If you listen carefully, at the end of each calendar year you hear a gusty communal exhalation of relief.
Bruised from the outgoing year’s traumas, we feel, every December, that the past 12 months were harder, more harrowing, more freighted and more hopeless than any year before.
But the new year – ah, the new year. We have hope for the new year. We are, after all, wiser now, and older. We have learned from our errors and the errors of others. This will be the year we get things right. This year the deserving will be rewarded, and the undeserving will be suitably chastened.
2016 was a year of wishful thinking. Citizens in B.C. and elsewhere demanded of their leaders economic growth without environmental degradation; tightly controlled borders porous only to friendly and extravagant investors and tourists; free trade outward but not inward; affordable and excellent housing, goods, education and health care; cheaper prices and lower taxes; the preservation of older industries and the stimulation of new ones; equal opportunities without displacement; and equal rights without upset or discomfort.
Have any of these people ever made an omelette?
Our elected representatives and government administrators are also hopeful of progress without disruption or cost. In October, for example, Canada joined over 60 countries when we formally ratified the Paris climate change agreement. However, insufficient plans are in place to meet our aspirational commitments.
This was also a year of fear.
I am afraid of president-elect Donald Trump, who reminds me of the wildly gyrating nozzle of an unattended high-pressure power washer.
I am afraid of those people near and far who, throughout 2016, on the streets and on the Internet, delighted in cruelty, crudeness and ignorance.
I fear for our beautiful planet. This was a year of lost ecological diversity, and of floods, fires, earthquakes, disappearing aquifers and human displacement. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations warns that, due to soil depletion, the world has on average only 60 more years of crops. There is not a lot of time to get our collective house in order.
Inequality prevailed in 2016. The journal Nature reports that 800 million people go hungry while two billion people are overweight or obese. Food Banks Canada tells us that food bank use in B.C. is at a record high, and one-third of users are children.
But the new year – ah, the new year. I do have hope for the new year. To paraphrase a recent Economist cover story on Canada, we in B.C. have an enviable hand to play compared with much of the rest of the world.
In 2016, our universities continued to provide peerless and fearless education to local and foreign students who will be tomorrow’s experts, problem-solvers and leaders.
In 2016, World Wildlife Fund Canada and the Vancouver Aquarium carried out critical, science-based work to protect species and understand and protect the environment in B.C. and beyond.
Our collective commitment to sustainability is growing broader and deeper. The Greater Vancouver Board of Trade committed in 2016 not just to profitability for its members, but to sustainable prosperity. In an open letter in November, more than 60 CEOs and civil society leaders urged Canada’s prime minister and premiers to take bold action on clean growth and climate change.
In 2016, Canadian companies and governments at all levels remained, by and large, law-abiding, consultative and responsive to citizens, consumers and stakeholders. Yes, there are exceptions, and those get the headlines, but behind the headlines reasonableness generally prevailed.
As a member of the Independent Advisory Board for Senate Appointments, in 2016, I had the honour of reviewing a large number of applications for appointment to Canada’s Senate. I was greatly moved by the range of backgrounds and experiences, commitment to public service, dedication to this country, and simple goodness of the applicants.
My hope for B.C. for the year ahead, in addition to celebrating this remarkable country’s sesquicentennial, is for us to sustain friendships and alliances, remain open to nuance and complexity, forswear hate, practise empathy and continue a journey that more and more seems to me to be uniquely Canadian: principled and co-operative, resolute and gentle, forward-looking and respectful, thoughtful and inclusive. •
Anne Giardini is chancellor of Simon Fraser University.
