Andreae Sennyah: I’m Andreae Sennyah.
Ray Pennings: And I’m Ray Pennings.
Andreae Sennyah: And this is Proverbs & Policy. The wisdom of two thousand years of Christian social thought for public life today.
Welcome back, listeners, to another episode of Proverbs & Policy. My name is Andreae. I am joined again with my co-host, the formidable Ray Pennings. Today, we’re really excited to welcome onto the show Dr. Ian Brodie, who is probably famous to many of you, having been the first chief of staff to Prime Minister Harper, I believe from 2006 to 2008. Dr. Brodie’s nodding. He’s also the author of the best-selling book At the Centre of Government and his weekly Substack called The Thursday Question. And he is a professor of political science at the University of Calgary. Dr. Brodie, it’s great to see you.
Before we jump into it, Ray has asked me to explain to our listeners why it is that I call you Dr. Brodie. And I have two reasons for doing so. The first is because my mama raised me right, as they say. And second, of course, because I was a student of yours at the University of Calgary. And so, old habits die hard. Ray is going to refer to you as Ian for most of this episode, which I trust still reflects his deep respect for you. So, Dr. Brodie, great to see you. Thanks so much for joining us on today’s episode.
Ian Brodie: Good to see both of you. And congratulations on the new podcast offering. I think we no sooner celebrated twenty-five years of Cardus than now we’re into podcasts. Andreae, I have to say, if you win a gold medal for your work at the University of Calgary, you’re entitled to call the instructor Ian, but I know you persist with this “Dr. Brodie.”
Andreae Sennyah: Yes, we’ve argued about this many times, and so I think I’m gonna stick with it.
So, Dr. Brodie, I think we’re going to dub this episode “Election Month in Canada,” for reasons that are hopefully obvious. We’ve had provincial elections in both BC and Quebec. And in Alberta, we just had a referendum on a number of questions, including the question of separation. And as I was reflecting and preparing for this episode, I realized that the results are kind of a little bit hard to make sense of, right? So in BC, we just saw a supermajority where the incumbents were defeated. In Quebec, we saw the incumbents also completely lose all of their seats, but form a minority government that was campaigning on the intention of a separation question. And then in Alberta, the separation question in the referendum was defeated, but there were a number of other questions with mixed results. And so I’m curious what your take is on that. Is there one coherent story to tell about what’s happening in Canada today? Or is there more to the story than meets the eye?
Ian Brodie: There’s always more than one thing going on in politics in a country this big. So it’s difficult to answer all three sort of rounds of voting with the same explanation.
That said, in addition to some external challenges we face from the United States — not just on the trade front, but on the kind of rhetorical assaults on Canadian sovereignty from the States — that matches or comes at the same time as we’re still recovering from the effects, the after-effects, of the COVID shutdowns, the COVID lockdowns, and then the policy reaction to that: the sort of flooding of the market with money and all of the inflation that was generated from that. I guess Ray and I are old enough, and some of your listeners will be old enough, to remember what inflation was like in the ’70s.
Inflation is not just an economic or monetary policy problem, although it’s certainly that. It creates political and social problems across societies that experience that kind of inflation, and they’re quite long-lasting and they’re quite severe. I don’t want to dismiss it by talking about it in technical terms. People pay the price for — cost of living rising faster than their family incomes, all the dislocation of prices that takes place, and then strikes and other industrial actions that workers take to try to recoup from that. So, you know, the bout of inflation was sort of engineered about five years ago. I trust that the people who engineered it thought through what the political implications were, but we’re continuing to feel that.
In addition, of course, all of our authoritative sources of knowledge, in news media and elsewhere, have been disrupted by this kind of radical democratization of communication and social media. I don’t think we’ve quite absorbed what all of that means. And so it’s expressing itself in different ways.
Look, in British Columbia — British Columbia had a particularly desperate combination of trade problems as a result of the situation with the United States; a desperate social situation as a result of drugs, hopelessness, easy access to terrible drugs, and the public authority’s difficulty of responding to that; plus all the social media and so forth. So I think the Eby government had particular difficulty managing that, probably made that situation — I don’t want to turn your podcast into too much of a partisan discussion here. I think there was a widespread rejection of that approach to governing British Columbia.
Quebec is a different situation, where there were many alternatives. Quebecers always have many alternatives in the party system. And the rise of the Conservative Party in Quebec over the course of several elections speaks to a continuation of their search for other governing alternatives, or other political alternatives.
And then here in Alberta — well, that’s a special case as well. I think the referendum, the headline one on independence, turned out the way it was expected. But I think there were some surprises further up the ballot — I say up the ballot, since the referendum question on independence was the last one. And some of those did not turn out the way the government had expected.
Ray Pennings: You mentioned in your answer very much affordability and inflation and the stuff — you know, security on the streets, drugs. I’m wondering — one of the things that struck me was the relatively low voter turnout, especially in BC, record lows since 1928. Even the referendum in Alberta got much lower voter turnout than one would have expected for a referendum in terms of which national identity questions were at stake. Have the elections themselves been a voice of the people and a positive expression of democracy? Or has the low voter turnout reflected more of a cynicism and the brokenness of our political systems?
Ian Brodie: Look, I think turnout problems are serious problems. People have the right not to vote if they don’t find the political system engages with them. So I don’t want to go around blaming voters for not turning out to vote. You sometimes hear this — you know, people should educate themselves, or so forth, or take their civic responsibilities more seriously. I don’t take that school of thought. I think it’s incumbent on political actors to engage citizens. They don’t — you know, political actors don’t own the time of citizens, or own, you know, the mindshare of citizens. So they have to connect.
Quebec has, as I said, a longer tradition of sort of cycling through political options, especially in the last twenty-five years. As Andreae said, the rise and fall of the Coalition Avenir Québec is part and parcel of that. And as the CAQ has sort of fallen off the edge of the table in government, people are going to look for other options — both the Conservatives and sort of this odd Québec solidaire party. So I think it’s easier for voters to find a way to engage with the election process there.
