How we will make Canada

How we will make Canada ours again.

I therefore feel comfortable saying that, on the basis of such a foundation, it is not possible to imagine that such a state of poverty -- of exclusion -- as 4,000 to 5,000 homeless a night in one city, is normal or part of the way things have to be.

To which someone might reply, "Things have changed, conditions have changed, technology, global markets, interdependency. We can no longer be held responsible for our past engagements." I won't go on. You know the line. In reply, I could, without trying to avoid our failures, nevertheless trace the LaFontaine-Baldwin trajectory event by event, over the past 152 years.

Let me deal, therefore, with this idea that something called progress or change can wipe out something called memory or the trajectory of a society. The underlying idea seems to be that, for the first time in 2,500 years of Western civilization, things have changed so drastically that the public good must automatically give way before technology and self-interest. This argument reminds me of what Robert Baldwin called the struggle of "the might of public opinion against fashion and corruption."