Two Solitudes (Part Deux)

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Most clichés posses a big whack of truth; that is why they become clichés. Take this one: Democracy is messy.

After 13 weeks of student protests, mayhem on the streets, defiance, disruptions, disorder and what appear to be failed negotiations with the government of Jean Charest, democracy in Quebec is manifestly messy. And it is democracy that’s going on, despite what’s being said by the media voices of orthodoxy, the champions of order and convention — the Andrew Coynes, the Jeffrey Simpsons  — who demand that the government use the stick, who want Mr. Charest to put the little brats in their place, who are outraged by Mr. Charest’s capitulation (in Mr. Simpson’s words, his “predictable” capitulation) to the student protesters.

God save our freedom from these Coynes and Simpsons. Continue reading “Two Solitudes (Part Deux)” »

Two (new) Solitudes

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The best comment (certainly in English) on the 12-week-long Quebec post-secondary student strike just ended was left anonymously on the CBC’s website: “At least in the case of Quebec students, ‘the sheep look up’ unlike the rest of Canada.” Ah, literate as well as insightful.

 

The reference is to British author John Brunner’s 1972 science fiction novel of that name — The Sheep Look Up — dealing with catastrophic environmental despoliation of the United States as a result of government being in thrall to polluting corporations. The title comes  from John Milton’s poem Lycidias:

 

The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
But swollen with wind and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread.

 

Three things have been — well, “revealed” is not the word; they’ve already been revealed — so let’s say three things have been made manifest by the Quebec student action. First, English Canada doesn’t really get French Canada. Second, both Canadas are deeply fractured by age but it’s playing out worse in English Canada. Third, you’ve got to wonder why Quebec post-secondary students seemingly alone among the sheep are looking up, which gets us back to a theme dealt with previously in this space: what makes people act against their own interests. Continue reading “Two (new) Solitudes” »

Let them eat cake

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UPDATE: It appears, in the example offered below, that it wasn’t just private relationships between the wealthiest that make them work harder. Sometimes they just ‘feel that I did a great job’ and are thus entitled to their entitlements

 

 

In two recent appearances on the CTV news National Affairs program, James ‘Jim’ Doak has argued against the recent Ontario NDP-Liberal budget deal to add a 2% surtax to those with incomes over $500,000. Appearing on a panel with CCPA Senior Economist Armine Yalnizian, Mr Doak, an asset manager, suggested that the NDP proposal (now adopted by the Ontario Liberal government) amounted to ‘ethnic cleansing’ in that it deliberately ‘defined a group not by language or culture but by how much they make. And she (Ontario NDP leader Andrea Horwath) wants to get rid of them.’

Put aside for a moment the macroeconomic merits of a wealth surtax, or the likelihood of the wealthiest moving to more tax-friendly jurisdictions, or even the dangers inherent to increased income inequality. And ignore the ridiculous moral equivalence between macroeconomic policy that might lead to capital flight between provincial jurisdictions and the programmatic murder of specific ethnic groups.

What is perhaps most charming about Mr Doak’s outburst is the very real contempt he exhibits for the process of policy deliberation and the complicity of the media in accepting his contempt as if it were all part and parcel of a healthy public debate. (‘A great, great debate’ says one of the two hosts as the discussion ends, ‘we should have you two on together again!’) Continue reading “Let them eat cake” »

When a union isn’t a union

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UPDATE: There are important discussions going on here and here concerning the union name change

UPDATE 2: As of May 2nd the TCU will indeed be known as Cycle Toronto. Members voted at their AGM  71% to 29% in favour of the name change.

 

 

 

The Toronto Cyclists Union — a five-year-old organization that lobbies for a healthier cycling environment in Canada’s largest city — proclaims in its most recent newsletter that, while it has doubled its membership in a year, from 1,018 to 2,100, the city in the same period has reduced the number of bike lanes. Thus, says the newsletter, “Toronto has not shown the will to respect us as taxpayers, as road users, and as valuable citizens.”

 

Analyzing what roadbocks may be in the path of the Toronto Cyclists Union becoming more muscular, strident and effective, its board of directors has identified the organization’s name as a significant obstacle. We quote the directors in full:

 

“Over the past years, we have run into unexpected pockets of resistance when applying for grants as well as in recruiting business members and individual donors. There is a large group of cyclists in Toronto that don’t feel connected to our organization, and they have often expressed that our current name is largely responsible for that disconnect. Considering all of the positive impacts that we want to have as an organization, the Board of Directors does not want our name to prevent a single cyclist from joining our organization. Our strategy and trajectory demands that we be accessible and essential for everyone who rides in Toronto, and we feel that now – as we are poised for record growth – is the time to address this issue.”

 

They propose to change the name to Cycle Toronto. Perhaps they can do even better and sell off corporate naming rights. Scotiabank Cycle Toronto.

 

This is so interesting.

Continue reading “When a union isn’t a union” »

Don Cherry’s Rock’ em Sock ‘em honorary degree

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The front lines of Canada’s culture war have moved to, of all places, Royal Military College.