In British Columbia, it’s not clear to me why the turnout was so low, because usually when there’s that big a change in government, you’re usually looking at a pretty high-turnout election. So elections that change government tend to have a spike up in turnout compared to previous elections. If the government’s going to get re-elected, usually that’s an indication of a low-turnout election. So this runs against that trend. And it’s not clear to me why the parties had difficulty connecting with all of those voters. The fact that the Conservative Party of British Columbia is basically a new organization, or a new name for an older organization, and had a really rough start to the election campaign — it might be that they weren’t as well prepared as a party would ordinarily be prepared in that kind of situation.
Here in Alberta, yes, I was surprised by the low turnout. I thought the turnout would be in the 75 percent range, given the consequences of the questions that were on the ballot. That said, the turnout was the second-highest turnout for a province-wide election event since the early 1980s. The only two higher-turnout events: the 1982 election, which was also about separation and about the first Trudeau government’s policies on oil and gas and the national energy policy — so there was high turnout for that election — and then the 2019 election, where the province turned out the NDP government after a single term and elected the Kenney government. So I would say, by the standards of Alberta, it was a high-turnout event, even if some of us is a little disappointed that we didn’t get up into — much closer to what Quebec had, for example, in 1995. Like, over 95 percent turnout for their sovereignty referendum in 1995. I did expect to get closer to that mark than we did.
Andreae Sennyah: Yeah, I suspected that this is the wrong audience to talk about the importance of turnout, because I just voted in a municipal election and was astonished by the dopamine hit that I received by participating.
Ian Brodie: That’s good. We’ve got you hooked.
Andreae Sennyah: We’ve got me hooked, yeah.
Ray Pennings: Your mama raised you right.
Andreae Sennyah: That’s right. Yeah, exactly. She’s our number one listener, right? So we got to make sure that we give credit where credit’s due.
I was hoping maybe we could delve a little bit more into some of the themes that were underpinning some of these elections. And one of them being the theme of federalism, and how provinces and the federal government relate to each other. That seemed to be a core question, obviously, in the Quebec provincial election. In BC, it was an issue around sort of resource development and how we approach those policy questions. And then obviously in Alberta, I think four, maybe five of the referendum questions, if you exclude the immigration ones, were about our relationship with the federal government. Ray, you’ve written a little bit about this as well in the coming months. I’m curious what your take is, and maybe something — if there’s anything we can pull out of Dr. Brodie while we have him here.
Ray Pennings: It was interesting. Let me just test this theory on you a little bit, in terms of how Quebec clearly has its identity in its past — in its language, its culture, its history — holding on to something. And I thought it was very interesting that at the swearing-in — you know, not even, you know, taking steps to have the monarchy not visibly present, even if the documents still needed to be signed. In Alberta, the immigration is a very complicated question, and the results were decidedly mixed. But it strikes me that insofar as there is culture in Alberta, it’s very much about an entrepreneurial, can-do, immigrant, future-looking, as opposed to a past-looking, sort of way. When I think of those two opposite things and potential allies, and I put this in the context of a general apathy nationally about what does it mean to be Canadian — Justin Trudeau’s post-national state question and identity — and I try to fit that all together: are we learning anything at all about what it means to be Canadian through all of this?
Ian Brodie: Well, on the Alberta side, let me just say, I think the strong, sharp debate about the immigration questions, I thought, was only a partial service to the province. Alberta certainly, like most of Canada, has a strong track record of success with immigration. We bring people to Alberta from all over the world, either as permanent residents on a path to citizenship or as temporary residents here. I don’t think anybody until recently was ever really fussed about that distinction, to be honest. We put people to work in extremely high-value occupations. People are paid well in Alberta because we do extremely high-value work, and we don’t spend as much time on low-value work as in other provinces.
And then you’ve got the Stampede, the sort of local civic festival here in Calgary. Every new group that arrives in Calgary wants to have its piece of Stampede, which I think is a part and parcel of a success in a pluralistic society — where, obviously, we have mosques and gurdwaras and all sorts of places of worship all over the city, some of them spectacular pieces of architecture, with their own vibrant faith societies, faith communities around them, and all sorts of other community groups for the people who come from all over the world and all across Canada. And then a big annual civic celebration of the cowboy past, the ranching past of the province, where everybody who ends up in Calgary wants their piece of the Stampede celebration, which is great.
And you go to the hockey arenas across the suburbs of Calgary where newly arrived immigrant groups are being settled, and there’s somebody starting a hockey league for the newest arrivals from wherever they’ve come from, because parents often want their kids to be involved in Canadian pastimes like hockey. I’m not a hockey player myself, but I’m always sort of encouraged by that. I think in Alberta we have lots to be quite satisfied with. On the whole, we’ve done as well as any part of Canada, probably any part of North America, on that side. That’s not to understate problems that have come, you know, at the same time. But on the whole, we bring people from all over the place, and we manage to — we plan to find a place for them in Alberta society.
It’s true that the referendum campaign here — the immigration questions didn’t get a huge majority. But they did do better than Mr. Trudeau’s government did in 2021, just before they rewrote immigration rules in response to, I think, business pressure to hugely increase the number of temporary foreign workers in the country. It had a special impact here in Alberta, because so many of the temporary foreign workers ended up here. And it caused local problems, as it does everywhere that there’s a surge in immigration of this sort. My sense is it was coming back under control, but the province is building schools, I think, as fast as the construction industry in Alberta can build schools, to try to accommodate the growth: natural growth of Albertans having kids, which in this province we still do; migration from other parts of Canada; and immigration from every part of the world.
