Shawn Whatley: Culture is a worthy fight, and requires a new kind of politician

Instead of being expert managers of the administrative state, we need politicians who have vested interests in the vision and history of Canada itself.

(Perched behind Centre Block in Ottawa, the Library of Parliament stands as a testament to Canada’s history and heritage.)

Calls to promote culture in politics are subversive. Those who work in the administrative state might even say it borders on sedition. Liberal politicians would call it undemocratic. Culture presents a material threat to the status quo, but not in the way you might assume.

We can see through the simplistic dichotomy of culture versus economy: You are not a socialist by supporting culture. We need both a cherished culture and a strong economy.

But the threat remains, and we need to unpack it.

Calls to re-emphasise culture ask for more than a simple reordering of social goods. By culture, we mean the lived norms, shared symbols, and inherited practices that bind a particular people into a common life. We ask government to change how it works, and change how it thinks. The whole approach threatens the status quo of the administrative state. And it challenges a central pillar of liberalism: the myth of the disinterested representative.

Calls to emphasise culture ask for something the administrative state cannot do.

To prioritise culture, officials must choose among competing visions of the good. To emphasise culture is to ask liberals to pick a side rather than defer to a pretend-neutrality that never quite exists in practice.

Calls to embrace culture ask for a new form of administration and a new vision of representation, at the same time.

Culture and administration

Picture an executive manager at the Ministry of Health preparing a report for her board of directors. She fills in her part of the board dashboard, which is a colour-coded spreadsheet, a snapshot of how the organisation is performing on its strategic plan. Each one of the strategic goals assigned to her department needs a label: green, amber, or red, which corresponds with all-systems-go, caution, and critical respectively. She adds quantitative key performance indicators (KPIs) to justify each coloured label. She might pull data from the latest statement of financial position, from a Gantt chart created by her project manager, and elsewhere.

Now imagine this executive has been asked to report on the culture in her department. What KPI does she use? Where does the data reside in her financial summary, Gantt chart, or board dashboard?

Culture represents an intangible asset. Broadly speaking, it is the collection of norms and behaviours that shape thoughts and behaviours within a particular group. Culture grows out of a peoples’ history and changes over time.

For example, staff working in one organisation will arrive early, stay late, and avoid slang. No rules dictate hours or language. They are simply part of the culture and expectations of that workplace. At another organisation, staff arrive late and swear like sailors.

But even though culture is an intangible asset, it is still an asset. Surely we can account for it in our spreadsheet-governed, KPI-driven, executive-managed approach? Just ask any accountant how hard, and often impossible, it can be to amortise a company’s intangible assets.

In this sense, culture is just one of many vital things that we cannot measure and struggle to manage. For example, how do we measure how much ‘peace’ a peace officer has kept? We can use proxies for intangible assets, such as management staff turnover or number of speeding tickets issued, but the assets themselves remain intangible.

Despite the challenge, culture remains crucial to the health of any group, organisation, or country. As Peter Drucker, management consultant, famously said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

Herein lies the crux.

Culture is a higher-order good that does not fit into a spreadsheet-governed, KPI-driven, executive-managed approach, for any organisation. This is why policy writers continue to craft proposals in terms of economics, law, and processes, even when more fundamental change is needed. It would be fruitless, and frustrating, to ask professional managers to implement a federal policy that simply calls for a culture of creativity and innovation.

Culture and representation

Considered at the level of federal politics, we can see that culture has not been ignored by intention. It is just irrelevant to the operation of government. Culture animates citizens, to be sure, but it falls outside concerns about state capacity, administrative function, regulatory capacity, and so on.

Today, politicians see themselves as overseers of an administrative machine. The machine drafts legislation and then implements whatever Parliament approves. We lack space to unpack the full nature of the machine itself. The point here is simply that politicians see themselves as overseers and, hopefully, masters of the machine beneath them.

A call to re-emphasise culture is actually a call for politicians to consider a higher-order good, something that falls outside the scope of the administrative state. This is unfamiliar in modern politics. It asks representatives to make decisions using criteria foreign to the status quo. You see it whenever a bill’s “regulatory impact analysis” tallies compliance costs and staffing needs. What it lacks is a line for what a measure does to civic memory, common rituals, or national symbols.

Culture asks politicians to embrace a new, much older notion of representation. We are asking them to become statesmen.