The Canadian cargo cult

The following article has been updated somewhat from the original 2006 version.

The most popular article on our sister site (that is, the article with the most hits and the most links to it) is a fifteen-year-old one about contemporary cargo cults. An early passage in that article observes:

Cargo cults supposedly originated in Melanesia about 75 years ago, but the type of thinking which is the foundation of cargo cults has long been characteristic of what we like to consider the most sophisticated society on the face of the earth. In fact, North America is currently ruled by cargo cults.

The cargo cult is founded on a familiar, and popular, bit of fallacious reasoning: post hoc ergo propter hoc. The residents of Papua, Yaliwan, Vanuatu and other places noticed that when the colonial occupiers built wharves and airstrips, the wharves and airstrips were soon visited by ships and airplanes which delivered cargos of goods. They concluded that the ships and airplanes arrived as a consequence of the building of the wharves and airstrips, so they built their own wharves and airstrips in the expectation of receiving their own cargoes.

This reasoning seems naive to us, since we already know that the correct chain of reasoning is the reverse: the wharves and airstrips were built because ships and airplanes were going to be arriving. However, in dealing with that which is new to
us, just as wharves and airstrips were new to Melanesians, we draw exactly the same conclusions about it.

Among the contemporary cargo cults discussed in the argument are the cults of the shopping mall and of the computer. The first shopping malls attracted lots of customers, so other poeple built shopping malls, expecting that they would also draw lots of customers. This is how the article describes what happened next:

We soon had a shopping mall on nearly every block. Retail space expanded enormously, and eventually the retail industry collapsed under its own weight. Retail chains closed and downsized, their unsustainable outlets either replaced by dollar stores or left permanently empty.

Today, Wellington Square in London, Ontario, the first shopping mall in this country, bloated to three or four times its original size and given a trendier name, lies dying in the centre of a downtown which it has already killed. On Saturdays the
retail staff in the few stores that are open outnumber the customers. In Toronto, the Eaton Centre has transformed the retail neighbourhood around it into a vast bazaar of dollar stores, adult book stores, and fast food franchises.

Since that was written some of the dollar stores and adult book stores around the Eaton Centre have been transformed into a giant empty space, Dundas Square.

The computer cult is somewhat weaker today, but the following observation from the article still isn't that far off the mark:

Even when it is used for undertakings which could not be done more effectively without a computer,
the computer often is more of a hindrance than a help, simply because it is considered more as a talisman than as the appliance which it is. For example, computers have been widely used to amass great quantities of data in databases which then prove to be unanalyzable or unreliable. We reason that since other people have increased the efficiency of their organizations by constructing databases, we will also increase the efficiency of our operations if we construct databases. We might as plausibly argue that since Newton had brilliant ideas when he sat under apple trees, we should all sit under apple trees.

The computer can help carry out intelligent plans more efficiently, but it cannot do much with wishful thinking, apart from dressing it up with pretty graphics. Nevertheless, even when wishful thinking goes disastrously awry, people seem to think
that everything will turn out all right if they just get the next upgrade.

Well, you get the idea. While all but one of the Melanesian cargo cults have disappeared, and the one surviving one has developed a more sophisticated theology, the cargo cult is alive and well in the rest of the world.

I was reminded of the article about cargo cults while trying to answer the question raised in a 2006 article at our old NEW IMPROVED HEAD website – how did a 2006 Commonwealth Fund report about health care, a topic in which Canadians are extremely interested, a report which suggests furthermore that Canadian health care is a shambles and suggests several specific improvements to it whose effectiveness could easily be assessed, how did that report end up being almost completely ignored by the Canadian press and public?

The answer, it seems to me, lies in Canada's being perhaps the biggest cargo cult in the world. We have provided it with what seem to us to be all the characteristics of a nation, but on closer examination these characteristics turn out to be in large part primitive imitations of the real thing. Furthermore, the large part of these characteristics consisting of primitive imitation seems to be getting larger.