That said, those questions were not as popular in some parts of Calgary, and most of Calgary, as they were in some other parts of the — country, or other parts of the province. If you think about where the impact of that immigration is seen every day and felt every day, in schools and services all across the city, I think it’s sort of a statement about Calgary’s hopefulness about the future, as you say, Ray: that, yeah, there’s lots of people here. Yes, we’re having trouble finding schooling and doctors and so on and so forth, but this is a problem we will manage, like we have managed many similar problems in the past.
Andreae Sennyah: I’m curious your take on how our current moment fits into the history of what we have seen in Canada in the past, right? This is not the first time we’ve experienced either debates about federalism or debates about immigration. Is there anything that comes to mind for you, of things that we and our listeners should be thinking about in terms of learning from our own history — Canadian history — on how we’ve resolved these questions in the past? Are these tensions entirely new? Or are there ways that we have addressed these changes to this social fabric in a way that was constructive?
Ian Brodie: I’ve been reflecting in the last month about the history that we have with separatist movements in Canada, to be honest. Because in lots of countries, if you raise your hand and say, “I think we should get out of this country,” you’re going to find yourself on the receiving end of a government investigation, imprisonment, possibly worse. And in Canada, we have a long tradition of not doing that, because I think it’s a recognition that Confederation in the first place, in the 1860s, was itself a bit of a difficult road, and not everybody bought into Confederation right away.
The Quebec Conference of 1864 included Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland. Their political leaders who were at those conferences both agreed to the sort of the term sheet — or the general description, outline of Confederation was agreed to at that conference. But, you know, when they went home, found out that their populations were not onside. And so they opted out in Newfoundland — or PEI, not for another six years after 1867; in Newfoundland, not until 1949. No sooner did the original four provinces confederate in July of 1867 than in September, Nova Scotia elected a separatist government. So from the very beginning of Confederation, we’ve had to deal with these ideas that we weren’t always entirely sure. It was sort of a contingent discussion about whether we’d be better off together than we were apart.
That Nova Scotia bid obviously didn’t work. Nova Scotia is still, thank goodness, a province in Confederation. The two leaders of that party: William Annand, who became premier — the separatist premier of Nova Scotia — ended up as the federal government’s agent in London, before we had ambassadors. A nice federal appointment on behalf of the Canadian government. And Joseph Howe was in many ways the mastermind of that government. He became a federal minister, negotiated Manitoba’s entry into Confederation, and then ended up as lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia — a nice federal patronage appointment.
So we have a tradition of letting these debates take their course. They have not generally worked. And when people are willing to accept that they’re not going to work — that they don’t have a democratic mandate, or the separatism plan is unworkable, in the case of Nova Scotia — we’re very good about accommodating those people back into the political establishment of the country. And in a sense, I think that’s to be welcomed. Macdonald and Mackenzie, the first two prime ministers of the country, were kind of geniuses at making this system work, where people could eventually reconcile themselves to Confederation and be accepted as part of the political establishment of the country. I think that speaks well to us.
This debate of late in Alberta — you know, accusations of traitors and treason, and people should be jailed, and so forth — maybe that’s a new trend. It’s not the traditional Canadian trend here. It’s not what the Supreme Court has decided in regards of Quebec and the secession reference, which is a debate that could be held legitimately. So we made it into more dangerous terrain here, where there’s more consequences for this kind of debate, and not recognizing that Canada is a contingent country.
It helps, I think, that we have this period of hostility from the American administration. That was part and parcel of the original Confederation arrangement — not the only driving factor. But it does take an act of will on our part to decide we want to live in North America as a single country without being part of the United States. And renewing that will every so often, as Albertans did last week — I think that’s a hopeful sign, not a reason for doom.
Ray Pennings: If I can add a supplementary to that line of thought. Welcome your framing of that. I often — I’m not a gold medal student in political science, and I didn’t have the privilege of studying under Dr. Brodie, but I did—
Ian Brodie: You just hire them, right?
Ray Pennings: I have read the Federalist Papers and the debates in terms of the 1860s. One of the things that strikes me — when I’m speaking to an audience, I often describe Confederation as a conscious peace treaty between French Catholics and English Protestants who were fighting each other but decided the threat from America was a greater threat, and so we had to figure out a way to get along. Now, that shorthand leaves a lot of nuance out that I’m sure you cover in all of your classes.
One of the things that strikes me is that our federal institutions have actually historically failed, right from the origins of the Senate — when, on the one hand, we wanted a bicameral system and an institution to represent regions, but we never achieved that with the Senate, almost from day one, in terms of who appoints, how does it appoint. I’m wondering, even now, the subtext of — you know, particularly in Alberta — stabilization, the lack of reflection of the Senate representing the population of Alberta, a sense that the federal systems don’t work, was the basis of Reform. You know, “The West wants in”; now it’s “The West wants out” sort of thing.
Fill that out a little bit, in terms of: you’ve got the threat from America that forces a peace treaty, and an uneasy alliance between people who actually are always looking elsewhere. And we’ve actually managed for 157 or 159 years to do that, with institutions that actually don’t really answer the question that seems so obviously put in front of them.
Ian Brodie: Yeah, well, we’ll get into the hardcore political science here, Ray. I mean, it’s obviously true that because of the population of Ontario and Quebec, voters in Ontario and Quebec make or break governments in Canada at the federal level. And therefore, federal governments — and, you know, you said I worked in one — very attentive to the interests of voters in Ontario and Quebec. I don’t want to overstate Ontario and Quebec as a single bloc. There’s obviously all sorts of political divisions in those two provinces. Every so often, once a generation or so, we get a government that figures out they can play some divisions inside Ontario and Quebec against Alberta, on the economic side and on the social side, and win themselves power for a period of time. And we went through that for ten years just recently.
We have to be careful about that, and it would be good if we had some institutional mechanisms to try to at least mitigate the threat of that. There is — you know, Alberta is a major economic engine. In the last couple of years, probably has been the economic engine of the country. But it’s sparsely populated compared to Ontario and Quebec, and sometimes has a difficulty getting a hearing on that front.
