Political lessons from a retired teacher
This is part of a series we’ve dubbed Politics for the rest of us — an attempt to see if Canadians can find common ground, without rancour, between differing views. Today, meet a retired school teacher who’d really appreciate it if everyone stopped the personal attacks and focused on the content of the arguments instead.
You’d expect a semi-retired teacher to care a lot about education, and indeed Laurel Roberts does, especially the historical kind. She is old enough to receive her federal pension but that doesn’t seem to have slowed her down much. From her home outside Calgary, she continues to be active in several evangelical churches. She has been married to the same man for more than 40 years; they have three adult kids (two of whom are married) and five grandchildren.
She is serious about her religion. But unlike many evangelical Christians, she can be critical of conservative parties and politicians when they get too arrogant. And her laissez-faire tendencies have limits. “A nation needs enough government to protect and defend its citizens,” she said, “to interact with other nations, to set and enforce standards of measurement and safety, and to provide basic national infrastructure” such as highways.
She tends to vote Conservative, even though she dislikes big government of any colour, much preferring the kind of personal charity and good works that she and her husband support. She was “very disappointed” that the Conservative executive under Stephen Harper “was so large, so prone to interfere in the concerns of provinces and municipalities, and so ready to pick winners and losers by funding select local projects. No government should do that.”
Had she been alive at that particular stage in history, she would not have voted for the Family Compact any more than she would vote now for the so-called “Laurentian Elite”: political and cultural leaders from Central Canada who wield much power, especially within the Liberal party. “I believe in servant-leadership, not entitlement,” she explains, “and I certainly don’t think government at any level should be taking care of us or telling us what is good for us. The question should not be, ‘Does government trust us?’ but ‘Do we trust them?’ ” Having said that, had she been American she would have voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. “He may be boorish, but he has surrounded himself with some good people and the American economy seems to be picking up.”
If she were given a magic wand to make changes to the way this country is run, she’d want to see better checks and balances, to “keep each level of government out of the jurisdictions of other levels of government, and the branches of government clearly defined.” She would like property rights enshrined in the Constitution, and elected representatives at all levels of government “get back to their job of restricting how the executive spends our money.”
Roberts would also like a simpler education system, “with a very basic curriculum guide, and replace ‘social studies’ with a good deal of history and its cousin, geography.” She would like provincial authorities to place more trust in their teachers and not impose so much paperwork under the guise of accountability. That’s not an approach necessarily popular among right-wingers, especially given that she points to Finland as an example worth following.
She firmly believes in fostering better educated children, not just schooled ones, because she thinks proper education would help us fight one of the big problems we currently have with young people coming out of school “who are far too easily duped.”
And she thinks if we could change one thing to improve our public discourse, it would be to “understand what the ‘ad hominem’ fallacy is, and give it up.
“Difficult as it is to have an open-hearted conversation with our opponents, we need to deal with the arguments themselves, instead of throwing out the people who are making them.”
And if she could change a second thing, she’d want us to develop genuine friendships with people we don’t necessarily agree with. “It’s a little harder to be fierce and rude with a friend. Not if you want to keep the friend.”
Focusing on the argument itself, while staying friendly with the person? There’s a worthwhile assignment.