Take two pills and vote in the morning

This may sound bizarre, but in following the news coverage of the US Presidential campaign, I am reminded of bacteria. I realize that in penning this I am also being more than a tad bit insulting. For that, I apologize. There is a point to this, but it requires a bit of a detour down analogy lane, so fasten your seatbelt.

One of the emerging issues in the field of medicine is how to deal with MRSA’s – drug-resistant bacteria, in layperson’s terms. The advent of penicillin in the early 20^th century meant that people could take a couple of pills a day for a week and survive potentially life-threatening illnesses. When my son was 4, he was admitted to the hospital with the same ailment that killed my grandfather’s older brother in 1927. Three pills a day for five days, and that was that. Antibiotics may have grown in number and in potency, but they are also declining in effectiveness.

There are a number of opinions regarding what happened, but they seem to fall into two categories – one, that overuse or improper use of the drugs has lessened their punch, and two – that the bugs themselves have begun to mutate and build immunities of their own. The truth is likely some combination of the two phenomena, but the outcome is the same. What used to work no longer does, and the experts are left scratching their heads over what to do.

And so back to politics.

Political insiders and professional advisors are often called 'spin doctors' by others and by each other. I know some who view the moniker as some mark of favour, some source of pride. The term really owes to the fact that like practitioners of traditional medicine,  they deal with complex interactions and know what ‘remedies’ to employ when a campaign gets sick (i.e:  goes off the rails). Their patient’s health and wellbeing is what counts, even if it is a campaign and not the human body

For years, they have prescribed the same types of messages, targeted the same demographics, and pushed the same particular issues. The strategies have been repeated because, to this point, they have always worked. 'Play to your base' has been standard operating procedure since before most of us were born. Do it effectively, and you get 4 years and then, come the next election, it's more of the same.

What if, like their medical counterparts, the treatment that these ‘doctors’ are prescribing are losing their potency?  What if all of the pills in the ‘spin doctor’s’ black bag don’t deal with the infection?


Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz should never have – in the eyes of the American Spin Doctor Association – gotten this far, this fast, and with this much potency. Like their medical counterparts, the politicos have thrown every textbook treatment at them. Endorsements from former candidates and current office-holders, nods of support from powerful interest lobbies, and the unleashing of surrogates to the 24 hour news channels and talk radio circuit are the equivalent of following an article in the latest edition of the New England Journal of Medicine or The Lancet. They look for what the professional consensus declares to be the ‘gold standard’ treatment, apply, then sit back and wait.

But if polls and delegate counts are the blood work and diagnostic tests of the ‘spin doctor’, it is clear that the treatment is not working.

The patient, of course, is not sick – but they are ‘sick and tired.’ They don’t respond to the Bill Clinton pill, and they seem to have developed a severe reaction to the Mitt Romney medication as well.

In this case, people are not the bacteria – but their problems are. Declining living standards, the hollowing out of industries – and communities – as well as the devaluation of what many considered the ‘American Dream’.  The treatments on offer have been the same for four decades, and if they had worked even a fraction of the amount they have been purported to, you would not have seen this phenomenon unfold.

The ‘spin doctors’ say they are as surprised as anyone, but should they really be? When you stake a career on political consulting, when you work 50+ hours a week on K Street, collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars from clients, and you get to sit in a studio where Wolf Blitzer or Anderson Cooper ask you what it all means, do you have the luxury of shrugging your shoulders and muttering “I dunno”?

My take is this – the bacteria is ‘anger’. It has been made stronger by a combination of inaction and indifference. The bug gets stronger with each ‘I don’t know’ and ‘I don’t care’ that comes from the governing class. They, in turn, calmly declare that they’ve seen it all before and administer a treatment of ‘we care, seriously we do’, of actors and singers appearing on stage and doing a rendition of their last Billboard top ten tune, or referencing the catch phrase that helped their last picture earn $100 million, and a heavy duty course of surrogates ‘explaining’ what the ‘real’ issues are.

The treatments used to alleviate the discomfort. Joe Q. Public’s overdue mortgage payments didn’t miraculously catch up just because Fleetwood Mac queued up ‘Don’t Stop’ for the umpteenth Bill and Hillary whistle stop, but he felt that much more positive about his situation that he could actually see light at the end of the tunnel.

Today, the light at the end of the tunnel feels a lot like the headlamp of a speeding locomotive.

Joe Q. Public has grown weary of the medicine he’s been taking for the past four decades, and like someone with a long term illness that defies conventional treatment, he’s willing do the equivalent of going to some third world country where a doctor has declared that they have a new experimental drug that the medical community back home won’t certify. If you’re that sick and that frustrated, you might just borrow fifty grand and fly halfway around the world for the ‘extract of the adrenal gland of the whatchamacallit’ because the hospital back home is full of people in white coats who just shrug and mutter ‘I dunno.’

The political establishment, I believe, brought this on themselves. The spin doctors over prescribed answers to tough socioeconomic issues with treatments barely stronger than a placebo. They allowed the ‘anger’ to grow and metastasize. Just as important, they failed to come up with something strong enough to give the patient – the middle class voter – any real relief. Instead, they have tried to manage the anger, much like a doctor tries to manage pain.