Ray Pennings: So why is that? In spite of the fact that the federal government spends about 17 percent of GDP, the provincial government spent 24 percent. You would think — health, social services, transportation, roads; you’ve already mentioned Alberta, some of the economic — you would think provincial governments have way more levers than they have exercised. Why have they not?
Ian Brodie: Yes. So this is the difference, I think, between the Quebec separatist movement and the situation in Alberta. I think the separatist answer was not really a complete answer to Alberta’s problem, by the way, and this is partly why. As you said, in Quebec, there’s sort of a pride in where Quebec has come from — past identity that they want to carry into the future. That means creating — kind of the classic argument is, we must be masters in our own house in Quebec, because we’re the only government that answers to a French-speaking, culturally distinct majority, and we have to be able to use the levers of state in order to perpetuate that. I mean, you can consider that to be a convincing argument or not convincing argument — to say, that’s the argument that has appealed, is that we need to carve out for Quebec a special place in a big, English-speaking, aggressively expansionist continent to protect our culture into the future.
Alberta’s situation is different. Yes, there’s some things — you know, we have lots of levers to control the future of Alberta’s destiny internally here. But at a certain point, because it’s growth-oriented and future-oriented, as you said earlier, we also need export capacity to ship some of what we produce to other parts of the world. And that depends, then — that’s why the separatist answer is not really a complete answer to the problems in Alberta, because we need a cooperative federal government to help us do that. On occasion, over the course of the last few years, and in the 1980s, and back into history, federal governments have, I think, pushed their powers as far as possible to try and thwart Alberta’s natural growth of its natural resource industry. I think that’s unfortunate. And then have not always been very cooperative in building out the infrastructure that’s needed for Alberta to get its natural products to markets.
So in a sense, unhappiness with federalism in Alberta is at least as much an unhappiness that the federal government doesn’t do the work that we need it to do. Whereas in Quebec, the unhappiness is about — we see governments in answer to other types of cultural minorities. That’s a problem for our job of preserving what we have and extending it into the future. And those are two different scenarios that require, in a sense, two different designs of government if you’re going to meet those people’s aspirations.
Andreae Sennyah: Dr. Brodie, when you reflect on the results that we’ve seen so far, what do you think about cohesion on a day-to-day basis? Like, you know, if you’re dropping your kids off at school, or if I’m going into work — you know, like, what does this mean for how we relate to each other on a personal level as Canadians, or even maybe just from the perspective of Alberta, where you are?
Ian Brodie: This is a very difficult question because, you know, since the rise of liberal democratic regimes — you know, two or three hundred years ago, or whatever you want to mark the beginning of that era — I think we’ve understood that, at least on issues that appropriately belong to Caesar, it’s okay for people to disagree. There can be vibrant — should be vibrant — disagreement about some of those issues. We organize them — those disagreements — into political parties, in order to provide a mechanism for people to hold government accountable and to have the debate.
You know, there’s a bridge around the corner. We need to repair the bridge. Should we turn it into a toll bridge, so the people who cross the bridge pay for the bridge improvements? Or should we increase our taxes, so that everybody pays for the bridge and then everybody can use the bridge without paying an additional fee for it? That’s sort of a normal political debate of the sort that, yeah, people might have different views. We should have a big public debate about it. If you want to have a municipal election that’s based on that, that’s great. And I don’t think that goes to social cohesion. You can have a disagreement about who pays for the roads, or who pays for hospitals, or where we put the new public school, without causing a great rupture. People take these issues seriously, as they should, but they’re not the sorts of things that go to our identity as Canadians or neighbours or co-religionists or colleagues in some community organization.
The problem is that, although that, I think, is a successful way of managing a liberal democratic society on political issues, we also wanted to deal with more fundamental issues of identity — and in the case of the Alberta referendum, whether we’re going to be part of Canada or not. And in that case, using that kind of very divisive kind of — but structured — division of normal politics to deal with more fundamental questions. We’ve had periods where we’ve done that, and I think we’ve always regretted it and had a reaction against it. After a couple of years, you think, yeah, let’s never do that again.
And my hope is that over the course of the next couple of years, we go through this and say, yeah, that kind of divisive politics is okay when it comes to municipal issues or provincial issues or the normal issues of federal politics. What should the capital gains tax rate be? Nobody’s going to have a social division about that. That’s fair to have a debate about. But on some of the bigger issues — of whether we should be Canadians or Albertans, whether Alberta should be its own country — that kind of divisive politics fits uncomfortably with those more serious questions, and they leave deeper marks in the population. I hope we can avoid that for the next little while. Personally, I have to say, I’ve had enough of it.
Ray Pennings: Are we asking politics to carry a burden it is incapable of carrying? It’s asking pre-political questions that you need institutions other than politics to answer?
Ian Brodie: Yeah, I would say — let me take that one step further, Ray. It’s not just that politics is not capable of answering these questions. It’s dangerous to ask politics to answer these questions, because every political debate carries with it the powers of the state, which are compulsory — and tax powers, powers of the Criminal Code, and so forth. We don’t have the option of opting out of those arrangements. We don’t have the option of negotiating them locally, outside of the state structures, if we want to find a different way to live. And so it’s not just that the politics isn’t capable of giving us answers to those questions. Every time you ask politics to answer those questions, our life together becomes more dangerous in that way. We’re putting something at risk by taking that out of a civil realm and moving it into a political realm.
Ray Pennings: One follow-up. So if we take a very broad arc of history, these used to — you know, religious questions used to be political questions, and we had wars of religion. We had the Council of Westphalia. We started the process of separating that all out. Fast-forward very much to today. Is this tied somewhat to the decline of pre-political institutions — whether that’s family, religion, or other institutions where questions of identity used to get formed? And is politics filling up in the context of that? There’s all these debates in the political realm about post-liberalism on the political right, and has liberalism failed us? Is liberalism ultimately going to be corrosive of, as you say, the pre-political institutions of society?
