Canada's culture of begging

No sooner had David Miller been re-elected mayor of Toronto last month than he began to beg for money: publicly, openly, unashamedly. During the campaign, the mayor had been the fount of munificence, for all the world as if the promises he was making were to be funded out of his own personal wealth.

But now the election was over; time for the begging to start. “Tonight,” he told his electors, “you have given me a strong mandate to tell the Premier and the Prime Minister that Toronto deserves a one-cent share of sales tax revenue, and we will not take ‘No’ for an answer.” It’s not clear why the mayor needed a “mandate” to do this, but what comes through loud and clear is the sense of entitlement: Toronto deserves, not taking ‘no’ for an answer etc.

Somehow in his own mind the mayor had transformed what in most contexts is considered shameful, even craven behaviour -- begging -- into a point of pride, an assertion of the city’s self-worth. He was not asking for money, out of charity, you understand: he was demanding it, as of right. He wasn’t doing so on his account, but because Torontonians had given him a mandate. And it wasn’t for him, to bail him out of the cost of his own promises. It was for “Toronto.”

I don’t mean to single out the mayor. His own evident shamelessness on this score only reflects the larger culture in which he is immersed. The fact is that a great many political leaders in Canada consider it the larger part of their duties to beg other people for money. You’d think it would be enough, having the power to take people’s money, by taxation. But at length even this well runs dry, and so their attention turns to other levels of government, even other jurisdictions. All politicians cultivate the art of persuading one group of voters that another group of voters will pay for their plans, but in Canada, as in few other places, that second group is often not even within their bailiwick.

Nor are politicians by any means the only profession to succumb to this temptation. Corporate leaders, particularly in the manufacturing sector, can be spotted soliciting passers-by for spare change almost every day. To be sure, the passers-by are called “the government,” and the cash they dispense is not called a handout but an “investment” or even a “commitment,” and it’s not their money but someone else’s, but the fundamentals are the same. So let’s call it by its proper name: not “transfers” or “subsidies” or even “corporate welfare,” but begging.

It would not be going too far to say that this country has developed a culture of begging. I’m not talking about the panhandlers and squeegee kids you see in increasing numbers on the street. I’m talking about grown men with jobs and suits and houses, men who in all likelihood would rather walk through fire than ask for a quarter on the subway but who think nothing of cadging billions of dollars from the taxpayer. Any number of principled arguments might be made against this practice, but you’d think at some point simple shame would enter into it: a sense that this is not how anyone with any self-respect ought to conduct himself. Yet it almost never does. After all, the money’s there. Might as well go to us as someone else.

This has become the operative principle, for example, of federal-provincial relations. The Premier of Ontario, the very man from whom Mr. Miller was last seen trying to bum a spare percentage point, has spent most of his time in office pleading for money from the feds. Just this week, his Finance minister, Greg Sorbara, was complaining that he could not cut Ontarians’ taxes because of “major shortfalls in federal funding.”

“In simple terms,” he told a legislative committee, “Ontario over the past several years is always on the verge of not having the resources that it needs.” Leave aside the facts of the case. (At 15.4% of GDP, provincial revenues last year were at their second-highest level ever; federal transfers to Ontario, at $13.2 billion, were the highest ever, after adjusting for inflation and population growth, and nearly twice as much as they were just five years ago.) How can he look at himself in the mirror?

Oh, and this just in: Provincial health ministers, fresh from mooching $41-billion from the federal government just to establish targets for wait times -- and failing to do even that -- are now demanding billions more to actually meet those unset targets. Once upon a time there was a point to these transfers, when there were meaningful conditions attached and the expectation that these would be met. But that no longer being the case, it is time they were ended, along with the rest of the subsidy boodle on which the corporate sector has become so dependent.

It is time, that is, to confront the culture of begging head on. We need to stage an “intervention” with our political and corporate leaders. We need to tell them to shave, shower, and get a job.