Shoot-out in the Supreme Court Corral - Take Cover

… And in Sports...

 When I was a practicing “teacher,” I accumulated licenses to work in that capacity in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and Ontario. Not in BC nor in Quebec or the Maritimes or Newfoundland-Labrador. You see, Education is a provincial jurisdiction in our constitution and to be trained as a teacher in Saskatchewan might not make you competent enough to teach in Manitoba schools, so they’d let you work “on probation” for two years before you were eligible for a Manitoba permanent certificate. Needless to say, I taught in those four provinces at one time or another; I was not, as has been rumoured, running from the law.

Distributed governance by region makes sense; the tricky part is the division of jurisdictions and taxing power. Educational priorities could be different region to region, but different enough to prohibit education’s placement in the national basket? And what about natural resources? Do provinces with lots of these have any obligation to share that unmerited wealth with Canadians living in other provinces? Or should Canada—as Pierre Trudeau believed—have a National Energy Program (NEP)? [i] Anyone following Alberta politics back since the Leduc oil strike knows that the fight for revenues from the rich oil fields of that province has been an ongoing battle for a long, long time.

Some of the jurisdictional divisions seem obvious: defense, waterways, treaties with indigenous nations, border regulation, international relations and others clearly don’t fit into provincial or municipal jurisdictions. But what about day care? What about roadways? Airports? Medicine? Is it good to have a national health program that pays medical costs out of general revenues while hospitals and medical training are provincially/municipally governed?

The perception giving rise to Alberta’s Sovereignty Act and the Saskatchewan First Act is that the lines between national and provincial jurisdiction in those provinces are blurred, particularly on the subject of natural resources. Well it would be, wouldn’t it, given the constant provincial interest/national interest dilemma that’s unavoidable in any nation that distributes jurisdiction as we do? The mining of fossil fuels falls under provincial jurisdiction while international trade and climate-change-related policy are primarily federal. To the Alberta government, the oily substance in the oil sands looks like money they can’t get at because of environmental protection policies.  

The premiers of both provinces are banking on the flexing of provincial jurisdictional muscle to change the application of the constitutional powers, if not the constitution itself. In order to achieve this, the recent actions have set up an adversarial approach, the outcome of which will depend on continuing public support (Alberta has an election coming up in Spring, 2023) and the interpretation placed on the constitution by the courts in specific cases. In Saskatchewan, the premier enjoys a 56% approval rate and the main hurdle to the effectiveness of the Act there will likely be the courts. In neither province is it clear which specific issues the governments mean to act on/litigate.

First Nations are protesting provincial sovereignty acts, of course. Their treaties are with the federal government, for one, and they see little good coming their way from provinces overriding, for instance, federal obligations to consult and to regulate environmental impacts of provincially initiated projects. (Clearly, the whole question of whether the ceding of land in the treaties included mineral rights might be an interesting debate now, but far too late to revisit seriously.)

I’m in no position to know how this will all pan out. I never learned water-witching nor the reading of the future in chicken guts. I worry though, that sovereignty acts might become a tool for provinces more generally, at least if the two mentioned achieve their stated goals. We don’t need a constant, quarrelsome competitiveness among our provinces and/or between provinces and our federal government. To ask citizens to choose between them when all our interests are best served by their cooperation can turn out to have been a “shooting ourselves in the foot” mistake.

I will predict, however, that I won’t be carrying a Saskatchewan passport anytime soon.

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[i] National Energy Program - Wikipedia

The Sweet Spot in the Middle

 

A few things stood out for me in the one-and-one-half-hour-long interview Dr. Jordan Peterson did with Pierre Poilievre recently. If Poilievre becomes Prime Minister, he will defund the CBC and along with that, the new wave he will bring to Ottawa will deliver the repeated talking point that he will reduce government, taking it out of its interfering role in the business of citizens, thereby setting them free to manage their own affairs.

