Beware the peddlers of ‘change’

Let us suppose we had decided it was time to move house or trade in our car. Entirely understandable. We are human. We tire of things, outgrow them or come to have different needs.

Besides, newness is exciting. Improvement always beckons. The grass, as someone who understood human yearning once noted, usually seems greener elsewhere.

What are the odds, though, that, should a realtor suggest a house a few kilometres away but refuse to show it to us, or if an auto dealer brought a new car to the curb but draped in a tarpaulin, we’d make these changes sight unseen? Not very likely. For as much as we aspire to do better or have more, we instinctively know that not all change is for the good. Some is. Some isn’t. The details don’t just matter. They make or break the deal.

Which makes it curious why, as consumers of a different product — as voters — we are so easily smitten by campaigning politicians who assure us that not only is it time for change, but that they, by some cosmic authority that conveniently demands no particulars, are the agent of that change.

It’s a tactic on which no political side holds a monopoly. Little is more unchanging, actually, in the 21st century than promises of change from campaigning politicians.

Barack Obama promised “change you can believe in.” Now, already essentially campaigning for the June 7 Ontario election, Progressive Conservative Leader Doug Ford promises change — and not much more.

“The people of this province are ready for change,” Ford said on the shambolic evening he won the leadership. “To the people of Ontario, I say relief is on its way.”

In the weeks since, elaboration has been slight.

“We’re going to find efficiencies, we’re going to drive efficiencies through lean systems, best practices and technologies,” he told one interviewer. Asked how, he said: “We’re going to start sharing synergies.”

This is worrisome. For change is not inherently positive. It involves risk. That’s why a fundamental rule of life — and for a very long time — has been caveat emptor.

So as with our prospective buyer of a new home or car, Ontarians interested in political change will presumably insist on learning more in coming weeks about the products on offer.

They might also contemplate the paradox at work in the modern desire for change.

In truth, the last quarter-century has brought more change over a short period than the planet once experienced over millennia. Change now happens faster than our ability to guess at consequences.

Along comes Facebook, for instance. It’s all aboard. And only now are we beginning to understand the ramifications of all that sharing.

What men and women desperate for change really seem to crave is a little more stability, some certainty, some respite from upheaval. In short, and here’s the rub, a return to times when things were surer and there was less change.

That’s why promisers of change so often seem to promise a return to some notional golden age. They promise to Make America Great Again.

Or promise revolutions of common sense or label-company wisdom to restore Ontario, say, to its proper role as the prosperous patriarch of Confederation.

But turning back the clock is the promise of political mountebanks, playing to the seemingly innate human wish for wizards or miracles or lottery wins that will make things right at a stroke.

Change seldom occurs that way. In fact, change as cataclysm usually brings chaos or disaster. Positive change tends to be slow, considered, persistent, evolutionary.

That truth is conveyed in most meaningful thoughts uttered on change.

“Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world,” Nelson Mandela said. Margaret Mead said it takes “thoughtful, committed citizens” to change the world. The actor Carol Burnett noted that “only I can change my life; no one can do it for me.”

Sometimes, of course, change for its own sake is good. As the adage goes, a change can be as good as a rest. But on the big-ticket items, houses and cars and the like, we usually demand to know a good deal before changing.

The prudent Ontario voter should cock an eyebrow at any leader promising that change is easy, unequivocably good, or will not carry costs.

Those voters will properly demand that all candidates — especially, it would appear, Doug Ford — outline how they would achieve the change they promise and how that change will constitute improvement.

To date, Ford has preferred to traffic at the level of abstractions. But government is conducted in the necessary details of deciding who and where gets what, and who pays for same.

As the likes of Mandela and Mead make clear, change for the better requires education, thought, commitment to informing ourselves.

This year’s Ontario budget calls for spending of $158.5 billion. Just more than $61 billion of that will be spent on health care, chiefly in salaries for doctors, nurses, technicians and such. A total of about $41 billion is spent on education, including post-secondary and training programs, and again mostly on salaries.

Doug Ford has said he will save billions without cutting jobs in sectors vital and already overburdened.

At a minimum, Ontarians contemplating “change” should be entitled to know how.

Change is not inherently positive. It involves risk. That’s why a fundamental rule of life has been ‘caveat emptor’