the disgruntled democrat

Canada's Third Solitude

2012-01-09T14:59:00.002-05:00

When I was a boy in elementary school, we would all stand up and sing at the end of the day when "God Save the Queen" was piped over the intercom. Later, as an adult, I moved to Quebec and mastered the French language. It would seem that I would be at home in either of Canada's two solitudes, but, in fact, I do not recognize myself in either one, and, as a result, find myself with a large number of other Canadians living in the third solitude.

In brief, those of us living in Canada's third solitude don't ponder over the significance of who won the battle on the plains of Abraham. We don't care. Abstracted from the historical propaganda that we are force fed in school, it was simply another skirmish fought between two imperial European nations that had been fighting each other off and on for a thousand years.

Yes, there were consequences. We still have a British monarch as our head of state, but at the heart of the matter was a struggle of two rapacious imperial powers that wanted to take control of a populated territory in the interests of a societal elite in each country.

In the words of Canada's cultural icon, William Shatner, otherwise known as Captain Kirk from the spaceship, Enterprise: "O Canada, our home ON native land."

In one of the other solitudes, people get warm and fuzzy feelings when they think that they are the descendants from the winning side. In the other, they get warm and fuzzy feelings thinking that they somehow survived despite being the descendants from the losing side.

In Canada's third solitude, we are profoundly indifferent to either historical narrative and find it oppressive that all the other historical narratives that have transpired here are tossed aside in favor of the means in which Canada's two charter groups proclaim the over riding importance of their respective ethnic origins.

Give me a break!

We are almost all immigrants to a settler state imposed upon an indigenous people against their will. Moreover, an occupied territory the size of a continent necessitates massive immigration if that territory's natural resources are to be exploited for the benefit of a privileged few. Consequently, given the dire conditions that the Industrial revolution brought on for the world's poor, massive migration was inevitable as millions dared to travel to a distant land in order to improve what was often a miserable lot in life.

This is hardly the manifest destiny of a glorious nation.

In the English Canadian version of the meta-narrative, economic gains are distributed on an individual basis and those at the top receive the lion's share. In the Quebec version, economic gain is more widely distributed in order to secure the continued survival of the French language and culture, which is dependent on the continued prosperity of a nation overwhelming comprised of those who share a common ethnic heritage.

In both solitudes, the monoculture of "it's all about the economy" pushes aside and marginalizes other ways of looking at and being in the world as alternative methods of organizing a society.

For example, attempts to transform Canada into a modern democratic state in which its citizens have meaningful participation in the process of self government fail repeatedly. Likewise, environmental concerns over the manner in which the exploitation of Canada's natural resources are exploited do not gain sufficient traction to bring about significant change. It is the received wisdom here that nothing can be done that would harm the economy.

It's important to remember that belonging to Canada's third solitude is not determined by one's ethnic heritage. There are a number of disenfranchised Canadians of Anglo-Saxon and old stock French origins that do not subscribe to the dictates of Canadian monoculture. However, they are not sufficient in number to alter the Canadian Zeitgeist. As well, there are a number of new Canadians who simply accept the prevailing order of things and unquestionably try to fit in by accepting the dominant values of their host country.

Consequently, the third solitude is peopled by Canadians who live their lives outside of the worldview that guides the lives of most Canadians. Some are simply trying to get by. Others manifest life narratives that are wholly divorced from seeking status by the display of conspicuous consumption. They live life by different rules. They create life narratives that fall outside of the mainstream.

My feeling is that at the beginning of the twenty-first century Canada's third solitude is a gathering force. Continued immigration and the inevitable decline of the political force of the baby boom generation will eventually weaken the grip that the two solitudes have in determining what master narratives are in play to guide Canadian society. By the middle of the century, the population of the two Charter groups will be insufficient to hold the country to the historical narratives now in place. Moreover, the rise of the Internet will create sufficient disruption in the prevailing patterns of communication so that the third solitude will gradually emerge to challenge and then subsequently displace the meta-narratives that are rooted in our colonial past.

Connecting the Dots from the Electoral System to Income Inequality

2011-10-31T19:59:00.001-04:00

It warms my heart to see how the Occupy Wall Street has taken hold. At long last, people have realized that the politics of economic growth are conceived to enrich the top 1% of the population at the expense of the bottom 99%.

However, one huge question remains: how do you fix the system?

The answer is that you have to change the electoral system that enables a small minority to effectively buy the politicians that will do their bidding. To do this, we have to get rid of selecting our elected representatives by the single member plurality method more popularly known as first-past-the-post.

If ever there was a voting system designed to favor rent seeking, the economic term for buying favors, it is first-past-the-post. I love the name because the horse race allusion captures what happens in the stands at a race track: being able to pick the winner backed by a significant wager pays off handsomely.

Let us remember that there is no greater return on investment in countries that use first-past-the-post than making a financial contribution to a political party coupled with a post election lobbying campaign. In the market, competition is fierce and investments to increase market share or profitability are fraught with uncertainty as competitors try to gain advantage in a zero-sum game. So, instead of trying to tip the entire playing field in one's direction, it is much easier to increase profits by getting those who set the rules of the game to intercede on one's behalf with a government contract, favorable legislation, or fiscal policy.

This is how the top 1% reap the lion's share of the nation's wealth. They hedge their bets, so it doesn't matter who wins the election. Both parties that offer government options to the electorate are funded by or by those who owe their social standing to the one per centers. Consequently, electoral campaigns come and go, focusing on peripheral issues, leaving in place the cumulative gains that the constant lobbying piles up for those in the upper most echelons of the society.

Indeed, accumulating favors is relatively easy to do when polling data tells you where the political parties stand relative to one another and all that is required is to pick which candidate will garner the most votes in each single electoral district. No messy formulas that award seats on the basis of the popular vote. Few surprises with regard to which candidate from which party will get elected. As a result, it is not difficult to identify who needs to be influenced in order to obtain preferential treatment and a cosy symbiotic relationship between politicians and their financiers comes about.

No wonder the anachronistic first-past-the-post resists attempts to replace it with other electoral systems that give better representation of the popular vote. To change the voting system, especially for one that gives proportional representation, increases the uncertainty of the results and consequently increases the risk of getting a return from one's campaign contribution.

In fact, multiparty coalitions are much more difficult to influence since there is no one who can wield authority in a unilateral fashion. Moreover, when everything has to be negotiated, there are no guarantees that the negotiated agreement will deliver the goods. In the process of negotiation, one's preferred outcome may fall off the table in the process of reaching an agreement.

To change the political economy so that there is a more equitable distribution of a nation's wealth, the demos, in other words the 99% who are effectively under-represented, must ensure that the transfer of political power from the electorate to elected officials that occurs as a result of election is done in a truly democratic fashion.

This will not occur as long as the first-past-the-post system is in place. To change the distribution of wealth, people must disable the political institution that enables the concentration of wealth in the first place.

It's Now Up To The Supreme Court of Canada

2011-10-21T10:25:00.002-04:00

Seven years later, two refusals to entertain the evidence, we finally arrive at the end point of our journey: applying for leave to appeal our case concerning the constitutionality of the first-past-the-post voting system to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Essentially, the question we are asking of the courts is whether the current voting system respects the equality guarantees laid out in Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

That the Quebec Superior Court and the Quebec Court of Appeal did not grant our motion to have the articles of Quebec's Electoral Act that stipulate the use of the first-past-the-post method declared null and void did not come as any surprise. After all, Quebec still hasn't signed the the constitution circa 1982, which establishes the Charter.

Our expert testimony that provides both mathematical and empirical evidence demonstrating the systemic discrimination inherent to the system is barely mentioned in either decision. In the first instance, the judge wrongfully dismissed our case saying that the question was essentially political, and in the second instance the appellate court concluded that although our case was indeed judicable, such egregious democratic anomalies like a political party that received nearly a million votes but was denied representation and political parties that received less votes than another but still went on to form a majority government were not sufficient grounds to demonstrate that first-past-the-post impinged upon citizens's rights to effective representation.

Comments like that blow my mind.

In trying to wrap my mind around such outrageous statements, I can only come up with three explanations. The first is that the Quebec Appeal Court decided to evacuate any democratic norms from the notion of effective representation: being able to cast a vote, become a candidate, and being represented by a deputy is all that is required for representation to be effective. That the result of the electoral process is undemocratic does not matter. The second is that the since the Court didn't understand the nature of the question that was being asked, it consequently opted for the default option and denied the motion. The third is that judges acted upon the notion is that they are there to ensure the continuity of the state as it presently exists and will therefore not grant a motion that would effectively cause a significant rupture with the past.

All three scenarios give us grounds for an appeal.

In the first instance, the application of the Charter is guided by the values belonging to a free and democratic society and not a society that is free from the constraints that democracy imposes. In the second, it appears that it is only at the Supreme Court of Canada that we find the human resources and intellectual rigor to properly render an informed judgment on what is a fundamental question concerning Canada's system of governance. Finally, in the third, it is the primary role of the Court to uphold the rights protected by the Charter not to uphold a government's right to continue an electoral practice that contravenes each citizen's right to participate in a democratic election.

So we now arrive at a moment of truth, a moment that speaks volumes about how this nation-state is constituted.

For the Supreme Court to hear our appeal demonstrates a commitment to the values of a free and democratic society.

For the Supreme Court to decide not to hear our appeal would be an instance of dismissive silence that demonstrates that Canada has not yet evolved from its colonial past as an English settler state.

Our appeal will be filed before November 14, 2011.

There's Something Rotten in the Province of Quebec

2011-09-18T19:45:00.000-04:00

This week was a remarkable week. On two levels, I witnessed now badly the situation has unfortunately deteriorated in la belle province.

I am of the opinion that under the guidance of Premier Jean Charest, Quebec has devolved into a kleptocracy and Charest has become a modern day despot exercising his control over the entire state including the judiciary.

Early in week, the report leaked to the press from the Quebec Government's anti collusion squad was damming. It went as far as to say that some functions of the state had been overtaken by a consortium of public servants working for the Ministry of Transportation, engineering firms, and the criminal element, supported by a clandestine financing of Quebec's major political parties in the way of kickbacks which arise from charging overinflated prices for construction projects and a portion of which eventually reach their way to the political party in power.

In other words, everybody in the consortium is taking a cut while the taxpayer is being ripped off for the replacement of the crumbling infrastructure at a cost that is 40% higher than the rest of Canada and is of lower quality. It goes as far as having the Ministry of Transport contracting out to the private sector to do the required inspection and supervision of the construction performed by the private sector firms. The report details how the consortium will arrange to charge the government for 1000 truckloads of contaminated earth to be removed when in reality it takes only 100 truckloads to perform the task.

No wonder the Quebec Government announced in the same week a 800 million reduction in budget expenditures, including funding for Health and Education. Faced with a mountain of debt, the Quebec Government has to find some way to keep the infernal money machine operating.

Incredibly, when Premier Charest faced the media, had the audacity to say that it was thanks to the determined efforts of his government that we have become aware at how corrupt it has become. He went as far as too say that he hadn't even read the report. Imagine going in front of the nation without having read the document leaked to the press and is available on the Internet that asserts that your government is the most corrupt in living memory.

Yet, Charest has something up his sleeve that most Quebecers are only vaguely aware of despite the recent public hearings of the Bastarache Commission that investigated irregularities in appointing judges to the bench.

During his press conference, Charest would keep coming back to the point that we live by the rule of law, evidence must be obtained, and that the government is determined to prosecute those who have engaged in illegal activities.

What is left unsaid is that Charest and his Liberal cronies effectively control the legal system. They decide where and how legal resources will be deployed concerning who is targeted for investigation and who will be charged. Moreover, they have put in place many of the judges who preside over the trials and more importantly the judges that decide which of their peers will hear which cases. In short, the fix is on as we should expect when candidates applying for positions on the bench have their resumes forwarded to Premier Charest with post-it notes that indicate whether they have supported the Quebec Liberal Party in the past.

At a personal level, I have first hand experience with how political power controls the judiciary. As any reader of my Taking On The System blog would know, we have filed a motion to have the first-past-the-post electoral system declared unconstitutional.

This week we received the decision from Quebec's Court of Appeal that I would liken to the insult to their intelligence that Quebecers felt when their Premier appeared before them to defend himself from the accusations from a report that he commissioned but couldn't be bothered to read.

Not surprisingly, the decision did not support our motion to have the electoral system declared unconstitutional. After all, for better or for worse, the first-past-the-post voting system distorts the popular vote to give dictatorial control of the government to the leader of the party that wins the most seats. The political power that the Premier enjoys results from a manipulation in the manner the votes cast are transformed into seats in the legislature and that power is used to appoint judges. Simply put, judges are human and they are not going to bite the hand that feeds them.

Intellectually, I understand the systemic bias that protects the status quo, but what I didn't expect is a decision that would make Kafka laugh in the way it was rendered.

In rendering his decision, Judge Dufresne did toss us a crumb in asserting that the lower court judge had erred when saying our case wasn't judicable. Wow! This question had already been addressed when Quebec's Attorney General tried and failed to have our case declared inadmissible at an earlier instance in the proceedings. Moreover, even a cursory reading of the jurisprudence would indicate that the Court is obliged to hear a case when reasonable doubt on the constitutionality of electoral practices has been produced.

However, when it came to the real question that was put forward, it was as if the three judges put their hands over their ears and started singing and uttering the phrase, "we can't hear you".

In our case, the judge accepted what was obvious, the first-past-the-post voting system distorts the popular vote, but declared that this in itself wasn't sufficient to grant our motion since all voting systems produce distortions.

Well then what about the scale of the distortions and the manner in which they are produced? We have provided expert testimony that demonstrates that the level of distortion is beyond that of the distortions caused by other electoral practices and were subsequently declared unconstitutional and that the manner in which it is done is unclear violation of the equality guarantees of the Charter.

No matter. We won't give that evidence proper consideration. In the lower court decision not a word was devoted to our most compelling evidence in the analysis and the Appeal Court Judges decided that this slight of hand did not constitute a judicial error.

Excuse my language but "What the Fuck!"

Again, I would accept the decision if it were demonstrated that we had erred in claiming that the fact that first-past-the-post denied representation to as many as a million voters that voted for the Greens in the 2008 federal election was an infringement of their democratic rights guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

But this was not done. They simply dodged this inconvenient fact with dismissive silence concerning how such an electoral anomaly could be countenanced. To date, the contestable prejudice caused to those who have their votes discarded by an electoral system that is unique in that it doesn't possess a mechanism to aggregate votes or voting preferences has not been addressed and thus gives us grounds for an appeal.

Moreover, Judge Dufresne went on to make two outlandish statements that suggest that he doesn't understand or chooses not to understand the fundamental democratic principles upon which the case is founded.

The first was to suggest that the fact that the reversal of the democratic result of the Quebec 1966 and 1998 general elections (the party that won less votes than another went on to form a majority government) and the fact that almost a million voters who voted Green did not gain any representation in the 2008 federal election did not constitute a grave injustice. At the same time, Judge Dufresne uses a statistical outlier, a once-in-a-hundred year electoral result from the 2007 Quebec General Election (the three major parties gained more or less representation proportional to the popular vote) to demonstrate that the distortions inherent to first-past-the-post are not systemic yet ignored that two smaller parties that together garnered 7% of the vote were denied any representation at all.

He then suggests that the most recent federal election in which the Conservatives form a majority government with only 39% of the popular vote and in Quebec the Bloc is reduced only 4 out of 75 seats despite amassing 25% of the popular vote while the the NDP gains 70% of the seats with only approximately 40% of the vote is evidence to the contrary. In making such a claim, Judge Dufresne is suggesting that black is white for in no way do these electoral results conform to the principles of democracy, in particular that each and every vote carries equal weight.

One has to wonder what is the frame of reference being used to apply the concept of effective representation for each and every citizen. Do the egalitarian values inherent to democracy enter the equation? Apparently not in Quebec at this time.

Clearly, an appeal grounded on democratic principles would go nowhere in Charest's Quebec because to grant our appeal would upset the very power base that political parties rely upon to gain absolute control of the state and their subsequent ability to redirect a large portion of the collective wealth into private hands. Too many people profit handsomely from this dysfunctional form of governance to let it be replaced with a democratic electoral system.

In order to seek justice, we will need to have our case heard in a different political context, which we hope to find in having our appeal heard at the Supreme Court of Canada.

Epilogue: The Tao of Politics

2011-09-05T11:04:00.001-04:00

Having taken a break from writing this blog over the summer, I have had the time to reflect over the texts that I have read and written over the last two years. I'd like to share those reflections with you.

At the heart of the Tao is the dynamic interaction between yin and yang represented by a symbolic circle divided into a black and a white half, each containing a smaller circle or dot of the opposite color. Effectively, this represents a perpetual motion in which yin gives way to yang, which in turn transforms back to yin and so on.

When I was reading John Dunn's brilliant book, Democracy: A History, I came across a reference to an essay written by Philippe Buonarroti shortly after the French Revolution in which Buonarroti asserted that at the base of any society is an intractable conflict or tension between the order of privilege and the order of equality and this conflict was the driver of the French Revolution.

In other words, at the heart of societal discord is a binary opposition. Sounds familiar.

While I was mulling this over, I picked up a copy of George Lakoff's, The Political Mind. In his book Lakoff puts forth the idea of the family as the central metaphor that controls American politics. He says that there are two competing visions of the family at play, the conservative family dominated by the authoritarian male and the progressive family in which more or less equal partners nurture the family.

What makes Lakoff's thesis particularly interesting is that he claims that these differences are to be found at the synaptic level in the brain. Those with conservative synaptic networks have much difficulty processing information associated with progressive perspectives and visa versa.

Pushing this binary opposition towards the Tao, a pattern begins to emerge in which we can associate the male energy of yang with the order of privilege and the conservative mindset while drawing parallels between the female energy of yin, the order of equality, and the progressive mindset. Importantly, this opposition or complementarity is grounded biologically in the structure of brain.

What really brought the notion home to me concerning the relevance of the Tao when looking at politics is primate expert, Robert Sapolsky's, finding that when looking at human sexual behavior and social patterns, we find that humans display characteristics associated with both tournament and pair-bonding species. According to Sapolsky, we have aspects of both species hard-wired into our DNA.

To paraphrase Sapolsky, "isn't that interesting? What's up with that?"

Well, in my opinion it goes a long way to explaining the historical ebb and flow of political conflict over the last two hundred years and perhaps longer. In short, this basic biological duality hard-wired into humanity is the root cause of the tension between the order of privilege and the order of equality, between conservative and progressive. Essentially, the order of privilege is the manifestation of an alpha male status hierarchy finding its way into conservative rhetoric while the equalitarian traits of a pair-bonding species is manifested into the social democratic beliefs of progressives. The interplay of these two opposing but complementary forces unfolds as the Tao of politics.

The incorporation of two radically mating patterns into the evolution of the human species begets an intractable conflict between the opposing sides. Nothing is stronger than the biological imperative to reproduce, so it should come as no surprise that each side is incapable of finding common ground with the other since to do so runs contrary to the genetic program each group possesses that is designed to increase their chances of passing on their genes to the next generation.

Simply put, alphas will be alphas and betas will be betas and never the twain shall meet.

Consequently, what we see at the society at large is a small group of alpha males trying to amass as much wealth and power as possible so they can engage in an ostentatious display of wealth in order to attract the most desirable females. If in doubt, take a look at the advertising for the sale of luxury items. This group is opposed by a much larger of beta males and females that push for a more equal distribution of the society's wealth.

Of course there is a variance in how this opposition plays out from one society to another. Path dependence is in play, so turning points in the evolution of a society, (wars, revolutions, changes in religious beliefs) can push a society in either direction so that we can identify societies as being predominantly supportive of either alpha or beta procreation patterns. This is not say that societies attain a permanent equilibrium that entrenches the rule of one over the other. In fact, over time each element can gain ascendency over the other in what could be described as the eternal motion of the Tao.

History repeats itself in an unmistaken pattern.

Regardless of the supporting ideology favored by the alphas, wealth is concentrated over time into their hands in order to support their mating habits at the expense of the betas. Eventually, the betas realize that the depletion of resources threatens the survival of their offspring so they organize and depose of the alphas that rule the society. Previously, this was done exclusively by armed conflict, but as societies develop they come to realize that it is advantageous to contain this perpetual conflict within their political institutions, hence the spread of democracy across the globe over the last two hundred years.

Each side possesses a competitive advantage that allows them to rule the roost periodically. In short, alphas are more motivated to organize so they can extract wealth from the betas, but betas have numbers on their side. Also, alphas are extremely sensitive to differences within a status hierarchy so they will be tenacious in their attempt to procure wealth since inequality of wealth distribution and subsequent ostentatious display of wealth is greatest at the very top of the hierarchy. Their steadfast refusal to share wealth is their undoing because eventually the sleeping giant awakes and addresses the situation. Betas, on the other hand, have difficulty organizing. Their propensity to share and cooperate makes them reticent to confront the forces of the alpha groups early on. It takes considerable time before their collective angst reaches a tipping point and they spring into action.