The Canadian health care system does provide real health care. However, it is not providing enough. We have built hospitals, but they are performing only a fraction of the operations which are needed. Waiting times for surgery are long, sometimes measured in years, and often the ailments for which surgery is required are life-threatening and progressive – that is, they get more life-threatening while surgery is being waited for. Even when they are not life-threatening they may still have economic effects. The reduced mobility of people waiting for hip replacements – for an average of two years or so if their hip is not actually broken – obviously must affect their productivity and earning power, at least on the average, so that the country loses domestic product and acquires social program costs.

And why does that happen? Well, we have the health care "system," but we don't have the staff. We don't have enough doctors, nurses, or technicians. Governments decided to save money by not training doctors and by laying off nurses and technicians. Those decisions mean that not only are operations postponed, but the tests which must be performed to prepare for the operation must also be delayed, so that the operations end up delayed even more.

In other words, Canadian governments have about as many clues about running the hospitals they've built as the average Melanesian cargo cultist had about running the air traffic control tower he built. Furthermore, when confronted with a study whose results suggest that some technological changes which should anyway have been undertaken years ago would improve the effectivess and reduce the cost of the health care system, the cargo-besotted government and its cargo-besotted citizens show the same comprehension as the Melanesian operator of an imitation air traffic control tower would display of a report about the relative effectiveness of different radar systems.

[Since I wrote this, the Ontario government set out to implement a system of electronic health records, which the Commonwealth Fund report recommended. However, it went about the program in true cargo cult fashion, simply hiring people willy-nilly to create the system, not specifying deliverables, and not getting anything delivered. For a billion dollars ($1,000,000,000) we got some classy looking letterhead.]

Yes, not only are our governments cargo-besotted, so are we non-governmental types. It is scarcely a surprise. The whole country has been from the beginning explicitly a cargo undertaking. Canada was not founded for reasons of history or principle. It was founded to solve a managerial problem.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the legislature of the then Province of Canada (which consisted of the shores of the St. Lawrence and the British shores of the Great Lakes) was incapacitated by deadlock. Canada East (along most of the shores of the St. Lawrence) kept electing Conservatives, while Canada West (along the rest of the St. Lawrence and along the Great Lakes) kept electing Reformers, the predecessors of today's Liberals. Canada West and Canada East had equal numbers of seats in the legislature, so the legislature permanently consisted of equal numbers of Conservatives and Reformers. Governments tended to fall quickly, and little got done.

The idea of a federal union, in which some responsibilities could be hived off to local legislatures in Canada East and West, thus ending much of the deadlock, was first proposed as a solution by Alexander Galt in the 1850s. A federal union, incorporating New Brunswick and Nova Scotia as well as the old Province of Canada, finally was implemented in 1867. Canadians have traditionally been so deeply moved by this accomplishment that in the 1960s they took Galt's name off the town in Ontario named after him (it's now part of Cambridge).

From the beginning Canada was intended to represent a political nationality only. In those days it was considered unlikely that English and French could forge a common intellectual nationality, so they let that aspect of the issue slide. Of course, by neglecting it they guaranteed that it would never develop. To this day we have a country which, as Joey Slinger has observed, is held together only by each province's fear that if it doesn't stick around with the other provinces they might get something it doesn't. He calls it "seagull democracy." In fact, British Columbia entered the federation because it had been promised a railway, and Newfoundland because it was broke and Canada wasn't.

The early years of the Dominion were marked by attempts by the stronger provinces, Ontario and Quebec, to weaken the federal government. Their attempts were facilitated by a decision by the Imperial Privy Council in 1896 that the federal government could exercise its residuary power only in time of war (the British North America Act 1867 reserves any powers not specifically enumerated in it to the federal government). As a result, programs in new areas of government responsibility, such as unemployment insurance and social welfare, were not automatically taken over by the federal government (whose capacity to wage endless war was severely limited). These days the federation has loosened to the point that provinces may, if they choose, regulate immigration, which is inherently a federal responsibility – no matter, Quebec has taken up this option. Quebec also gets miffed when it's not allowed to represent itself at conferences of sovereign nations.

