Have we elected a liberal Liberal?

 

Mark Carney continues to enjoy majority approval in the Canadian public. He’s got a great smile and projects an amiable presence. His governorship of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England probably taught him that people respond well to even arbitrary decisiveness if it comes with a demeanour that projects wisdom and good will. Doctors and nurses pass or fail on bedside manner more than on their credentials, I’m told.

Our Prime Minister heads a Liberal government, but I’ve become less certain that he thinks and acts liberally by the common definitions of that word. Liberal Arts Education for instance, aspires to produce citizens who are broadly knowledgeable, tolerant of differences, competent readers, dialoguers, and community minded (as opposed to the current drive to make education more focused on specific, employment areas of engagement… Science, technology, engineering and mathematics: STEM.) Not surprising given the breakneck pace at which technology is advancing.

Here are a few of the areas in which Carney’s choices make me wonder about his liberality:

1.      His stated support for the US actions in Iran,

2.      His push to double Canada’s military capability,

3.      His appeasement of Alberta separatism by adding another pipeline,

4.      His reduction of environmental assessments in favour of industrial expediency,

5.      His costly drive to make Canada an AI leader.

I can’t predict whether Carney’s decidedly financial/industrial focus will improve life in Canada. To me, it feels like Canada is currently operating as a corporation with Carney as CEO. And I think back to great Liberal prime ministers like Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau who focused more on peace making and individual human rights and citizen welfare than we’re seeing today. And I look back at a Conservative prime minister in William Lyon Mackenzie King, who made it possible for over 20,000 refugees from Soviet tyranny to resettle in Canada.  

Being a pacifist, I obviously am appalled that we’re escalating our debt to have a dozen submarines, thirty or so jet fighters, at a cost that would build thousands of homes. The most we can do in this area, China, Russia, the USA could turn to rubble in a weekend. The USA’s “Peace through Strength” ideal has proven so often to fail: Vietnam, Afghanistan and now Iran, Venezuela and Cuba. Peace through friendship, dialogue and justice is the true liberal outlook.

We are a democracy. One citizen, one vote is a consequence of the liberalization of governance and, as far as I know, the best defense against tyranny. Unfortunately our contribution to our democracy too often ends at the voting booth, where we choose parties, not people mostly. I’m going to write to Carney stating my concerns about the five points. My letter will go into a big basket where with AI’s help, it will be sorted as relevant or irrelevant and via AI again, a letter will be generated to thank me for my concerns and that the Prime Minister takes my concerns very seriously. But I’ll send it anyway. A million such protests would make a difference. 

AFTERWORD: Estimated cost of 12 submarines, $24,000,000,000 (24 billion) to purchase and an equal amount to operate for their lifetime. Gripen jets have been sold for $90,000,000 (90 million each flyaway cost) so total purchase package equals $26,550,000,000 which at ca. $300,000 per home building cost, would build 88,500 homes. The per capita cost to Canadians is $663.75 for an investment that brings no profit, but requires immense cost in maintenance and operating after purchase. Not to mention interest on the borrowed billions. 

NAICA     gg.epp41@gmail.com

 

 

What About Alberta?

 

Good Morning, Alberta

What about Alberta?

“The election has already been decided before the Alberta votes are even counted.”

I’ve heard this complaint any number of times. Every vote counted in Central Canada was cast by an individual in a secret booth, just like every vote cast in Alberta, B.C., Nova Scotia and P.E.I. But it’s sometimes reported as if it were a conspiracy to exclude the West whenever the results are unfavourable. In logic, this is a non-sequitur, an argument irrelevant to the case.

The trucker’s protest and the government’s response prove that the “government doesn’t uphold the right to lawful protest.”

The protest developed into an occupation as the COVID epidemic continued to be a distinct general threat. The national understanding was that Ottawa as the federal government needed to enforce (if necessary) strategies for public safety. The vaccine requirement for people who entered from another country or who worked in close contact with the public forced many who saw this as a freedom issue to make a choice, which often meant losing their jobs.

Another interpretation was that those who either were vaccinated or had not had the opportunity to be, would be endangered by contact with anti-vax persons. The relative importance of “you have no right to make me get the jab,” or “the spirit of accepting some sacrifice for the sake of my community” made for pretty severe divisions in our towns, families and, indeed, our Canada. The degree to which individuals held their cooperative view, or their personal freedom inclination, nearly gave the appearance of religions or cults.

It would be a mistake, I think, to assume that the fervour behind the two stands is unconnected to the current separatist sentiment in Alberta.   

