Another Canadian Loss
The closing of Report magazine is another sad blow to Canadian conservatism. It’s a little hard to explain to non-Canadians what the Report was and what it represented. Founded by a newspaperman turned teacher turned magazine editor named Ted Byfield, the Report was a newsmagazine saturated with opinion: a passionate, populist, explicitly Christian champion of the values and demands of the Canadian West.
Canadian conservatism is bound up with the plight of the Canadian West. The relationship between central Canada and western Canada has long been a grimly exploitive one, and the exploitation continues to this day. No province does worse out of Confederation than Alberta: As the Report frequently pointed out, every man, woman, and child in the province of Alberta pays C$3000more per year into the federal treasury than he or she receives. (The eastern provinces and Quebec, in turn, receive far more than they pay: Quebec alone is a net beneficiary to the tune of C$6 billion.)
To add injury to injury, the federal government has over a century through tariffs and regulations manipulated Canada’s terms of trades in ways that tend to raise the price of the goods Alberta imports while lowering the value of its exports. And this habit continues too: The Kyoto protocols that Ottawa so enthusiastically endorses will make it difficult, if not impossible, for Alberta to tap the vast petroleum reserves in its oil sands.
This exploitive relationship has taught Albertans to look at the doings of the Canadian federal government with more skepticism than any other group of Canadians. And it was this skepticism that the Report powerfully expressed – and forwarded. For the Report was more than a magazine: It was the vanguard of a movement. The Report midwifed the Reform party, which became the Canadian Alliance, which is today Canada’s official opposition.
The Report had its faults. It was not always well-written; it was never very attractive to look at. Its conservatism could be, well, obsessive and peculiar: It had a strange enthusiasm for doctors who felt persecuted by mainstream medicine, and some of its editors seemed not to have completely liberated themselves from Alberta’s Depression-era experiment with the crackpot Social Credit economics of Major Douglas. But the Report also launched an astonishing number of brilliant conservative media careers, including that of Ken Whyte, who went on to create the National Post. It articulated a social conservatism that otherwise would have gone unheard in Canada. And it never lost sight of its readers – or became inured to the injustices they and their province suffered. It will be missed – and it will not easily be replaced.
So Much for that Theory
Do you remember the media enthusiasm for Professor Richard Florida and his theory that the fastest-growing cities were those that catered to bohemians, gays, and urban trendies? He was wrong. Joel Kotkin demolishes Florida’s work in the current issue of the American Enterprise magazine, unfortunately unavailable online. Kotkin points out that English reached his conclusions by lumping ultra-square Silicon Valley in with San Francisco. In any case, Florida’s observation lasted only as long as the dot.com craze. In today’s economy, the fastest growing regions are family-friendly, church-attending suburbs like California’s Inland Empire. Florida’s theories were widely reported. Let’s see how much traction Kotkin’s demolition gets.