Looking back at the post war years, there is a definite oscillation between the order of privilege and the order of equality. Indeed, the conclusion of the Second World War ushered in a historical period in the English speaking countries in which there was great economic growth and the increased wealth was equitably divided throughout the societies. Thirty years later, marked by the election of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the order of privilege reestablished its control and material wealth over time became more concentrated in the upper echelons of the respective societies.

Today, we appear to be at the beginning of the end of the rule of the order of privilege. The global economy which the alphas so diligently worked to bring about is about to collapse. Mountains of debt have arisen as a result of the desire to increase economic growth so to enrich a privileged elite. To meet these debt obligations, the order of privilege is attempting to force austerity measures upon the betas. The question that remains to be answered is how long will it take the betas to respond and in what manner their response will take form.

Were the recent riots and looting in England an isolated event or are they the precursors to the type of change of regime that we have seen during the Arab spring? Certainly, the mettle of the West's political institutions are about to undergo a severe stress test. Perhaps, they will hold. Perhaps, they will buckle. One way or another, as we enter a period of crisis for the global political economy, there will be opportunities for significant societal change to come about.

This state of affairs reminds me of the lyrics from Bob Dylan's song, The Times Are A-Changing:

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.

Trickle Up Economics and the Perversity of Cuts to Public Health Care

2011-05-23T12:20:00.000-04:00

It's common knowledge that throughout Canada, the UK, and the US continued economic growth has not translated in increased living standards for the masses. For example, in the US the economy has doubled in size over the last 30 years, but the median wage has remained stagnant when adjusted for inflation.

In fact, the lion's share of the gains caused by economic growth accrue to the top 1% of revenue earners. As a result, pursuing continued growth within the present economic conditions only serves to exacerbate rising inequality, which in turn only exacerbates a degradation of the public's health, which in turn increases expenditures on public health care.

What I truly find perverse in the political rhetoric prevalent in both the UK and the US is the fixation on making cuts to public health care as a means to addressing the fiscal woes caused by the collapse of the financial markets, which both countries came to rely on for generated economic growth, and the subsequent global recession that ensued.

The securities markets have recovered thanks to the trillion dollar bailouts supplied by the public purse. However, the real economy peopled by wage earners has not. The timing of austerity measures could not be worse for those in need and yet cutting back on public expenditures to those in need seems to have gained the status of received wisdom.

What doesn't make its way onto the political agenda is a realignment of fiscal policy to reflect our present fiscal reality. In short, financiers, the corporate sector, and the political class (see the documentary film, The Inside Job) perpetrated the largest Ponzi scheme in history upon unsuspecting public and now behave as if nothing extraordinary happened.

Where's the payback?

There won't be one because of the colossal failure of collective memory and the capacity of the traditional media to frame the current state of affairs so that the only option is to cut public expenditures aimed to help those who are the victims of a financial fraud that defies the imagination.

Faced with an unmanageable debt load, the governments in place could raise taxes on those who could afford to pay and to the corporations that don't pay them, but that would reduce financial contributions much needed to wage successful electoral campaigns, so the institutional lock is on and the population has no way out but to see a significant reduction in living standards for the bottom 90%.

At the same time, a growing body of evidence demonstrates that inequality of income correlates to a host of societal ills that require public funds if they are to be addressed. However, it appears that faced with the choice of reducing the wealth of the very well off in order to address the societal problems that inequality brings about, keeping in mind that the reduction of inequality itself can have a beneficial effect, and doing nothing other than leaving more and more people to fend for themselves in underperforming sectors of the economy, there is considerable will for the latter.

Consequently, politicians will continue to portray themselves as managers of THE economy bolstered by economic data selectively aggregated that supports the ruse when in reality the economic trajectory of the haves and the have nots will only to continue to widen.

We Are All Protestants Now, Slouching Towards the Apocalypse

2011-05-10T15:57:00.003-04:00

Well, not exactly all of us, but with Conservatives now in the driving seat in the UK, Canada, and the US, a Protestant derived mindset is firmly in control of the Anglo-American Empire as we leave behind the gains that secular humanism brought about for the great "unwashed" masses.

When trying to name this mindset, the term Cultural Calvinism is often applied. Of all the protestant sects, it is the doctrines of the Calvinistic creed that have had the greatest impact upon the English speaking societies. Importantly, the ideas are no longer anchored to a particular faith or dogma. Instead, they have drifted to permeate large parts of socio-economic discourse, and, as a result, have become more insidious with regard to how they exercise control, framing socio-economic debates unbeknownst to the participants.

In a nutshell, Cultural Calvinism is founded on the belief that human society is essentially God's creation and that we should not interfere with God's plans for each and everyone of us. People get what they deserve, especially the rich whose wealth demonstrates their favored status in the eyes of God. The less well off must be content to toil away at their callings/jobs, and the wretched of the earth must be purged of their imperfections and be punished for their sins.

Once one understands the extent to which Cultural Calvinism permeates English-speaking cultures, a great deal of the mind boggling inequality actually makes sense from within the framework and of course looks like a bunch of self-serving bullshit on behalf of the rich and powerful from the outside.

From the perspective of the rich, there's probably no better self defense that to invoke God's name to fool people into thinking that the existing social order has been sanctified by the All Mighty and that to seek change is an invitation to invoke God's wrath.

Never underestimate the gullibility of the masses and the extent to which they'll by into the schtick. Just ask Bernie Madoff.

So, looking at the collapse of the financial markets, the onset of the Great Recession, and the austerity measures taken to slay the dragon of budgetary deficits, events are unfolding pretty much to the liking of Cultural Calvinists.

The great transfer of wealth is just God's way of rewarding his favored ones. Those who lost their jobs, homes, or both deserve what they got. Consequently, no prosecutions against those who were responsible for humanity's greatest financial swindle and little or no relief for the afflicted.

In fact, the building of more prisons to "house" the less fortunate at public expense is just what the good Lord wanted.

Moreover, catastrophic climate change is in reality the apocalypse, which according to the word of God will usher in the second coming.

By all means should we ratchet up the economy as fast as she can go so we can bring more wealth to the Elect and bring the chosen few closer to that day when they will meet their maker and enter into paradise.

If the rest of the world goes to hell in a hand basket, it's all part of the master plan, and if you don't get it, there's no special place for you.

In Canada It's All Part of the Game

2011-05-05T12:57:00.003-04:00

The Canadian federal general election has come and gone and from what I can gather most Canadians are pretty well satisfied with the results: a majority government, the centre left in opposition, the blasted sovereignists almost swept completely off the electoral map, and Canada's first Green MP elected. Something for everyone.

You might object that once again the voting system generated significant distortions that left large swaths of the population under represented, in particular, the Liberals, the Bloc Quebecois, and the Greens. But hey, that's the way the ball bounces. One election the voting system favors you and in another you are on the wrong side of the distortions.

You might think that given the history of the vagaries of the electoral system that Canadians would be apt to put into place a fairer voting system in which everyone's vote was given equitable treatment. But that's not the case. In fact, the vast majority of Canadians are not bothered at all with the fact that the voting system is inherently unfair.

Indeed, the vast majority of Canadians accept that an election is not a democratic exercise but a game played between rival clans. To them, it's the winner-take-all aspect of the game that makes interesting to play. Hell, it would be boring if we knew in advance that a party showing 35% of the vote would expect to receive 35% of the seats in Parliament.

Play the game, place your bets, take your chances.

The idea that an election is far too important to be framed with a gaming metaphor appropriately named first-past-the-post is beyond them. If the game entails the systemic elimination of millions of voices in Parliament, so be it. Only the sore losers complain about the rules.

Democracy? What's that?

Huge Distortions of the Popular Vote Mire Canadian Election Results

2011-05-03T07:17:00.000-04:00

How is it that a supposedly developed country, a member of the G-8, endures a medieval electoral system?

The Conservatives's quest for what Canadians erroneously refer to as a majority government was fulfilled, largely due to an outrageous distortion of the popular vote in Ontario. As well, the newly formed NDP opposition had its number of seats bolstered by an even more outrageous distribution of seats in Quebec.

In short, the election was decided in Canada's two most populous provinces. Effectively, the massive vote splitting in Ontario was more than enough to offset the massive vote splitting in Quebec. The principle victims of this democratic charade were the Liberals and the Bloc Quebecois. What goes around comes around.

Taking a closer look at the results, one can easily see how the voting system and not the electors determined the formation of the government and the opposition.

In Ontario, the Conservatives received 44.4% of the popular vote, yet received 68.9% of the available seat, a classic example of coming up the middle when two other parties split the outstanding 50% of the vote. With regard to the allocation of extra seats as a result of the plurality method, the Conservatives received an extra 27 seats. To put this in perspective, the total number of extra seats allocated to the Conservatives nation wide in the 2008 election was only 30.

In Quebec, the distortion of the popular vote is even more spectacular. The NDP won 42.9 % of the vote, yet garnered 77.3% of the seats. In this instance, the allocation of extra seats totals 26. In other words, instead of receiving 32 seats in Quebec, which would be the number in proportion to the number of votes, the NDP was awarded 58 seats. The transfer can be attributed to the huge under representation of the Bloc Quebecois: the Bloc captured 23.4% of the vote but received only 5.2% of the seats.

Instead of having an election where the electoral results reflected the manner in which people actually voted, Canadians witnessed once again the application of a voting method that generates wild deviations from democratic norms.

I think the question that needs to be asked is how much longer are Canadians going to sit back and let their political class make mockery of the very notion of democracy. In my case, I have taken the issue to Court and am waiting on a decision from the Quebec Appeal Court with regard to the constitutionality of the first-past-the-post system.

While in deliberation, I hope the three judges take note of the antidemocratic nature of the latest federal election.

Canada's Facebook Election Changes the Face of the Nation

2011-04-29T15:37:00.003-04:00

Yes, I've seen the latest polls and have jumped on the bandwagon. I'm putting aside the pessimist belief that the vagaries of the voting system would undo the sudden rise in support of the NPD.

There's something historic going on and it has more than just a shift in voting patterns. More importantly, this is the election that historians will point to as the election where social media, in particular Facebook, played a determining role in bringing about the electoral results.

In short, what has occurred is that the traditional media has lost its ability to control how elections will be played out. It no longer can decide on how the issues will be framed. Although it stills plays a role, the advent of social networking tempers what was a previously unchecked power to determine who will win elections.

In the case of this election, people entered into hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of political exchanges with their Facebook friends. Essentially, all of us who participated became media sources. As a result, traditional media was no longer privileged as an information source. On the contrary, it became more important to see how the issues were playing about on our News Feeds.

This is not to say that you wouldn't find links to articles stemming from the traditional media, but what is different is that when posted they were followed by comments that weighed the opinion and allowed for exchanges between the participants. This is a significant break from the one-to-many communication pattern that gives traditional media its power. Often, it is the comments that follow that are more informative than the original article.

As well, these millions of exchanges allowed Canadians to self organize in an unprecedented manner. At the beginning of the campaign, the Prime Minister framed the ballot question as a choice between a Harper majority or a reckless coalition. Canadians then took it upon themselves to talk it over and see what they could come up with.

Following the lead of Quebecers who have an uncanny ability to mobilize their vote in favor of the party that will go on to form a government, Canadians have responded to Mr. Harper's framing of the question and have decided that they would prefer to be governed by a coalition government and that this coalition should be led by the leader of the NDP, Jack Layton, and it shall be formed without the support of the Bloc Quebecois.

Talk about the wisdom of crowds.

Canada's Progressives Are About to Get Screwed by a Corrupt Electoral System

2011-04-27T16:41:00.003-04:00

The sudden rise of the NDP in the polls gives reason to hope that the political landscape is about to change fundamentally.

Don't bet the farm on it.

What the pundits don't say is that the NDP is far from playing on an even playing field. As anybody who is even vaguely aware of the way our electoral system actually works, national or even provincial percentages of the popular vote do not produce a proportional number of seats. It all depends on how the vote is distributed.

Concentrated support in smaller regions pays off whereas moderate support over large regions provides disappointing results. Add to mixture the possibility of a relatively even distribution of votes among opposing parties that allows candidates to triumph with only 30% of the vote and an electoral map that is gerrymandered to give rural ridings more voting power than urban ridings and you find a recipe for a democratic debacle.

For instance, it is most probable that in Quebec despite gaining more of the popular vote than the Bloc Quebecois the NDP will find themselves with less seats than they deserve. The Bloc will win more seats because of their strength in the rural regions and because of vote splitting between the federalist parties.

Likewise, across Canada the Conservatives will benefit from the vote splitting between Liberals and the supporters of the NDP. In fact, it is quite foreseeable that the Conservatives will win more seats this time around with a slightly smaller share of the popular vote as compared to the 2008 election. So much so, they will go on to win a majority government with slightly more than just one third of the popular vote.

Perhaps some will find solace if the NDP forms the opposition, thinking that they are only one election away from forming a progressive government. So close and yet so far from real power.

My advice for any of my progressive readers is to watch the results on election evening in a bar. You're going to need a stiff drink when reality sets it and you realize that the country is still ruled by a minority with whom you have little in common.

Are the Political Planets Re-aligning in Quebec?

2011-04-25T13:52:00.001-04:00

Elsewhere in Canada, the political continuum is from right to left. Here in Quebec, the parties have been aligned on the basis of a federalist-nationalist allegiance for more than 30 years. The question on everyone's mind within the political class is whether the rise of the NDP signals a rupture with our recent political past.

Considering the current state of affairs in Quebec, accusations of corruption abound, it's not that surprising that Quebecers are seeking an exit strategy from the way politics are usually done. Essentially, the Liberals both at the provincial and federal level have been the default option for those who don't support the sovereignty movement. The Conservatives don't have much appeal for the vast majority of voters.

However, successive scandals involving the Liberal Party of Canada and the Quebec Liberal Party have rendered the Liberal brand toxic. At the same time, the fervor for sovereignty has waned. Consequently, the third federalist option, the NDP, has gained much in the way of support.

What is significant in the rise of the NDP is that the party attracts voters from both the federalist and the sovereignist camps. The party's left-of-center policies are in keeping with the political values of Quebec society. Yet for the last twenty years, the sovereignist Bloc Quebecois has been able to position itself as the protector of Quebec's social democracy. But will that tendency continue?

Perhaps, what we are witnessing is a demographic shift in political power in Quebec. Those born before the war are apt to continue in the Roman Catholic tradition of supporting the Liberals. The Quebec baby boomers defied their parents by supporting the sovereignist parties. Today, it's generations x,y, and zed's turn to define their political identity by rejecting the federalist-nationalist dichotomy altogether.

Certainly, it will take more than just one election to see how this plays out, but I have the feeling that we are at the beginning of the Internet generation's emergence as a political power.

The NDP Has Gone Viral in Quebec

2011-04-21T17:58:00.002-04:00

I woke up this morning to see confirmation in two polls that with regard to voting intentions in the upcoming federal elections Quebecers have gone viral in their support of the NDP.

You need to know that the Quebec population is very closely knit. I'm not exaggerating when I say that there is only three degrees of separation. Changes in attitudes can occur quite rapidly.

What's happening right now reminds me of the June Quebec by-elections in 2002 when the ADQ won three out of four seats up for grabs and got 45% of the populate vote. Unfortunately for the ADQ viral epidemics reach their peak and eventually fall off quickly. One year later, the party received only 18% of the vote.

Consequently, as we know all to well timing is everything and it looks like the NDP has hit the perfect storm.

On Thursday morning, Quebecers woke up to the news of the polls. By Thursday afternoon the great provincial wide trek to visit the extended family during the Easter long weekend began. Across the province, hundreds of thousands of families are getting together and without question there will be considerable talk about the federal election. Quite often an influential family member will come and say who he or she is voting for, and this gesture tells other family members who are less inclined to invest the energy to make up their own mind on how they should vote.

Consequently, there can be a domino effect and with only a week to go during the campaign there might not be enough time to get the genie back into the bottle.

The important question to ask is how much further will the ascension continue before it tops out. At 35%, the NDP could win about 10 seats, but at 40-45% they could end up with the majority of seats in Quebec, 40-50.

This would change the power dynamics in Canada completely since it would probably put the NDP as the opposition, with the possibility that they could lead a coalition government with the Liberals. For this to occur, people in B.C. and in the greater Toronto region would need to take notice and to vote strategically. This way those who are motivated to vote against the eventuality of a Harper majority would vote strategically for the NDP instead of for the Liberals, a complete reversal of historic strategic voting trends.

Suddenly, what was a Seinfeld general election, a story about nothing, might become a historic event.

North America Has Become a Huge Fat Farm

2011-04-15T13:10:00.003-04:00

Last year, I had the shock of my life when I visited the US. I had never seen so many super obese people in all my life. Statistics say that one in three Americans is obese, but I wasn’t prepared for how big people have become. During my vacation, I felt slim on the beach and by the pool as compared to the people around me, when in reality I could stand to lose 40 pounds.

In some ways, I can sympathize with my obese friends across the border. I have been working out four to five times a week for the last two years; I watch what I eat, cutting down on carbs, eating more fruits and vegetables, but after an initial weight loss of about 20 pounds, I’m stuck at my present weight, which is not a healthy weight.

I went for my annual check-up and my doctor said I was in excellent health despite my ample girth. I told my story and she told me that it was genetic, my pancreas is super- efficient and that I easily store the smallest amount of extra blood sugar as body fat. Apparently, if there were a famine, I’d be one of the last to die.

This was depressing news since I’m pretty close to my limits for working out. Much more and I would risk injury.

Then by chance, more precisely because of my personalized magazine application for my iPad, I received an article from the New York Times questioning whether sugar was toxic. Within the text, there is a link to what I believe to be perhaps the most important video on Public Health in the last thirty years, Sugar: the Bitter Truth.

In short, we are told that the decision thirty years ago to promote a low fat, high carbohydrate diet across North America has been an unmitigated disaster. Yes, we are eating less fat, but now we are eating more sugar in our diets as never before, about 140 pounds per person per year. Simply put, our bodies cannot metabolize this amount of sugar, especially when it contains fructose. So we pack on the pounds, add to our bad cholesterol, and increase our risk to heart attacks, diabetes and cancer.

The food industry and the regulatory agencies are largely to blame. High Fructose Corn Syrup is found in almost all of our processed food. Looking at the evidence presented in the video, it appears that Fructose is indeed a toxin. Unfortunately, regulators will not act to curb its use since it falls into the category of a substance that is not acutely toxic (it won’t kill you after just one meal) but is toxic with chronic use (it will make you sick after a 1000 meals.)

Consequently, food producers in North America are pumping out enormous amounts of cheap, sugar-laced processed food products unabated by government and the population is more than happy to gobble them up.

Driven by the profit motive, politicians representing the food industry and the interests in the health sector have come to realize is that there is a fortune to be made by fattening up the population, and the beauty of it is that no one is forcing anyone to consume the adulterated food stuffs. In fact, we are genetically programmed to seek and ingest that which is sweet.

First, the US government subsidizes the corn producers so they can provide the food industry with a cheap foodstuff that can be used widely and generates huge profit margins. Second, private health care providers can then capitalize on a disease ridden population, whose treatment is also subsidized by the state.

It has been estimated that the US government could save more than one trillion dollars a year by simply reducing the incidence of preventable disease among its citizens that is largely attributable to lifestyle. However, to do so would cut into the profits of the food-health service consortium. As a result, nothing substantial gets done to address the root cause of the obesity epidemic in North America, its addiction to sugar.

Is there anything more American than knocking back a Coke or wolfing down a double slice of apple pie?

Yeah, the insatiable greed that drives people to exploit as many as they can and sticking the government with the task of having to deal with the mess.

The Sacred Cows No Politician Dares To Touch

2011-04-13T16:26:00.002-04:00

Thank God the Stanley Cup Playoffs start this evening. This has to be the dullest federal election since Sir John A. swore off the bottle. Same old. Same old.

Yet, around the world things are different. Despots are being disposed, countries teeter on bankruptcy and severe austerity programs are being implemented in response to a perceived debt crisis.

Here, the election is being framed as the choice between the “reckless” coalition and the stability of a Harper majority government. In other words, the choice is between the Liberals in bed with the separatists and socialists or a Canada governed by a guy with a bad haircut.

These are the choices?

This election would generate a lot more interest if our politicians started focusing on the real problem facing Canadians, especially for those who believe that it is our social programs that keep this nation together.

Sky-rocketing health care costs coupled with an ideological belief that no new tax revenues can be raised threatens the continued viability of the Canadian social system. At the present rate of growth in health care costs, expenditures for health care will represent 50% of budget allocations at the provincial level by 2020, and this includes monies targeted for health care transferred to the provinces from the federal government. In other words, if we continue on the present course, we will not be able to adequately fund education, welfare, public transportation, environmental measures, debt reduction, etc.

