Skating into 2012, More Resolutions

[Editor's note: At the end of last year, author and social entrepreneur Al Etmanski asked a gamut of notable friends the question "What are you skating towards in 2012?" -- in other words, what ideas, concepts and phenomena are on your horizon to make 2012 the best yet? The Tyee recently published a first round of responses by Mark Kingwell, Shari Graydon, and Patrick O'Neill, who wrote of their commitments to unlock empathy, turn voice into actions, and age fearlessly. Today, a few more big ideas to tackle in the coming year.]

John Stapleton: Addressing Public Scarcity and Private Wealth

As we race to create greater inequality through increased public scarcity and private wealth, I want to conduct thought experiments concerning where Canada is heading as a nation.

What does this look like? The area I know best is our income security programs, so I'll start there.

This is the first "skate." Our public narrative is the arena. A first experiment: If Canadian governments were to cancel all income security payments to individuals overnight, the immediate savings to governments would be in the $150 billion range. This includes all Old Age Security, child benefits, EI, and disability payments. It also includes provincial payments such as workers' compensation and welfare. In addition to placing hundreds of thousands of Canadians into immediate destitution, grocery stores and other shops would take a huge hit to their sales and landlords would be forced to evict hundreds of thousands of tenants. Some would go out of business.

Although one can't be clear if a $150-billion haircut would result in a contraction in activity of $150 billion overnight, the nominal short-term Canadian balance sheet would get a sudden boost with this immediate change. In nominal terms, we could eliminate the $60-billion federal deficit and, over time, we would have many billions left over for all governments to make serious inroads in paying down their deficits and accumulated debt. Our fiscal house would finally be in order.

But something else very curious would happen. Since government and all other income security expenditures are components of GDP, the $150 billion in cancelled payments could reduce our GDP by over 10 per cent literally overnight, placing Canada into a deep and long economic depression that would easily rival the Great Depression of the 1930s. At the same time, millions of Canadians could become homeless. In essence, our economy would contract and tax revenues would deteriorate quickly and deeply.

This pathology might sound familiar. It is the same prescription that our economies swallowed in the 1930s. This prescription is now being recommended in part for countries like Greece, Spain, Ireland, Italy and Portugal in the modern day European Union. If it continues, it will spread to all of us. Why? Because you can't shrink yourself bigger. Public scarcity is a choice and not an inevitability. This is the arena, and I'll be skating.

Peter Deitz: Microphilanthropy

"What are you skating toward?" is a Canadian remix of the classic Siddharthian question, "Whither will my path yet lead me?"

I recall coming across this question in high school, and thinking, "That's one of the best questions I've been confronted with ever." I printed it out on our family's first black and white laser printer, and carried it with me for several months. "My path" jumped out in contrast to "the path" I gloomily felt I was traveling along with little influence over the route, mode of transportation, or final destination.

If the last 17 years are any indication, I'm doing a fairly good job of proving my glum 15 year-old self wrong. Al's question, "What are you skating towards?" has just as much agency built in. It conjures a skater or team of skaters who have fixed their sights on a hockey puck and are doing their best to land it exactly where they want it to be.

So what is the puck I'm skating toward in 2012? Where is it now? And where do I want it to be? Of all the big ideas I've taken a shot at in the past several years -- social enterprise, nonprofit technology, open data, impact investing -- the one that still holds the greatest promise in my eyes is microphilanthropy.

Microphilanthropy spans the transactional (giving of time, talent, and money) and the non-transactional (giving a damn about the people and world around us). Microphilanthropy is in equal parts something we do and something we care about deeply.

Unlike democracy, economic development, and the like, which have their champions, some more legitimate than others -- microphilanthropy isn't even on the radar of most systems thinkers and social innovators. As a result, the infrastructure for it appears underdeveloped. In our daily entanglement with mobile, social, and cloud technology, we aren't exactly confronted with an abundance of "one-click checkout" buttons for creating the change we want to see in ourselves, our families, and the world. And yet, I've learned the presence or absence of such buttons has little impact on microphilanthropy's long-term prospects.