And that’s the thing. If all you are doing for your patient is managing their pain, you are admitting that curing their condition is not in your purview. The patient knows that, and that’s why he and she are willing to take the risk.

A letter to my British friends

As a Canadian, I am loathe to make any comment about the affairs of a foreign country, even if that country’s head of state and mine are one in the same.

The fact is, though, the current campaign regarding whether or not Britain should – or should not – remain in the European Union has already had such influence insinuated into it. There are those in EU member states who have declared their opinion as to what Britons should do, and what they may do if the answer is not to their liking.

More importantly, those in the Remain camp declare that “the Commonwealth wants us to stay.” As a citizen of a Commonwealth nation, I do not recall being asked my opinion on this matter. On the other hand, if people in the UK have declared that the feelings and sentiments of Commonwealth kith and kin are valid, then I no longer feel that I have any particular prohibition on stating my views.

In 2006, I travelled to the UK and met with several people in relation to my book “The Case for Commonwealth Free Trade.” I received a very polite and sincere welcome, but also a warning. I was told that while the idea sounded splendid, and that Canada, Australia and New Zealand should certainly avail themselves of the opportunity, the EU meant that Britain could only stand at the sidelines and give its well wishes. There was a sense at the time that the move toward an ‘ever closer union’ was inevitable and that little could be done to halt the inexorable march of time.

Two years later, while my wife and I sat in a hotel room in the Caribbean, we tuned into CNN and the unfolding economic crisis – the precipitous crashing of stock indices and the impromptu gathering of bankers and politicians to show solidarity. Just like the proverbial receding tide at a nudist beach, much came to be revealed. For eight years, we have been treated to terms like ‘stimulus’, ‘quantitative easing’ and ‘liquidity’ on an all too regular basis. That may have been the obvious result, but something else happened.

Theories and plans that had been treated like articles of faith began to be questioned. Like Sir Karl Popper’s theory of falsification, people began to discover limitations to assumptions, where things began to break down. That included the ‘European project.’

To this interested observer, the origins of ‘Brexit’ trace back to the very beginning of the UK’s membership in the Common Market back in the early 1970’s.

It was based on two assumptions and a bit of a finesse.

The two assumptions were that:

• Europe was in economic ascendency while the Commonwealth was in decline; and,
• Economic unity in Europe was necessary to ensure political solidarity against the threat of Communism

The finesse was not necessarily to deny that the planned end-game of the EEC was a ‘United States of Europe’, but to suggest that Britain could sign up for the economic access without taking on the political project.

Four decades later, the reality is as follows:

• The European Union’s long term growth prospects are moribund while Commonwealth nations are among the star economic performers; and,
• The end of Communism eliminated the ideological threat, and what military threat may or may not remain falls within the purview of NATO – not the EU

The finesse, as well, has shown itself to be ineffective. 

Skeptical minds might question how Britain is not part of a nation-building project when it must submit its national laws to a European Court, adopt laws passed by a European Parliament, and elect legislators to said Parliament. Suggestions that Britain is not heading toward inclusion as a province or state of a larger federation is reminiscent of the Black Knight in ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’ who, after having had his arms and legs lopped off, dismisses the injuries as ‘but a scratch’ and insists that he’s still up for a fight.

You can say that you belong to a trade agreement, but that trade agreement has a flag, an anthem, a Parliament, a President, a currency, courts and a body of laws. If it waddles like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, then one can only be drawn to a particular conclusion.

Free trade agreements exist around the world and in different guises. In the past decade, Canada has signed more free trade agreements than I can count on my fingers. That, incidentally, includes the recently negotiated agreement with the EU. In none of these instances were we told that we would no longer have a Prime Minister, or that we should stop singing ‘O Canada’, or that Her Majesty would no longer appear on the front of our 20 dollar banknotes.

Understand that Canada kept her sovereignty and political independence when concluding the Canada-US agreement in 1988. Also bear in mind that it was an agreement between a nation with half the UK population versus a nation with ten times our population, who had amassed more economic and political power than any other country or empire in the annals of human history. Yes, 35 million Canadians managed to secure free trade access to the world’s only superpower without having to change our flag or sing a different song at sporting events. There is no NAFTA flag, no NAFTA Parliament full of NAFTA MP’s – never has been and never will.

The experience of jurisdictions in North America and around the world is that you can do trade without a political merger. The EU does trade deals with non-member states all the time, so a post-Brexit UK should not be any different.

And that is the central question – one of politics, not economics.

To this outside observer, leaving means you don’t want Britain to become a like a Canadian province or an American state to a larger federation. Remaining means you are supportive of Britain becoming the jurisdictional equivalent of Ontario or Alberta, Ohio or Massachusetts.

What this outside observer cannot tell you is what you should do. That is fundamentally a decision for the British people. If you believe that the world has evolved in such a way that the future of your society is better served under a different construct that is a decision that you can make. If you feel that the future of Britain – economically and politically – is better served by maintaining political independence, then you have your choice as well.

Canadians and Britons have gone through much over the decades and generations, and the result of this vote will not alter that. It is your choice, and those of us beyond your border wish you luck in this monumental decision.