The first is a threat that’s become tiresome in its repetition by a host of earlier conservative contenders for power. Peterson drew attention to that fact, to his credit, but like the current Alberta premier rising to power via extreme talking points regarding, primarily, Alberta sovereignty vis á vis the government of Canada, so Poilievre is currently able to wave the whip of an imagined cultural, political coup d'état to the cheers of diehard reactionaries.

Clearly, the curtailing of personal freedom as a legacy of progressive governments is a myth that’s hard to dispel. The opening up of greater choice for individual citizens has always ridden on the backs of progressive, not conservative, political policies. Child benefits lifting millions of children out of poverty, Medicare that provides illness treatment for everyone, tuition-free basic education for everyone, even the freeing of slaves can be argued logically to have been a victory of progressive politics. In each case, freeing strategies have been opposed by status-quo-loving conservatism that to this day wishes even to reverse, for instance, the public education system in favour of promoting theme-based, private schools (USA) and initiating a greater role for private medicine.

It’s no surprise that Jordan Peterson and fellow reactionaries are opposed to, for instance, non-cis gender accommodation. Indeed, life was easier for many when individual liberties--like living one’s life in accordance with one’s make-up--were denied, when left-handed people were made to write with their right hand, queers made to hide or be thrown in jail. Individual freedom for everyone to live comfortably and to be respected for who and what they are is a progressive ideal, and a mightily liberating one for sexual and gender, racial, ethnic and other minorities. Peterson’s public refusal to recognize queer people’s individuality with new pronouns is just one petulant gunshot in the war to reverse citizen freedom for all but the conforming.

The kind of hypocrisy that characterizes Canadian reactionism was on full display in the interview. Making of the economy and climate change separate spheres and speaking about one without critical connections to the other ran rampant. Not to minimize the dilemma faced by fossil fuel workers as the transition to clean energy plods onward; attempts to make omelets without breaking any eggs is simply not on. Progressively, Jagmeet Singh is proposing a dedicated transition program (Jagmeet Singh promises programs, funding to get new jobs for oilsands workers | The Star) for people losing their jobs to this change.

The hypocrisy was on full display in the Freedom Convoy, where occupiers compromised the freedom of Ottawa Citizens and vaccinated truckers at border crossings in order to force a legitimate government to grant them what they called “freedom.” 

In the debate, Poilievre waded knee-deep into the “free enterprise” and “self-regulated marketplace” territories and apparently saw no contradiction when promising to do something about the high price of housing and the construction of low-cost housing. House building, rental rates, mortgage rates are largely consequences of the normal functioning of a free market and one can easily interpret his comments on that front to be advocating for government interference in the housing marketplace. Affordable housing as a government matter is decidedly progressive policy-making. 

You can find the interview with your favourite search engine by typing in “Peterson interviews Poilievre.” You and I should care about trends in the village square that is Canada, particularly if we know that the Canada we love is neither an unreserved capitalist state nor a socialist “nanny state,” but that its strength has always lain in its ability to combine the best of both leanings and reject the extremes. Not “personal freedom” or “civic responsibility,” but “personal freedom and civic responsibility.”

Occasionally we’re shown charts illustrating where Canadians lie on the Socialist to Capitalist political spectrum and by a vast majority, we hover right around the centre, not because we can’t make up our minds, but because it’s the politic that works in our democracy. We alternate between Liberal and Conservative governments nationally (and in several provinces) and the difference in how our affairs are being administered differs hardly enough to notice. 

Results of our elections seem to be driven much more by personality than by policy, the effectiveness of the ad hominem strategy in campaigning illustrated by the repeated denigration of Justin Trudeau, Jagmeet Singh and the Minister of the Environment, Steven Guilbeault, by both men in the interview.

At times like this, when events beyond our control have encouraged an immense, biting dissatisfaction in so many of us that we want badly to go back to a time before, governments get blamed for so much because, well, who else could be to blame? 