Ian Brodie: I’ve never come to that conclusion. I still don’t come to that conclusion. I don’t buy what the post-liberal political theorists are trying to persuade us of. But yes, there’s no question that there’s been a collapse of the vitality of all sorts of other institutions that a democratic society — it has to do what it can to encourage, to perpetuate.
So when I see federal government proposals to put, for example, pregnancy counselling organizations out of business because they don’t like the kind of counselling that goes on — independent of the debate about whether those clinics are doing a good job or not. In fact, these are voluntary organizations of people who are largely driven by faith concerns. They’re worried about women who find themselves in difficult pregnancies and trying to care for them in the way they see fit. I don’t think you have to agree with what those clinics are doing in order to see that that, too, is part of a vibrant civil society. There’s a role for that. Certainly the state should not use its powers to try to eradicate them, or to undercut their ability to organize them. Same for churches, same for Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts, and all the sports leagues that I see around my neighbourhood, and so forth. These are all part and parcel of a healthy civil society, which is a handmaiden or a hand partner to a healthy and free democratic political regime.
Andreae Sennyah: Well, a beautiful reflection on civil society to help wrap us up on the most Cardusian of notes, as we would say. Dr. Brodie, we are in the habit of asking our guests to give us one thing that is causing them to hope as we reflect on some of these challenging issues. Could you wrap us up on that note? What is giving you cause for hope as you reflect on the events of the past few months and what you see coming ahead?
Ian Brodie: Whatever else has gone on over the course of the past couple of months, you know, one of the great things about teaching at the university is that you get young students — some of them are very good. And I’ve written a bunch of letters of reference for students over the course of the past couple of months. They’re starting to get back offers of admission to law school or grad school or business school, or some job they applied for, some internship program they’re going to start in May. I always insist, when I write a letter of reference, you got to tell me how this turns out, because, you know, the letters work. But the payoff is when I find out that somebody’s been admitted to whatever program or internship that they wanted to go on to. That’s a source of great hope to me.
Andreae Sennyah: I can affirm the letters work.
Ian Brodie: Yes. Okay, good. I might have written a few to Cardus.
And hearing back from students that they slaved their backsides off for four years in an undergraduate program, they put in a really good performance, they had the temerity to come ask an instructor for a letter of reference — which I know is not easy, since I did it once myself — and then they put some time into an application, and their plan for their next step in their own lives is going to pay off in a way that they find happy. I find that an annual source of great hope. And we’re coming into admission letter season, which is in many ways the happiest season at the university.
Andreae Sennyah: Excellent. That was a beautiful note to end off on. I’m so glad we asked this question. I’m so glad we invited you onto the podcast, Dr. Brodie. Thanks for making time for us, and hopefully we’ll do this again in the future.
Ian Brodie: Great. Great to talk to both of you.
Ray Pennings: Thank you, Ian.
Ray Pennings: Hello, Andreae. Since our conversation with Ian, I’ve been thinking about much of what he said, and looking forward to this conversation, because there are several themes that we can dig into. The first one I’d be very interested in your reaction to, because I know I have some thoughts about it. Ian sort of blamed the lack of voter involvement, and put the blame very much on our political leaders and our systems for not connecting with voters. It wasn’t exclusively that, but that was sort of one of the things I took away from that. Do you agree?
Andreae Sennyah: Yeah, it’s good to see you, Ray. And I’ve been looking forward to this conversation, discussing what Dr. Brodie shared with us in part one. This thesis that he shared around low voter turnout — I have been thinking a lot about it and trying to make sense of it for myself, and discerning what the tradition might have to say about something like this, versus my own personal reaction. So I think I’m a high-personal-responsibility type of individual. And so I usually put the blame for low voter turnout on voters. And it was interesting to hear him challenge that idea, to suggest that it’s actually on the part of the politicians themselves, political parties, to engage voters more fully.
I do think — and I don’t know if we’re going to get too much into the meat of this before we get to some other themes — but I know certainly, in the Catholic social teaching tradition, that participation in a democracy is a core principle of how we organize our social life. I’m sure we’re going to get into that a bit later too in this episode, Ray, talking about civil society and those things. And so I think I’m unresolved on that question. I do believe that political parties have some role to play in their responsibilities, but I also think that citizens do. What was your reaction to that?
Ray Pennings: I’m with you very much. And I want to be very clear — and I suspect Dr. Brodie would agree, and you and I would agree — we don’t have to narrow it down on one or the other, as if this is a binary choice. I think clearly there’s a responsibility to political leadership, there’s something of the function and the nature of the system, and then there is also the responsibility of citizenship. And you can take a look at each of those. I actually think it’s fairly important to look at each differently.
I’m with you very much. I just actually want to highlight the fact that I did a bit of homework, even coming in, in terms of what you might say about the Catholic social tradition on that. There was a 1965 pastoral letter that was sent, Gaudium et spes — I’m sure you’re going to correct that along the way. But the quote, rather than the title, is really at the heart of it. And the quote is this:
All citizens, therefore, should be mindful of the right and also the duty to use their free vote to further the common good.
And I think that whole concept of the common good, which we’ve talked about, which is sort of one of the key themes of Christian social thought, is something that bears a responsibility of individual voters to vote as well. How’s my Catholic pronunciation?
Andreae Sennyah: Well, yeah, so I hear your — I see your Gaudium et spes, and I raise you a Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, which is going to reflect many of the same things, undoubtedly. So I do think that the Catholic social tradition is quite clear about the relationship between, as you say, rights and duties, and that both of those have to be considered together. And in chapter eight of the Compendium, which is what I consulted as part of my homework, there is a line in there that essentially says that the person who exercises their rights without also fulfilling their duties builds with one hand and destroys with the other. And maybe that is actually originally from Gaudium et spes, Ray — you can tell me, since you read that. But I think it’s an interesting dynamic. There are two hands involved here, and both parts are important. And I think that’s helpful for setting us up on this whole conversation about recent elections.