Faced with such a dilemma, we need to cut to the heart of the matter and address two outstanding issues that politicians fear to discuss publically since it places them in opposition to the rich and the powerful. The first is the method in which doctors are remunerated in the public health care system, fee for service performed, and the second is the imposition of a financial transaction tax, which is often referred to as the Robin Hood Tax.

With regard to the former, we cannot endure the continued growth in health care costs. Technological advances in medicine combined with an aging population create a situation where the potential for the expansion of medical services to be performed will surpass our capacity to pay within the present payment structure. To rein in costs in the public system, all medical personnel will need to be salaried as is the case with other professionals employed by the state. No exceptions. Those wishing to continue working within the fee for service model can continue to do so within the private sector.

With regard to the latter, we need to be able to distinguish between no new taxes for those who are already taxed to the hilt and new taxes for those who pay no tax or very little tax at all. Presently, the financial sector escapes paying its fair share and receives preferential treatment. Remember the federal Goods and Services Tax replaced the hidden Manufacturers’ Sales Tax? Financial services were among the exemptions. Yet, even a ridiculously small levy of one tenth of one percent on all financial transactions has the potential to raise billions in revenue. This new revenue could then be used to pay down the debt thereby liberating billions in service charges that could be reallocated to continue making investments to promote the social well-being of the population.

Serious debate on core issues like these will generate genuine interest in the electorate. However, as long as the political debate is confined to peripheral issues the electoral campaign will continue to be a sleep fest.

Perhaps, that’s how the powers that be prefer to have the electoral campaign contested.

Tired of Having the News Dumbed Down? Turn Off the Tube and Get An iPad!

2011-04-11T21:16:00.002-04:00

I've enjoyed my iPad for about a year now. For someone who is an info-holic and works in communications, it's changed the way I access information and there's no going back.

High definition touch screen with which I get the news on line from around the world, watch the videos I want when I want, read e-books that take 30 seconds or less to download, surf the web, connect to social media, compose and post my blogs, send and receive email, read a personalized magazine dedicated to the subjects which are of interest to me, keep track of everything with powerful applications, and that's without mentioning all the fun stuff.

Lately, I noticed by the time I get home in time to watch the evening news, it's no longer news. Not only am already aware of the day's events, but I have already read the pertinent comments from my Facebook friends. As a result, I rarely find the so called expert analysis all that interesting. Moreover, the presentation of the news by the major television networks smacks of low grade propaganda. It goes out of its way to treat complex issues with trite explanations that fit easily with the dominant worldview put forward by the powers that be. Heaven forbid that a cultural myth is called into question.

Take advantage of what newer communications technology has to offer. I've already replaced commercial radio in my car with a satellite feed, and I enjoy not having my favorite tunes interrupted by the banal sales pitch trying to sell me something I don't really need.

So, I'm going to kick the filthy habit. I'm no longer going to park my ass in front of the Tube to watch the news. There's only so much time in the day and I'm not going to waste it being forced fed commercials that intersperse sound bytes featuring low information content.

Be a wise-guy or a wise-gal. Get an iPad or its equivalent and set your mind free. Not only will you become more intelligent, you will be less stressed out by having escaped thinking about all the crap the networks force you to attend to.

In Canada the Powers that Be Conspire to Suppress the Emergence of Alternative Voices

2011-04-07T12:59:00.001-04:00

Catch 22 for the Green Party of Canada. Because the Greens haven't won a seat in Parliament, their leader can't participate in the televised leaders debate. Because their leader doesn't participate in the leaders debate, the Greens can't win a seat in Parliament.

At first glance, this seems to be a rather straight forward number being perpetrated against the Greens that would be easy to fix. Change the electoral system or change the rules for the leaders debate.

Fat chance.

The powers that be: the political parties, the corporate sector, and the media, buttressed by a complacent judiciary, are just far too comfortable with the status quo to allow anyone else into the game, especially a political party that proposes to change the rules concerning the way the game is played.

That the political system has become out dated and dysfunctional is beside the point. If you play your cards right, life can be quite comfortable as long as the status quo is maintained.

That globalization has rendered many of our ways of thinking about how and what social services to deliver and how and when to intervene in the multiple spheres of economic activity obsolete is also a moot point as we continue to pile on the debt that we will ask future generations to pay. If the ship of the nation has veered off course, no matter as long as you're in first class.

In short, the social contract between the forces that be in Canada asserts that the political parties will ensure a socio-economic sphere that is favorable to wealth extraction by the corporate sector, the corporate sector will provide financial support to the traditional political parties, the media will act as the gatekeeper to what actually makes it onto the nation's political agenda, the political parties and the corporate sector will purchase advertising from the media, and the judiciary will ensure (I hope to be proved wrong on this point) that the rules of the political economy remain in place.

Dissent is fine as long as it remains contained within the confines of the existing power structure. Emerging political parties that attempt to change the "gentleman's agreements" in place will have their hopes dashed by an electoral system that either denies or severely distorts the representation given to smaller parties, closed doors when seeking funds, and hostile treatment from the media that will cast dispersions upon the capacity of the emerging party to form a government.

Moreover, those who are brave or foolish enough to put their name forward to appear on the ballot for an emerging party also face the the wrath of those who will use administrative means to make it as difficult as possible for someone to be a candidate.

On two separate occasions for two different political parties, I have been subjected to personal harassment from employers when I announced that I was to be candidate for a smaller party in which I expected and received only 10% of the vote. In one instance, I had my salary cut, and in the second, I received written notification that I would be fired if I did indeed become a candidate.

Needless to say, claims made about how Canada cherishes democratic values tend to make me scoff and wonder what is the person talking about when he or she mentions the word "democracy."

On this note a disgruntled democrat will sign off with the intention to examine what the term actually means and how it is being misused in my next blog.

In the meantime, I salute all those candidates who put their names forward knowing full well they have no hope of being elected. In doing so, they allow a great many of us to express our political beliefs in what is a sham of a democracy.

It warms my heart to know that the spirit of democracy is alive and well in the hearts of those who get it.

Canada Should Look Down Under to Address Its Democratic Deficit

2011-04-04T17:54:00.001-04:00

I think that most people would now recognize that the world has moved on and Canada is still stuck with it colonial system of governance. No modern democratic state has a lower house elected by first-past-the-post and an upper house that is unelected.

Elsewhere in the Commonwealth, in particular Australia and New Zealand, political institutions have evolved, and Canada would do well to look down under for a model to bring about democratic reform.

Both countries ditched first-past-the post: Australia uses the Alternative Vote to elect the representatives in the lower house and a proportional method for the Senate, while New Zealand uses a proportional method to elect the members to its unicameral legislature.

Either country could serve as a model depending on what Canadians decide to do with regard to the Senate.

If Canadians choose to abolish the Senate, a mixed member proportional electoral system found in New Zealand has the advantage of combining territorial representation, using a voting method Canadians are familiar, with a list method to ensure that the electoral results with regard to representation are proportional to the popular vote.

If Canadians choose to retain the Senate, the Australian system is also appealing. In short, the lower house retains its territorial representation, electing one member per electoral district, but does so by requiring the winning candidate to seek a majority instead of a plurality. To obtain the 50% plus one, electors are asked to rank the candidates and voting preferences are transferred until one candidate receives a majority of the votes. In the Senate, multimember region districts are in place and representation is awarded in a proportional manner based on the number of votes cast for each of the political parties. Taken together, voters maintain the strong link with an individual Deputy in the lower house and enjoy equitable representation in the Senate.

Where to begin?

It would appear that the best place to begin would be to replace the voting system used to elect representatives to the House of Commons. Again, we should look to New Zealand for a model to guide us with regard how to go about making the change. Importantly, a committee of citizens should be entrusted with implementing a two-round referendum to choose the new system. On the first ballot, there should be at least four alternative voting methods. The first referendum would determine the two most popular alternatives and they would appear on the second ballot. The second referendum would then determine the people's choice by obtaining a majority result.

With only a few weeks before Canadians choose to elect a fourth minority government in seven years or to award a false majority to a single political party, we would do well to consider how to replace a broken electoral system that is beyond repair.

We All Lose When Only the Winners Gain Representation

2011-04-02T11:27:00.004-04:00

While campaigning against the alternative vote option on the ballot in the UK referendum on the voting system, British Prime Minister, David Cameron makes the following analogy that underscores the dominant belief for those who support the first-past-the-post voting system:

"Just think forward to the Olympics. Usain Bolt powers home in the hundred metres but when it comes to handing out the gold medals they give it to the person who comes third. You wouldn't do it in the Olympics, we shouldn't do it in politics, we've got to vote no to this crazy system."

http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4408415205100913549&postID=5629911940251715793

Clearly, this analogy asserts that it is the winner of the contest that deserves the prize, a seat in Parliament. Push the analogy a little further to include its intended audience and the assertion reads: you are the winners of the socio-economic game and, as a result, you are the ones who deserve to rule.

This is also the rhetoric heard during the 2011 federal election in Canada. Time and time again we hear Prime Minister Harper say it is only the "winners" that have the right to form the government and not the "coalition of losers".

In other words, only the strong should be allowed to rule, and the weak, even if they are in the majority, should submit to the rule of those who have been deemed fit to rule because of their performance in the contest to see who gets the most votes.

The obvious question is why should the formation of a government be reduced to a sporting contest? Why should representation be seen as the prize to be awarded based on the results of a winner-take-all contest?

There are other ways to form a government.

We could make it a game of chance. That's what the ancient Athenians did when they formed their government that gave birth to the term democracy, the rule of the demos, the people. Most office holders were chosen on the basis of drawing lots. That way domination by any one group could be avoided because the odds on being selected were equal for each citizen.

We could also make it a game of sharing the pie. Everyone gets their fair share. The size of the slice, the number of seats in the legislature, is proportional to the number of voters who support each party.

With regard to the results of this type of exercise, a fundamental question must be asked when choosing the rules of the game: is it our intent to give preferential treatment to some players or shall we be equitable in the treatment of all the players.

Let's not forget where we are coming from. Our political institutions have evolved over time from our inheritance of a political system from a class-structured British society. As little as 150 years ago, only white, male, Protestant, land owners had the right to vote. The entire system was set up to privilege this part of the population.

Over time, our political institutions have evolved: universal suffrage became the norm and the power of money to influence electoral outcomes has been significantly reduced. However, one powerful institution has not changed.

We still have in place a political system that privileges the so-called "winners" in Canadian society. Indeed, a winner-take-all electoral system leads to a winner-takes-most economy. The inequality of economic results reflects the inequality built into the political system. Yet, this inequality comes with a price.

Research shows that societies that have greater economic inequality experience higher incidents of social problems and the members of these societies have shorter lives, yes even the rich, than their counterparts in societies where the wealth is more equitably distributed.

So, let's do everybody in Canada a favor: drop the idea that forming a government is like winning a sporting contest and let's give everyone their fair share of the electoral pie.

Contesting Canada's Shamocracy

2011-03-31T13:01:00.000-04:00

"Although we like to think of ourselves as living in a mature democracy, we live, instead, in something little better than a benign dictatorship, not under a strict one-party rule, but under a one-party-plus system beset by the factionalism, regionalism and cronyism that accompany any such system. Our parliamentary government creates a concentrated power structure out of step with other aspects of society. For Canadian democracy to mature, Canadian citizens must face these facts, as citizens in other countries have, and update our political structures to reflect the diverse political aspirations of our diverse communities." (Stephen Harper and Tom Flanagan: Our Benign Dictatorship)

Well then, if you try pass of something little better than a benign dictatorship as a democracy, you would be engaging in a sham, and in this case the set of institutional practices in question should be referred to as a shamocracy, a cheap imitation of the real thing.

The exclusion of Elizabeth May, the leader of the Green Party of Canada, from the televised leaders debate because the Greens have yet to win a seat in Parliament is a flagrant example of the systemic discrimination that the Greens face in their attempt to gain representation.

In this instance, we are talking about a political party that garnered nearly a million votes during the 2008 federal election but did not receive a single seat. How can you square this anomaly with any conception of a modern democracy? You can't. In fact, Stephen Harper was bang on with his assessment that Canadians need to update their political institutions.

However, what we see time and again is that regardless of the individual the desire to make institutional change is related to the distance from exercising real political power. The closer one gets, the less one is inclined to bring about change.

As a result, I was glad when I learned that the Greens are taking the issue to Court. Already, the constitutionality of the first-past-the-post voting system is before the Quebec Court of Appeal and appears destined to make it's way to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Eventually, the Courts will have to deal with the systemic discrimination facing the Greens. Judges would do well to draw from John Hart Ely's theory of judicial review, which asserts that it is exactly in theses instances when those who are "in" the corridors of power conspire to keep those who are outside the said corridors "out" should the Court intervene.

In the near future, the Court will need to make a fundamental distinction of whether Canada is indeed a democracy or a cheap facsimile.

The Bloc Quebecois Has the Last Laugh Since Canada Has Become Ungovernable

2011-03-28T15:56:00.000-04:00

One thing is for sure. Once the writ is dropped, partisan interests prevail and the leaders can't see the forest for the trees.

For example, all this fear mongering about the participation of the Bloc in a ruling coalition misses the point. Indeed, what has happened is that the Bloc has appropriated a disproportionately large share of our electoral system's best known distortion, the winner's bonus, which, as a result, renders the system wholly dysfunctional since it cannot produce the desired result: a false majority, where a plurality of the votes is transformed into a majority of seats.

Generally speaking, 40% of the vote garners 60% of the seats for the party that gains the most votes when using the first-past-the-post voting method. The so called winner's bonus results from the inability of smaller parties whose distribution of seats is spread too thin geographically to effectively turn those votes into seats. In other words, the distribution of votes is as important as the number of votes cast. For example, in the 2008 federal election the Green Party of Canada received approximately 1.0 million votes and did not elect a single MP whereas the Bloc received 1.3 million votes and elected 49 MPs.

In fact, looking at the numbers from the 2008 election tells us that the Bloc received a winner's bonus that is three times as large as what the Conservatives received.

For instance, the Bloc received 38.1% of the popular vote and yet obtained 65% of the seats in Quebec, the only province where it fields candidates. This represents a winner's bonus of twenty extra seats, which is a 69% increase in the number of seats as compared to the number of seats obtained if the seats were distributed on the basis of the popular vote.

Likewise, the Conservatives also enjoyed a winner's bonus. They received an extra 27 seats or an increase of 23% of the number of seats as compared to a distribution of seats based on the popular vote. However, it should be pointed out that the Conservatives fielded candidates in 308 ridings as compared to only 75 candidates for the Bloc.

In other words, the Bloc was much more effective in capturing the benefit from the distortions derived from the voting system than the Conservatives. So much so that it thwarts the capacity of either the Conservatives or Liberals to form a majority government, thereby rendering the country ungovernable over the long term.

Given the disproportional number of seats awarded to the Bloc and the ideological differences between the parties that excludes the Bloc from participating in a stable coalition, Canada appears to be stuck in a pattern of successive, short-lived minority governments.

Ironically, the Bloc uses a core feature of the British Parliamentary system to bring about electoral results that run contrary to the design of the system and much to the rest of Canada's chagrin.

Of course, this anomaly could be dispensed with by changing the voting system so that it produces more proportional results, but for that to occur either the Liberals or Conservatives would have to renounce the blatant unfairness of the electoral system that they have used to gain advantage for quite some time.

Methinks that neither party is prepared to bite the hand that feeds them.

Truth Be Told Coalition Governments Have Become the Norm in Westminster Parliaments

2011-03-24T14:22:00.000-04:00

The red door and the blue door. Forming a coalition with the socialists and the separatists. Give me a frickin break.

Here we are about to embark on our fourth general election in seven years and the two leaders of Canada's major political parties are afraid to address the big issue: the quest for a single party majority government is a thing of the past.

Take a look around the world. India, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom all have coalition governments. What distinguishes Canada from its Westminster cousins, apart from the frequency of general elections, is that we are clinging onto the outdated concept that we must be governed by a single political party.

Elsewhere, politicians can speak openly about confidence and supply agreements with smaller political parties, meaning that smaller parties will cooperate with larger ones so not to bring down the government on confidence motions or budget matters. Forming a stable long-lasting coalition that votes as one on all motions is but one option amongst many to bring more stability to the political system.

Are we going to go through this entire campaign with a blind eye towards what's happened in the other counties that use the Westminster parliamentary system?

The media needs to push this button.

Forget an Election. We Need a Referendum on the Electoral System!

2011-03-22T13:47:00.001-04:00

So here we are. Yet again facing the possibility of a general election that won't resolve anything. A few seats will change hands, but for the most part the distribution of seats will still give us another Conservative minority government. So, why bother?

We can no longer throw the rascals out because the electorate no longer plays the game as it was intended to be played. In the United States, on the other hand, people still cling to the Republican/Democrat dichotomy, but here in Canada people have moved on.

For example, Greens are still going to vote Green, the supporters of the Bloc are still going to vote for the Bloc, and almost half the electorate won't vote at all. Each of the governing options, the Liberals and the Conservatives are unable to form a majority government, and, in fact, their combined support comes from less than 50% of the eligible voters.

This means that we will be continued to be ruled by a minority that usurps the political power of the majority because of the divide and rule component built into an outdated electoral system that is a vestige of the British Empire.

Canadians now have to face up to the fact that our political system is broken and is beyond repair as long as we stay with our current electoral method. Majority government, the cornerstone of democratic government, is possible but not one constituted by a single political party. The formation of a majority government can only arise as a result of a coalition between two or more parties.

So, here are the choices: we continue with the same electoral system and endure minority rule with the faint hope that one day a new leader will emerge and deliver us to democratic government, or we take the situation in hand and change our electoral system.

To stay with the first choice is to consent to an undemocratic system of governance. To make the second choice is an affirmation of democratic rule.

Let's be clear. Those who are elected by first-past-the-post are in a conflict of interest when it comes to changing the electoral system, and as recent history attests in B.C., Ontario, and the UK, they cannot be trusted to put into place a fair and equitable process that might put themselves out of a job.

Consequently, let's go with a process that has proven to be successful. Drawing inspiration from the New Zealand experience, we should have a citizens committee come up with four alternative voting methods to appear on the ballot of the first round of a two-round referendum. Leave it up to the committee to decide whether to use a simple plurality method or a preferential ballot for the first round. In either case, two options will advance to a second round ballot, and it will be the the population at large in which each and every citizen has the opportunity to have their vote count that will decide. It takes a democratic method to move us towards democratic rule.

Come on Canada. What do you have to lose?

A dysfunctional system of governance.

How to Best Stop Natural Gas Drilling in Quebec? Give the Administrative Regions the Power to Revoke Corporate Personhood.

2011-03-09T16:13:00.000-05:00

Like the majority of Quebecois, I feel that we are being taken for a ride when it comes to the drilling for natural gas using the controversial hydofracking process.

Essentially, a toxic mixture of water and known carcinogens are pumped into the ground under high pressure in order to fracture the shale in which the bubbles of natural gas are trapped and thereafter extracted. Trouble is what to do about the fracking fluid that escapes into the ground water and how to treat the leftover fluid that is pumped out into retaining ponds.

A government study was done in record time and is advisory in nature. This means that the government can spin the findings so to appear that it is moving forward with the necessary precautions in place. In my opinion, the citizens of the affected regions have little reason to believe that the government will act with their best interests at heart. Time and time again, the Charest-led Liberals have shown their propensity to reward their financial contributors at the expense of the public good.

If we want to see the precautionary principle put into place with regard to natural gas drilling, we will have to move the locus of decision closer to those who are at risk of having their health and the health of their children adversely affected.

The most effective way to do this is to give the citizens of an administrative region the power to control the manner in which the natural gas is to be exploited, if at all. Corporations that seek to do business within an administrative region must be able to demonstrate that their business activities advance a public good.

If not, the citizens of an administrative region should be able to revoke the corporate personhood of the business entity, thereby stripping the limited liability protection of the officers of the corporation with regard to its activities within the region. That way, the individuals involved in the management of the business assume the responsibility for the corporation's activities, both legally and financially.

Of course, for this to happen it will require the devolution of political power from the province towards its citizens by creating political entities out of the administrative regions. France, Germany, and Switzerland have such regional governments in place.

Elected regional assemblies combined with citizen initiated referendums could help to restore confidence in the democratic process since citizens would have more meaningful ways of participating in the political process that shapes the socio-economic quality of their lives.

As it stands now, we are little more than, to use former Quebec Premier Jacques Parizeau's phrase, lobsters caught in a trap. Our future is determined by those who are far off and who have little concern for our well being.

Corporate Fascism

2011-03-03T05:06:00.000-05:00

If there is a God, he must ask for our pardon.
(Words scratched onto the walls of the barracks in the Mauthausen concentration camp)

There are times when we learn things that we may prefer not to know.

I had this experience after visiting the Mauthausen Memorial for the concentration camp that was built there. Mauthausen was a category 3 camp, which meant that it was a forced labour camp for political prisoners, the intellegensia, and other undesirables. It is located above a granite quarry that supplied building materials used in the construction of monuments glorifying the Third Reich.