To be activated, microphilanthropy requires little more than tightly networked individuals who share a deep and common concern. Fortunately, the technology sector, after years of making money by isolating individuals behind television sets and word processors, has transformed itself into a multi-billion dollar industry that thrives on tightly networking individuals. The tighter the networks a technology company can create, the larger its valuation. Viewed through the microphilanthropy lens, this is a very good trend.

If the technology sector is covering the networks, then the philanthropic sector needs to be tackling the second condition for microphilanthropy: individuals sharing a deep and common concern.

In 2012, I'd like to see grant-makers become far more visible in their efforts to deepen and widen the communities of individuals who share their unique concern for a specific cause, community, individual, resource, or idea. The deeper and wider the shared concern, the more likely we are to witness unprecedented giving of time, talent, and money.

All this to say, I'm committing to skating alongside any effort that bridges the tight-network-forming innovations of the technology sector with the common-concern-building activities of organized philanthropy. The elusive prize of a world abounding with acts of generosity, creativity, and empathy will follow.

Donna Thomson: Defense!

Frankly, I have no idea what I'm skating towards. I am careening and I can't quite see where the winds of change are taking me.

Within the last four months, we have moved our family across the world, my husband retired from the diplomatic corps after 37 years, and we helped our adult son relocate from the family home into a residence with nursing care. In my book and my blogs, I write about disability, care in the community and our aging population. Lucky that I have such rich material within my own four walls!

During the past few months, I described to a friend how I felt about the onslaught of change in my life. "It's as if someone has removed all the floorboards from my house," I said. "It's like I am walking on just the narrow joists and I worry about falling."

I know that others will write about skating towards positive change, and I will be inspired. But I would like to talk about defense and not offense, to use another hockey metaphor.

Over the last year, I have observed a pernicious trend toward labeling some people as unworthy of continued care. In 2012, I will be skating defensively toward it. Thanks to information technology, I have many friends all over the world who are also parents of children with disabilities. One family, from Australia, I have known "virtually" for many years -- their son has developmental disabilities, is medically complex and has managed to survive over 77 hospitalizations in his 23 years of life. This year, the professional advisory committee at their hospital took a unilateral decision that there would be no more ICU hospitalizations or resuscitation measures because these would "not be in the best interest of the patient" and furthermore, they would be "futile." It was my guess that a meeting of hospital administrators had taken place that basically placed a cap on the public funds that one individual could or should consume in a lifetime -- especially if that individual had developmental disabilities.

In November of this year, Louise Kinross, the editor of Bloom, the Holland Bloorview family magazine, attended a conference on medical ethics and disability at McGill. She reported that one neonatologist commented: "There is a feeling among my colleagues -- an unspoken and probably unconscious bias -- between physical and mental disability. Sometimes neonatologists think if you're not perfect mentally, you're better off dead. But when it comes to physical disability, they will go a long way with interventions."

The McGill seminar also addressed "The Disability Paradox" -- that people with serious disabilities rate their lives as good or excellent while able-bodied people, particularly medical professionals, rate quality of life in people with disabilities as poor. The elderly, especially those with dementia, are also in a risky situation. In the absence of a strong and vocal personal support network, those who are vulnerable and voiceless risk becoming expendable, especially in a climate of austerity.

The worth of giving and receiving care is my "defensive" strategy. I believe that we urgently need a public conversation in Canada about a national ethic of care -- one with a sustainable business plan. If the "product" in the business plan is the well-being of those who require care, how do we value that product as a nation? Who performs the tasks of caring and who pays are the questions that require honest answers for all stakeholders. And if we truly value the well-being of our citizens with care needs, governments need to nurture and enable social innovation and social enterprise to operate in this sphere. The giving and receiving of care is a commodity, but so is every other facet of daily life. I value the well-being of the vulnerable people in my family and I know I'm not alone. The giving and receiving of care should be a valuable commodity for everyone.

My hair is white and my son requires 24-hour nursing care. My mother turns 90 this year. Scratch the surface of Canadian society -- my family is not that unusual. Careening toward the future is not a good way to score goals and win the game or make public policy. We need an honest and public appraisal of our strengths and capabilities in the arena. In my family, we rate our life as excellent. I want to make sure that we keep it that way, so in 2012 I'll be keeping my eye on the puck and designing my next defensive strategy.