And I think Dr. Brodie mentioned the fact that there comes a time in which not voting may be an act of principle and citizenship as well. So I don’t think it’s essential to define participation and caring about the common good simply in the exercise of voting.
Ray Pennings: You know, you mentioned in our conversation that maybe you and I are not the best discussers of this, as you got a dopamine hit from voting in the municipal election recently in Ontario. It’s interesting — I voted in that same election, in a different municipality. What I found: while one candidate knocked on my door, my councillor candidate — and I was familiar, I personally knew two of the leading mayoral candidates and was able to make a judgment — for all the other councillor candidates and school board trustees, I spent about forty-five minutes to an hour doing homework, trying to find — none of them knocked on my door. None of them gave me information about themselves. I actually did the better part of an hour’s worth of homework, and frankly could not find anything that differentiated them from each other. They all were in favour of motherhood and apple pie. They all liked integrity. They all thought things needed to be better. And they had these political slogans that were all commendable but meaningless.
So I ended up not voting for the school board election, leaving that portion of my ballot blank, largely because I did my homework and could not actually find credible answers, and was not invested enough, within the time frames, to go do an extra two hours of homework along the way. So I think, you know, let’s not say that it simply translates into voting and putting an X on a ballot. There are multiple ways to exercise that.
It was interesting, in a totally different context — I’ve been reading a fair bit of Augustine of late, and internally within Cardus, actually, last week we had a webinar in terms of some of Augustine’s writing. Augustine says, “For the life of the city is a social life.” And I think what’s at the heart of this is an understanding of voting and participation not simply being a selfish thing, in terms of my rights, my autonomy, and trying to get the government that I want and the outcomes I want. It is actually viewing it with something of a “we” mentality — something that puts us in solidarity with our neighbours and fellow citizens, and looks at good for the good of the city, rather than just what’s in my own self-interest.
Andreae Sennyah: Yeah, so this is a good segue into something that I really wanted us to get into, which was something that Dr. Brodie answered toward the end of the last episode, around the question of whether we are asking politics to do more than it can, more than it should. And he said, as I recall — like, not just that we are asking politics to do more than it should by resolving these deeper questions around national identity or social cohesion, but actually that it’s dangerous to ask politics to answer these questions, primarily because the state exercises coercive power as one of its functions.
And so we’ve been talking about this notion of participation. So if we should not be asking the political to be answering these deeper questions, that implies that there is some other place, or group of people, who are engaging in these kind of democratic debates that are outside of just the, you know, the legislative, or even, like, a referendum question. But what happens, Ray, when those institutions in society — these areas in which the Compendium would say that we are building civil friendship, different from maybe the friendship that you and I have with our actual friends; a civil friendship is something slightly different than that — what happens when those institutions in society are anemic, or gutted, or not active?
We at Cardus talk about this all the time when it comes to the charitable sector. Charitable giving is going down. Volunteerism in our country is going down. Participation in all of these civil society institutions — whether they’re cultural, recreational, volunteer — is all on the decline. It’s kind of natural that these questions have to go somewhere, and they seem to be then being pushed up into the political sphere to answer. What’s your take on that? And what do you think our listeners can actually — because I’m hoping that we don’t just harp on the problems here, but can talk through maybe some of the things that people can actually do to resolve this anemic civil society.
Ray Pennings: Well, it’s interesting. You raised our last episode with Christine Emba, where we talked about fertility issues, and we rolled it back to relationships, the formation of relationships, the role of family, and the very public role of family — highlighted that the family is an illiberal institution. It’s not a democratic, nor should it be, a democratic sort of institution. And yet it’s a public, not just a private, institution. It has public consequence, in terms of not only producing children who become future taxpayers and contributors to society. But the family itself is a core organizing unit in society that we need to pay attention to.
And so I think we’re bang on. The health of politics depends on the health of family, the health of church, the health of community organizations. In many ways, government is a convening of a public conversation between various institutions. And I think the real challenge is — and Dr. Brodie highlighted that quite well — that when we eliminate all the others, we put all the weight on government to do things for which it isn’t equipped. And that’s something I’ve often said. What he said that I thought was particularly insightful is not only is it ill-equipped to; when it does it, it actually does it in a dangerous way. And I think we’re seeing some of that with some of the nationalism sort of discussions, and government creating identity, creating culture.
It’s interesting, just segueing to the Alberta referendum question: watching it from afar, there were three or four very different debates happening. There was an economic debate — how will Alberta continue on as an economic thing? There was a sub-debate within a conservative Christian community, as if Alberta was a more Christian — offered the hope for a more Christian society than Canada. And sort of there was a pro-independence force that said, well, let’s vote for independence, because we have a better chance of having the sort of society that we want, and government we want, that reflects Christian values, just in Alberta.
Now, you know, that’s a whole episode all to itself, and we won’t get into all the particulars. I would just highlight a couple of things. Number one, ironically, in terms of checking the box, there are less Christians in Alberta than there are in most of the rest of Canada. It’s actually got lower. So the data doesn’t back that up. Yes, those who check the box are a little more active, but so are they in other Prairie provinces. And at most, they’re, you know, one in four of the population — the same degree that’s in favour of separation. And by no means is Alberta a different sort of secular society than is the rest of Canada. So it’s interesting, yet the argument was made that we could vote for separation, we could get this government, somehow the government of Alberta would somehow inculcate a whole different ethos, a whole different set of values, and all the rest. And I — frankly, even if a government was doing that with an ethos I agreed with, I think history says that that usually doesn’t end all that well. There are governments that put forward that, and they end up being pretty unjust governments, usually.
Andreae Sennyah: Yeah, I’m always hesitant to — to borrow a phrase that you sometimes use, right? — baptize our politics and call it Christianity. That relationship, I think, for me — for Christians and their political life, to always assign these messianic hopes onto someone or something that isn’t the Messiah is always a dangerous game.