In my view, there are two separate but related components of the horror: the psychopathic and sociopathic elements.

At first, it's the psychopathic element that rises its ugly head. Barbed wire, gas chambers, throwing people off cliffs, human experiments, starvation, torture, and the list goes on.

How could anyone commit such atrocities upon other humans and at the end of the work day go home to a wife, family, and a modest bourgeois lifestyle as if it were just another job?

Psychopaths.

Afterwards, we push a little further and ask the question, considering how everything was so planned out, what kind of sick fucks would work out the logistics so that the camps could operate at the scale they did. Psychopaths couldn't work out the details and the protocols necessary to manage the information requirements. They would need the help of sociopaths that could bring in their expertise of managing business systems, so they turned to the corporate sector and found that there were many in this sector that were more than willing to embrace fascism in order to turn a profit, including those in the United States like Ford, Coca Cola, and the notorious complicity of IBM.

Growing up as a kid, I was taught the the German corporate sector profited enormously by providing the armaments required for Hitler's military exploits. Makes sense, tanks, bombs, guns, aircraft and ships are normal fare.

What I just learned is that the corporate sector also profited from the machinations of the Holocaust.

Mauthausen, for example, was an enormously profitable joint venture that included amongst others Dailmer, of Mercedes Benz fame. Not only did it record multimillion dollar profits by first stealing from and then working to death those condemned to the camps, including extracting the gold in their teeth, but they also exterminated anyone who dared to express their dissidence.

Moreover, the ruthlessness was not contained to the German soil. American corporations, in particular IBM, knowingly aided the Nazis in their heinous crimes. For example, according to Edwin Black in his book, IBM and the Holocaust, IBM furnished the machines and the punch cards to record the demographic information, including racial profile, during the 1933 and 1938 national German census. This enabled the Nazis to locate with precision their prey for future ethnic cleansing. As well, IBM leased the machines and supplied the punch cards and the personnel to program them to capture the pertinent data (ethic origin, reason for interment, cause of death) concerning the inmates of the concentration camps.

It is important to note that the contracts signed with the Nazi regime did not originate from their European subsidiaries but from the parent head office in New York, which suggests that American corporate executives were well aware of the atrocities that were being committed and from which they were drawing profits.

There might be a temptation to dismiss these events as aberrations caused by the limited thinking and belief systems that were in place during the time. However, if we push the question even further, there appears to be a strain of corporate fascism that survives and flourishes today.

The first characteristic of corporate fascism is the belief in an extremist, speculative, narrative. In the case of the fascist state, there exists the fundamental belief in the inherent superiority of the chosen people. Others can be tolerated only to the extent that they serve the interests of the fascist state. In the case of the fascist corporation, there exists the fundamental belief in the inherent superiority of the market. Everything should be controlled by private interests and commercial relations should predominate.

The second characteristic of corporate fascism is its fundamental amorality. Whereas in the fascist state human sentiments are not ascribed to those who are genetically inferior, similar treatment is afforded by those working in the fascist corporation to those or to that which does not generate profits. There is no intrinsic value. Worth is determined only by the market.

The third characteristic follows the second. Without moral sentiments there can be no empathy. Living things are there to be exploited. All relations are subject to cost benefit analysis.

The last characteristic of corporate fascism is that corporations and the people who work within them share no responsibility to advance a common good. They exist only to generate profits. Just as those who participated in the commission of crimes against humanity during the Holocaust offered the feeble excuse that they were just following orders, corporate criminals offer the same lame type of excuse to justify their criminal behavior.

Finally, corporate fascists are willing to pursue the realization of their core narrative to its very end indifferent to the harm they inflict and the probable collapse of the underpinnings of their enterprise. As long as they able to carry on with their activities unabated, they will, even if it entails the collapse of the environmental conditions that enable humans to live on the planet.

Hey Quebec! What Are You Waiting For? Take It to the Streets

2011-02-23T07:03:00.000-05:00

Maybe it's just me. When the president of the association of the province's crown attorneys declares publicly that the Quebec government is acting in a manner that is unconstitutional, irresponsible, and immoral, you would think that given the political context in Quebec, corruption and collusion at all levels of government, that people would get riled and take their protests to the streets.

That didn't happen. Instead, a former PQ minister releases a tepid manifesto that may or may not lead to the formation of a new political party. Wow.

In the Arab world, citizens are putting their lives on the line to depose of despotic rule. Even in Madison, Wisconsin, tens of thousands take to the streets to protest the government's desire to strip some of the collective bargaining rights of its public sector workers.

Here in Quebec, we signed an on line petition asking for the Premier to step down; there was supposed to be a protest march in front of Quebec's National Assembly, but it was cancelled so it wouldn't interfere with the winter carnival; and, oh yes, 50 thousand people did assemble in Quebec City to express their desire for a professional hockey team.

Pathetic.

Having just spent the last several years in the Quebec Courts pushing forward the question of the constitutionality of the electoral system, I have cause for concern with the government's decision to enact legislation to force the crown attorneys back to work.

In our case, I was quite surprised by the lack of resources and the quality of arguments put forward by the Crown, especially since a decision in our favor would have huge consequences on Quebec's political system. In my opinion, their arguments were hastily prepared and they didn't seek out any expert witnesses who could speak with authority on the subject of voting systems. In fact, just two of us with very limited means could totally out resource the Crown with regard to assembling a legal team and obtaining expert witness testimony. Just imagine what happens in criminal cases where the defendants are capable to hire the best legal team available.

So what, coconut.

Adding the legal system to the long list of government services that don't function very well doesn't make much of a difference. What really counts is how far the Habs go in the playoffs and which couple wins the tele-reality show, Occupation Double.

Brave New World anyone? No thanks, I already live there.

The Tyranny of Class in the Anglo-American Empire

2011-02-16T17:43:00.000-05:00

Money, money, money. Lots of it. Can't get enough. Makes the world go around. Keep your grubby hands off my pile.

Familiar words? They should be. These are the sentiments at the heart of the Anglo-American Empire. Those with the cash rig the rules of the political game so they can make as much as they can with as little interference from the unwashed masses as possible.

But deep down they are running scared. They still haven't gotten over the fact that a French-speaking mob lopped off the heads of 20,000 of their kind and that their Russian cousins met a similar fate.

So, they decided to give us the vote, knowing that this would be enough since having the vote is not nearly as important as establishing the rules of how campaigns are to be financed and how the votes are to be counted.

Moreover, they propagate the myth that the regime is democratic. In the United States where corporations can spend without limits in support of their favored candidates, it is hard to imagine that a corporate elite would not dominate the political process. In other words, the wealthy few dominate the many.

In a similar vein, in the UK there is soon to be a referendum on the choice of a voting system where the choices are between two majoritarian systems in which in either case majorities are created by eliminating the voices of minority groups. In the case of First-Past-The-Post, the voices of the minorities are systemically reduced or eliminated altogether from Parliament. With the alternative vote, the supporters of smaller parties are supposed to find consolation after their political preferences are denied representation with the fact that their second or third choices might make a difference in the electoral result.

In both instances, there is a steadfast refusal to give equal treatment to the entire electorate. As a result, a general election is not a democratic exercise to form a government of, for, and by the people. Instead, it is a show of force. To the winner go the spoils of victory, the transfer of the political power of the majority to the privileged minority.

Never mind the tyranny of the majority. What the populations of Anglo-American empires are subjected to is the tyranny of a minority. The super rich have gained an institutional lock on the political process and will continue to exploit this advantage to their benefit and to the detriment of the population at large.

Exhorting Egypt Towards Democracy, Obama Embraces the Big Lie

2011-02-14T16:58:00.000-05:00

It's interesting to hear the president of a country that is only nominally democratic exhort the citizens of another that have just recently deposed their despot to embrace democracy.

Believe it or not Mr. Obama, there are some of us who take the time to read up on the subject, and even with a just a quick survey of the literature, one quickly comes to the conclusion that the US, despite having put into place popular elections, is far from being a democratic country.

Yes, there were some democratic rights gains in the 1960s, most notably the Voting Rights Act, but these historic gains are far from sufficient to counter the huge disparities of political power that presently exist and continue to grow in the US.

Democracy is a political philosophy that is based on a radical conception of equality. It posits that all humans are born equal and that equality exists between citizens with regard to political rights, speech, and power and that all citizens are equal before the law.

Upon close analysis, it is not until the late twentieth century that America finally owns up to the belief that all Americans are born with equal rights. For the other components of democracy, America is far off the mark, so much so, I would rank the belief that America is a democracy right up there with the belief that the American dream is available to all Americans. At best, wishful thinking, at worst, in the words of eminent political theorist John Dunn, "a thumping falsehood, a bald-faced lie."

America since its inception has been a plutocracy and even more so today than in the days of its founding fathers. Essentially, a aristocracy based on hereditary common in Europe was rejected in favor of a plutocracy of land owners that has evolved over time into a corporate plutocracy. If you are interested in knowing more, I would suggest picking up Michael Parenti's, Democracy for the Few.

Putting aside the obvious anomalies, the Electoral College, the composition of the US Senate, and the influence of the judiciary on electoral results, (Bush v. Gore), Obama has done nothing to make the US more democratic and, in fact, has already thrown his hat in with the corporate elite in order to finance his 2012 electoral campaign.

No real democrat, by this I mean one who understands and supports the equality provisions of the creed, would set out to maintain the tax advantages for the super rich and then go on to cut the budgetary allocations that support the middle and the working classes in order to mitigate the deficits that the favorable treatment for the already privileged brings on.

Money and the power it brings has completely undermined the democratic legitimacy of the electoral process in the US. What Obama has done in his first term is to demonstrate that behind the soaring rhetoric is a man who is quite comfortable presiding over corporate America but doesn't have the interest of the vast majority of Americans when it comes time to defend the interests of the average American.

Greatest country on earth, beacon of hope and liberty, defender of democracy, and the bullshit goes on and on because that's what the American people want to hear and that's what Obama gets paid to deliver: empty eloquence about a fairy tail future.

In reality, the corporate elite have already moved on to seek their fortunes in a global economy, leaving the poor, the uneducated, the unskilled, and the unwanted to fend for themselves in the decay of an abandoned America.

Elizabeth May Speaks to the Damage First-Past-The-Post Imposes on Canadian Political Culture

2011-02-09T19:02:00.003-05:00

On Monday, January 31, 2011, we had the privilege of Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party of Canada speak to our gathering to learn more about the Quebec Charter Challenge of the voting system. I invite you to watch it because she addresses some important cultural issues that arise due to the impact our out-dated voting method has upon Canadian politics.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cg_sBaa4mEk

Pushing the Values of the Charter into the Heart of Politics in Canada

2011-02-07T20:34:00.000-05:00

Political institutions provide the rules for the way the political game is played. Here in Canada, the rules were inherited from our colonial past and have evolved somewhat over our relatively short history as a nation-state.

The most significant change was the adoption of the Canadian Charter of Rights ad Freedoms in 1982. The Charter in my opinion is Canada's greatest cultural achievement. It distinguishes us from the Westminster Parliamentary tradition by displacing the supremacy of Parliament with a fundamental declaration based on the values of a free and democratic society. In our system, laws passed by Parliament and the provincial legislatures can be subjected to judicial review and may be struck down if they are found to contravene the equality guarantees of the Charter.

In some ways, it is as though our Westminster traditions that were born and conceived to serve the interests of a class-based society operated in parallel with a set of values that are conceived to serve a society that embraces equality. Occasionally, these two opposing value systems would clash as citizens who challenged the legitimacy of the nations laws sought to have the principles of equality enshrined in the Charter and the power therein applied against the powers of privilege supported by what was perceived to be offending legislation, for example, laws restricting abortion and prohibiting same sex marriage. In these two instances, the Charter prevented the ruling class from imposing their social values upon the entire population, but the political system that gave rise to their dominant position in the society remained untouched.

In the relatively short time that the Charter has been in place, we have developed and used the metaphor of the living tree and reference to a dialogue between the Courts and the legislative branch of government to describe the relation between them. This customary framing of the relation can exist only as long as the two opposing value systems only bump into each other occasionally.

However, what has emerged with Gibb v. the Attorney General of Quebec is the inevitable attempt to push the equality values of the Charter into the very heart of Canadian politics and its parliamentary traditions.

The British parliamentary tradition is a political system that concentrates political power in the executive branch where the Prime Minister embodies the power of the crown. Different factions within the society will seek to win the political contest that allows the transfer of monarch-like prerogatives to the leader of the political party that gains advantage in the greatest amount of territorial electoral districts. There is no attempt to seek out political representation on the basis of the popular vote. Such a democratic principle runs contrary to the operating logic of a system that is conceived to give socio-economic advantage to those who prevail in the electoral contest that is aptly named first-past-the-post, especially when we take into consideration how the spoils of victory are distributed. A winner-take-all electoral system is culturally appropriate for a winner-take-most society.

Essentially, by asking the Court to invalidate the discriminatory practices inherent to the voting system we inherited from the British Gibb v. the Attorney General of Quebec aims to replace the portion of Canada's political DNA that seeks to reward and maintain privilege with another set of operating instructions that promotes, and over time, will produce a more egalitarian society. Instead of pursuing a political agenda that serves to increase the distributional gains of the few, Canadians will become empowered to advance the well-being of the many.

Will this happen on the first attempt to do? Only time will tell. In any case, it is of the utmost importance that democrats continue to use the Courts in a similar manner that the corporate sector uses the Courts to put into place an institutional order that advances its interests.

The Courts Must Intercede to Release the Institutional Lock that Our Political Parties Have Upon Political Power

2011-02-04T07:46:00.001-05:00

Looking at the situation in Quebec and at the federal level, it is evident that the political class has usurped the political power of the population at large.

In Quebec, the Parti Quebecois is unable to tell us whether it would hold a referendum on independence during its first mandate for fears that such a declaration would hurt its electoral chances.

Give me a break. It's article number one of your political platform. If you don't have the balls to come out and say it directly, it's because there isn't the necessary support of the majority of the electors for such a proposal.

And this represents the alternative government option to the present government, the scandal-plagued, thoroughly incompetent, Charest-led, Quebec Liberals.

These are the choices?

Things aren't any better on the federal front. The system offers us a variant of the Quebec voting dilemma. Do we continue to support the Harper-led Conservatives, who we return to power by default because of a medieval electoral system, or do we turf them in favor of the Liberals, who are surrounded still by the stench of corruption?

Again, these are the choices?

Yes, they are!

Alternative voices are systemically under-represented or eliminated altogether. In fact, the electoral campaign is no longer about trying to attract more votes. Instead, it's about slagging your opponent to turn as many electors off as possible so they won't go out to vote and doing a better job than your opponents in getting out the vote from your core supporters.

Democracy, Shamocracy. This is rule by the professional politician.

And what are the chances that any of the political parties that offer a legitimate government option will make qualitative changes to the political system to render it more democratic?

Slim and none!

In the words of Peter H. Russell, eminent Canadian constitutional expert, "those who would can't, and those who could won't."

In other words, there are sufficient institutional incentives that keep the system in place and make it impervious to systemic change. In political science, this state of affairs is referred to as "institutional lock."

Given the traditional media's role in supporting the status quo, the only recourse to bringing about a change to the system is through the courts. The leverage point is, of course, the electoral system, and the point of attack is the discriminatory voting method that systemically distorts the popular will in favor of the will of professional politicians.

Fortunately, there now exists the opportunity for the judges at the Quebec Court of Appeal in hearing the appeal of the plaintiffs in Gibb v. the Attorney General of Quebec to make history and create a rupture with our colonial past and our continued existence as an English Settler State.

Essentially, the Court must decide if we have any pretension to live in a democracy or are we a Shamocracy, a nation that has popular elections in which the objective is to prevent the population from truly engaging in self government.

The End of Westminster as We Know It

2011-02-01T12:44:00.000-05:00

The House returns in session and we again seem to be hurtling towards the abyss of yet another general election that in the end will leave us gaping at the real problem, an outdated system of governance.

After the election of a fourth consecutive minority government, Canadians will be forced to face up to reality that the country can no longer be ruled by a single political party. From a democratic perspective, minority government which has become the rule rather than exception should not be tolerated.

Personally, I shed no tears for a political system that is a vestige of the British Empire. Like the former Empire, it should be relegated to the dustbin of history. Indeed, Canadians have succeeded, unlike our neighbors to the south, in building a nation where class and material wealth are not the determining factors for establishing a societal order.

Rather than flogging the dead horse of a political system that was designed to perpetuate the order of privilege, we should now be seeking to construct our own system of governance that carries the label: Made in Canada.

Corporate taxes, the gun registry, illegal immigration aside, the real issue of the upcoming general election is that we are no longer able to govern ourselves effectively.

The first step to extricating ourselves out of the carcass know as Westminster is to flush first-past-the-post in order to get a new set of players around the table and a new set of rules for the game. Afterwards, free from the shackles of the past a new order will emerge.

Lower Taxes for Corporations Leading to Job Growth is Corporate Propaganda at Its Best

2011-01-26T20:45:00.001-05:00

The 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance. The growth of democracy; the growth of corporate power; and the growth of corporate propaganda against democracy.
(Alex Carey)

In Canada fifty years ago, corporate income tax represented 50 % of government revenues. Today, that figure is around 7%, and there are those who would have us believe that if we don't lower corporate tax rates further that this would blind side the economy and leave Canada crumpled on the ice like Sidney Crosby after a hit to the head.

Pretty powerful stuff. Completely beside the point, but pretty powerful stuff nonetheless.

The obvious question to ask is where will those new jobs be located. Here at home or somewhere else in the world where labour is cheaper and the regulatory framework is more favorable?

The intended effect of lowering corporate tax rates is to make corporations more profitable and to enrich those in the investor class. The secondary effect with regard to increased employment as a result of greater corporate profitability is in no way materializing in the US. So, why should it do so here?

Looking at rise in stock prices, investors have experienced a "V" shape recovery while those unemployed in the labour market are experiencing an "L" shape recovery, meaning their futures have been flat-lined.

Take the case of the appointment of GE executive Jeffrey Immelt to President Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board. As Paul Krugman points out, with fewer of half of GE's workforce based in the US and less than half of it's revenues generated by US operations, GE's fortunes have little to do with prosperity in the US.

The truth of the matter is that we all don't live in the same economy. Value can be added to the production cycle of either goods or services from almost anywhere on planet. As a result, many of the jobs in question can just as easily be outsourced off shore.

What's really at issue is those who comprise the top one percent of revenue earners can never have enough. The income inequality within this bracket is extremely high, the top one-tenth of the one percent earn ridiculously more than the bottom one-tenth of the same one percent, so that to keep up with the super rich Jones it takes everything that one makes and more. Consequently, the pressure to lower corporate taxes as a means to raise investment income never abates.

In the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald,"the rich are different from you and me." They don't give a shit about anybody but themselves.

Minority Government is the Domination of the Many by the Few

2011-01-25T16:42:00.000-05:00

One day I would like to live in a democracy. Chances are that's not going to happen anytime soon judging by the media's reaction to the five year anniversary of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative government.

Almost all the punditry is focused on the performance of Mr. Harper's government and precious little is devoted to the larger more fundamental question of Canada's democratic deficit.

Single party minority government is a flagrant violation of democratic principles. The Harper government, like the previous Martin government, rules as if it had a majority. However, if you factor in our pathetic participation rate during federal elections, the present government enjoys the support of less than one quarter of the electorate.

So, what does this mean in practice?

In reality, it means that we are governed by an oligarchy that advances its own interest at the expense of the common good. In the Westminster parliamentary tradition, the two parties vying to form a government, not on the basis of the popular vote but of territorial control, each take their turn dominating and controlling the population. The same can be said of America. As a result, choices between Liberal or Conservative in Canada, Conservative or New Labour in the UK, or Democrat or Republican in the US are largely illusory. The fact of the matter is that in each instance private interests trump public concerns, which leads to increasing inequality within the respective societies and the absence of adequate legislation to address the global hazards of climate change.

Canadians need to wake up collectively to the fact that only a government which gives meaningful voice to the concerns of all its citizens will in the long term advance the well-being of the entire population. Eliminating voices by narrowing political debate to a few essential ballot questions in a few swing ridings makes mockery of democracy.

The 21st century challenge for Canada is to break with traditional Anglo-American political institutions and develop its own democratic order. There are many improvements that could be made, but the journey of a thousand miles begins with a first step. In what would be a sequence of events to establish a system of governance based on democratic principles, the first step is to change the electoral system so that each vote counts and is given equal weight.

Afterwards, we would mark the anniversary of the introduction of successive democratic reforms together.

The Moral of the Bastarache Commission: Don't Fix the Blame, Fix the Problem

2011-01-21T06:59:00.000-05:00

There was something adolescent in Jean Charest's assertion that he had been cleared of any wrong doing in the nomination of judges by the Bastarache Commission report and that it was the former Minister of Justice, Marc Bellemare's fault that it was necessary to convene the commission.

