The Context

A child born in Canada today is immediately handed an $18,000 invoice. This is equivalent to that child’s share, along with 30 million other Canadians, of the accumulated federal government debt, which stood at $536 billion at the end of the 2001 / 2002 fiscal year. This hardly seems fair, that a baby should be in debt before he or she begins life’s journey. But that is exactly what we are doing to each new generation of Canadians…..expecting them to pick up the tab for our collective inability to live within our means.

How we got into this situation is a combination of many misguided public policy decisions and a growing lack of accountability of our governing institutions, particularly our federal Parliament, over the past three decades. It is the central theme of The underground royal commission Report, upon which this course is based.

Just as we, as a country, are not paying our own way to support the many programs run in our interest by government, we are also not paying our own way for our national defence and collective security arrangements. For our many social, industrial development and regional development programs, we are expecting future generations of Canadians to pay the bills. For our shortcomings in defence and collective security expenditures, those who are paying the most are our soldiers. They pay with their safety and, in some cases, their lives, by being under equipped, under trained and comparatively fewer in numbers than ever before. And our allies pay the lion’s share of collective security costs that we seem unwilling to bear. This irresponsibility with respect to our nation’s defence and our collective security arrangements is the other theme of The underground royal commission Report.

Both themes of the Report – our fiscal policy and our foreign policy – speak to important questions about what kind of country we are, what our values are, and what kind of country we wish to leave to future generations. These are in crisis, and our ability to collectively come to solutions to these crises will establish our quality of life, by determining our options in how we deal with problems at home and in the world and by defining our very sovereignty as a nation.

This eLearning course is an exploration of the findings of The underground royal commission Report. Read through the various sections, try some of the interactive exercises, and join other Canadians in the online discussion forums to debate these important issues. If you are concerned about your country and its direction, take the first step by becoming an informed citizen. Once informed and engaged, you can make a positive impact on this country’s future direction. We hope that you will find this course an interesting way to become familiar with the underground royal commission's findings and that it will inspire you to further exploration and citizen engagement.

To be sure, we can all be proud of Canada. We are a free, wealthy, tolerant, equitable and peaceful country that is the envy of many worldwide. However, over the previous three decades we have seem to have lost our way. We have become less productive, we have become more concerned with redistributing wealth than creating it, we are squandering wealth and opportunity by being fiscally irresponsible, we are burdening future generations with huge debts, and we no longer have clear direction, or pull our weight, in terms of our own national defence and security.

These are the themes of The underground royal commission, and these are the themes of this course.

Try the urc Citizenship Test to gauge your understanding of key issues facing Canada today.