But I think this gives us a good link to something else that I was thinking about here. I’m doing a bit of the book of Brodie, according to Brodie. So a couple of years ago, Dr. Brodie gave a keynote address at an event that we hosted here.
Ray Pennings: That’s Brodie 7, verse 4, right?
Andreae Sennyah: Right, exactly. Yeah, I’m sure that he’s going to be thrilled to hear us referring to it as that. But in his speech that he delivered at the Cardus Exchange in 2025, Dr. Brodie was talking about rebuilding trust in government, as part of a bigger conversation we were having about the declining trust in institutions. And he took a very Christian, but also unexpected, approach to answering this question, by essentially saying that the way to rebuild trust in government is to recover the virtue of humility: humility in the promises that we make about what government can do, humility about what government itself aspires to do in the practice of government, and then also humility in how we talk about government, but also in our treatment of political leaders. First of all, I’ll say that I’m confident we can link this in the show notes. I would highly recommend it to our listeners as really excellent reading on how we can rethink these concerns we have in the decline of our institutions.
I think that whole posture of humility would correct even these ideas that you’re talking about, Ray — that there were groups in Alberta who thought that the revitalization of some kind of Christian society would be possible if the government of Alberta was able to be sovereign and determine its own future. One thing that really stuck out to me — and I think that is a theme throughout even some of these election results that we’ve seen in Canada over the past month — is allowing our political leaders to make mistakes; for them to have the humility to admit their mistakes; but then also for us to have the humility to forgive them, essentially. And Dr. Brodie gave us some interesting examples of past separatist movements earlier on in Confederation, who were then later reintegrated into the political establishment and not ostracized for having had a different set of views, or for debating or thinking through these questions together — acknowledging a very Christian notion of our human frailty, and then also the very Christian notion of having the humility to accept mistakes, and then to reintegrate people into, you know, whether it’s our political life, after having made those mistakes.
For me, that was — you know, if I were to do an examination of conscience — I, as you know, much prefer private confessions, but I’ll permit this in this case — which is that, you know, I am disinclined to listen to our leaders when they admit that they make a mistake, if they ever do, and can be pretty merciless in my response to when they do do something foolish. And I’m confident that if Andreae Sennyah was a senator, as some of us joke about often, or if I was, you know, a leader of a political party, that I would be making mistakes all the time. I would be making mistakes all the time. And so I wonder what you make of that, right? Especially if we look at maybe, on the partisan side, what happened in BC, or even the fact that so many of the incumbents have just been defeated in recent elections?
Ray Pennings: Yeah, I think there’s two things. One, our system is one that demands accountability, and the electoral system is the means by which accountability is there. So I do not begrudge voters for holding people accountable for their records and, in some cases, unelecting. I often say, in analyzing elections in Canada, we throw governments out more than we elect them. And that is usually the case. We usually are fairly generous with governments when they come in. There’s usually a honeymoon period, in terms of the polls and everything else. But then once the mistakes start piling — I don’t think it is necessarily the point that’s at issue here. I don’t think it’s the fact that people make mistakes. I think it’s how they respond and how they deal with those mistakes.
It’s interesting you mentioned the BC election. I want to be very careful not to judge into the personal motives of anybody. I’ve been around the political sphere for several decades, and I can say that 95 percent of the people who I have met in political life, from all political stripes — including those I most profoundly disagree with and would never vote for — most of them are there for the right reasons. They actually love their country. They actually have a vision of the good, and they’re trying to advance it, even if sometimes I think that vision is totally misguided. That’s part of democracy, and I welcome and respect that. So I’m not going to climb into the motives. There are a few bad apples, but they’re the minority.
It was interesting: Premier-elect Doerkson in British Columbia, in his election speech — here was this accountant, management type, who we barely got to know over the last few weeks, coming on stage, clearly overcome with emotion and jumping up and down with enthusiasm. Then highlighting — and if I remember correctly, in his opening speech, made two essential points. Number one: I’m going to get to work and work hard for the people of BC, implementing the platform, blah, blah. We expect that. But the second was: I fully expect to make lots of mistakes, and I’m going to be transparent about them.
Time will tell. I’ve heard that before. “We govern for all the people,” and “We make mistakes in our transparency.” Sometimes that’s easier in an acceptance speech than it is in real life, when the mistakes are made. But let’s verify as the process unfolds. But I think there is something very welcome.
So the second point I always focus on is competence. Governance is a set of capacities, and we show disrespect for the office — we show disrespect for the institution of government, which is a God-ordained institution — when we put people in place who simply are not competent. I would urge you not to hire me to fix your car or to renovate your house. My toolbox consists of phone numbers. That’s not my competence. And similarly, when we elect people, I think there’s a Christian obligation to look at competence, and to ensure — I will vote for someone who has character and who has competence but who I disagree with on a whole pile of things. I will prioritize that over agreement, necessarily, on the issues — which, that doesn’t mean that convictions, the third C that I usually go to, are unimportant. Obviously, I want a platform that best reflects the sort of policies that I think are best, and I pay attention to that. So it’s not either-or, and you can’t have zero in any of them. But if I have to prioritize voting for people, I would say character, competence, and conviction, in that order, actually shows a proper respect for the office of government, and participation in. And maybe back to the point where we started with, in terms of voter participation: sometimes that may mean not casting a ballot, or casting a blank ballot, or spoiling your ballot.
Andreae Sennyah: Yeah, Ray, there’s a lot to reflect on there, actually, because I think your three Cs — which obviously reflect the fact that you occasionally preach somewhere on Sundays — is a high bar. It is a high bar. And, you know, character is a high bar for all of us. But even on the issue of competence, I frequently think about the fact that, yes, human beings participate in institutions and form them, but the reverse is also true. We are also formed by the institutions in which we participate. And governing is a very particular skill that has to be cultivated in its context, right? Governing federally is different from governing provincially, too. So I think there’s a challenge there in discerning — especially for, let’s say, new candidates, people running for the first time — how to discern their past experience and its applicability or relevance to the competence that they’re going to bring to the current position.