Obviously, the buck doesn't stop with Jean, six million bucks to be precise, the cost to the public purse for what could have been accomplished at a fraction of the cost by a legislative committee.

In short, the Charest led Liberals were found not guilty of undue influence peddling in the nomination of judges. Undue in this instance means that the nominations were not simply bought.

Yet, in a wonderfully euphemistic understatement, Bastarache went on to say that the nomination process was "permeable" to outside influence:

the process is vulnerable to all manner of interventions and influence, particularly by members of the National Assembly, members of political parties, lawyers and the candidates themselves. The candidates’ political affiliation or acquaintance with representatives of the political party in power may play a role. There are no standards governing the handling of the files or the conduct required of the Minister of Justice, the Premier, the members of their political staff or other stakeholders, particularly with respect to which persons may be consulted for the purpose of recommending an appointment. There are no criteria in place to guide the Minister in making recommendations. Every Minister of Justice has had to establish his or her own guidelines in these areas.

This is not a glowing assessment of the nomination process of which Charest is ultimately responsible. It's as if with Charest at the helm the ship has run aground, but the investigation has shown that he wasn't drunk at the wheel; he was simply incompetent.

Fortunately, there were 46 recommendations made that would if acted upon raise the credibility of the nomination process.

Which brings me to my main point, this is not all about you Jean. We know that you want to hang onto your job at all costs. But hey, things are extremely screwed up in Quebec. We need to understand the scale and the scope of the problem. That's why a public inquiry into the construction industry and the financing of political parties is absolutely necessary.

Your precious reputation aside, having your ridiculously named Operation Hammer lay charges upon a few scapegoats is not going to address the systemic problems and restore the people's confidence in their government.

Let's get out of the blame game and fix the problem.

Corporate Personhood the Great Mother of Political Lies

2011-01-19T07:23:00.002-05:00

January 21, 2011 marks the first anniversary of the infamous US Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in which the Court ruled that corporations had First Amendment rights concerning freedom of speech and that limitations on their ability to spend during elections constituted an infringement of those rights. Consequently, corporations can spend as much as they want on third party campaigns, including foreign corporations that have an American subsidiary.

Of course, this means that corporations will make contributions to organizations like the American Chamber of Commerce, which will in turn invest millions in political advertising supporting the positions taken be their preferred candidates. So much for democracy.

At the moment, I happen to be reading a must read, Thom Hartmann’s Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became “People” – And How You Can Fight Back. In his book, Hartmann chronicles the abuses of power that result from granting what are essentially human rights to non-human legal fictions. (In case you are wondering, in Canada corporations are not granted Charter rights). For example, corporations are protected by the privacy rights of the Fourth Amendment and do not have to reveal information against their desire not to disclose. As a result, when it comes to knowing what is the composition of the toxic concoction used in the fracking process to extract shale gas, the public is left in the dark. Moreover, corporations shielded by the Fifth Amendment can lie to the public as was the case of Nike that lied about its production methods used for the fabrication of its products.

But what really blows my mind is the whole notion of corportate personhood is founded of a big fat whopping lie. The US Supreme Court never granted natural person status to corporations in any decision rendered by the Court. The notion that a corporation is a natural person and is subject to the equal protection requirements of the Fourteenth Amendment is found in the headnote added to the decision by the then court reporter when the decision of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railway was published after the death of the sitting chief justice of the Court. Importantly, the headnote has no legal status, but was used to establish precedent in a subsequent decision by the subsequent chief justice and then became part of the case law. Talk about a miscarriage of justice.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know that I try as best I can to flush out the cultural myths that lead us to live within the lie. It strikes me that if average Americans would like to do something to improve their lot, they should do something to address the huge lie that has been perpetrated at their expense and end this outrageous affront to democracy.

The Nasty Truth About Living Within the Big Lie

2010-12-29T14:21:00.000-05:00

Today, living within the big lie requires that one consents to the belief in free markets, representative democracy, and sustainable development, regardless of the gaping flaws in each of the concepts. Taken together they represent the so-called noble lie that provides the social cohesion that allows for our society to function. Dissent is for the most part fruitless since there exits an implicit consensus within the society to ignore or quickly forget any speech or gesture that calls into question the truthfulness about the foundation concepts. Nevertheless, having been the recipient of a quality public education, I feel obliged to expose the myths for what they are and hope that by gaining a better understanding of how they function others will be better able to lead more authentic lives.

Upon close analysis, each one of the cultural myths underlying the big lie puts forward a belief that is contrary to what the myth attempts to conceal.

For example, the belief that markets function better when left to themselves is political propaganda at best. First, in order for markets to function at all, they need to be enabled by a legal system that respects contractual obligations and offers dispute resolution. Governments provide this much needed feature at public expense. Second, favorable market intervention from government offers corporations sizable competitive advantage, so much so that it is more profitable to invest billions of dollars in lobbying and political donations than to reinvest the said amounts into improving the quality of existing goods and services in hopes of gaining a greater share of the market. Third, markets, financial markets in particular, are prone to systemic failure if not properly regulated. Indeed, failure to regulate the financial markets brought about a global economic recession that made necessary huge injections of public funds so to avoid a full scale collapse and possible depression. Profits remained profit and risk was socialized.

One might argue that a democratic response from the electorate would supply the appropriate corrective. However, it should be noted that representative democracy in North America provides for popular elections, but this in itself does not render the political institutions democratic. Hardly. At the most fundamental level, democracy entails that the majority of the citizens hold and exercise political power. This is not the case in North America. In fact, a combination of electoral practices, the influence of money and a voting method that discards the majority of votes, thwarts the demos from exercising its political will and power is effectively held and exercised by a monied elite. The advent of universal suffrage has done little to change electoral dynamics except to heighten the property requirements to become a member of the ruling class.

Finally, to overcome any misgivings that might arise among the population upon reflection about the consequences of ever-increasing levels of consumption, the term "sustainable development" has been appropriated to mean something far different from its original meaning. No longer used to signify economic development that sustains a healthy social sphere and maintains a healthy environment, the term is widely used as a means to greenwash the continued unsustainable consumption of nonrenewable resources. By framing economic activity as being part of sustainable development the inconvenient fact that nonrenewable resources are finite is conveniently ignored and the much-needed development of the large scale use of renewable energy sources is further delayed.

In short, the virtuous connotations surrounding the concept of sustainability are linked to economic development in a similar manner that the virtuous connotations surrounding the concept of democracy are linked to representation. In neither case are the virtues to be found in practice and the much sought legitimacy is just a front.

And this brings me to the nasty truth about living within the big lie. As the renowned playwright Vaclev Havel once wrote, "the individual, declares his loyalty . . . in the only way the regime is capable of hearing; that is, by accepting the prescribed ritual, by accepting appearances as reality, by accepting the given rules of the game. In doing so, however, he has himself become a player in the game, thus making it possible for the game to go on, for it to exist in the first place."

Compliance allows the game to continue. So, in 2011 don't be compliant. In everyone there is some willingness to merge with the anonymous crowd and to flow comfortably along with it down the river of pseudo-life. Be authentic and choose to live within the truth.

Contesting the Democratic Legitimacy and the Political Authority of the Quebec and Federal Governments

2010-12-21T06:37:00.000-05:00

Two recent events cast serious doubts about the democratic legitimacy of our political institutions and call into question the nature of the political authority they wield.

In Quebec, the Charest government refuses to hold a public inquiry against the wishes of the vast majority of the population into the corruption within the construction industry and its ties to the financing of Quebec's political parties. At the federal level, the unelected Canadian Senate voted down the comprehensive climate change legislation passed by the majority of members of the elected lower house.

Indeed, this turn of events in Quebec demonstrates that the majority of citizens do not hold and exercise political power in Quebec and that the same can be said of the majority of the elected representatives in Parliament.

What does this say about our political institutions?

At a fundamental level, Canada's constitutional monarchy is undemocratic and its political authority is derived from a show of force rather than from the will of the majority of its citizens. Popular elections are held, but they do not yield electoral results that reflect the popular will. On the contrary, the electoral system is designed to usurp the power of the majority and transfer it to a minority. In between elections, there is little that can be done to change this state of affairs.

How does this come about?

In short, our electoral system uses the single member plurality (SMP) voting method that brings about a system of governance in which the most powerful political minority rules as if were a majority.

As could be expected, this electoral system was conceived during the Middle Ages, an epoch that privileged those who exerted territorial control and little attention was paid to those who lived and toiled upon the land. Essentially, the SMP method reproduces this feudal relationship with regard to political power.

For instance, in the Middle Ages military force established who gained control over disputed territory, and to the winner went the spoils of victory. Similarly, in our electoral system, the spoils of victory, effective representation, go to the winner of the electoral campaign in a winner-take-all manner.

It doesn't matter if the majority of citizens/serfs in the territory/electoral district voted against the the candidate who garnered the most votes. Their voices do not matter and all their votes are discarded as if they were not cast at all. Regardless of the total lack of democratic legitimacy in the process, the newly elected deputy takes his or her place as the territorial representative in Parliament.

The primacy of territorial control is then leveraged to form a ruling government. Again, the formation of the government is not bound by the manner in which the citizens/serfs actually voted. The vast majority of Deputies in the House of Commons do not have the support of the majority of their constituents. All that matters is to identify the political party that acquired the most territory as expressed by the number of electoral districts captured in the electoral campaign. To the winner goes the right to rule the land.

As you could imagine, using an electoral method that actually discards what is most often the majority of votes cast by the citizens/serfs compromises the democratic legitimacy of the government that is duly formed. Beyond the recurrent over and under representation of the different political parties in Parliament, there exists a fundamental flaw: the formation of what is misleadingly referred to as a majority government does not require the support of the majority of the electorate. In fact, it is rare that a majority government even has the support of the majority of the citizens that cast their votes, let alone those who are eligible to vote.

Needless to say, this becomes problematic, especially in terms of how political authority is exercised. In a democracy, as a matter of principle the citizenry is bound to accept the will of the majority as long as fundamental human rights are respected. What is the guarantor of respect for political authority if it does not stem from directly from the people but instead is obtained from a democratically flawed process? Tradition? Coercion?

Personally, I find it unacceptable that such a state of affairs is allowed to continue under the guise of democracy. So much so, in collaboration with three of my colleagues, we decided to challenge the democratic legitimacy of the electoral system that brings forward in our eyes a system of government that can only be described as rule of the few over the many.

What allows for this challenge is the adoption in 1982 of Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In particular, section 3 of the Charter guarantees the right to vote. As defined by the Supreme Court of Canada, this right goes beyond simply the right to place a ballot into a box and includes the right of each citizen to effective representation and the right of each citizen to participate meaningfully in the electoral process and that these rights are not subject to the political preferences of the majority.

Perhaps, the majority of Canadians prefer to maintain the present system, but this preference does not give them the right to deny effective representation to a significant minority of voters. For example, in the last federal election approximately a million people voted for the Green Party, yet these electors have no effective voice in Parliament. How can this be squared with the right of each citizen to have effective representation? It cannot.

Similarly, where is the substantive equality in an electoral process that confers effective representation only on those electors whose votes establish a candidate's plurality at the expense of all other electors? This means that the system gives strong institutional incentives to people to vote for political parties that are in a position to potentially form a government at the expense of those parties that are not. Consequently, many electors who would otherwise vote for a smaller party if there vote would be used to establish representation don't vote at all or choose to vote strategically by substituting their authentic choice for a strategic vote. In either case, this situation systemically reduces the number of votes a candidate from a small party would otherwise receive, a situation already judged to be antithetical by the Supreme Court of Canada to the values informing a free and democratic society.

At the heart of the issue is whether the electoral system that we inherited from our colonial past conforms to the values of a free and democratic society. Even the British have their doubts as demonstrated by the holding of a nation-wide referendum in the UK on the continued use of their archaic first-past-the-post voting method in May, 2011.

At the very least, both at the provincial and federal, electoral systems must incorporate some mechanism that enables each citizen's vote or preferences to be aggregated so each vote is used in the formula that determines representation and no votes are simply discarded. This would restore democratic legitimacy to our system of governance.

On February 8, 2011, at the Quebec Court of Appeal in Montreal, arguments will be heard to overturn the decision at the lower court that did not support the motion to have our present voting method rendered null and void. With lawyers of the stature of Julius Grey and Peter Rosenthal, both having successfully obtained seminal decisions on democratic rights issues from the Supreme Court of Canada, this promises to be a historic confrontation between the desire to maintain our colonial past and the desire to evolve into a modern democratic society.

Sometimes You Have to Say, "Fuck the Economy"

2010-12-14T18:06:00.000-05:00

Mighty harsh words, but then again these are mighty harsh times.

It appears to me that on a regular basis regular folks hear proposals and arguments destined to advance the economic interests of the super rich under the guise that this would be good for the economy.

However, if you are aware that your economic interests are not aligned with the proposed course of action, you are perfectly within your rights and you should say, "Fuck the Economy."

Once said, you have moved the discussion out of an abstract, second order debate concerning dubious social theory and the selective use of data sets into what economic debate is really about, the zero-sum struggle to capture a greater share of the available material wealth.

Keep in mind that there is no such thing as THE economy. In fact, what is referred to when we use the term is nothing more, nothing less than the reification of an imagined order the advances or impedes one's economic interests.

In other words, there is no singular, objective economy. Instead, there are data sets that point to the existence of multiple economies, ready to constructed or deconstructed according to the desires of those engaged in the flight of the imagination.

So, don't be fooled by the numbers. For example, some would say on the basis of a highly abstract set of calculations that does not differentiate between the costs of socially positive and socially negative monetary transactions (breaking or repairing a window) that the recession is over as demonstrated by the renewed growth in the gross domestic product (GDP).

Yet, those who are part of the twenty some million in the US who can't find full-time employment might not agree, especially if they find themselves living in a community where there are a large number of people in similar circumstances.

Local reality is often at odds with the official picture emerging from the fraudulent use of economic statistics.

For instance, when calculating the official unemployment rate those who exhaust their unemployment benefits but are unable to find a job simply disappear from the jobless numbers, which means that by using such an obviously flawed statistical measurement, governments knowingly mislead the population by propagating economic propaganda.

Ah yes, but this is a jobless recovery, usually said by a person whose economic interests are aligned with those whose fortunes are no longer adversely affected by the noticeable downturn in economic activity.

In a similar vein, we are told that if were to implement measures to prevent climate change that this would harm the economy. Again, I think the appropriate response is to say, "Well then, Fuck the economy", because living in that reality represents a death wish, which from the proponents of THE Economy Uber Alles isn't such a bad thing since they fervently believe that upon death they will be rewarded with a material upgrade to their present lot in life.

Christmas is coming. Extended families will gather and chances are you'll hear someone talk about THE economy. Give it a try. See if you can get a rise out of old Uncle Ernie, the cheap bastard.

So to everyone who made it this far, I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year, and lest I forget, Fuck the economy.

Obama Betrays Those Who Put Him in the White House

2010-12-07T18:52:00.000-05:00

In almost every enterprise, the plutocracy has enjoyed opportunities for private gain at public expense. Government nurtures private capital accumulation through a process of subsidies, supports, and deficit spending and an increasingly inequitable tax system.(Michael Parenti)

It so happens that at the moment I'm reading Parenti's classic book, Democracy For The Few, which puts forward the thesis that America since its inception has been a plutocracy, rule for and by the rich. Needless to say, I was prepared to learn of Obama's capitulation with regard to extending tax breaks for the rich that would add to America's staggering deficit.

From the perspective of a progressive, outrage seems appropriate at Obama's lack of resolve to resist the Republicans's attempt to use those who are close to exhausting their unemployment benefits as hostages in order to get the tax breaks for the wealthy.

So much for the slogan: "change we can believe in."

The notion that the extension is just for a period of two years is complete nonsense. Does Obama really believe that the segment of the population that votes infrequently but came out in record numbers to support his presidential bid will cast their ballots for him in 2012? Fat chance.

However, if you look at the turn of events from the perspective that the US is a plutocracy, there is no reason to be alarmed. This is the way the political system in America works.

Some may object that even for a plutocracy that tries to pass itself off for a democracy, this stretches the quaint assertion that America has a government of, by, and for the people beyond what is credible.

But what is the average American to do? The electoral system gives a virtual lock on political power to the monied class. Apart from the hollow rhetoric that distinguishes Democrats from Republicans, both parties are wholly dependent on financing from wealthy Americans. So, at the end of the day, aside from some political gesturing, the political process produces the same economic results regardless of who is the White House and who rules Congress.

God bless America. A nation where corporations enjoy record profits while millions of Americans are without jobs and homes and where the rich stick it to the poor any chance they get.

Long Live the Order of Egoism and God Save the Planet

2010-11-29T20:03:00.000-05:00

The exercise of sovereign power by a part of the nation over the whole is an inevitable consequence of the inequality consecrated by the Order of Egoism.

Some two hundred years ago, the Italian ex-patriot, Philippe Buonarroti writing about the French Revolution, characterized the struggle as one between the Order of Equality and the Order of Egoism. Despite the lofty rhetoric invoked by those who advocated fundamental equality to be found in Robespierre's Declaration of the Rights of Man, and of the Citizen, the Aristocrats have won the day.

They have done so by circumventing the desire for equality by appealing to the mass's own desire to become members of the privileged elite. Hereditary and lineage are things of the past. Today, what confers status is money and the things that it can buy.

Moreover, the acquisition of great wealth is no longer confined to landownership and the return on investments obtained from industrial ventures. Today's aristocrats earn billions exploiting currency exchange and financial derivatives. Lower down are the CEOs of publicly traded companies who earn hundreds of millions, followed by sports and entertainment stars who earn millions.

As the old adage goes, it takes money to make money and what we have seen over the last thirty years is a net transfer of wealth from the lower and middle classes to the very upper class, more precisely the top one percent of revenue earners.

What has also changed is that the lower classes have lost the ability to effectively mobilize in order to improve their lot. It's as if the ideology of egoism normally associated with the monied class has worked its way down so that those with significantly less aspire to become celebrities rather than self organize to challenge for a greater piece of the economic pie.

Indeed, YouTube has become the opiate of the masses. If only my video goes viral can I escape the banality of being a member of the precariously employed working class. If that doesn't pan out, I can pretend to be important by amassing a significant number of followers on Twitter, and if I really get lucky, I can get my 15 minutes of fame by appearing on a reality based television program.

The only people that I come across who reject the Order of Egoism outright are the deep greens who reject conspicuous consumption altogether in favor of voluntary simplicity that smacks of the desire to live in an egalitarian society. But their numbers are far too small. They don't comprise a critical mass that could actually contest the nature of the economic order.

So, I guess I'm saying that corporate capitalism has triumphed. Representative democracy is as good as it gets with its illusion that political legitimacy is derived from the people. In reality, it's the super rich that rule and they are hellbent on amassing as much wealth as they possibly can since their egos know no bounds. The vast majority, try as they may, attempt to follow in their footsteps, and if they're lucky, they might make enough to enjoy life in the realm of affordable luxury.

In the meantime, those of us who can lift our heads above the crass accumulation of material possessions can only watch and wait. Eventually, the non-renewable resources that sustain global economic growth will run out and then and only then will all hell break loose.

Will it happen in my lifetime? In the lifetime of my children? I don't know. Only in my dreams -- there probably exists a video game -- can I grab a rocket launcher and blow those egotistical bastards away.

Plutocracy Is Alive and Well in Quebec

2010-11-25T17:53:00.000-05:00

Plutocracy is rule by the wealthy or power provided by wealth and let me tell you it's thriving here in Quebec. The name of the game is who do you know who's got the dough, and it don't matter how they got it whether it's the mafia, the construction unions, the Hells Angels or the Quebec Liberal Party.

In reality Quebec can be divided into two classes, the plutocrats who seem to be somewhat uncomfortable these days with all the accusations about money-stuffed envelopes being exchanged for favors, and the chumps whose tax dollars go to support the lifestyles of those who have direct access to the public purse.

Yesterday, the scene in the Quebec National Assembly was priceless. After surviving a non-confidence vote because Quebec retains a medieval electoral system that allows a political party to form a majority government with the support of less than 25% of the electorate, the members of Quebec Liberal Party stood up and gave Premier Jean Charest, who leads what is arguably the most corrupt provincial government in Canada, a standing ovation.

Way to go Jean! We get to keep our jobs and you get to fly off to Paris to see your buddy Sarkozy at taxpayers's expense.

Meanwhile, Quebecers continue to buy the newspapers that tell them that 3 out 4 people think the province is corrupt and that 8 out of 10 people have little or no confidence that Jean Charest will adequately address the problem of corruption.

Hey, if this state of affairs really pisses you off, you can go to the National Assembly website and sign a petition demanding that Charest resign and join the other 230,000 some odd chumps who think that somehow this futile gesture would have an effect.