Pierre Poilievre, Jordan Peterson very clearly crave attention and influence and in Pierre’s case, power. The assumption that there’s enough of a reactionary wave to carry them where they hope to go may turn out to have been an astute calculation.

In the end, very basic principles are at stake here. We’ve faced them over and over and still are: is it OK for people of certain religious persuasions to see their choice of dress regulated by the state? If a man or woman refuses to take up arms for this country in answer to a wartime call-up, should there be consequences? Is a storekeeper or a pastor justified in allowing only masked persons to enter premises during an epidemic or pandemic? If authorities advise all residents to leave immediately to avoid an approaching fire, should fire fighters be obligated to rescue those who ignore the warning? Can a national government legitimately enact a citizen-wide directive to minimize the effects of, say, a pandemic, or must it allow individual citizens freedom to respond to the risks as they wish or believe, and are there exceptions? 

The workable range of our words and actions as independent individuals on the one hand, and as community members on the other, will always be very basic to the functioning of a democratic country. We need always to be wary of concerted efforts to push the population closer to one or the other poles; it’s just not who we are.

 

Heavy themes in the Foyer

 

I was listening to the final chapter of the Public Order Emergency Commission hearings yesterday. They took a fifteen-minute afternoon break and I took the time to compose and print a sign-up sheet for the condo Christmas dinner. I took the sheet down to the foyer and posted it on the bulletin board. 

Two residents of the condo were sitting in the foyer and chatting as residents often do, and I thought, “Why aren’t they at home, listening to the Commission proceedings, like I am?” A silly question, of course; a more relevant one might have been, “Why am I spending hours listening to the repetitious, predictable questions and answers when there’s so much more to do?”

In short, we know that people engage in the big questions of democracy in direct proportion to the degree to which they’re directly implicated. “They’re raising the carbon tax,” may come to us as coffee gossip and we take note, but gasoline prices fluctuate wildly, we see ourselves as involved in the grand debates about climate change and economics supporting the tax in the same way that we’re involved in the science of quirks and quarks: it’s all up there and out there and nothing I could do—even if I understood it—could possibly make a difference.  

An independent trucker may take greater note of the tax increase because his/her/their livelihood is directly affected. But if the principle and the need for it isn’t understood and acknowledged, he/she/they may see it primarily as a personal affront and--being unable to affect any influence--might well be reduced to a “f*** Trudeau” rage and to attempt influence in this matter by joining an enraged convoy of truckers to Ottawa. 

When the collective interest and individual interest conflict, protest, even outrage, are to be expected. In a democracy (a politic where each individual has an equal voice in selecting leadership) the tyranny of the majority can’t be resolved by substituting for it a tyranny of the most vocal minority; this conundrum will always need to be addressed, particularly in stressful times.

In the Freedom Convoy case, a vocal minority (according to Trudeau’s testimony) “… didn’t only want to be heard; they wanted to be obeyed.” Could the democratic “will of the people” be broadened to include an exception declaring, “Notwithstanding the border-crossing mandates, truckers will be allowed to cross from the US to Canada without giving evidence of vaccination?” To have the general citizenry debate the principle behind a question like this—a question that goes to the heart of decision making in a democracy—would only be possible if the majority were informed and engaged, which might mean not sitting in the foyer chatting about winter tires or the price of coconuts, but sitting up in one’s apartment, watching, listening and taking notes on the perspectives being expressed there.

And then, going down to the foyer to compare views on these subjects. 

Good luck with that.    

The Emergency Act: an impression or two

Winter ca. 1978, Paint Lake, Manitoba

 I’m watching the Inquiry into the invocation of the Emergency Act on CBC Gem, particularly the interviews with the Freedom Convoy organizers. Most of Thursday and Friday, it was Tamara Lich’s turn; she’s spent 49 days in jail on various charges including mischief and counseling mischief.  