You did say something, though, there, Ray, that I think is important for us to clarify, and is true for both of our traditions, about the legitimacy of political authority. I’ll speak for my tradition: the Catholic tradition doesn’t view politics as a necessary evil. In fact, it views it as a good, and a necessary way to order complex societies. And I think that’s, like, an even more important starting point for any conversation about elections, their results, and what we expect from government. The political sphere is a legitimate sphere. Political authority is legitimate. Its coercive authority can also be legitimate, insofar as it’s, you know, ordered toward what is morally right and good. And I do think that there are some Christians who dispute that, for different reasons and different traditions, or through bad formation. But I would value hearing, from the Reformed perspective, the view of political authority.
Ray Pennings: Absolutely. You know, one of the most famous quotes that happens in terms of public life from a Protestant perspective is that of the former Dutch prime minister Abraham Kuyper, who said, “There is not a square inch of the world over which Christ has not said, ‘It is mine.'” God’s sovereignty extends to everywhere. And that means that sovereignty — political sovereignty — is exercised as a delegated authority from God. So, you know, borrowing Romans 13, the Peter and Timothy passages, various scriptural passages, the Reformed tradition is very much that government is a minister of God, and we obey government, and in obeying government, we obey God. Now, there are boundaries. There are times when government makes itself not worthy, and there are processes — go beyond what we can cover here today — in terms of when it’s legitimate to civilly disobey. But the default position is respect for authority, even authority held by unbelieving rulers, because the office is one that is a delegated authority from God.
I think that points to something that maybe can help us pull some of these threads together, and that is: the purpose of government is not winning an argument. The purpose of government is not pronouncement of truth. The purpose of government is justice. And the irony is, the origins of the word justice actually comes from worthiness. Giving each what they are worth is an element of justice. Etymologically, the word actually has some common roots with the word worship, because worship is to give God what is due to him. Justice is to give our fellow humans what is due to them as image bearers of God. And that is an accountability of government.
So when I look at the purpose of government and the purpose of leadership, I see leadership that is directed towards a justice that is actually, ideally, consistent with the worship of God. But we live in a fallen, broken world, and even the best government, held by the people of the highest character and the most competence, is — to borrow one more Reformed thing — government by depraved people who are in need of God’s grace. Which is one of the reasons — you know, the origins of federalism and the division of powers between different levels of government actually comes from a political theorist in the sixteenth century, Johannes Althusius, who was a right-hand man of Calvin. And basically, it was the idea that human beings are sinful, can’t trust them with too much, so therefore let’s divide, so that not all power ends up in one hand. Almost a precursor to Lord Acton’s famous dictum: power corrupts absolutely. If that is one of the characteristics of human nature, we actually need to divvy up power so we can hold each other accountable.
Andreae Sennyah: Well, Ray, you’re ending us off with so many tantalizing threads about depravity and Calvin that I would love to get into, but I’m cognizant of the time. I do wonder, perhaps, maybe if we could conclude by bringing it back to something quite on the personal, interpersonal level — that was Dr. Brodie’s kind of message of hope, and what he was pointing to. And I think it’s actually quite profound to reflect on the fact that someone who has served at some of the highest levels of government in our society was pointing to reference letters — character reference letters that he was writing for his students during this time of year — as a way of, as a cause for hope for him.
You know, if we go back to what we first started part two on, this idea of participation: the magnitude of the problems that are facing our society seem to be getting bigger and bigger every day. And if they’re not getting bigger, then we’re simply just becoming more aware of them, if they were always this big. But I do think that there is something consoling about the fact that we have agency, and we are each deeply moved by something, or the things that we see each day, right? Many of our colleagues have school-aged children. They are very involved in their local school. You know, you are involved, no doubt, in many volunteering activities — of the people who are most directly impacting your life. And yes, casting our ballot in free and fair elections — which is one of life’s greatest and simplest pleasures, I have recently discovered — is one aspect of us exercising that agency and participating in our society. But so too is, you know, going to the NAC for a Christmas concert, and volunteering at the local soup kitchen, and participating in a board or a charitable organization in our community. So I don’t want us to leave on an overly helpless note. And yeah, I’m curious, maybe, your reaction to the cause for hope.
Ray Pennings: Neither of us are Pentecostal, but let me put a spiritual enthusiasm behind what you just said, and say amen to that. Let’s not underestimate the value of government. There are people all around the world who wish they had the opportunities that we do. And, you know, we’re going to be very honest in this podcast about some of the flaws of the system, and we’re going to talk about it. But let’s do it with a perspective of how privileged we are — both considering a historical, but even a contemporary, perspective — of the opportunities we have to live in a free and democratic society.
Secondly, let’s not make politics more than it is. It is limited, but as Dr. Brodie reminded us, when we ask it to do things it can’t do, it actually becomes much more dangerous. And it’s the good, the true, the beautiful. Joining a symphony orchestra is as much a political act towards the common good as joining a political party. And helping — serving at a soup kitchen, getting involved in your community association.
I combined the two for many years. I was an umpire. I actually was the umpire-in-chief in the Hamilton region. And that was a matter of serving my community — kids playing ball and everything else — and appealing to justice. I aimed to get the calls right and make sure the game was fairly played. So both of my passions, for justice and for service, were captured in that beautiful game of baseball — which, I would highlight the fact that the Milwaukee Brewers did win the World Series. The World Series is misnamed when two American teams are playing for it. But nonetheless, congratulations to them.
Andreae Sennyah: Yeah, I’m confident that last part was meaningful to at least some of our listeners, even if it wasn’t meaningful to me, Ray. So thanks so much for this conversation, and looking forward to the next one.
Ray Pennings: Thank you. I appreciate you hitting the ball out of the park.
Andreae Sennyah: Bye, Ray.
