their manufacturing sector, with a resulting flight of both capital and people, along with a spike in unemployment and a heightening of social tensions.

Mr. Mulcair was making an objective observation, not to mention a volatile and politically dangerous one. It is easily supportable, however, by a variety of well-established economic models, including those espoused by the Economist, which, tellingly, still chooses to refer to Alberta's 'tarsands' as 'Alberta's dirty oil' - and this from a flagship publication of capitalist enterprise. What he was saying is that an over-accelerated development of the oilsands with chronically-insufficient royalty levies is resulting in an over-valued Canadian petro-dollar which in turn directly results in a weakened export capacity, especially in the manufacturing sector, as had happened to the Dutch. This is not debatable - it simply is the case. The question is as to whether the undeniable benefits of the oilsands might outweigh such side-effects (or as Robin Williams once quipped in a sketch about Olestra and it's potential ‘side-effect’ of anal leakage - "That's not a side-effect - I think that's an effect!"). Of course the hackles came up right away and the spectre of the National Energy Policy of Pierre Elliot Trudeau (the N.E.P. of P.E.T.) was dutifully disinterred and paraded about in all its mouldery horror. Much pompous indignation was to be seen on the TV, including Premier Brad Wall of Saskatchewan harping on about 'divisiveness' and 'impediments to progress', etc. Mr. Harper and Ms. Redford likewise obliged with mock dismay and indignation. Of course, Mr. Wall would have to come out on the attack, especially since he's busied himself with undercutting Alberta's already too-low hydrocarbon royalties these last several years in order to try and poach some business for Scratchy's mini-patch in the eastern Athabasca. This business model can be summed up as 'bend over and spread 'em'. Hardly a bastion of thoughtful conservatism.

But then conservatism is on the run these days amongst Canada's right-wing administrations, especially those of Ottawa and Edmonton. Given the approximate socio-political flavours of conservation, preservation and exploitation - typically loosely attached respectively to small-c conservatives and/or social-democrats (conservation), greenies (preservation), and gluttonous capitalists (exploitation), it seems disturbingly clear that our 'Conservative' governments are increasingly in thrall to the siren call of exploitation. That siren of temptation should give us a sick feeling, like the old air-raid sirens of the 1960s. The warnings are sharp - and they are immediate - 'Something wicked this way comes.....'.

It is informative to note that what passes for socio-economic development these days from the perspective of government is little more than an abrogation of what otherwise would be perceived as the state's responsibility to assure equitable market-access for all of society. Along with this there is a pernicious misperception that the Free Market approximates the behaviour of the food chain in the jungle. It is nothing of the sort. Nature 'red in tooth and claw' is by no means the model upon which ten thousand years of human commerce and intellectual interaction is based. The absolute essence of the marketplace is the fair exchange of goods and ideas - not the overwhelming of lesser interests by the misbehaviour of unbridled monstrosities. There is now a so-called 'wisdom' that any impingement whatsoever upon the malignant proclivities of certain corporate entities is tantamount to free-market heresy - why else do you think corporations are even now busily working to see to it that they are not only regarded as 'persons' under proprietary and civil law, but are also wheedling their way deviously and inexorably into the body of protections afforded under various forms of Human Rights and Bill of Rights legislation? It is in no way substantively different than having the weasel petition for access to the chicken house for no better reason than that the chickens are allowed in there, and it is discriminatory to so hinder the hard-working weasel in his legitimate pursuits - viz. killing chickens. Children can figure this kind of bogus line of twisted logic out in a jiffy.

An economy addicted to the hydrocarbon sector is like an eighteen year old kid about five seconds away from getting his girlfriend pregnant - 'It feels too good to pull out nuh-nuh-nooooow!' We inhabit a federation in this country, for good or for ill. It is absolutely necessary to have the sort of discussions as that triggered by Mr. Mulcair. Pretending nobody let go a beaner in the cocktail lounge gets us nowhere. If an over-emphasis on a commodity-based economy is causing problems with the manufacturing sector, let's have a conversation about that. If agri-business and trans-global chemical and seed outfits are gutting rural life and sending waves of young country folk fleeing to the cities, let's have a conversation about that too. To complain that pointing out the frailties and susceptibilities in the federation is automatically 'divisive' is just self-serving bluster. The new owners of the Athabasca oilsands - Alberta, Saskatchewan and Canada - are nothing more than lottery winners. We woke up one day with a winning ticket, and now behave as though we invented it or earned it. We didn't. What we do earn, if we try, is a rightful place in the human family. And this isn't done by finger-pointing and unwarranted crowing.

It's windy in the Big Empty. Coyotes yip and the dust stings as it hits your face. The swirling sands of hysteria and delusion quickly gather around your ankles, clutching and creeping, sucking you down. Reach out for an anchor-post and there's nothing there - just the cackling of the banshees, and the fast-receding voices of reason and good sense. Don't believe everything you see on TV. And always, always beware the crocodile tears of the pompous and the righteously indignant.

Phil Burpee

May 26, 2012