Equalization has meant that Alberta pays into the fund, and Quebec gets it handed to them. 

There is no Equalization Fund, and Alberta doesn’t pay into it. Equalization may be the wrong word. The basic assumption is that every Canadian should have access to similar services: healthcare, education, etc. But some provinces aren’t as endowed with natural resources as their counterparts, so by a formula, the Government of Canada funds those to bring them closer to the average. Money flowing to the Federal Treasury from provinces go by the same rules in all the provinces through uniform taxation and grant legislation; Alberta pays more because they have more resources, wealthier taxpayers.

In thousands of dollars, here are the per capita GDPs of the provinces: Alberta, 97; Saskatchewan, 91; B.C., 74; NFLD & Lab, 72; Ontario, 72; Quebec, 65; Manitoba, 63; PEI, 57; New Brunswick, 57; Nova Scotia, 56. (Per capita GDP in Canadian provinces. - Search (The territories outrank all the provinces in per capita GDP, a result of their sparse populations.)

Alberta is sovereign over its own affairs. 

The “sovereign” word has been front and centre in the UCP government’s push toward greater independence. Sovereignty means, “where the buck stops,” it’s the final say on a particular entity. Canada has a division of powers outlined in the British North America Act of 1867; the feds are sovereign over borders and defense, while the provinces are sovereign over healthcare and education.

Sounds simple, but it can be muddy. The Federal Government has sovereignty over international relations, and if it deems climate change to be worthy of best efforts in its mitigation for the sake of the welfare of Canadians, does it have sovereignty over pollution drifting out of Alberta, across Saskatchewan and onward? Of course it does. Similarly, the Saskatchewan River flowing through BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba could never fall under the sovereignty of any of them.

Danielle Smith’s government proposed an act which would give the sovereign right to the province to veto any federal act deemed to be against Alberta’s interests. That judgment would be left to an Alberta government committee, of course.

Because the arbitrary decision by Alberta to override federal jurisdictions is constitutionally not possible, and because the province contains large areas of indigenous “nations” with particular sovereignty over land and its use, Alberta appears to be using the Sovereignty Act to pressure Canada into negotiating a special relationship, perhaps something like Quebec’s “Sovereignty-association” relationship.

Is Alberta the Texas of Canada?

Labeling a people or place with pejoratives is always a temptation when conflicts develop. Classifying people who favour politics with a liberal, socially conscious bent as woke, and calling people who prefer right-of-centre political arrangements rednecks may feel good, like landing the final punch in a playground fight.

But both labels are fake. Labeling is a tool of propaganda, a ploy to elevate a position by denigrating its opposite. The sad thing about it is that it works. Albertans’ attitudes toward non-Albertans and non-Albertans’ attitudes toward Albertans isn’t helped by negative characterizations spread publicly.

I’ve lived and worked in Alberta for ten years and found them to be woke on some issues and redneckish on others, just like people in my town in Saskatchewan, and in Thompson, Manitoba when I lived and worked there for fifteen years, and in Europe where I was an MCC administrator for three years. The division and antagonism that we find is not our natural state as a community; the myths are seeded and nurtured for a purpose by those who finding themselves in a position of influence, fall for the temptation of using it to gain ever-increasing wealth, power and/or notoriety.

Like Canada’s need to find a way to retain the peace and harmony of our relationship with Americans, Alberta must be judicious in preserving good relations with their fellow citizens in the community that is Canada. It may be that Carney’s appeasement of Donald Trump will prove to have been judicious, and signs that he will relax regulations on fossil fuel expansion to appease the Albertans’ given their threat to separate, might work out Jim-dandy.

Then again, think Germany, Chamberlain and appeasement, and the prospects of a good end dim.

A Final Thought

Alberta as a sovereign country, landlocked among Saskatchewan, British Columbia, Northwest Territories and Montana would be faced with massive economic, social and political adjustments, not the least of which would be the first nations place in a sovereign Alberta. And their dream of pipelines carrying their oil--a gentleman conjectured to me yesterday--would necessitate an agreement with—or annexation by—the USA. And those are just for starters.

More importantly, Alberta and its people and its incredible vistas are loved by their brother and sister Canadians, who have long accepted that the colourful, rugged, can do spirit that characterizes Southern Alberta, at least, is a unique and valued part of us as a nation.

In short, we want you to stay.

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.

 

A playlet for people mourning the imagined demise of freedom in Canada

A playlet for people mourning the imagined demise of Freedom in Canada.