Paul S. Rouleau, the Commissioner, has run a tight ship. He’s been flexible when it comes to time allotments for the interveners to question witnesses and has insisted on keeping to the focus of the commission, which is to ascertain whether the government was justified in invoking the Emergency Act to end the demonstrations in Ottawa.  

I don’t need to say this, really, but Canada is seriously divided on the issue of the need for mandates relating to vaccinations, masking, distancing in order to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus. The news that a protest convoy was being organized drew far more numbers and far more financial support than was anticipated. The convoy organizers and participants being questioned at the commission hearings tended to paint the demonstrators as peaceful, loving and kind and to deny reporting that drew attention to racism, threats and harassment. That’s completely understandable. Cross examiners for the police and Ottawa citizens tended to justify their viewpoints and actions as you’d expect. 

What became apparent in virtually all the testimony was that the sheer number of people participating in the protest was both a boost and a handicap for the central organizers, particularly Lich and Barber who presented as likeable, reasonable people with strong convictions regarding personal liberty. Maintaining the overall focus on ending the mandates as they related to unvaccinated truckers was practically impossible; that goal was muddied by the numbers of diverse groups, hangers-on and individuals with broader objectives. This apparently became very frustrating for the Freedom Convoy leadership.  

Blaming the mainstream news for distorting reality will always be an issue, but the presence of “F*** Trudeau” signage, the maverick messages of the hangers-on existed in abundance on social media and in common discourse so that Canadians probably assumed that they had a relatively clear picture of the chaos in Ottawa. To explain the events as “just a mob action” would certainly be unjust to those participants who sincerely believed that mandates represented government overreach and that their actions were simply demonstrations of this belief.  

I know too little in detail to opine on the core question: was the Government of Canada justified in implementing the Emergency Act in February of 2022? I expect that a “yes” answer will raise loud protests and possibly street action by the supporters of no-vaccine, no-masking, no-social-distancing mandates. If the answer is “no,” then citizens who approve of health measures directed toward the general population in a pandemic may well be incensed. The problem that makes this so divisive is not as simple as it might seem; whether we cooperated with mandates or not grew out of our perspectives on community cooperation and individual liberty, perspectives that lie peacefully side by side until something like a pandemic brings them into the open.  

Throughout the demonstration, I wished that Trudeau and the relevant ministers would take a day for a round-table discussion of the protestors’ grievances. That they had no obligation to do so is obvious, but according to the organizing leadership of the Freedom Convoy, being heard was their paramount objective. What the hearings suggested to me was that the Convoy leadership failed for several reasons to achieve their objective, and that the Government of Canada failed in exercising a leadership that would have decreased the division rather than boosting it.  

The Commission is expected to take eight weeks before it concludes deliberations. Most Canadians won’t spend that time glued to their TVs to watch and learn. The outcome, however, will be significant in the light of the Freedom Convoy’s and others’ challenges to the future of democracy in Canada.  

As legitimate as protest is in any nation, the rule of the ballot box must remain foundational. There’s good reason to argue that the Freedom Convoy and the groups that attached themselves sought to overturn governance rulings made by an administration placed in Ottawa by a free and peaceful election. Working to replace or re-elect that government is a legitimate democratic activity; protesting the decisions reached by the duly elected government is protected by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as well. Occupations and blockades that seek to inconvenience private citizens, governing authorities and businesses in order to force a minority agenda is neither a democratic nor a human right.  

At the same time, a democracy will always be measured against its attention to the well-being of its minorities. Otherwise, it finds itself in danger of becoming a tyranny of the majority. This becomes particularly significant where the prime minister, the entire cabinet can be selected from a party that received only 40% +/- of the popular vote.  