In the end, don't worry, be happy. The chumps are apparently very happy with their lot.

It's Ridiculous to Define Canadian Democracy as Rule by the People

2010-11-18T16:30:00.000-05:00

Democracy comes from the Greek language and refers to a set of political relations in Athens some 2500 years ago. It existed then and has appeared rarely within small groupings but has never taken hold in modern state.

We can say that a nation is democratic if the majority of its citizens hold and exercise power. This is certainly not the case in any modern state so why do we get our shit into a knot when we discover another instance of a government acting in an undemocratic fashion?

On one hand, we can speak of it as an ideal, something to be strived for, and when we fall short of the ideal in practice, it could bring about a response. On the other, it should be recognized that when most people, especially politicians, refer to democracy they are not referring to government of, by, and for the people, but a process of authorization in which by holding popular elections (in our case, far from being democratic) an electorate transfers its political power to an oligarchy headed by professional politicians. The subsequent use of that power is then deemed to be legitimate by those who have obtained power and their supporters since it results from holding a popular election. Importantly, the traditional conception of democracy as rule by the majority is reduced to simply the sporadic authorization of hopefully a majority of citizens participating in the electoral process.

As could be expected, the so called democratic legitimacy gained by the authorization process varies considerably relative to the quality of the electoral process in use. Those countries using a proportional voting method come closer to a form of representative democracy in which political power is at least held and exercised by the elected officials that represent the majority of voters.

This is not the case in countries such as our own where the government rarely has the support of the majority of voters. For example, today in Canada and in Quebec the ruling party wields the power of a majority with the support of less than 25% of the electorate.

As a result, people should be extremely wary when politicians or political pundits start making appeals to democratic principles in advancing their positions. In reality, our system of governance is a form of contested authoritarian rule where two or more political parties compete to win a popular election that legitimizes the domination and control of the political party that gains the most electoral districts during a general election. This process is much closer by nature to medieval feudalism than to Athenian democracy.

Hence, I find it ridiculous when the supporters of the Climate Change Accountability Act (legislation that I strongly support) bemoan the fact that the Bill was killed by an unelected Senate and that Stephen Harper was making a mockery of democracy.

Hello there, wake up and smell the coffee!

Since when did Canada become a democratic state? The Conservatives like the Liberals before them use the political power that is afforded to them by the political institutions that are in place. Private Member Bills from opposition parties that don't have the balls to defeat the government, force an election, and then go on to form a governing coalition that would empower them to both adopt the legislation in the House of Commons and to control the nomination of Senators are completely useless. Such actions sidestep the much more important issue of the distribution of power. Until we have a semblance of democracy in Canada, effective climate change legislation remains something to be wished for, and frankly I don't have the time to engage in magical thinking.

In a similar vein, it is even more ridiculous when Jean Charest tries to normalize his rapidly growing unpopularity in Quebec as a result of his refusal to hold a public inquiry into the ever growing scandals in the construction industry by saying that we live in a democracy and it's normal for people to disagree.

In fact, Jean, you couldn't be more wrong. In this instance, the vast majority of Quebecers are extremely pissed off that you are not giving the people what they want. We want a public inquiry and you insist on a police investigation. So, the real point of contention is that the majority of Quebecers realize that their desires trump your authorization process. Somewhere in the collective memory that has become part of the national character there is a sufficient belief in a future that carries with it the hope of living in a democracy and the people are not fooled by what you are trying to pass off as the real thing.

Hopefully, this collective realization that we need not bow to a form of authoritarian control will not be fleeting and that real substantive change will come about so that we no longer deal with the symptoms of the problem but get to the root cause, the undemocratic nature of our political institutions.

Let's not replace one elected dictator with another.

Canada's Growing Empathy Deficit

2010-11-17T16:35:00.001-05:00

When I was a young man growing up in the prairies I was under the impression that I lived in the kinder, gentler part of the Americas. We had a quiet, subdued sense of pride that led us to stitch on red maple leafs on our backpacks before we went off to see the world.

Now, I'm not so sure. It's as if Canada has become Uncle Sam's mini-me, a smaller version of a set of qualities we once thought were exclusive to our neighbors to the south.

At the heart of my disappointment is the realization that Canadians at a fundamental level no longer give a shit about people outside their immediate family. Call it what you will, but for me it arises out of a lack of empathy for others, especially those on the fringe of our society.

In my opinion, the real test for empathy arises in our ability to share the feelings and emotions of those who are much different from ourselves. It's much easier to be empathetic to those who share our core beliefs and conform to our expectations of personal conduct.

Warning, the following paragraphs are intended to make you feel uncomfortable.

If you are a parent or can imagine yourself some day becoming one, a healthy dose of mirror neurons would make you cringe when thinking about the plight of Omar Kkadr. In his story we find two of a parent's worst fears: your child is led astray and then once his misdeeds are revealed, there is no compassion shown and the powers that be decide to make an example of him. Forget that he was a child soldier brainwashed by his terrorist father. Forget that the Supreme Court of Canada found that his rights had been violated and forget that he was tortured in order to extract a confession in the hell hole of Guantanamo Bay. All that love that you poured out of your soul into your child doesn't matter. Your child is a terrorist and that's the end of it.

Sure there were many Canadians who could not allow for this injustice to go unnoticed, but they were a tiny minority. The majority of Canadians were wholly indifferent and were untouched or turned away when they saw the boy in a captured video take off his shirt to show that he had been beaten and that he cried for his mother. No big deal, we'll do a plea bargain.

Then there's the recent push back from the Ontario Superior Court's decision to strike down the Canadian laws surrounding prostitution, an act which is not illegal. Again, imagine your little girl or little boy being led astray and ending up in the sex trade. Not something anyone would want for their child, and can you imagine that your child would then be brutally murdered and have his or her body fed to the pigs that the murderer kept on his farm a la Robert Pickton, who claimed he wanted to kill one more woman to make it an even fifty.
What's more important protecting sex trade workers from horrific acts of violence or clinging onto the outdated belief that our laws surrounding prostitution are effective deterrents? Seems that holding up the moral order of things is more important, and if bad things happened to those people, well, they deserved to be punished.

Finally, for my last example that makes me shake my head in disbelief, let's move from the fringe into the heart of Canadian society to see how cold a heart that wears the maple leaf can become. Yes, I'm talking about the former Commander of Canada's largest military base, Colonel Russell Williams.

In his case, we find a sociopathic lack of empathy. This is a man who thought up and starred in his home-made snuff videos. This is a man who was thought to be a upstanding member of the community, but in reality was a monster. This was the guy next door.

Of the many things that I find shocking in the Williams case is how is it that no one was aware of what was going on? I don't believe for an instant that he hadn't given himself away before he was arrested. In his murder of Cpl. Marie-France Commeau he used his position as Base Commander to find out about Cpl. Commeau whereabouts. Nothing of this kind of behavior ever appeared previously? This smacks of complicity, but we'll never know; he pleaded guilty to his horrific crimes and will most likely spend the rest of his days in prison.

In closing, I think we need to drop the pretense that we are morally superior to the Americans. Over the last thirty years, we've lost the ability to plumb the depths of human despair and take notice so that we act in a compassionate manner. In case if you hadn't noticed we have dropped from first on the United Nations Human Development Index to eighth, largely as a result of the growing disparities amongst the people who call Canada home.

The Godfather of Quebec and the Omerta Binding the Liberal Party

2010-11-15T14:45:00.001-05:00

Another bizarre week in Quebec. First, the alleged godfather of the Rizzuto family which is said to control criminal activity in Montreal is gunned down in his home by a professional hit man. A few days later, an investigation by Radio Canada reveals collusion between the mafia, a number of construction companies, and one of the province's certified unions in the construction and resale of a condo unit.

The week before, the book, Mafia Inc., was released alleging that a consortium of fourteen companies in Montreal colluded to control the bidding process for public projects and that the member companies would pay a fee of 5% of the value of the contracts obtained to the Rizzuto clan. As well, two mayors of large municipalities were forced to step down concerning affairs where blatant conflict of interest came to light and a third is under investigation.

Yet, the Charest government remains steadfast in it's refusal to hold a public inquiry into the construction industry despite the accumulation of glaring irregularities that continue to pile up. Furthermore, all the while things get progressively worst in what Macleans magazine labelled the most corrupt province in Canada -- funny how the collective indignation that Macleans magazine brought about is long gone -- we are supposed to sit tight and wait for the results of Quebec's provincial police inquiry ridiculously referred to as Operation Hammer.

Give me a fricken break, how can I have confidence in a process where the political personnel in charge opt for a label out of a seventies cop show that overwhelming invites derision? How stupid do they think we are? Stupid enough to have elected them to a third term?

As could be expected, the continued refusal to hold the public inquiry incited Charest's political foes to make the connection between him and the mafia. During the week, a member of the PQ taunted Charest in the National Assembly by saying that Charest's refusal to act made him complicit to the collusion. On the weekend, the leader of the ADQ, Gerard Deltell, accused Charest of being the godfather of Quebec's Liberal Party, a charge that Charest tried to turn to his advantage by saying that he had become a victim of a personal attack.

What I found telling was how the mafia's code of silence, the omertà, had taken hold of the Liberals during the Party's national congress. One of the Party's militants actually went up to the microphone during a plenary session to move that the Liberals hold a public inquiry into the construction industry. The president of the assembly asked if there was anyone to second the motion, and despite the fact that 75% of the population wants the inquiry to be held, there was deathly silence in the hall holding more than 500 people and no one seconded the motion.

Talk about unwavering loyalty and blind obedience to authority. It was as if the Liberals were out to show the mafia how the omertà should be applied within a political party.

My only question is how long are the Liberals going to obey the dead man walking Premier? Isn't there anyone within the Party with the cajones to take on Charest?

For the rest of us, we'll have to make due with a petition posted on the Quebec National Assembly's website demanding that Charest resign as the Premier of Quebec. To sign the petition visit the site at:

https://www.assnat.qc.ca/fr/exprimez-votre-opinion/petition/Petition-1123/index.htm

The Rule of the Professional Politician

2010-11-12T13:13:00.000-05:00

Democracy means that the people hold power and exercise rule, but as Joseph Schumpeter maintained, electoral democracy as practiced in Western nations, in particular Canada, is in reality the rule of the politician.

This week brought home to me how far we are from being a democratic state on two fronts. The first is the extension of the mission in Afghanistan without the approval of Parliament, and the second is the continued refusal of the Charest government to hold a public inquiry into the construction industry in Quebec.

In both instances, professional politicians make the decision on behalf of the population, and in both instances those making the decisions have the support of approximately 25% of the electorate.

What I also observe is that the majority of Canadians, including Quebecers, are more than OK with allowing professional politicians to make the major decisions, regardless of the lack of democratic legitimacy in the process.

In fact, the population is only called upon sporadically (once every four years) to lend some semblance of democratic legitimacy to our system of governance, but looking at the plummeting participation rates during general elections, it appears that in the near future the majority of Canadians couldn't even be bothered to show up to the polls in order to decide who will govern.

It has occurred to me that I'm living in a land largely populated by drones. By this I mean that life for most Canadians consists of, for the most part, fulfilling some occupational function which affords them some low grade honey that makes life bearable. Sure, there are some bumble bees in the land that are able to take flight into the realm of ideas, make discoveries, get excited and return to the hum drum of the hive only to find that not only are the drones profoundly uninterested but that given the choice of being a drone or a bumble bee, almost all the drones are quite content with their lot and would spurn the offer of becoming a thinker bumble bee.

Professional politicians are like beekeepers. Their job is to keep the hive happy and productive, and they do this by making sure that the bumble bees never get the rest of the hive buzzing with excitement with the thought that the bees could swarm and effectively move the hive elsewhere.

They know all to well that the only dangerous mob is a hungry mob and that we are amongst the fattest on the earth.

Have the Conservatives Gone Bi?

2010-11-05T12:28:00.001-04:00

I have a confession to make. Politically speaking, I'm bi, that is to say biconceptual, and I have suspicions that the Conservative Party of Canada also has some bi tendencies that for the longest time have been kept in the closet.

In his brilliant book, The Political Mind, neuroscientist George Lakoff demonstrates that culturally dominant metaphors become hardwired into the brain at the level of the synapses. For Lakoff, the conceptualization of the nation is divided into different metaphors of the family, the authoritarian strict father represented by the conservatives, and the empathetic, nurturing parents represented by the progressives. He observes that the political spectrum is not a left/right continuum, but a continuum of progressives on one end, conservatives at the other, and in the middle those that are biconceptual, meaning that in some contexts these people will have their progressive cognitive frames activated and in other contexts it will be their conservative cognitive frames that dominate.

As a evidence-based democrat, I find myself wavering between the two frames depending on the context. Most of the time, I am a progressive, but there are times when the conservative networks in my brain get activated. For example, here in Quebec, we run a program called Act Differently, which is designed to reduce the incidence of high school drop outs. Unfortunately, research shows that after a number of years and $40 million later, the program has had no effect on bringing about its intended change. When I see this type of intervention into the social sphere, I become fiscally conservative within this particular context. I don't, however, generalize and transfer my conservative cognitive frame to other social contexts.

During the last week, we have had two significant political decisions made by a Conservative government that demonstrate that they too, within certain contexts, can be progressive. In refusing to let the Prosperity Gold and Copper Mine go forward in British Columbia and to intervene so to prevent Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan from being taken over by an Australian based company, BHP Billiton, they appeared to be acting in a manner more becoming of a progressive, social democratic party like the NDP.

Since it appears that a single party majority government in Canada is something of the past, perhaps in our political future bi is the only way to fly if we want to have good government.

Take the Time to Read This To the End

2010-11-02T17:18:00.000-04:00

As the late Tony Judt told us oh so well, fear is re-emerging as an active ingredient of political life in Western democracies. Fear of terrorism, of course, but also, and perhaps more insidiously, fear of the uncontrollable speed of change, fear of the loss of employment, fear of losing ground to others in an increasingly unequal distribution of resources, fear of losing control of the circumstances and routines of one's daily life. And, perhaps above all, fear that it is not just we who can no longer shape our lives but that those in authority have lost control as well, to forces beyond their reach.

Yes, we are fearful. Speed kills. It kills our relationship to the world around us. It kills our perceptions of who we are and the knowledge of how did we get here.

The world moves so fast, propelled by ever-increasing volumes of information, that we tend not to see the past any more as guide to the present and the future or see the future as the effects of acts having been taken in the past. We simply have less time to devote to anything else but the task at hand.

The effect is that we are not only less reflective, but also less critical. To be less critical, to be less able to critique an issue or the society in which we live makes us less politically powerful. In our efforts to keep on top of things, in the know, abreast of the latest trends and developments, we are drained of the energy and the ability to connect the dots, to see the big picture.

If we allow it, life moves so fast that it causes us to lose touch with any deeper connections to the world and to the reality of the economic, political, and technological processes that drive us.

Time's up. Crunch time. Deadlines. Get it done yesterday. Time to separate the men from the boys. No time to loose. Overtime. Won't give me the time of day. A waste of time. Time is money. No sense of time.

But wait. Time out. Down time. Quality time. Time to catch my breath. Time well spent with friends. Family time. A time for all seasons. Timeless. Endless Summer. These were the best of times.

Now, turn off your computing devise and be kind to yourself: take a walk, and think about your very short time here on the earth.

Too-da-loo.

The Dance of the Despot

2010-10-29T13:11:00.000-04:00

I have to say that things just keep getting weirder in Quebec every day, especially if you are a democrat.

Yesterday, Premier Jean Charest announced that he was scrapping the electoral map drawn up by the independent Director General of Elections and effectively suspending the electoral laws in Quebec until he can figure out exactly what he wants.

The process of how the electoral map is to be drawn up, how the public is to be consulted, and how the new map is to be ratified in Quebec's National Assembly is clearly spelled out in the electoral law. It's just that Charest doesn't like or appreciate that the Director General of Elections, Marcel Blanchet, goes about doing his business in a law abiding fashion, which includes respecting the constitutional limits upheld by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms with regard to the equality guarantees in the manner electoral systems advance and maintain each citizen's right to vote.

In short, Charest doesn't like the way the law and the jurisprudence surrounding the right to vote is written, so he unilaterally decided to scrap Quebec's electoral law, which in my opinion is a despotic act. It demonstrates a fundamental contempt for democracy and a belief that the state, c'est moi.

This farce has been going on ever since he took office. Leading up to the 2003 Quebec General Election, he promised to introduce elements of proportionality into the voting system. He led us to believe that change was in the works: draft legislation was introduced and a special commission was convened to consult the population. The only problem was that no one supported the proposed the model. So, to save face he asked Mr. Blanchet to prepare a report detailing how the model could be improved. However, he didn't like the findings of the Director General's report so it was released three days before Christmas and then properly buried.

Still required by law to produce a new electoral map -- in passing, approximately one in four ridings didn't conform to the electoral laws limits on the number of electors per riding when Charest decided to call a snap election in 2008 -- Mr. Blanchet set out to draw up a new map that would respect the constitutional limits of the number of electors per riding. Given the demographic shift away from the outlying regions towards the regions surrounding Montreal, the new map eliminated three ridings in the peripheral regions and added three to the more populous regions. Sounds fair to me even though I am dead set against the use of the present voting system.

But once again, Charest didn't want what the law prescribes, so he introduced legislation that would in effect create rotten boroughs in the outlying regions in which the weight of a vote cast in one of these ridings would be three to four times greater than a vote cast in a large suburban riding.

Fortunately, the opposition parties would have none of it and neither would Mr. Blanchet, who on a matter of principle resigned rather than bow down to the desires of the despot. Bravo Mr. Blanchet!

Yesterday, in a truly pathetic gesture Charest calls a press conference in which he paraded the members of a committee from the outlying regions in order to announce that he is temporarily suspending the present electoral law and will introduce a new one by March 15, 2011, taking advantage of the fact that Mr. Blanchet is out of the country and unavailable for comment.

Very well orchestrated, and the dance of the despot goes on.

We Need More Than Two Hands on the Wheel

2010-10-27T20:18:00.003-04:00

Almost two years ago, Jean Charest the leader of a minority government in Quebec decided to call a general election to take advantage of a significant drop in the polls of the official opposition, the Action Democratic of Quebec. Our dysfunctional electoral system is unforgiving for political parties whose support is a mile wide but an inch deep. A 15 point drop in the popular vote reduced the number of ADQ seats in the National Assembly from 41 to 7. As a result, the Charest-led Liberals formed a majority government with the support of only 23% of the electorate.

During the campaign, which was launched at the onset of the Great Recession, Charest's slogan was that in troubled times, Quebec needed to have just two hands on the wheel. Two years later is there anyone -- other than die hard Quebec Liberal Party supporters -- that believes that Quebec is better off now that we have a false majority government rather than a minority government that depended on the support of another party to maintain a government.

Essentially, the incontestable control and political power Charest now enjoys means that he can effectively tell the rest of the population to go to hell with regard to holding a public inquiry into the link between the construction industry and the financing of political parties in Quebec. This would not be the case if we had a minority government or a majority coalition.

We thought that things had come to a head with the publication of an edition of Macleans magazine that claimed Quebec was the most corrupt province in Canada. The claim seemed to be dismissed in the media as another instance of Quebec bashing.

Well, a few weeks later we learn that a vast majority of appointees to the Boards of Directors to Quebec's crown corporations made financial donations to the Quebec Liberal Party. In the case of the most important, Hydro Quebec, 85% of the Board had contributed to the Liberals. No surprise that they would approve the award of approximately $800 million in contracts to the family businesses of Franco Fava, one of the Liberal Party's principle fundraisers.

Worse yet, new revelations have come to light. According to Montreal journalists, André Noël and André Cédilot, more than 600 businesses pay Mafia protection money in Montreal alone, handing organized crime leaders an unprecedented degree of control of Quebec's economy.

When questioned in the National Assembly, Charest made another pathetic reference to
his laughable Operation Hammer, and allowing the police squad, Quebec's answer to the Keystone cops, to do its job.

Without question, Quebec has come full circle to find itself exactly where it was 50 years ago. Charest has undone the work of Jean Lesage,and we have returned to the dark days of Duplesis.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Voting out the Liberals will only treat the symptoms and not the cause of the problem. What underlies the manifestation of corruption and influence peddling is a political system that in effect places the control of the province's political machinery in the hands of the Premier.

From time to time, one of those hands slips into the public purse to provide support for one of his friends.

Therefore, what needs to be done is to bring more hands to the helm in order to share political power and the place to start is the electoral system. The abuse of power begins with the abuse of each voter whose vote is simply discarded and not used to determine who will seize power in Quebec, Canada, and all other countries which use a plurality voting system.

America's Collective Memory Lapse

2010-10-23T12:38:00.004-04:00

Approaching the mid-term elections in the United States, it appears that the American electorate is having difficulty remembering what actually happened during the Bush years. As a result, Americans risk making an electoral choice that, given recent circumstances, could be very detrimental to the population at large.

