The Stories We Tell Create And Sustain Our Agency To Make Change

Plus some observations on the impact of the federal prorogation

Today, I want to explore the connection between storytelling and policymaking. Although they might seem quite distinct, I think it is important to understand how they depend on each other. First, though, a quick note on the political changes happening in Canada.

Yesterday, Justin Trudeau announced his impending resignation as Prime Minister and Liberal leader. To enable time for a leadership race, he was granted a prorogation by the Governor General. As I mentioned last week, that means that Bill C-27, the government’s major legislation on AI and privacy, dies on the order paper, as does C-26 on cybersecurity and C-63 on Online Harms. In addition, it seems that other major initiatives will no longer go forward, including the changes to the capital gains inclusion rate and various items that were in the Fall Economic Statement. However, the government still has the power to make policies and amend regulations that don’t require legislative approval. Some innovation-related measures in the FES, such as removing the current rule limiting investments in Canadian entities by pension funds, may be able to go ahead if they are regulatory in nature (I’m not sure if that one is or not). Changes to SR&ED, though, will have required the FES implementing legislation.

All in all, we likely face a significant period of paralysis as the leadership election plays out, and then we will almost certainly dive straight into a spring election. Anyway, let's move on to the main topic of today’s newsletter.

The Stories We Tell Create And Sustain Our Agency To Make Change

Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash

Stories are like the coins of the realm, the currency we implicitly agree to make the means of exchange, and, as such, a means of creating a viable social world. Stories thus disclose not just ‘who’ we are, but ‘what’ we have in common with others, not just ‘who’ we think we are but ‘what’ shared circumstances bear upon our lives and our fate - Michael Jackson, The Politics of Storytelling: Variations on a Theme by Hannah Arendt

Before the break, in my post On History and Policy, I discussed how the ideological props we construct and the coalitions we build play key roles in shaping the world we live in. A few recent articles have made me want to expand on that and discuss the place of narratives and storytelling in politics and policymaking. 

As should be clear from my writing here, I place a great emphasis on the need to articulate a vision for the future. I think doing this is essential for several reasons. It helps provide a guide to the direction of travel for policy decisions - facilitating bottom-up policymaking that is pulling in a coherent direction. It helps to frame the tradeoffs that inevitably have to be made, helping to avoid the trap of short-term and reactive policy. And it ultimately helps provide accountability - do your actions actually stand up against the vision you have articulated?

Inherent in all of these is also how this kind of vision opens a space for coalition building. There is, of course, a political element here in terms of building coalitions of voters. Policy can never be separated completely from politics, though that doesn’t necessarily mean every part of policy is a partisan issue. However, coalition building also goes beyond big ‘P’ politics to create coalitions of actors who can understand, embrace, and enact the policy change you want to see. This can include public servants but goes out into the wider world - of business, academia, civil society, and beyond.

Successfully articulating a vision ultimately comes down to the narratives and stories we tell. Stories create agency. I think the anthropologist Michael Jackson was great on this point when he argued: “storytelling is a vital human strategy for sustaining a sense of agency in the face of disempowering circumstances” and that “to reconstitute events in a story is no longer to live those events in passivity, but to actively rework them, both in dialogue with others and within one’s own imagination.” I believe this holds up from the micro-scale of people’s lives through to the macro-scale of national politics and policymaking.

Two recent stories have brought all of this to the forefront of my mind. The first is about the UK, where the Labour government under Sir Keir Starmer has been floundering despite introducing some rather positive and impactful policies. Part of the reason for this, in the view of Guardian journalist John Harris, is that Starmer’s messaging contains “no moral messages about the government’s values,” nor do they contain “two of the most fundamental features of any story: how we got from the recent past to the present, and a sense of the adversity he is fighting to overcome.”

Harris argues that:

Convincing political stories are not just a matter of presentation. Without them, parties and governments lack not just a connection with the public but any solid sense of what they are doing and why, which is one of the reasons the left keeps losing to the right. “Take back control” crystallised a story. So does Donald Trump’s deathless promise to make America great again, and all the righteous battle cries that come with it.

Closer to home, an article by Shawn Micallef in the Toronto Star hits many of the same notes. In it, Micallef argues that Olivia Chow, Toronto’s mayor, has taken an “appeasing path” when it comes to a range of potential battles with Doug Ford’s provincial government, “despite some major incursions into areas conventionally Toronto’s turf — while also destroying Ontario landmarks in the city for dubious reasons.” Micallef compares the lack of fight here with the simultaneous lack of fight against President-Elect Trump’s bellicose language about Canada as the 51st state.

There are some clear, logical reasons for Chow's lack of action. Yet, they add up to a failure to weave a narrative about what is happening to the city. As Micallef argues:

In isolation, each of the decisions not to fight is understandable, even rational. But looking at the whole story, the main character of our political saga isn’t talking about those efforts in a way that can connect them and inspire the hearts and minds of more Torontonians. It’s risky because there’s power in a performance that gets a whole city to fight back too.

The stories articulated by elected politicians are obviously incredibly impactful and play an important role in creating the space to enact positive change or to counteract negative changes. However, I don’t think this is something limited to that realm alone. As a policy community or as citizens interested in how we create a fairer, more inclusive, and more innovative Canada, we have a role to play in articulating different narratives.

In a very well-timed post, while I was procrastinating from writing the end of this piece, the UK-based innovation thinker and leader James Plunkett quotes from a book about the political economist Elinor Ostrom and how she emphasized how:

Political change and improvements in policy outcomes are driven by public entrepreneurs (public officials, community leaders, citizens). They identify collective problems or shared aspirations, and explore available options or invent new ones when necessary. Collective entities constructed and operated by public entrepreneurs interact with each other in complex configurations of competition, collaboration, or integration. Let this process run long enough, and a very complex array of interconnected centers of authority will emerge and will continue to evolve as circumstances change. Contributions from a wide range of public entrepreneurs are also critical to the long-term sustainability of the civic foundations of liberal democracy.

At a time of immense change, major challenges, and significant opportunities, we don’t just need our leaders to engage in storytelling. We also need to create it from the bottom up with new visions of where we should be heading and how we will get there.