The Harper Shift is a month-long series that looks at how Canada has changed over a decade of Conservative government – and at what kind of country we want to become. Here Michael Valpy considers Canada’s dwindling social cohesion.

In a recent editorial in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, deputy editor Dr. Matthew Stanbrook asks why national health policy — supposedly of such great importance to Canadians — is conspicuous by its absence from the election campaign.

Indeed, he asks, why has it been absent from public discourse and the political agenda for much of the last decade while the federal government has “declined to renew the [federal-provincial funding] Accord on Health Care; dithered on public health measures of glaringly obvious benefit, such as tobacco control and asbestos elimination; ignored and disbanded expert advisory panels on health issues; weakened the authority of the public health agency; muzzled scientists; eliminated the long form census, the best source of information on regional disparities relevant to health; and eroded research support.”

Stanbrook could have asked the same questions about national programs for pharmacare, child-care and care for the frail elderly. He could have asked about the evisceration of the CBC and employment insurance, the weakening of environmental, health and safety monitoring agencies, about the government’s tepid interest in climate change and the lack of policy attention of all three major parties to the barriers to post-secondary education support, good-jobs employment, family formation and housing faced by the second-largest generation of the past century — the 9.1 million millennials, only marginally smaller than the 9.6 million baby boomers.

In Canada over the past 10 years, the national state and its programs have been shrinking, just as Prime Minister Stephen Harper intended they should. They have been shrinking in accordance with what Harper has called “the true values of Canadians” — a liberal individualism that turns to civil society (the private sector) for progress and leadership and doesn’t hold with big government.

He is right, in a way. But his liberal individualism is only half the defining mythology of Canadians. The other half is equally defining: that of a communitarian society glued together by state nationalism from which Canadians — young, old, men, women, native-born, new arrivals — derive their identity through public institutions such as health care, the CBC, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and so on; in short, a public life in common.

There are consequences to turning away from that communitarianism.

Yvonne Hébert, a professor of education at the University of Calgary who studies concepts of social identity and citizenship among young people, says the shrinkage of the state in Canadians’ lives is undermining young Canadians’ national attachment — which corresponds to surveys by EKOS Research that, while Canadians retain a strong attachment to the land, they are losing their attachment to each other and their public institutions.

In 1956, according to EKOS, almost 75 per cent of Canadians said they trusted the government to do the right thing all or most of the time. In 2012, only 28 per cent did. Canadians’ trust generally in their democracy, says EKOS, has reached a 50-year low.

I ask my students at the University of Toronto to define their sense of Canadian collectivity. They have trouble doing it.

We know that young, highly educated “next Canada” is disconnecting itself from formal participation in Canada’s democracy. The percentage that voted in the 2011 federal election was under 40 per cent and EKOS president Frank Graves predicts it may well slip even lower in this coming election. What we don’t know for certain is why they are disconnecting, but there are clues.

We know that we’re not born with our core values fully formed. They’re shaped by the environment in which we grow up — and the circumstances we encounter in our youth come to be perceived as normal and unexceptional.

Thus if a country has a public health system and a social safety net that ensure that everyone who needs help receives it, it helps instil the belief in each succeeding generation that it is normal to care for strangers, and abnormal and wrong to neglect them — a psychological trait known as the Values Ratchet. But if you live in a country where people are left to look after themselves, this embeds the idea that you have no responsibility toward the poor and weak.

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“When you change the way society works, our values shift in response,” writes British journalist and political activist George Monbiot. “Privatization, marketization, austerity for the poor, inequality: they all shift baselines, alter the social cues we receive and generate insecurity and a sense of threat.”