By Beryl Wajsman
Wednesday, October 12, 2005a recentNew York Times Magazine published "The Broken Contract" by Michael Ignatieff of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. It is one of the most incisive arguments for a re-affirmation, and re-definition, of the social contract between government and citizens in the wake of state failures to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. It is an argument for compassion over complacency and for conscience over contempt.
In a recent National Post, Peter Foster attacked Ignatieff in an article entitled "The Wild Wind of Hurricane Michael". In my view, aside from the glaring misrepresentations of Ignatieff's positions, Foster's piece smacked of the kind of smug self-satisfaction we have witnessed for too long in Canadian media.
as many of you know, the Institute has worked with Team EMS and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in sending relief workers to the stricken areas. (Please see: "New Orleans: a Human Triumph of the Power of One" at Canada Free Press
We know first-hand that the facts Prof. Ignatieff relates are true. We attach both articles above for you to read.
>What follows is the letter I sent to the editors of the National Post.
Peter Foster's critique of Michael Ignatieff's New York Times piece on Katrina entitled "The Broken Contract" was astounding in its inaccuracies and misleading in the assumptions he ascribes to Ignatieff. One wonders if he really read the article at all.
Foster's claim that Ignatieff believes in big government and focus-group solutions to problems large and small is not only untrue as regards the point of Ignatieff's article, but evidences a remarkable ignorance of Ignatieff's work. Big government and focus-group solutions are the crosses we bear in Canada. Ignatieff has never advocated them.
"The Broken Contract" is one of the clearest statements of the minimal duties owed by governors to the governed. Its centerpiece is the quote he used from a displaced black woman who voiced her frustration in simple terms. "We are americans!" she shouted. americans are not supposed to be treated this way. No one is.
Ignatieff goes on to write some of the most stirring words we have read in a long time. "That single sentence was a lesson in political obligation. Citizenship ties are not humanitarian, abstract or discretionary. They are not ties of charity. ... a citizen has a claim of right on the resources of government when she cannot - simply cannot - help herself." It is a call we would do well to hear as Canadians who have, for a generation, abdicated the sovereignty of our suffrage to statocratic social engineers.
Citizens cede their natural liberties to a state in return for the provision of those services that can best be rendered in common, not for the politically correct vote-grabbing pork-barrel schemes that are so in vogue today. Defense, food, education, care and protection from nature's fate are the central duties of governance. So that we may all have the luxury of time to pursue our private passions and poetry free of state fiat. That is the essence of liberal, pluralistic society. That has been the essence of
Ignatieff's public philosophy and the duties he reminds us of in "The Broken Contract".
The fact is that the system did fail. Not from want of resources or logistics, but from lack of will. as Ignatieff writes, "Let us not be sentimental. The poor and dispossessed of New Orleans cannot afford to be sentimental. They know they live in an unjust and unfair society. There are inequalities that people endure, and there are inequalities that enrage. When government failed so dismally in New Orleans, the betrayal was of the same order: it was no longer possible to believe in the contract that binds americans together. What makes the failure over Katrina so unexpected is that while liberals and conservatives agreed about nothing else, they were supposed to have agreed that government should protect americans from natural disaster."
The Institute for Public affairs of Montreal supported Hal Newman's Team EMS, a leading emergency preparedness provider, in bringing together the largest national or NGO contingent of para-medics yet assembled to aid the victims of the Katrina disaster. Responding to a request for volunteers from several organizations, particularly the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, our role was to break through the bureaucratic logjams on the american and Canadian sides and get these relief workers down to the affected areas.
We can attest first-hand that what Ignatieff wrote was correct. The system did fail. The huge bureaucracy of Homeland Security that lumped FEMa, Health & Human Services and all other relief agencies together, became paralyzed as one agency after another thought the other one was going to act first. It was a top down process rendered rudderless through the jostling of jealously guarded bureaucratic imperatives and transparent and cowardly buck-passing.
Fortunately there were individuals of courage and conscience at the State Department, HHS, FEMa and in the armed services who marshaled the resolve, and displayed the daring, needed to make things happen. Ignatieff summed it up succinctly, "The failures were not just failures of performance or anticipation. They were failures of political imagination."
at the Institute we learned one other frightening fact through the past four weeks. at least the americans had procedures in place, though many failed to function. Here in Canada we do not even have the personnel that our government has publicly stated exists since 9-11. Except for the Canadian Forces, civilian emergency preparedness in Canada is a Potemkin Village. We do not have, again in Ignatieff's words, the civilian "...foot soldiers who did not fail..." in New Orleans.
Peter Foster is also unrealistic in his implied support of more reliance on private corporate solutions to disasters. Though many individuals, particularly in the faith-based communities, did heroic work, too much of big business in the United States came with too little too late. I know that the Institute's efforts here got more corporate support than many front-line organizations in the south.
This is not about writing cheques. Ninety per cent of the money pledged to Tsunami relief has not been received nor disbursed some nine months later. In our work we came across problems of medical supplies that had to be shipped from Colorado to New Orleans. But no transport company could be found to donate free shipping. Cell and sat phones were urgently needed at New Orleans International airport and the Superdome, the two main triage points, where some 100,000 displaced citizens could not call friends and family to tell them they were alive because of a lack of communications. For two weeks not one phone company came forward with equipment.
Foster should go back and read "The Broken Contract" again. The testament to what we should be as global citizens celebrating our universal humanity is reflected in the following words from Michael Ignatieff: "Private benevolence cannot heal the wounds of humiliation and abandonment caused by government failure. all lives are worth protecting and, since this is america, worth protecting at the highest standard. To an important degree, the future of confidence in american government will depend not on the leaders who failed their trust but on the foot-soldiers who did not and whom americans can only hope will do the right thing now."
Peter Foster is wrong. Michael Ignatieff's words are not a "wild wind". To quote Harold Laski, another singularly unique public intellectual, Ignatieff's words are "...the warm gentle breeze of compassion that is prelude to the renewal of a bright spring... rather than the cold stinging frost of complacency that signals entry into a long night of winter..."
Canadians should always remember that the "Just Society" which men of goodwill seek to build is predicated on a recognition of an equal claim on the stock of welfare of the land by all, and that this recognition has not yet found full expression in the social contract between the government and the people.