The Emergency Act, if I understand it correctly, requires that its use be impartially examined after the fact. The question of whether its invocation was justified is not without problems of bias and personal and group interest, seems to me. Against what principle or set of rules is it being tested? We’ve heard much conjecture that the “occupation” could have been concluded using existing tools, but for three weeks the OPP, the RCMP, the Ottawa Police Service and the Parliamentary Police Service, the possessors of these “ordinary tools,” did not achieve what Ottawa citizens and administration, the Federal Government, the Provincial Government and Canadian citizens generally knew to be necessary. Does that justify the invoking of powers of the Emergency Act?  

It’s true, many fellow Canadians suffered loss of jobs, income, and security because—for conscience or whatever their personal reasons—they chose not to be vaccinated, or they chose not to mask in places where it had been mandated, or they gathered in numbers that didn’t conform to the guidelines of the day. Although human rights and freedoms were invoked as defenses for the Convoy action, that defense rings hollow without an equivalent appeal for the rights and freedoms of those cooperating and in favour of the mandates.  

Whether or not the restrictions on Canadians were the correct ones for countering the pandemic threat is arguable, and in hindsight, it's clear that how decisions were made by governments on the advice of virologists and immunologists must be reviewed. To say that governments “should have known,” however, is disingenuous … unless one can show that it was conspiracy, not planning, that drove decisions. In law, a conspiracy is an agreement among two or more persons to carry out an unlawful act, with the intent of carrying out the unlawful act. Hence, the Freedom Convoy’s understandable efforts to show that theirs was not an occupation (illegal) but a demonstration (legal).  

The witness of participants supports the view that what began as a planned demonstration went out of control because of the large numbers of participants with differing agendas, turning what began as a demonstration into what was reasonably judged to be an occupation. This was unfortunate for everyone involved (all Canadians, in reality) because it made negotiation, even dialogue between government and protesters impossible. With whom was a government supposed to even begin a dialogue? Can a gathering of thousands even have a single, trustworthy voice with whom one can reasonably carry on a negotiation?  

So, was the Emergencies Act justified? It depends on imagination, in part at least. How would Canada be different if the demonstration/occupation hadn’t been dispersed by force? Would ordinary policing without the power to freeze funding have brought the event to a conclusion that was satisfying to all? Would an offer of a dialogue with organizers have been sufficient incentive for the demonstration/occupation to disperse voluntarily? Would the various area police forces have been able to disperse the demonstration/occupation if there had been more cooperation? We’ll never know.  

There can come a point where dissent and the demonstration of that dissent begins to degenerate into what has the appearance of anarchic behaviour, a refusal to recognize or accede to the authority governing the country. The refusal to obey the “back to work” order of the Ontario government by educational support workers is a case of teetering on the brink of anarchy. Where is that line?  

For me, the most poignant historical example of protest from which we might generalize some principles would be the participation in—or refusal to participate in—armed conflict. Principle One is that you cannot make a person carry or use a weapon on another person, just as you cannot drag a person to a clinic and hold him/her/them down while injecting a vaccine. No democratic government can control citizen behaviour to an unlimited degree. The second principle is that being excused from a national directive doesn’t come without a cost, so that if I refuse to bear arms, it is both logical and legal that I contribute to the welfare of the country in another, balanced way. Conscientious Objectors gave up their freedom to serve in mandated programs of work in the forests, mountains, farms and fields of the country ... as a civic duty. Many who took the conscientious objector option gave up more than some others who enlisted. Those who refused military and alternate service were imprisoned.  

And an overarching principle: the world is and always will be chaotic as opposed to orderly, at least until humans are replaced by robots. What kind of hell would that be? How to be a good person in a chaotic world is, in a nutshell, the Christian Gospel at its best. To love God and God’s creation and to wish for your neighbour peace and plenty amid the chaos is the incontrovertible kernel inside the nut. When a truckers’ convoy and the Canadian government set this kernel aside and make something else their truth—power, personal liberty, the righteousness of governance, the righteousness of protest, money, notoriety, whatever—chaos will always laugh its way to the bank.  

 

Bet Ya Ten Bucks...