Pierre: When I’m your Prime Minister, I’m going to make Canada the freest country in the world. I …

Skepticus: But Canada already ranks in the top 5 in the world in terms of personal freedoms, along with Denmark, Switzerland, New Zealand, Estonia, and Ireland. (I guess that makes 6, sorry.)

Pierre: Yah, but you put on a demonstration in Ottawa and the tanks roll in, people are crushed and …

Skepticus: You’re thinking of China, Pierre.

Pierre: … and we have an election and only one candidate is allowed onto the ball….

Skepticus: China again. Sorry.

Pierre: And the liberals don’t allow any real opposition, and people who try get jailed, or poison….

Skepticus: Russia, Pierre. Russia, not Canada.

Pierre: And the Liberals own that propaganda machine, the CBC….

Skepticus: Ditto, Pierre. You’re thinking of the Russian News Agency, TASS.

Pierre: Well, anyway. We can’t cross the Canada/US border so we’re not free!

Skepticus: Thousands of Canadian and American citizens, trucks, airplanes cross that border every day. You’re reading only the sentence in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that says, “Canadian citizens have the right to enter, remain in, and leave Canada,” and not the part that says, “The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society (emphasis mine). You cannot cross the border without the recommended vaccinations for the same reason that you aren’t allowed to drive at whatever speed you want through a school zone; the restriction on border crossing without proof of vaccination (rightly or wrongly) is justified as a measure for saving lives in the time of a pandemic. The ability to set conditions on mobility rights in dangerous times is an essential feature of “free and democratic societies.” Just like “Free Speech” doesn’t extend to hate speech, slander or libel.

Pierre: I don’t get that. A bunch of liberal bullshit, is all.

Skepticus: Why am I not surprised, Pierre? Maybe just talk to some people who have fled countries where they weren’t able to enjoy reasonable rights and freedoms. When they imagined freedom, they imagined Canada, or Ireland, or Denmark, New Zealand, Switzerland, or Estonia, the United Kingdom or the USA. Not Syria, not North Korea, not Russia, not Cuba, not Venezuela, not Communist China, not Iran, not Hungary or Bulgaria … well, you get the point … I hope. Good luck in your campaign, Pierre, but please don’t encourage Canadians thinking that we’re turning into North Korea; compared to countries with oligarchies, single party dictatorships, oppressive theocracies, Canada is personal freedom heaven. There’s nothing here for you to fix in that regard.

 

  

Obama and the Culture Wars

Insane Palette

The first chapter in Barack Obama’s book, The Audacity of Hope, is titled “Values.” In it, Obama convincingly draws the argument that Americans have come to accept by slow degrees a politic surrounding their differences as opposed to their common values. We’ve come to know this divide as the “culture wars,” although that name may be more misleading than enlightening.

Finding values on which North Americans agree is not difficult. Values surrounding individual freedom of speech, movement and religion and the democratic rights we enjoy are generally hold in common by the inductive and the deductive thinkers among us, by the conservatives, liberals and socialists as well as by the Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and atheists. It’s these (and others, of course) that unite us; it’s the hot-button issues like same-sex marriage, abortion laws, stem cell research that divide us so dramatically that it seems like we are a people “at war,” culturally.

And so politics takes on the qualities of a hockey game. It turns itself into a match in which one team on a hot-button issue is pitted against the other. Hockey itself is based on a disagreement between two teams on a trivial matter: the Rockets believe that the little rubber disk should go into the net at the north end of the rink, the Trojans maintain adamantly that it should go into the net at the south end. A competition in which the sides agree would be no fun at all. American politics has turned itself into a hockey game and although the very idea of a party system gives a nod to some division of values, our value differences used to be debated amicably on the sidelines whereas now, they have taken over the core of the game called democracy. So argues Obama.

There are those, of course, who will argue that some hot-button issues of the day are by no means trivial, and I agree. The way we treat embryos as we research the efficacy of stem cells in disease treatment could very well influence how we view the life of the unborn in the future. That’s not trivial. But surely the core value here surrounds the right-to-life principle—a commonly held value—and the way we use embryonic stem cells in research and finally in medical practice is beyond the capability of government, who can render it legal or illegal, but cannot determine in every individual case whether the goals of science and life-preserving medicine in that case are ethical and right.

