A frightening future or a new day?
What might Canada look like in 2017, the year of our sesquicentennial celebration?
It is, of course, impossible to predict events a week from now, let alone five years out. But for fun and the sake of argument, let’s try. What follows is a brief national portrait, dated July 1, 2017. Utopia? Dystopia? Or the usual hodgepodge, leavened with fanciful nonsense? You decide.
Politics
In late June of 2017, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is just getting his feet wet. He has developed wrinkles, a few grey hairs, and a hint of a paunch — which he intends to work off, he tells reporters, by doing half an hour of yoga every morning. Trudeau leads a minority Liberal government of 157 MPs, having eight months earlier narrowly defeated then-minority Conservative prime minister Jason Kenney, now reduced to 128 seats.
The New Democrats, led by Megan Leslie, hold 45 House of Commons seats, most of them in Quebec and the Maritimes. Elizabeth May’s Greens, building on their five-seat B.C. breakthrough in Election 2015, hold eight seats in the 338-seat House of Commons.
But the talk this summer in Ottawa is not of eight Green seats, but 20: Delivering on a promise made in 2015 and again in the recent election, the Trudeau government has embarked on a full-blown reboot of the electoral system, which appears likely to result in a proportional setup based on the Australian model. That could see the Greens dramatically increasing their seat count at the next vote.
Meanwhile, as the price of their co-operation in the reform effort, May, Leslie and Kenney are negotiating through intermediaries for cabinet seats. Kenney has demanded Finance, Foreign Affairs and Industry. Leslie wants Health and Justice. May, of course, is determined to be environ- ment minister. If they’re not satisfied they may bring the government down, causing the whole reform process to collapse — and marring the sesquicentennial.
Complicating matters is a nationwide protest movement, initially led by aboriginal groups unhappy about the exclusionary tone and content of the 150th anniversary celebrations. “15,000, not 150!” goes the slogan. The protest quickly spreads, morphing into a multi-ethnic, multi-generational expression of dismay at the continuing spectre of high taxes, declining government services and bleak job prospects for anyone without a marketable trade. A celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, on April 9, 2017, is marked by mainly peaceful protests on Parliament Hill and across Canada.
None of this is made easier by the fact that former prime minister Stephen Harper, from his perch as head of the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary, continues to blast the Trudeau government and all its works with a stream of incisive and wickedly funny articles in the national media.
Nor is Tom Mulcair, the New Democratic premier of Quebec, any help: He dislikes Trudeau with an intensity bordering on mania, and in fact has his portrait pasted on a dartboard in his home office. Mulcair continues to wield considerable influence with his allies in the House and is fomenting for the government’s downfall.
Business
The Canadian and global economies remain mired in a decade-long slump — not a depression, per se, but anemic growth of just over one per cent. That’s because the massive global de-leveraging process that began in earnest in 2013 is still only half-complete. The United States, Europe, India and even China are struggling with slowdowns of their own and the effect is cumulative. A huge rampup in U.S. unconventional fossil fuel production has blunted, somewhat, demand for Canadian bitumen — despite the construction of new pipelines to the Gulf Coast and a massive new rail transport network to Alaska.
China is now deeply engaged in the Middle East, both as a consumer of oil and politically, and focusing its resource-extraction efforts there and in Africa. The resultant softening in Canadian commodity prices has caused the Canadian dollar to slip back below 80 cents US.
Canadian creative industries, however — including engineering, technology innovation, media and the arts — are thriving. Newspapers in particular, after a decade of darkness that lasted 20 years, are once again posting healthy annual profits, thanks partly to the cascade of Internet pay walls that went up beginning in 2013.
Technology
By 2017, technology is well on its way to transforming everything, again. Mining and oil-and-gas explorers are going deeper than they’ve ever gone before, in places they’ve never gone before, using increasingly sophisticated robots and drones. But the most startling technological innovations come in health care. For the first time, realistic-looking, functional and affordable prosthetics can be controlled by a user’s thoughts. In early 2017, a chess robot designed and built by another computer defeats a chess robot built by a human engineer.
Locator chips become commonplace in pets and controversy erupts over plans for their widespread implantation in children. More controversy erupts after a Mumbai-based firm offers complete home health diagnostics for Canadians, including 24/7 electronic and pacemaker monitoring, outside Medicare, payable via Paypal.
Provincial governments respond to exploding health-care costs by dra- matically increasing the numbers of mid-salaried nurse practitioners and health-care technologists, and sharply reducing the numbers of high-salaried medical doctors, relative to the number of patients. There’s still no cure for cancer — but incidence of the disease begins to drop sharply, due to much greater public attention to exercise, environmental factors, vitamins and nutrition. In late 2016, using stem-cell technology, researchers at the University of Waterloo find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease. They will later win the Nobel for medicine.
The Arts
In 2017, Canadian short story writer Alice Munro at long last wins the Nobel Prize for literature. Novelist Miriam Toews wins the Booker for a darkly sardonic story narrated from the point of view of a Japanese-designed housekeeping robot. The hits just keep on coming as a Sarah Polley film based on Michael Ondaatje’s 1987 masterpiece, In the Skin of a Lion, wins Oscar nominations for best adapted screenplay, best cinematography, best director and best picture. The film is shut out in all categories except cinematography, however, causing fans to cry foul.
In March 2017, Justin Bieber, just turned 23, undertakes a world tour “unplugged,” accompanying himself on an old acoustic guitar, sporting long hair and a scraggly beard. The show is wildly successful, including in Canada, where Bieber reprises his 2012 performance at the Grey Cup. This time, no one boos.
Sports
A wildly popular plan to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the NHL with a series of outdoor hockey games among the original six teams is shelved due to a dispute over money and television rights. After protracted negotiations, the games are cancelled.
In regular season sports action, the Toronto Maple Leafs lose. The Toronto Argonauts lose. The Toronto Blue Jays lose. And the Toronto Raptors lose. But all four GTA pro sports teams post record profits as fans turn out in ever-greater numbers, paying everhigher prices.
In Chiang Mai, Thailand, a new cycling race emerges, billing itself as “no holdsbarred”: Competitors are free to use any drug or substance they wish to enhance their performance. The competition is denounced by athletic officials worldwide but public interest is such that TSN decides to broadcast it anyway.
Nevertheless, public disgust at the excesses of elite sport leads to a rethink of athletics funding here in Canada. In a program personally championed by Prime Minister Trudeau, Participaction makes a comeback. Across Canada, sluggards and couch potatoes turn off their phones and tablets, and flog their bodies into action — running, walking and cycling, often by torchlight or by moonlight, to celebrate the country’s 150th birthday.