 

Its senate — comprising the chancellor (Defence Minister Peter MacKay), the commandant, the principal, the deans of the faculties, the director of cadets, the academic director of RMC St-Jean, Quebec, and a faculty representative — has, as a body, if not unanimously, proclaimed to Canada’s future military elite that the college is A-OK with gratuitous violence, calling people pukes, trashing multiculturalism and left-wing pinkos who ride bicycles, describing men with long hair as girls, speaking derogatively of francophone Canadians, labelling someone with a non-anglo name as “some kind of dog food” and supporting the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

 

CBC hockey commentator Don Cherry is celebrated for those views and RMC’s senate voted to grant Mr. Cherry an honorary doctorate at its November convocation, citing (in the words of principal Joel Sokolsky) “his work on behalf of the Forces, his charity work [and] his standing in promoting athletics in Canada.” All of which has created a fuss and an interesting outcome. Continue reading “Don Cherry’s Rock’ em Sock ‘em honorary degree” »

Mr Carney goes to Wall Street

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Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of Canada, as we all know said famously in a recent CBC-TV interview that the Occupy Movement is “entirely constructive.” He said: “I understand the frustration of many people, particularly in the United States. . . . This is a democratic expression of views. It is a physical, vocal manifestation of . . . cold figures.”

The news media got his words right; they know how to turn on voice-recorders. Yet they do appear to have run down fluffy paths in interpreting the significance of what he said.

His words were reported to have “raised eyebrows.” Whose eyebrows? We are left to presume it is the eyebrows of important persons who to date have not been identified, sitting behind teak doors and sucking their teeth in disapproval. His words “carry extra weight,” intoned The Globe and Mail, because the Stephen Harper government is pushing for him to become the next chair of the G20’s Financial Stability Board, the agency charged with coordinating the overhaul of international banking regulations. But extra weight for, or with, what? Or whom? Again, not spelled out but the implication is weight in important circles. Continue reading “Mr Carney goes to Wall Street” »

Harper Takes Aim

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“Stephen Harper’s Conservative government” are taking aim and shooting Canadians in the foot with the introduction of their tough-on-crime legislation. Keeping good on a campaign promise, the Conservatives have tabled Bill C-10 the Safe Streets and Communities Act, comprised of nine criminal justice bills they failed to pass in previous parliaments. They promised voters that the bill would be passed within the first one hundred sitting days of parliament.

The proposed measures, intended to “target crime and terrorism and provide support and protection for the victims of crime”, include tougher penalties for organized drug crimes (including mandatory minimum sentences), more accountability for youthful offenders, and a reduction in the use of conditional sentences (house arrest). Other aspects of the bill focus on protecting children from sexual predators and vulnerable immigrants from exploitation,  increasing the rights of crime and terrorism victims, and putting more controls on pardons and international prisoner transfers – all seemingly well intentioned, but also rather unnecessary. In order to accommodate the anticipated increase in the prison population the Harper government has committed billions of dollars for expansion and operation costs within the federal prison system. Further costs will be downloaded to the provinces which are actually responsible for the bulk of Canadian inmates. Continue reading “Harper Takes Aim” »

Did someone say culture war?

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The Hon. William G. Davis continues to haunt Ontario’s contemporary Progressive Conservatives with his political spectre slapping their wool-stuffed heads, something he’ll find amusing (or sad), snug in the vales of Brampton. The party’s young warrior class of the Common Sense Revolution who attempted to soil his name and drive all who had worked with him from the precincts of Queen’s Park in 1985 failed then — Mr. Davis, Ontario Conservative premier from 1971 to 1985 and a Red Tory, was canonized by the public in the bloom of mortal health faster than John Paul II could say Divinis Perfectionis Magister — and have learned nothing in the intervening 26 years. They could at least read Monday’s editorial in The Globe and Mail.

 

The Globe, making clear it was looking for a Bill Davis government to endorse and couldn’t find it, poured holy oil on Liberal Dalton McGuinty. Mr. McGuinty can do fuzzy, bland, big-tent politics maybe not as well as Mr. D but with the same dance steps. Tim Hudak? You could see The Globe’s editorialists making a moue. They found him, if you can believe this, “too dogmatic about smaller government,” code language for “Something here smells.”

So we will take our crystal ball out on a limb and declare an electoral victory for Mr. McGuinty on Thursday because the emotion he ignites in the province’s voters — optimism, hope — is stronger alchemy than the wand-waving in which Conservative leader Hudak has engaged: Culture war. Culture war is not smart. Culture war does not get voters to the polls. Mr. Hudak’s predecessor John Tory tried culture war with a promise to give public funding to all religious schools and almost destroyed the party. Continue reading “Did someone say culture war?” »

Rise up, rise up

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If it’s not too late, some observations from inside Roy Thomson Hall on the Afternoon…

New Democrats were to be heard saying wryly that they never would have believed so many New Democrats owned suits. Or could find Roy Thomson Hall, venue of Toronto high culture. Said a former senior party apparatchik, tongue in left cheek. “Roy Thomson Hall! We’ve arrived. We’ll be taken seriously from here on.” Although, tch,  some chaps removed their jackets in the close warmth and women fanned themselves with their programs, things Liberals would never have done, not in Toronto and certainly not in the presence of the Governor General. Continue reading “Rise up, rise up” »

Le bon Jack

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There are two conversations about Jack Layton’s death still substantially in need of air-time. The first deals with the pack-punditry pronouncement that the NDP without Mr. Layton is tanked and sans genitals before the seriously heterosexual Stephen Harper. The second is about that column by Christie Blatchford.

What we know about mass media is that it’s always the voice of orthodoxy, the guardian of conventional ideology, the representative of the community’s dominant values. Right-wing to a faretheewell with the Toronto Star behaving slightly differently, but not much. Thus the media’s take on 103 NDP seats in Parliament is that Canadians — and Quebeckers in particular — can’t really want a third of their elected representatives to be social democrats, therefore there has to be another explanation, which is that Jack Layton’s seductive charisma has made them fluff-heads. These people aren’t choosing to vote NDP, they’re merely beguiled by Mr. Layton and without him they’ll return to their senses with, of course, Quebeckers doing whatever they do as they always do to look after their self-interests.  Continue reading “Le bon Jack” »