Same-sex marriage definitely should not have become an election issue. The US constitution declares that every individual has the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” There are two significant aspects to marriage in Christian circles: 1) the community blesses a union, usually of husband and wife, and 2) the state acknowledges that from that day forward, all legal matters pertaining to spousal relationships will apply to this couple (if the documentation is in place and the minister is licensed properly.) Whether or not the Fenderbender Holier-Than-Thou Christian Church members decide to marry gay couples or not is up to them; the attempt to impose a universal legal restriction on the pursuit of happiness of people with a minority sexual orientation is a case of unnecessarily feeding a culture war.

The wish to have government settle our culture wars in Canada is becoming irksome, even if we haven’t sunk to the level of the USA in that regard . . . yet. The Conservative Party is running attack ads on television as I write this, even though there’s no election campaign in progress. Basing their argument on opposition leader Michael Ignatieff's having lived and worked outside the country for many years, they are attempting to exploit a trivial issue to inflame the gullible against the Liberal Party. Meanwhile, our core values—including courtesy, decency and fairness—are being thrown to the dogs in favour of petty partisanship.

We shouldn’t put up with that.

What about the CBC?

My Great Grandparents ca 1875

What About the CBC?

I don’t know all the details, but I do know that the CBC is suffering a deficit as a result of a loss of advertising revenue. The main reason—I’m told—is the recession and businesses’ need to cut costs. A request for a loan from the Canadian Government was turned down because—so a government spokesperson said—the CBC would then have loan payments to make on top of normal operating expenses and would therefore be hard-pressed to remain viable.

Chrysler and GM are suffering deficits because of lost sales resulting from their inability or unwillingness to compete with car manufacturers that produce better, more efficient and greener vehicles, plus the general malaise of the market. The government stands ready to extend money to them amounting to 21 times what the CBC was asking for—each.

If the car companies have to pay back the loans in future, does it stand to reason that these loan payments on top of their general expenses may make it difficult for them to remain viable?

Or is it that our government cares about the success of private corporations and does not care about the survival of a public corporation like the CBC? This would fit Conservative Party objectives, seems to me, except that the bailout of car companies falls so far short of another objective that it’s hard to see what conservative philosophy in this country is all about anymore. I think they used to call it “free enterprise,” a politic where government frees up entrepreneurship to act as the economic engine of the country, not interfering with the right to be profitable; not subsidizing it if it begins to fail.

I appreciate the CBC. For my money, it provides the best news and documentary coverage in the country and has the capability to act is a distinct national asset in many ways. It also provides commercial-free, informative radio, and I am one of those who will not listen to a radio station that bombards me with loud commercials, phone-in rant shows and country music. I appreciate intelligent radio: As it Happens, Ideas, Tapestry, etc. for which CBC is known.

Let your MP know that you want our government to support the continuation of a strong CBC.

copyright g.epp, 2009

Men, control your womenfolk!

A couple of anecdotes arrived almost simultaneously in the inbox of my consciousness this weekend. I was teaching an adult Sunday school lesson on the book of Esther, and I had the radio on as I drove the 30 Km. to church.

First: Xerxes I as portrayed in the book of Esther is a drunken sot of a king who—although powerful—is swayed this way and that by his advisers. When his wife Vashti defies him one day, he asks his advisers what he should do to respond to this impertinence. Basically, their advice is that he divorce her, replace her with a new queen and make sure this action is noised abroad, so that “each man might be master in his own house and control all his own womenfolk (Esther 1: 22, NEB). Now we need to remember that Xerxes’ chief adviser at the time was Haman, portrayed as an egotistical, self-serving tyrant who would later connive to initiate a pogrom against all the Jews in Persia. We need to remember also that these events were reported by Jewish storytellers, not Persian.

As I was driving to church with these thoughts roiling around in my head, the dialogue on CBC 1 was about gender equality in corporate board rooms and government. By some measure—and I didn’t quite get by whom and how the measuring was being done—Canada was ranked 85^th of 160 or so countries on the matter of working toward gender equality, i.e. ensuring that the halls of power had equitable female representation. Haman would probably have been appalled at the suggestion that men folk should even consider giving up any authority to their womenfolk.

(Typing this just now, WORD informs me that there’s no such word as menfolk, but that womenfolk is quite all right. Now what do you make of that?!)

For the sake of modern readers of the Christian Bible, I wish that a part of Mordecai’s objection to Haman’s and Xerxes’ behaviour had been directed toward their suppression of women. Unfortunately, no such objection is noted there.

We still have a lot of Hamans in positions of power, men who see it not only easier, but also scripturally sanctioned, that “each man might be master in his own house and control all his own womenfolk.”

copyright 2009, ge