Just two short years ago, the electorate turned its back on what could be described as the worst period in American politics during the last fifty years and elected a Democrat for President and at the same time gave control of the US Congress to the Democrats.

Yet, two years later, the same electorate is prepared to give back effective control of the Congress to the Republicans, which will effectively undo what was accomplished in the 2008 election.

Within this context, the question that needs to be asked is: “how is it that Americans can change their minds so quickly”?

The answer is that going into the mid-term elections America is experiencing a collective memory lapse.

As you know, a memory lapse is the inability to recall information when we want or need to. For example, it’s normal to forget the name of someone who we haven’t seen for a while, as well for a phone number that we don’t call often. When this happens, it may cause a minor inconvenience, but the consequences of this type of memory failure aren’t serious.

However, this is not true if we forget where we parked the car, or worse yet, where do we live. In either case, such a memory loss could have dire consequences, especially if we had to respond to an emergency at home.

In a similar vein, the inability to recall what happened during the Bush years could also have dire consequences for Americans, because by giving back control of the Congress to the Republicans, the US risks creating a situation where no meaningful response to America’s considerable economic woes can emerge for at least another two years.

What I find extremely interesting is how this collective memory block has been created socially.

The first element leading to the creation of this memory lapse involves the acceleration of time that occurs as a result of being constantly bombarded by information. Keeping up with all of this messaging requires more and more of our attention. Our brains are continually focusing on processing new information so that we have little time or energy to remember the past, especially when it’s not immediate and it contains elements of complexity.

In a sense, we become prisoners of our compulsion to constantly be in the now.

Second, a block can occur when we become focused on what has happened in the recent past so that we can’t recall what happened previously in the mid and long term. In the context of the American mid-term elections, many people are emotionally blocked over the disappointment that Obama hasn’t lived up to the impossible task of meeting the projected hopes that significant change in America could come quickly. Having been engaged in a type of magical thinking, these Americans have had their bubble burst and in the aftershock they are unable to move beyond their feelings of disappointment in order to, for example, reconnect with their previous feelings of anger of having been lied to by the Bush administration.

Finally, from a communications perspective, the right wing in the US has mounted a hugely successful campaign to erase from the collective memory any wrong doings that could be attributed to the Bush years. Essentially, the rise of the Tea Party movement diverts the collective memory of the American people away from its recent past of Republican rule and brings to mind the ideological conflict of the distant past, all the while evoking the patriotic feelings associated with the founding fathers.

In doing so, the short-term narrative of the Democrats trying to fix the serious problems left behind by the Republicans is replaced by the long running narrative centered on the perpetual dispute in the US over the size and role of the federal government. Within this narrative frame, the Democrats become the culprits since they are the ones trying to impose big government solutions upon problems that were caused by big government in the first place.

What is lost in the recollection -- and this is exactly the point of the exercise -- is that the Republicans are as much a political party that embraces big government as the Democrats. They just do it differently. In other words, the right wing has largely succeeded in reframing the political debate in the present so to change to their advantage how the past is to be remembered.

And where is the American electorate in all of this?

I would say between a rock and a hard place. Unable to recall its recent past, it will stumble forward like a drunk with a bad hangover, knowing that something significant happened last night, but not being able to remember the important details.

False Hopes for the New Messiah: Get Over It

2010-10-20T18:51:00.000-04:00

Barack Obama was elected President of the United States in 2008 and he had some pretty big shoes to fill.

Repeatedly during his presidential campaign, Obama and his followers invoked the Judeo-Christian narrative of the messiah. Under the Bush years America had fallen. Washington and Wall Street were the modern day equivalents of Sodom and Gomorrah. What was needed was someone who could offer redemption, someone who could restore hope and faith in the American dream and Obama fit the bill.

There was a fervor that gripped the land. People realized that they were participating in a historical narrative. They would be electing a black man to the highest office of a nation that once embraced slavery. Many wept tears of joy when he was declared the winner of the presidential election.

Pretty powerful stuff.

Yet, within Judaism there is also a counter narrative. On many occasions there have similar hopes that the anointed one has finally arrived only to give way to the disillusionment that the person in question alas is only human. Messianic hopes give way to bitter disappointment.

This is the narrative many Americans now find themselves living. Many are tired of defending Obama. The fervor has given way to reality. America's problems cannot be solved by any one man.

So, America. Get over it. It's time to move on. Projecting one's hopes on anyone rarely does any good.

Yeah, you got yourself a whole lot of problems. You've been lied to. You've been played for a sucker. Millions have lost jobs. Millions have lost homes. So, what are you going to do?

Are you going to go back to those who got you into this mess in the first place? Are you going to stay home and mope and feel sorry for yourself instead of going out to vote?

Yeah, the hole that you have dug for yourselves is mighty deep, but you got to go with the guy who, despite his short comings, actually cares about you. Staying home on election day will only let those who are fine and well with keeping you in that god damn hole take back the power that you ripped out of their hands.

What you need to do is to remember what it was like before Obama. Now is not the time to have a collective memory lapse.

End Private Funding of Political Parties

2010-10-18T19:53:00.000-04:00

Money talks in politics, so much so it tends to drown out all other voices. To say that it has an undue influence on electoral results is an understatement. For example, in more than nine times out of ten the candidate who spends the most money wins the seat in the US Congress. Similar trends exist in Canada.

It should be obvious that any political system that blatantly favors the interests of those with the economic means to make a significant financial contribution to a political party at the expense of the rest of the electorate will run into problems concerning its democratic legitimacy.

Essentially, the ever widening gap with regard to income inequality in North America can be attributed to the power of money to influence electoral results. In short, those who give generously, in effect, buy votes for the desired slate of candidates who in return adopt policies and intervene into the market on behalf of their favored donors. In other words, politics precedes policy formation.

In Canada, there has been significant evolution of electoral laws to limit the power of money has over elections. For instance, donations from corporations and unions to political parties are banned, limits are placed are third party spending during a federal election, and donations are limited to $1000 per donor.

Nevertheless, controversy over financing laws is considerable. For example, threats to end the federal subsidy for each vote cast almost caused the defeat of the Conservative government, which had to prorogue Parliament in order to avoid a non-confidence vote.

Likewise, in Quebec the refusal to hold a public enquiry into the link between the construction industry and the financing of Quebec's political parties, despite ample evidence suggesting that such an enquiry should be called, has led to a huge drop in the polls for the Quebec Liberal Party and in all likelihood will lead to the end of a Liberal government.

I believe that given the human propensity to pursue advantage whenever possible, most often at the expense of the common good, there are significant democratic dividends to be gained by eliminating the private funding of political parties altogether.

By leveling the playing field we would reduce significantly the political pandering to monied interests and increase the state's capacity to advance the common good. Indeed, as recent events leading up to the onset of the Great Recession demonstrate, it is guiding hand of government and not the invisible hand of the market that protects the material well-being of the population. As a result, fiscal policy should be determined by its effect on the real economy instead of adhering to the voodoo economic theories propagated by minions of the rich, their think tanks and in turn by the political parties which receive their support.

The minions of the rich, however, would have us believe that the ability of political parties to raise money not only demonstrates their democratic legitimacy but also their intrinsic worth. This is a self-serving political myth. Democracy is based on the principle of one person, one vote. We do not accept in principle at the level of society the notion of the super vote, which grants multiple votes per favored shareholder as a means of establishing and maintaining control over a company during the initial public offering of its shares. Government is not another instance of corporate rule.

Second, when the minions assert that the cost of exclusive public funding for political parties would be prohibitive, they are extremely selective in the cost benefit analysis. Let's not forget that donations to political parties are tax deductible. The amount the federal government forgoes in lost revenue to grant the tax deduction to donors dwarfs the amount which is given in the per vote subsidy.

As well, the cost of government doing business rises when it has to factor in the price of political patronage when conducting it's affairs. Granting government contracts without tender and selective interventions into the market that result in disproportionate gains for individuals that surpass the supposed benefits of the intervention are the two principle means that the practice of private funding for political parties extracts or extorts money from the public purse.

Indeed, the practice is maintained because of its exorbitant rate of return on the investment. Take the same amount used for political donations and subsequent lobbying efforts and try to obtain the same level of return in a truly completive market. Fat chance. So, instead of continuing the practice, let's conserve the resources we now have and be more socially effective and efficient in the use of the public purse.

A simple but effective proposal is to give all political parties that are able to meet a two percent threshold of the popular vote a lump sum to maintain basic operating requirements for a national party. Moreover, maintain the per vote subsidy, but increase the subsidy to give more incentive for people to actually cast their votes.

Voter apathy is widespread and threatens the vitality of our political institutions. Let's make it worthwhile for people to participate in the political process other than opening up their wallets in order to buy votes.

Welcome to the Disunited Shareholders of America

2010-10-15T15:08:00.005-04:00

The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy. (Alex Carey)

It's a bit trite to say that money rules in the United States.

For example, during the 2008 elections for the American Congress in slightly more than nine times out of ten the candidate that spent the most money during the campaign was elected.

Moreover, the net worth of members of the House of Representatives averages around $5 million whereas the net worth of the members of the Senate averages around $16 million.

Also, despite recessionary woes, lobbyist spending jumped upwards 5% in 2009 to attain $3.47 billion. According to Sheila Krumholz of the Centre for Responsive Politics, "lobbying appears recession proof." She added that "even when companies are scaling back other operations, many view lobbying as the critical tool in protecting their future interests, particularly when Congress is preparing to take action on issues that could seriously affect their bottom lines."

Finally, the US November elections are on track to be costliest ever. The Centre puts the price tag for this election cycle at about $3.4 billion and rising, compared to $1.6 billion for the mid-terms in 1998.

Given the strong correlation between campaign expenditures and electoral results, elections in the United States have become little more than corporate campaigns for proxy voters. During the presidential election that occurs once every four years, the financial contributions of the average citizen do come into play, but when it comes to electing members of Congress, big money rules the day. As a result, the role of the citizenry in the US is to elect the corporate Board of Directors to which the American President will have to answer to.

That being said, I'm not suggesting that in America the plutocratic shareholders have gained complete control over the United States of America. They are opposed somewhat by Institutional investors that manage union workers pension funds. There is a divergence of interest in that the plutocrats have no reservations whatsoever in maximizing profits even when doing so would harm the economy. Institutional investors managing public pension plans, on the other hand, are less apt to do so since they must answer to the representatives of the pension fund contributors.

Notwithstanding, once we factor in the recent US Supreme Court ruling that struck down any limits on corporate spending during American elections, the real battleground in American politics has shifted from the televised spectacle of Congressional elections to the battle of who gets on the ballot when it's time for corporations to elect their Board of Directors.

After the Enron debacle, the US Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) had to act to bring some order to the nature of corporate governance. In short, even plutocrats can't trust other plutocrats when it comes to managing the affairs of a corporation. Small cliques form often enough within corporate boards in which the said directors make off with corporate assets by engaging in fraudulent practices.

The SEC response was to allow shareholders or groups of shareholders with as little as 3% of the company's equity to be able to put their preferred candidates on the ballot to elect a publicly traded corporation's Board of Directors. This measure would make it possible for Institutional investors to find themselves represented on corporate boards from which they had been previously excluded. In a small way, corporate power could be subject to some democratic restraint.

Yet, the plutocrats would not even let even this small measure pass. The American Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable filed a law suit to suspend the SEC's plans for implementation.

The federal court will decide, but by that time a new Board of Directors will be in place in Congress, one that will be even less apt than the present Congress to enact any law or support any administrative decision that impedes the pursuit of corporate profits.

In other words, business as usual in America, and there is precious little that Obama can do about it.

Canadian Corporations Meddle in American Politics

2010-10-14T12:16:00.000-04:00

I find the story published by ThinkProgress about donations from foreign corporations to the American Chamber of Commerce, which is engaged in a large scale third-party political campaign in the US mid-term elections to be unsettling, especially since some of the corporations identified are Canadian, for example, Sun Life Financial and SNC Lavalin. http://thinkprogress.org/2010/10/13/chamber-foreign-funded-media/

Let's not forget that in Canada corporations cannot make donations to political parties. As well, unlike the US, there are limits to what third parties can spend during federal electoral campaigns. As a result, we should be asking the question: "what are Canadian corporations doing making contributions to third party organizations like the American Chamber of Commerce that are heavily involved in trying to influence the results of an American election?"

This should give cause for concern. Although American law allows for American subsidiaries of foreign owned corporations to make donations to politically active third party organizations, it is conceivable that corporate interest might not align well with the national interest. For instance, it might be in the best interest for a Canadian corporation to invest heavily in an American political campaign and thereafter engage in a lobbying effort to persuade Congress to adopt measures that advance its corporate interest and that interest might be diametrically opposed to position maintained and defended by the Canadian government.

Imagine a Canadian Investment Fund obtaining an American interventionist measure that would negatively impact the price of a Canadian produced commodity like wheat, softwood lumber or pork bellies after the Fund in question has shorted the targeted commodity. In this case, sizable financial gain could be had at the expense of Canadian producers and for government revenues.

It's funny how Canadians get this information from foreign sources. For example, we became aware of those Canadians with "hidden" Swiss bank accounts from the release of the names to other foreign countries that made this type of request to Swiss banking authorities.

These recent developments point out once again the need to totally revise and revamp our archaic access to information laws. Statutes that predate the rise of Information Technology and the globalization of commerce and communications are wholly inadequate to meet the present and future needs of Canadians to have timely access to information.

In the 21st century, nations that embrace open and transparent government and seek to empower their citizens by providing easy access to information that matters will prosper. Those that lag behind will pay the consequences.

Collective Memory Dysfunction

2010-10-11T11:11:00.001-04:00

At the level of the individual memory, we are aware that memory impairment can occur. We all have experienced the inability to recall a phone number, a date, someone's name, and so on. This is a normal occurrence. Memories fade over time.

However, memory loss can become dysfunctional when the information that can't be recalled is essential to the well-being of the individual. Not being able to remember your own name, where you live, and the nature of your relationship to family members, for example, would impact significantly on your ability to lead an autonomous life.

Most often this type of memory loss is caused by a traumatic head injury or the progression of a degenerative disease, and for the affected individual, the loss is catastrophic. Indeed, those in close relation to the individual will say that her or she is no longer the same person.

Consequently, we have come to realize that an individual's well-being is dependent on having a healthy, functional memory, which means the ability to retain and recall what is important and to forget that which is not.

Although the dynamics of a society's collective memory are more complex and subject to the concerted efforts of groups to influence its content, how it is to be interpreted, and what is to be forgotten, the ability of society to remember its past has a huge impact on the quality of life for groups within the society and for the population at large.

At the group level, it is interesting to note how a society can remember certain sequences of events but not recall others. Indeed, the collective memory can be quite selective, depending on the moral consequences and their impact on societal choices to be taken in the present. Social injustice towards minority groups, like the North American Indigenous Peoples, will often be maintained because their historical narratives cannot gain any traction within the society's collective memory.

Unfortunately, it appears that North Americans are now engaged in a process of selective memory repression. The sequence of events in question is the inability of the political class and its economic worldview to predict the collapse of financial markets and the onset of the Great Recession.

A monumental intellectual failure of this scale must be remembered, but alas with yesterday's announcement of this year's recipient of the Nobel prize for economics, it appears that our society is continuing with its business as usual.

To draw an analogy, I would take this state of affairs back down to the individual level. It's as if our society is acting like an individual whose spouse has been unfaithful and chooses not to react. Without question, the infidelity should impact on the quality of the relationship. However, in some instances, usually when comfortable lifestyles could be jeopardized, the inconvenient truth is actively repressed and life goes on like before.

As we head into the midterm US elections in November and most likely a Canadian federal election in the new year, economic prognostications are being made by politicians as if nothing has happened recently that would call into question the ability of making any useful macroeconomic predictions whatsoever.

For instance, the Canadian Minister of Finance, Jim Flaherty, recently claimed that the election of a ruling coalition formed by the opposition parties would lead to economic catastrophe for the Canadian economy. To be fair to the Conservatives similar economic hyperbole is forthcoming from the Liberals, the NDP, and the Bloc.

What the mainstream media in Canada totally missed is the opportunity to call into question the validity of the entire exercise. Only two years ago elected officials were denying that we were heading into a recession, which proved to be totally false and we recorded the highest federal budgetary deficit in Canadian history.

So, given recent past record, it would appear to me that the appropriate question that should have been asked to Mr. Flaherty and should be asked in the future to politicians who make macroeconomic predictions is as follows, "if we got it so wrong about the economy in the past, what makes you think that you got it right today with regard to your predictions, what's changed?"

I know that I'm asking too much from the mainstream media. After all, they are in the infotainment industry. That's why the blogosphere is growing and gaining importance. We bloggers provide the analysis for free and we assume the responsibility of drawing people's attention to what the mainstream media would sooner have us forget.

Blog on!

The Demise of the English Invader Nations

2010-10-08T20:50:00.002-04:00

When I was a school boy growing up in the Prairies, I would stare at the map of the world, provided by Nielsen Chocolates, in which the countries that comprised the British Empire were all in pink. More pink land mass than anything else. Something a school boy could be proud of.

As well, we would start each day with a slightly off key singing of the Canadian National Anthem and end the day with a less than enthusiastic rendition of God Save the Queen. Regardless, I would trudge home feeling content that I was part of the Dominion of Canada, the biggest jewel in the British Empire.

Now that I am older and a little bit wiser I can't help but think that there is no such thing as an English-speaking nation in the former colonies often referred to as the English Settler States (the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) which I prefer to call the English Invader Nations. The frame around the word "settler" is far too cozy, and for me the notion of invasion best captures the inherent violence and subsequent rape of the land that comes with conquest and exploitation.

Today I realize that there is no imagined community, the nation, to which I belong. Instead, I am positioned in a process of wealth extraction, a global market, in which I have nothing in common with those who dominate the process other than a command of the English language, a precursor to the real lingua franca of the world, HTML.

Years ago, I read a collection of essays penned by Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy that changed the way I thought about the society I lived in. Fifteen years later, his depiction of the ruling classes throughout the English Invader Nations is more poignant than ever.

The book's title is a take-off on Jose Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses, a reactionary work published in 1930 that ascribed the crisis of Western culture to the "political domination of the masses." Ortega believed that the rise of the masses threatened democracy by undermining the ideals of civic virtue that characterized the old ruling elites. But in twenty-first century America it is not the masses so much as an emerging elite of professional and managerial types who constitute the greatest threat to democracy.

The new cognitive elite is made up of what Robert Reich called "symbolic analysts" — lawyers, academics, journalists, systems analysts, brokers, bankers, etc. These professionals traffic in information and manipulate words and numbers for a living. They live in an abstract world in which information and expertise are the most valuable commodities. Since the market for these assets is international, the privileged class is more concerned with the global system than with regional, national, or local communities. In fact, members of the new elite tend to be estranged from their communities and their fellow citizens. "They send their children to private schools, insure themselves against medical emergencies ... and hire private security guards to protect themselves against the mounting violence against them," Lasch writes. "In effect, they have removed themselves from the common life."

Let's face it. The orchestrated collapse of the world's financial markets and the Great Recession that ensued was an Inside Job. They might look like us, they might talk like us, but they have absolutely no remorse of having caused so much harm to their fellow citizens. Take a peek at the award winning documentary's trailer.

Some might respond that the US is an isolated case, but in reality the same trend of rising income inequality and the accompanying social problems of increased child poverty, incarceration rates, and mental health problems, to mention just a few, can be found throughout English Invader Nations as well as in the UK.

No wonder how "we" do at the Olympics has become a national obsession. After all, nationalism is the opiate of the masses.

Amusing Ourselves to Death

2010-09-26T13:50:00.003-04:00

This week in Quebec we were treated to an extraordinary performance of political theatre and the media's role of reducing politics to spectacle.

This week, the parade of the witnesses in front of a national audience watching the televised proceedings of the Bastarache Commission investigating allegations of political meddling and influence peddling in the nomination of judges in Quebec could not have been better.

First off was the statesman like grandfatherly figure of a former member of Quebec's National Assembly and Deputy Minister corroborating the nature of the allegations of influence peddling against the current Quebec government, followed by the testimony of the two principal Liberal fundraisers, and then an extremely rare event, the testimony of the current Premier of Quebec.

The week began as expected. The principal actors performed well. The critics were satisfied and we were all looking for the dramatic showdown between the Premier and the lawyer charged with grilling the Premier with a pointed counter-interrogation that would surely force the presiding judge to intervene repeatedly to bring order to what promised to be a series of heated exchanges.

Then the unexpected happened. The fireworks fizzled. The fiery exchange never materialized. Instead, the horror, the two men actually engaged in a relatively polite debate on a substantive matter concerning the role of the Premier in the process of nominating judges as prescribed by the law and the norms surrounding the process of political appointments.

What a let down. We can't end the week that way after all the hype we pumped.

