The proposed expansion of Highway One from suburban Langley into East Vancouver is more than just a threat of increasingly burdensome traffic flows through an already besieged inner-city neighbourhood. If the free enterprise-oriented Liberal regime in Victoria succeeds in building the expanded highway, the catastrophe will be to 30 years of public education on civic development, 30 years of progressive regional democratic evolution, and 30 years of slowly growing local institutional awareness of dramatically shifting global realities—in particular, the looming decline of global oil production.

The proposal for highway expansion has about it all the alluring boosterism and attractive clear-headed pragmatism of 1950s economic progress for good reason: the highway expansion solution to present traffic congestion consciously turns its back on the grey and ambiguous, often anguished, philosophizing that has characterized Western politics since the 1950s.

For most thinking people, the postwar enthusiasm of the 1950s was crushed and buried under the weight of the Vietnam War and the Watergate investigation, two American events that occasioned rude awakenings around the American-lead world, especially for Conservative movements including those in Canada, in British Columbia, and in Vancouver. There were two options in the bleary-eyed but thoroughly awakened 70s: abandon the conservatism that had crashed so spectacularly on the shores of that reality, or—the option that became the preferred one—deny there had been a crash.

The pronounced refusal by the provincial government to debate the proposed expansion of Highway One, or to address directly concerns that that expansion gives rise to, has about it the frustration with the public process that is now common to Conservative movements everywhere in the West, as they are all now mired deeply in a state of multigenerational denial. It is the same refusal of Conservatism to globally debate the war in Iraq, or to nationally debate Canada’s war in Afghanistan. Debating, and the consequent compromises and nods to shifting realities that it engenders, is anathema to the studied moral rigidity and technocratic pragmatism that Conservatives have adopted as a shield to protect their fragile culture of denial.

The highway expansion is part of an attempt by local conservatives to make manifest their fantasy about an imagined era of endless economic progress, technological solutions, endless energy, and clear and rigid moral suasion. The proposal encapsulates all these elements of their imaginary 1950s era, before they had all been brought under clouds of suspicion after the rise of moral relativism brought about by extensive contact with foreign cultures, of psychological fracturing by the war in Vietnam, of rapidly changed values and behaviors by the rise of hippie culture, and of the profound disillusionment of Watergate and the subsequent draining of trust from all public figures—not to mention the spectre of peak oil.

The proposal to expand the highway reprises, as if for one last time, the era of trust in government leaders and economists, of a benefit of the doubt extended to religious authorities, and of a blind faith in the magical abilities of investment and technology to solve all problems, including the now-apparent limit to energy.

For a free enterprise-oriented government to now ditch their highway expansion solution would be for them to admit that everything they believe in, and everything they have risen to public prominence advocating, is wrong. They would have to argue to their own best friends, many of whom own pavement and cement companies, that expanded highways do not, as intuition and common sense might dictate, relieve traffic congestion in any meaningful way; that unlimited growth might bring unresolvable negative consequences and might not be universally and forever good; that some problems, however onerous, like traffic congestion, are best left to fester; and that we might not, as a society, know the answers to everything, or be able to solve all problems even if we tried.

It would mean Conservatives would have to admit that there may be other good purposes for government than to just always encourage economic growth, and it means they would have to admit that the economy might be usefully employed to generate other, more virtuous, goods besides just individual or family prosperity.

This may sound like a lot of philosophy with which to unfairly burden the debate about a relatively simple and local proposal to expand a highway. But proponents have made arguments about economic growth and prosperity to substantiate their enormous claim on the public purse, and opponents have argued in reply using concepts like limited growth and broader definitions of “the public good” beyond individual prosperity. The debate does involve the clash on this highest level of public discourse, if there would be a public debate, that is. But the fact there isn’t a debate, the fact the governing Liberals have cancelled the fall sitting of the legislature on the grounds there is nothing at all to debate in the whole province, is of course itself the product of that technocratic, morally unambiguous, and frankly exhausted Conservative stance that just can’t be argued anymore—because it has been found, for going on 30 years now, to be rotten in its core, and must now seek to avoid the debates it always loses.

For the same reason that Conservative America could not defeat the enemy it imagined in Vietnam, that Conservative Nixon could not stop the slide of his public image in the opened and energized media of the 70s, that Conservative Reagan could not unwind the 60s revolution, and that the Conservative’s “liberation” of Iraq was not greeted by flowers but rather by a vicious insurgency, the local governing Liberals will find, with the Highway One expansion only frustration at their efforts to revivify their beloved 1950s fantasy. But duplicating the Port Mann Bridge will not duplicate the 1950s. It is a mistake to think the economy can be made to grow by expanding the highway, and that prosperity will increase as well because of it. But it is a mistake formed by even bigger errors: the error of thinking that growth is forever and everywhere good, and thinking that individual prosperity is unquestionably the top priority of government.

If the Liberals succeed in their proposal to expand the highway, it will only be done by infantilizing the greater part of the population who had, in the last 30 years, thought they had progressed as a society to the point of electing a leadership that would be capable of exhibiting a more subtle and sophisticated grasp of the intricacies of growth and prosperity that comes from an in-depth reflection on how these are not, as our parents in the 1950s had characterized them to us, the most important things for government to achieve.

If the highway project succeeds, it will lead to all of us feeling we were wrong to have ever thought that growth and prosperity should be limited in light of more pressing matters like environmental degradation, climate change due to the burning of fossil fuels, global injustice, and the enormously unequal distribution of wealth locally and around the world. The debate over the highway expansion must be won if we are to have any hope of developing any other government policies to address all those other issues that have in most of our own minds displaced growth and prosperity as priorities.

If we, as so highly advanced and wealthy a democratic society as we are, cannot even stop in our own back yard something as antithetical to all the values that have arisen with us in the last 30 years as the highway expansion, we will have nothing to say to anyone else in the world suffering under less democracy and less wealth, as they step back to allow equally or more destructive projects to unfold in their own back yards. If we allow this revival of thoroughly discredited 1950s technocratic progress to bury underground 30 years of more subtle progressive thought, we will have turned our back on every hero we have ever pretended to celebrate, from Jane Jacobs to Noam Chomsky, and all of them in between. If we don’t stop our highway, we will have betrayed those who in the 1970s stopped theirs, and thereby preserved the city of Vancouver we all enjoy today.

But if we do stop the highway expansion, we will have consolidated our theoretical gains of the last 30 years, we will have made real all our progress in public thought about government policy, and we will have pegged our climb to a more progressive and outward-looking society at a higher ledge yet. For this reason, Highway One expansion is the key battle of our times, the one we must win.