Canada, therefore, is in form a nation but does not act like one. It is a cargo country, erected in the form of a country in the hopes that it would magically start reaping the benefits of being a country. For the first 75 or so years of the federation the trick seemed to be working, since most of Canada had the identity of loyal servant of the British Empire to fall back on. British imperial ideology provided most of Canada with national principles (there was no such thing as Canadian citizenship until 1948). Canada loyally furthered British imperial interests around the world, furthering them with arms in Egypt, South Africa, the Far East, and Europe. The non-imperialist part of Canada didn't play along, but the problems it created could be contained.

In 1931, however, Canada became independent. The Depression and the Second World War delayed the abandonment of imperial principles, but once the war was out of the way the attractions of imperialism started to pall. Over the succeeding decades we have seen the abandonment of the term Dominion, because it is colonial, and an attempt to substitute other ideals, such as the "just society" and multiculturalism, for the old imperial ones. However, none of these ideals has really caught on. The only thing that really defines Canada today is its refusal to be American, and that refusal is probably chiefly due to the unattractiveness of the great American ideology – we didn't throw off one empire's dogma so we could get fitted for another's.

It is not surprising that since the Second World War our institutions have become more like cargo institutions. Our armed forces have been reduced to the point where the country not only cannot defend itself (not a big problem, since the only country likely to invade is the United States, and we'd all have to be armed to fight them), but can maintain internal order only with difficulty (as at Oka, where a small band of lightly armed militants kept the army at bay for weeks). The Canadian armed forces are too small to carry out any large-scale sustained operation, as is becoming apparent in Afghanistan. For a long time we pretended we were too noble to have our armed forces actually use armed force, and that instead we were devoted to peacekeeping, but in the end even peacekeeping got to be too demanding for the tiny forces we were prepared to fund.

We needed an educational system, so we built schools. Just like the leaders of real countries, the leaders of ours frequently announce that education is crucial to Canadian prosperity and influence. Then they cut education budgets and raise university tuition. In Ontario in the early 1990s they reduced the number of places in medical schools, thereby helping to aggravate the problem of waiting times in the health care system, among other things.

And it's not just doctors we can't be bothered to train. We have always had to import tradespeople, for example. Even the ideas implemented by the educational system are imported. Having decided that if you build it, they will learn, we have never seen any need to think about what the schools should do. We'll build schools just like other countries' and think just like the educators of other countries. Usually, of course, that means not only that the ideas are often inappropriate for Canada but also that they are obsolete. Ontario, for example, set up the Educational Quality and Accountability Office in the 1990s to implement performance assessment, a type of evaluation which had been implemented much earlier in other countries, and which, when Ontario adopted it, those other countries were dropping like a hot potato. EQAO eventually dropped it, too, and since then seems to have been changing the type of evaluation it uses as often as Bill Gates changes operating systems. But then EQAO has traditionally been run by people untrained in measurement and evaluation.

Other sectors of Canadian society operate similarly. Pierre Berton observed long ago that early in the automobile age Swedish manufacturers decided to build cars adapted to the Swedish climate and road conditions, while Canadian manufacturers decided to assemble American cars. The Canadian private television industry follows the same strategy – it simply rebroadcasts American television programs.

And guess what? We gobble 'em up. Why, those are the programs people watch in a real country, the United States, so if we watch them that means that we're a real country, too. And don't think this generalization applies only to English Canada. When you watch most of the dramatic shows and movies on private French television, you'll notice that the actors' mouths aren't moving as they would if they were making the words on the soundtrack. And Quebec is the home of the idea that if it calls itself sovereign it will be, even if after becoming "sovereign" it uses another country's currency.

Well, Canada could have been a real country. Not only does it have a real culture, it has two of them. But one unfortunate characteristic of both those cultures is that an infatuation with appearance occupies the place that should be accorded to a devotion to principle and to comprehension.

The Canadian Cargo Cult © John FitzGerald, 2006