The notion of a 10-year plan for Canada sounds distinctly Chinese. Indeed, I mean it in a very Chinese way.

Of course, Canada is a democracy, and an old and proud one at that. While the Chinese are a far older people than the Canadians, the modern Canada state is more than twice as old as the modern Chinese state. My Chinese colleagues are often surprised when I assert that Canada is very old, while China is young.

And yet the young but huge Chinese state, for all its pathologies, is today able to think and plan long term – to deliver the world’s best transport infrastructure over time, and to constantly work (imperfectly but with extreme seriousness) to improve its systems of health, education, innovation and governance.

By contrast, Canadians are today, on all the evidence, plainly not able to deliver public goods requiring planning many years out, such as world-class infrastructure (green and non-green alike), transport systems, pipelines, northern communications, ports and defence assets.

There are multiple reasons for our national inability to think, plan and deliver long term. However, the fact that ours is not an authoritarian, unitary or centralized country like China is, in a hyper-competitive world, a poor self-justification.

Instead, the central challenge of Canadian governance for the coming decades is as follows: How does a modern democracy plan and deliver for the long run? In our case, more complicated still, how does a federal democracy plan?

There are not many examples out there for us among today’s federal democracies. Our American neighbours, led by a hyper-capricious and, in ethical and strategic terms, increasingly degenerate presidency, can hardly sustain a policy thought for a week, let alone plan major national projects decades out.

Nay, we will need to make this up by ourselves, drawing on and combining lessons from around the world in order to make Canadian governance unique among the democracies – federal, decentralized, but otherwise able to dream, strategize and competently implement major undertakings well beyond the limits of short electoral cycles.

How to do this? We must focus on the means, instruments and institutions of national long-term thinking and planning before determining its subjects or ends.

First, the prime minister owes the country a major speech. Tell us where we are going over the next 10 to 20 years. Be blunt about our challenges. Whet the national appetite and expand the imagination of the citizenry. Make our young people dream about the country’s future.

This, followed by multiple supporting speeches, should be part of a national consensus-making push — for a reasonable national consensus is fundamental to all long-term national preparation.

Second, each of our major parties, nationally and provincially, requires professional planning institutions and capabilities. Party financing and oversight should make it such that all major parties have full-time, professional, expert, well-paid staff, in large numbers, who plan for the country’s long term — with the aim of implementing long-term plans when their parties come to power.

Third, the federal-provincial-territorial system of national planning must be expanded, professionalized and made permanent. The existing Council of the Federation is a terrific start, but it is led by the provinces.

The better model, which I witnessed first-hand while working in the Australian prime minister’s department in Canberra, is the Council of Australian Governments — a permanent intergovernmental forum of Australian federal and state governments, chaired by the prime minister and, critically, supported by a very large scaffolding of intergovernmental committees across the country, often including business and non-governmental actors.

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Fourth, if we need a Council of Canadian Governments that interlocks the various levels of government in common long-run cause, then we also need our policy professionals at all levels of government to have significant experience of other governments and jurisdictions across Canada. As they do in India, federal officials of all ranks should be sent regularly to work in the provinces, territories and municipalities, and vice versa.

Canada is big. It is old. And it is difficult to move. But if we want to do big things together this century, on purpose, we had better learn to plan.

Irvin Studin is editor-in-chief and publisher of Global Brief Magazine, and president of the Institute for 21st Century Questions.

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