When big dreams collide with harsh realities

Opinion

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This article was published 30/09/2023 (743 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

We need people who dream big, and we need them in politics. It is the only real way to make major changes — truth is, people who make decisions with their own money tend to be a lot more risk-averse.

The only problem for those big public-office dreamers is that their greatest skill is also their greatest flaw.

Once they’ve settled on a dream, they are the kind of people who are nearly impossible to dissuade. Convinced of the accuracy of their own decision-making, they just keep going, regardless of the cost.

Sometimes, that dream is right. A big, successful ditch around the city of Winnipeg is testament to that.

Other big dreamers have not been so prescient: former Newfoundland and Labrador premier Danny Williams was bullish on a massive hydroelectric development at Muskrat Falls that could not possibly go over budget or fall behind schedule. It did both — the $6.2-billion project wound up costing more than $13.5 billion, and was completed more than five years later than planned. It produces some of the most expensive electricity in Canada.

British Columbia dug themselves into the same sort of hole with the Site C project.

I don’t even have to explain the similar issues that have cropped up in this province.

And it’s not just mega-projects, either.

I recognize Alberta might want to have its own pension plan, for example. With high wages meaning workers would regularly top-out contributions, and a younger population that doesn’t draw pensions out at the same rate, I can see why provincial politicians might like to have a new cash cow they’d like to use to invest in their own pet projects, and would like to harvest the money that’s already been contributed to the Canada Pension Plan by Albertans.

But demographics catch up with everyone: eventually, the people with money in an Alberta pension plan will want their pensions.

The fact is Alberta simply doesn’t own the money it wants to withdraw from the CPP: it belongs to the Canadians in whose names the funds have been set aside, and not to anyone else.

I don’t expect Danielle Smith to understand that nuance: with a big dream and a critically flawed study to back her up, I can see Alberta’s UCP trying to push the plan through, damn the torpedoes.

It doesn’t matter there are clear reasons to be cautious. Big dreams rule.

Likewise Heather Stefanson, with her big dream about bringing Manitoba’s population to two million by 2030, less than seven years from now.

In the PC’s plan, Vision 2030, the people will come here first, and then their taxes would improve services later — “Strengthening Manitoba’s economy will create more revenue for government to pay for the services that Manitobans rely on, while reducing burdensome taxes on Manitobans,” the news release for the plan says.

It sounds like a grand idea, but the real issue is that big dreams take big advance plans, and even bigger advance investment. And those plans — primarily centring around increased spending on services, on infrastructure, on health and education — are the exact opposite of what the PC government’s focus has been in the past.

A tax-cutting, budget-cutting government isn’t building the supports needed to handle a rapid increase in population — it’s actually whittling away at the supports for the population it already is supposed to serve.

To put it crassly, where does Stefanson think those extra 600,000 people are going to be able to find a bathroom, let alone somewhere to lay their heads? They won’t be waiting for the inevitable lead-time it takes to build new schools for their kids or expand hospital beds. We already have shortages now: add 40 per cent more people to this province, and just imagine the impact on something as simple as the price of a house.

It almost makes me wish every government employed an official devil’s advocate — a trusted person who could question the big ideas from inside the government itself, so their legitimate concern wouldn’t be dismissed as naysaying or the work of political opponents.

I’ve covered Canadian politics for a very long time, and the one thing I’ve learned is that, whatever direction they are going, right or left, they love nothing better than to keep their foot on the gas.

Finding the brake pedal? That’s a whole different thing.

Russell Wangersky is the Comment Editor at the Free Press. He can be reached at russell.wangersky@freepress.mb.ca