WHO’S ROLLING IN IT NOW?

TODAY’S PUBLIC SECTOR IS SO FLUSH IT CAN SPONSOR SUCH INESSENTIALS AS CAR RACES.

In what is probably the most-quoted passage from 1958’s best-selling The Affluent Society, which helped set the stage for the welfare state spending of the 1960s, dual U.S.-Canadian citizen John Kenneth Galbraith snarkily encapsulated his theme, which was public sector squalor in the midst of private sector affluence:

“The family which takes its mauve and cerise, airconditioned, power-steered and power-braked automobile out for a tour passes through cities that are badly paved, made hideous by litter, blighted buildings, billboards and posts for wires that should long since have been put underground. They pass on into a countryside that has been rendered largely invisible by commercial art… They picnic on exquisitely packaged food from a portable icebox by a polluted stream and go on to spend the night at a park which is a menace to public health and morals. Just before dozing off on an air mattress, beneath a nylon tent, amid the stench of decaying refuse, they may reflect vaguely on the curious unevenness of their blessings.”

I thought of this passage when reading about last weekend’s Formula E race in Montreal, a roving circus of high-performance, low-emission all-electric cars, which the city government just spent at least $24 million — some estimates say upwards of $30 million — to host.

Thirty million dollars is a lot of money. Or maybe I’m just showing my age and it really isn’t anymore. How exactly do you spend $30 million on a car race? You have to re-arrange parts of downtown for a couple of weeks, and put up hundreds of concrete barriers. We have among the world’s most expensive municipal workers, so that could cost. But still. Thirty million bucks? Do you pay Kate Upton an appearance fee? She was the most prominent celebrity in attendance, according to press reports — if you don’t count Jean Chrétien, that is, who is dear to the hearts of Canadians but a bit of a B-lister internationally.

How times have changed! John Kenneth Galbraith may well have been right in 1958. Lots of things he complained of probably did need attention.

Maybe the public sector was underfunded when in most places government took in less than a quarter of GDP. But many of our cities are better paved now — though in Montreal only on streets given over to international bike and car races. In our downtowns, most wires long ago went underground — with the result, in Montreal, that they have to be dug up every couple of years.

We’ve cracked down hard in other areas, too. Pollution regulation is a lot more aggressive — and effective — than in 1958. In the mid-1950s you could build pipelines with relatively little fuss. We built the first trans-Canada pipeline in that decade and doing so didn’t take its own decade of litigation, though it did cause some unpleasantness during Parliament’s “pipeline debate.” Now we’re so attuned to environmental matters we give up lots of economic growth addressing them.

And today the public sector is so flush it can sponsor such inessentials as car races. I don’t know if any of the E-cars benefiting from Montrealers’ tax money were the mauve and cerise of Galbraith’s imagination. Video of the event suggests they all sported garish paint jobs, so maybe some were. But they’re all top of the line, as electric cars go, sponsored by big car companies like Renault, Jaguar, Audi and BMW, none of which is notably indigent.

Roman governments provided their citizens with bread and circuses, i.e., both necessities and luxuries. In fact, Romans probably would have eaten better if governments had stayed out of bread markets.

Be that as it may, Montreal’s government specializes in circuses. Residents of other cities expect street cleaning, snow removal and overhead lighting from their municipal governments. In Montreal, the city seems to think citizens’ main interest is who’s headlining the annual jazz and humour festivals and what’s next in terms of big spending to celebrate the city’s 375th anniversary. Where I work, we’re celebrating — genuinely celebrating since it caused severe disruption for pedestrians and vehicles — the completion of a commemorative walkway from the St. Lawrence to the top of Mount Royal. Maybe over the many years of its existence—assuming it was built to higher standards of durability than most municipal construction—it will pay for the $50 million or more it cost to build. But I have my doubts.

In the mid-20th century, if you looked around the society and asked who had so much money they put it to frivolous use, maybe the people you lit upon really were private citizens buying tail-finned convertibles.

In the early 21st, however, those with money to burn are the people working in our city halls, provincial legislatures and Parliament.