 I drove past a casino on a Sunday morning some years ago and noted that the parking lot was full of cars. “Why aren’t those people in church?” I wondered for a second, but only for a second because I knew why they were here and not there. The casino promises the chance of a reward for their presence, or at least a greater reward than the church does. We go to places that promise pleasure, avoid places that don’t.  

“Simple as that?” you ask.

          No, not really, but it’s enough of a factor to demand some serious exploration.

 

Dr. Brian Goldman on a podcast called “White coat, Black art” recently explored the implications of relaxed sports betting regulations on, particularly, those vulnerable to gambling addictions. Apparently, it’s not illegal anymore to bet on a specific game, even to bet on its details, like which hockey player will score the winning goal. You may have noticed the increased advertising by betting sites on your smart phone and computer.

 

I took a few Psychology courses at the University of Alberta long ago. The profs were either behaviourists or cognitive theory proponents, and this difference was reflected in how they accounted for influences that led us to behave in one way and not in another. Why did the chicken cross the road? The behaviourist assumed something on the other side promised a reward or that remaining on this side portended a punishment, but this reasoning dropped us right into the bailywick of the cognitive (thinking) theorist who would argue that the chicken weighed her options and chose to cross for whatever logic she was following.

 

Our chickens on the farm had very small heads; they showed no signs of behaving logically.  

A story was told of a behaviourist professor who taught that we humans are conditioned in the same manner as dogs are when being trained to sit. In discussions over beers, the class decided to test the theory by using and withholding the rewards of paying attention and taking notes. The details were that they would pay attention and write notes only when he spoke from the right corner of the classroom. It took only a few days before the goal was achieved; he lectured almost exclusively from the right-hand side of the room, jotted terms only on the extreme right-hand end of the blackboard.

When they divulged what they had done to the professor, he was furious; we want to be thought of as logical, not as unconsciously-trained creatures.  

A parent gets his/her/their son to wash his hands by giving him a jellybean whenever he does so. He washes his hands twenty times a day and his mouth becomes a mess of cavities.  

“Freedom” has become the noise de jour, it seems. “Restricting individual’s freedom to gamble however and wherever they choose is not the business of the government,” is the logic, the reasoning, the cognition. “We want to be free.” This makes perfect sense in a humanity where everyone is cognitively driven, but like the poor professor, we can be conditioned to behave in ways that are decidedly analogical and harmful to us and others, repeatedly betting against the house being one of them.                 

How much cognition does it take to end the behaviour of repeatedly buying lottery tickets where the chances of winning are in the millions to one? How much cognition does it take to figure out that casinos, lotteries, raffles are schemes with but one purpose: to condition as many as possible to cooperate with a plan for moving money from fellow citizens’ pockets into someone else’s.

Liberalizing gambling laws may feel like freedom, and for those who’ve already figured out that casinos’ promise of rewards is illusory, manipulative, the change means little. For those who can’t cognitively figure such things out, it’s an expansion of corporate opportunities to enslave, to advertise and coax as many as possible into habitual behaviour.

An irony: a woman* spends hours several times a week putting loonies into the one-armed bandit in the bar down the street. Occasionally, the machine coughs up a handful of coins and in her mind, she’s a winner. She doesn’t know that this payout is the jellybean that will rot her wallet; the occasional dopamine rush is enough to keep her dropping in the loonies and pulling the handle. If for every loonie she dropped in, the machine would spit out a loonie and a dime, it would become a job and she’d quit.

“Sit, Lassie, sit! Good girl.” 

I’ve been in a casino once. In Moose Jaw. I ate a meal there and left. I’ve been to church about 2,712 times or more. I’ve also eaten many a potluck meal there. I don’t remember conditioning or cognitive processing ever being discussed when “Why are our numbers falling?” comes up. Perhaps it’s time.

 

* If you prefer, read the rest in the masculine. If there’s a gender difference, I’d suggest that men are at least as “trainable” as women, maybe more.