Fortunately, in a brilliant scoop, Maclean's magazine came out with a provocative cover for its extremely well-timed weekly publication that stole the show and shifted the entire narrative that had been built up and then lost into something much more entertaining and potentially cathartic for a population in the process of realizing how pathetic its democratic institutions had become, the emotionally laden topic of Quebec bashing.

I couldn't believe it. The Maclean's cover actually bumped the Premier's testimony. On both Radio Canada's and TVA's nightly newscasts, the two leading televised newscasts in Quebec, the top story featured the Maclean's cover that said Quebec was the most corrupt province in Canada and appropriated the Quebec Carnaval's mascot for the visual image

I was flabbergasted. As someone who works in strategic communications, I had predicted that the lawyer leading the counter-interrogation would purposely push the presiding judge to shut him down, and then he would walk out and make a public statement lambasting the Commission for being blatantly partisan.

The intervention from Maclean's was totally unexpected and it made for great political theatre.

As could be expected there was little if any sympathy in the media being directed towards the Premier, despite his stalwart performance on the witness stand, with regard to the possibility that he might have been wrongly accused. Instead, the strongest emotional statements came from the Carnival of Quebec, who were outraged that their mascot had been defiled.

Intrigued, I set out early this morning to buy a copy of Maclean's magazine at Gatineau's largest newsstand, but to no avail. They were sold out. Undeterred, I crossed the river into Ottawa to buy and read the latest edition.

Having read the article, I found it to be pretty even-handed, not at all the Quebec bashing that Quebec politicians made out to be. However, the real power and the absolute brilliance of this edition, aside from the masterful timing of its publication, emerge from the headline and artful use of an iconic image on the magazine's cover.

To come out and actually say that Quebec is the most corrupt province in Canada took the prevailing political discourse out of its analytical approach of trying to tie credibility with performance on the witness stand and placed it squarely in the emotional minefield of Canada/Quebec relations. In short, this simple, bold assertion was like a kick in the crotch to Quebec's collective psyche, forcing it to attend to a disturbing state of affairs at an emotional level instead of trying to determine rationally which of the two political rivals is telling the truth.

Second, and more importantly, the image of the mascot holding the valise overflowing with cash symbolizes to me what is the real political malaise in Quebec.

In my opinion, the situation at hand is not a result of the obsession with sovereignty or the excessive growth of the state.

Political pundit Pierre Foglia correctly identified the nature of the problem in his column Saturday by noting that despite an intense week on the political front, the revelations of the Bastarache Commission and the Quebec government's u-turn on the question of charging user fees for health services, the story that was getting the most mileage in Quebec during the week was the lastest performance of the Montreal Canadiens goaltender, Carry Price.

Without question after two referendums on independence, Quebecers have become weary of politics. Participation rates during elections have plummeted.

Unfortunately, we are no longer paying much attention to politics and we certainly are not as politically engaged as we once were. As a result, given the amazing success of our cultural industries, we have replaced the passion of politics with the pleasure of being entertained. To use Neil Postman's method of analysis, we are amusing ourselves to death.

In other words, having failed to asserted our collective identity through political means, we have chosen to do so through our support and participation in cultural activities that strengthen our bonds to a linguistic community. On a daily basis, those bonds are reinforced whether following les Canadiens, watching our favorite television programs, listening to music on the radio, laughing with our comics, going to the movies to see the latest Quebecois film, flocking to the salon des livres, attending festival after festival. The list goes on.

In some ways, we have become political victims of our own cultural success. While we are being busily entertained, there are those who make off with more than their fair share of our common wealth and this has serious consequences.

It means that we let things pass that we shouldn't let pass. It means that we remain passive spectators when we should be active participants. It means that we settle for second rate education and second rate healthcare. It means that we are going to pass on an unmanageable debt to our children and our grandchildren.

If anything the image of Bonhomme Carnaval walking off with the cash tells us that we need to manage our affairs better. It's time to re-engage in the political sphere. Indeed, we need to let go of our previous terms of political reference and redefine the nature of our political community so that we are up to meeting the challenges of our common future.

Economic Apartheid Runs Rife in America

2010-09-23T11:30:00.000-04:00

Last week's release of the US Census Bureau's report: Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2009 caused quite a stir. The emerging image is quite bleak.

In summary, nearly 44 million people were living in poverty last year, which is 14% of the population, one in seven adults, one in five children. That is in an increase of 4 million people over the previous year, the highest percentage in 15 years, and the highest number in more than a half-century of record keeping.

Median Incomes were 5 percent lower in 2009 than they were a decade earlier, and as Harvard University economist, Lawrence Katz points out, "this is the first time in memory that an entire decade has produced essentially no economic growth for the typical American household."

Race continues to play a huge factor in poverty and income inequality. Median per capita income for non-Hispanic whites was $30,941, down 0.8 percent from a year earlier. Among blacks, median per capita income was not quite two-thirds that, at $18,135.

When looking at household income, the widest racial gap is between black and Asian households. Black-led households make less than half the median income that Asian households do.

In some ways, these figures are not all that surprising given that the United States is a nation founded on the genocide of its indigenous peoples, who by the way aren't considered important enough to make it into the official statistical portrait, and the enslavement of African Americans. It is doubtful that these types of historic income disparities can ever be erased.

Yet, the greatest income disparities exist within the white population where we find an almost complete decoupling of economic trajectories between the superrich and the rest of white America.

Income inequality in the United States is at an all-time high, surpassing even levels seen during the Great Depression, according to a recently updated paper by University of California, Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez. The paper, which covers data through 2007, points to a staggering, unprecedented disparity in American incomes.

Though income inequality has been growing for some time, the paper paints a stark, disturbing portrait of wealth distribution in America. Saez calculates that in 2007 the top .01 percent of American earners took home 6 percent of total U.S. wages, a figure that has nearly doubled since 2000.

As of 2007, the top decile of American earners, Saez writes, pulled in 49.7 percent of total wages, a level that's "higher than any other year since 1917 and even surpasses 1928, the peak of stock market bubble in the 'roaring' 1920s."

Beginning in the economic expansion of the early 1990s, Saez argues, the economy began to favor the top tiers American earners, but much of the country missed was left behind. "The top 1 percent incomes captured half of the overall economic growth over the period 1993-2007," Saez writes.

So how does less than one percent of the population maintain its privileged status in a nation that prides itself on having free and fair democratic elections? The answer: it engages in populist politics and plays the race card.

First, it should be remembered that the superrich don't give a shit about the well being of the average American regardless of the color of his or her skin. Therefore, the trick to be turned is to tie together a political package that includes preferential policies that benefit the rich with emotionally laden social issues that appeal to an the increasingly disenfranchised white population.

It's as if as long as the political agenda contains the familiar political rhetoric: anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-gun control, lower taxes, smaller government, and increased military spending, it doesn't matter that economic policies are tilted to favor the rich at the expense of the average American.

Moreover, the presence of colored people allows the rich to use them as scapegoats in order to fend off any claims that might be made against them. For example, if unemployment is a problem it isn't because the middle class jobs have been transferred off shore, it's because those damn immigrants are taking your jobs.

Playing to xenophobic fears is at the foundation of a divide-and-rule strategy. It is very effective and it is at the heart of the Republican strategy of regaining control of the US congress in 2010.

Dark Days for Evidence-Based Democracy

2010-09-16T12:40:00.003-04:00

As we know all too well, politics can get bogged down in ideological mud slinging. Each side, prisoner of its own political discourse, slings mud at the opposing side. One way out of this impasse is to look at what the evidence tells us about the issue at hand. That way, we can examine the veracity of the claims made in the presentation of arguments proposing a particular plan of action.

Here in Canada, and particularly in Quebec, we see concerted efforts to reduce the capacity of citizens to engage in informed political debate by either reducing the capacity of government organizations to collect, analyze, and report on pertinent data, or, in the case of Quebec, set ridiculously short time lines for the tabling of an environmental report, thereby preventing valuable studies from interfering with what appears to be the Quebec government's premature decision to go ahead with the exploitation of the province's immense shale gas reserves.

At the federal level, much ink has been spilt in protest of the government's decision to shelve the long form census, a move that triggered the resignation of Statistic Canada's chief statistician. As well, it was revealed that head of the Parliamentary Budget Office, Kevin Page, will not seek to renew his mandate, which is most assuredly related to the fact that his agency's paltry budget has been significantly reduced.

In both instances, these decisions will probably reduce the availability of timely information that could inform the citizenry, but as we would expect having an informed citizenry would actually reduce the capacity of a political/financial elite to impose its political agenda upon the nation. Like many, I find this state affairs unacceptable, but hey my vote never counts for anything other than awarding a pittance to the party I voted for during a federal election, and perhaps even this last remaining incentive for me to go out to vote will disappear.

In Quebec, given the Charest government's pathetic low level of support and its minimal chances of surviving another general election, it appears that the Quebec government has thrown caution to the wind and is proceeding at warp speed to put in place a perfunctory regulatory framework that would allow fortunes to be made at the expense of the health of the population before its term runs out.

Even the most rudimentary environmental scan on the subject of the safety hydraulic fracturing should raise grave concerns. In fact, to date no peer-reviewed scientific study demonstrates that the process does not create substantial health hazards. To learn more, consult a recent report of an 18 month Propublica investigation.

What I find truly deceitful is the behavior of Quebec's Vice-Premier, Natahlie Normandeau, who is now making regular public appearances saying that moving ahead with confidence is just a matter of communicating the facts. As someone who works in the communications field, I can't help asking myself, "what facts is she referring to?". She makes it sound as if there exists a consensus in the scientific community that fracking is safe. This impression that she is so desperately trying to give is unmitigated bullshit.

In the US, the Environmental Protection Agency has been given more than two million dollars to investigate the safety of the fracking process through its entire lifecycle and has until 2012 to complete its report. In Quebec, the Office for Public Audiences on the Protection of the Environment gets chump change and a four month deadline report.

I guess as a citizen it is moments like this that makes me realize that living through a fin de regime the quality of governance often sinks to the level of the banana republic.

Have the Quebec Liberals Lost the Moral Authority to Govern?

2010-09-06T10:37:00.000-04:00

The Westminster parliamentary system is often called a crown-in-parliament system of governance. In effect, the powers of the monarch are transferred to the Prime Minister of the confederation and to the Premier of each province. So, what happens when the population of a province no longer trusts its Premier? As well, if a breach of trust has occurred between the Premier and his citizens, does the ruling party have the moral authority to continue governing with the said Premier in office? These are the questions that Quebecers should be asking themselves.

Needless to say, when approximately 70% of those surveyed believe the version of events put forward by former Quebec Minister of Justice, Marc Bellemare, as opposed to the meagre 12% who believe the Quebec Premier's Jean Charest version, there exists a crisis of confidence and credibility, and it is not as if that the crisis is going to disappear when the Bastarache commission files it report concerning Mr. Bellemare's accusations.

In some sense, this crisis has been in the making for years. In short, many if not the majority of Quebecers have the distinct feeling that they have been repeatedly lied to.

Beginning in 2003 with the electoral promise to lower taxes by one billion per year during five years that was never kept, claiming that healthcare was the Liberals number one priority when no significant progress was made with regard to wait times and access to a family physician, calling a general election during the height of the Great Recession and then maintaining that there was no prior knowledge of the 40 billion dollar annual loss in the state-managed pension fund, and refusing to hold a public inquiry into the link between the construction industry and the financing of Quebec's political parties despite a series of revelations and public opinion that indicate that such an enquiry is badly needed, it should not come as a surprise that the majority of Quebecers no longer have confidence in Premier Charest and want him to step down.

So, where do we go from here?

Already, another controversy has emerged in the way the Liberal government is handling the exploration and the potential exploitation of Quebec's huge deposits of shale gas. There are some very serious and well-documented concerns with the safety of the extraction process, hydraulic fracturing, the most serious is that this process will contaminate the ground water in the surrounding areas around the gas wells. Moreover, given the importance of the publicly-owned Quebec Hydro, the largest producer of hydro electricity inn North America, it is odd that within the context of Quebec politics, a public debate has not occurred with regard to the ownership of this extremely important natural resource. In fact, it has been just revealed that a number of individuals with close ties to the Quebec Liberal Party have recently moved on to take on key positions in the gas and oil industry.

Having imposed a ridiculously short time period for the province's environmental review agency to produce a report (4 months) on complex issue where the intergenerational stakes are extremely high in order to quickly adopt a law which will establish the parameters for the oil and gas industry, the Charest-led Liberal government gives the distinct impression that the fix is on, leaving ordinary Quebecers that they are once again victims of an abuse of political power.

Indeed, in response to the population's desire to have a public enquiry into the endemic problem of influence peddling, we get the Bastarache Commission looking only at the question of the nomination of judges. In a similar vein, instead of getting a thorough environmental review of the proposed extraction of shale gas, the population receives a half-assed, short and speedy assessment of something that cries out for a slow a prudent process of examination.

So, the question arises can the Charest-led Quebec Liberal government be trusted to manage the affairs of the state in a fashion that protects and promotes the interest of the population at large. In my opinion, the answer is an overwhelming "No!"

Unfortunately, the Quebec Liberals have a mandate to govern Quebec for at least another three years. This does not bode well for a population that has already lost confidence in its democratic institutions. We are like the proverbial lobsters caught in the trap of a dysfunctional political system without the wherewithal to escape.

The only ones that can presently rectify the situation are the members of the Quebec Liberal Party. To continue on with Mr. Charest at the helm until the end of the present mandate is to risk having the same misfortune fall upon the party as that as their federal Liberal cousins, to have the Liberal name become a toxic brand for a least a generation to come. Hopefully, the plans for Jean Charest's graceful exit from the office of the Premier are already in the works.

The Real Choice in the Next Federal Election is Between a Conservative Minority Government and a Progressive Liberal Coalition

2010-09-02T20:25:00.000-04:00

Canadians, in particular our political class, need to face up to the fact that single party majority governments are a thing of the past. Take a look at comparable nations in the commonwealth. The UK is governed by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition, and negotiations are underway in Australia for either the Labour Party or the Liberal-National Coalition to enter into a governing coalition with the four independents and the single Green member of the lower house.

Let's face the music. The Bloc Quebecois is not going to disappear anytime soon. As a result, neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives can form a majority government on their own.

So, what are we left with? Successive single party minority governments that govern under the continual threat of an impending federal election. This state of affairs does not give us good government. In fact, what we get is a perpetual game of chicken in which introducing legislation that is consistent with the governing party's electoral mandate is compromised as is the opposition parties capacity to oppose. In short, what Canadians get is not a coherent vision guiding the country. Instead, they get a series of enacted bills that represent the lowest common denominator of what the political parties in Parliament can live with.

Elections are about choices. Who do we want to govern and with which political agenda. In simpler times the choices were straightforward: you vote for either the red or the blue team and you were stuck with the collective choice of who would govern until the Prime Minister decided it was time to go the polls.

Over the last twenty years, however, Canadian society and its political realm has morphed into something else. The old poles of attraction no longer hold the population captive. There has been a multiplication of varied interests, perspectives, beliefs and values. So much so that the traditional parties can no longer marshall sufficient numbers into their big tents. The population no longer allows itself to be dominated and controlled by a ruling oligarchy. This is a significant social transformation that slowly working it's way through the political sphere.

Already the political banter has started around single majority governments and the possibility of forming an "evil" coalition with the dreaded separatists.

In response, I would like to point out that in the latest Ekos poll neither the Conservatives nor the Liberals garnered the support of 30% of those who responded, which means that if you factor in a participation rate of 60%, it leaves each party with the support of less than 20% of the electorate. So, why are we even talking about the formation of a majority government? Current seat projections give each party somewhere between 100 and 110 seats.

Consequently, somebody is going to have to be the adult here and actually say what is on a lot of peoples's minds. Look, if the polls indicate that the Liberals have approximately 30%, the NDP 16%, and the Greens 13% of the vote (in total almost 60%), there is considerable support for a progressive/liberal coalition that would not need to be propped up by the Bloc.

So quit engaging in this magical thinking that a single party majority government can be had. Drop the pretenses and give us some straight talk that we need to evolve towards a consensual form of government and leave behind the days of domination and control.

Concretely, this means that the Liberals come out and say yes we are ready to share power and the NDP comes out and says that our price is a referendum on changing the voting system that gives the voters the choice between either the single transferable vote or a mixed-member proportional system. This would open up the door to having Greens taking their rightful place in Parliament. After all, approximately a million voters opted for the Greens during the last federal election. These voters have the right to effective representation.

Canadian society has evolved and it's time our democratic institutions do likewise.

Bellemare vs. Charest: A Classic Confrontation Between Principle and Self Interest

2010-08-31T18:31:00.000-04:00

As the week begins and the former Minister of Justice, Marc Bellemare, faces interrogation from lawyers representing no less than the Quebec government, the Quebec Liberal Party, and of Quebec Premier Jean Charest concerning his allegations of influence peddling when it comes to the nomination of judges, it appears that we are witnessing the testimony of a somewhat politically naive individual taking the Premier to task for allowing naked self interest to take precedence over the principle of the independence of the judiciary.

As this melodrama plays out, I find it quite interesting to see how the media attempts to both discredit Bellemare and to normalize the situation. After all the allegations are quite serious: caving to the desires of fundraisers to have their candidates named to the bench. Consequently, headlines read that "Bellemare is Contradicted" and "Bellemare Stumbles Upon Questioning" and unflattering appraisals of his character appear in the op-ed sections of Quebec newspapers. At the same time, political analysts assert that no real harm has occurred since the judges in question were deemed to be competent and that as Quebec Premier, Jean Charest had the prerogative to intervene.

What is not being discussed at length is the troublesome realization that if the Premier of the province allows himself to be influenced by his party's fundraisers in the sacrosanct nomination of judges that this indicates that the Charest government could be as lax or more-so in exercising its responsibility as steward of the public purse.

Case in point. In my region of the Outaouais, the Quebec Liberal Party's principle fundraiser, Guy Bisson, admitted to soliciting the support of the Liberal Minister responsible for the Outaouais and Minister for Transport, Norm MacMillan, to speak to Bellemare about having Mr. Bisson's son appointed to the bench. Mr. MacMillan also admitted publicly of having spoken to Bellemare.

Here's where it gets interesting. In his testimony, Bellemare asserts that it was Franco Favo, the Quebec Liberal Party's principle fundraiser in the Quebec City region that was applying pressure to have Mr. Bisson's son named to the judiciary. As it turns out, one of Franco Favo's companies was awarded a contract by the Department of Transport to construct a highway running through MacMillan's riding and the riding of the ex-Minister of Labour, David Whissell. Furthermore, Favo's company subcontracted the work to construct an overpass to a company in which Mr. Whissell was a principle shareholder.

Looks like every one was managing to advance his self interest very well except for one thing. The overpass that Mr. Whissel's company built was deemed to be unsafe and had to be demolished and then replaced at a cost of more than a million dollars to the taxpayer. Oops!

These events indicate that perhaps the Quebec government has slid significantly down the slippery slope of not abiding to the principles of good government and suggest that there are sufficient grounds for a public inquiry.
Regardless of whether or not the nomination of judges during the Parti Quebecois's reign had been done in a similar fashion, rewarding the party faithful, there remains the larger issue of political patronage running amok. According to Bellemare, Premier Charest and Quebec's Liberal Party have on many occasions put their self interest before that of the public good.

In these increasingly cynical times, it is refreshing to see someone who has the courage to stand up and remind all of us that elected officials have an obligation to put aside their self interest and advance the common good.

Frack On, Frack Off

2010-08-29T16:40:00.002-04:00

When it comes to hydraulic fracturing and the Quebec government’s decision to go forward with continued exploration of shale gas even before a promised environmental review has begun, as you would expect, I fall into the frack off crowd. If you are unfamiliar with the hydraulic fracturing (often referred to as fracking), I first invite you to view the trailer for the documentary film, Gasland.

As you can see, there are a number of unresolved environmental issues surrounding the process, which raises a number of unanswered questions.

First, why is the Quebec government allowing continued exploration for shale gas with the aim of immediate exploitation already on the table? This is where the issue of the burden of proof is inversed to favor the oil and gas companies at the expense of an unsuspecting public. For example, when a pharmaceutical company brings a drug to market, it assumes the responsibility to make sure that the drug in question is safe and has to demonstrate the absence of significant risk to a government agency before the drug is allowed to be marketed. However, when it comes to environmental issues, it is up to interested individuals to demonstrate that there is significant harm. Often, it will take years before the environmental danger is recognized (e.g. DTT) and in the meantime innocent victims fall into harm’s way. The burden of proof should fall onto the producers, and they should assume the costs of marshalling the evidence. Once this is done, then and only then should commercial exploitation take place.

Second, given that this year is shaping up to be the warmest year on the planet since records have been kept and areas at the extreme ends of the hydrologic cycle are experiencing catastrophic weather-related events, (Russia, China, and Pakistan), why are we even contemplating exploiting a new source of fossil fuels to be burned before we have gained control over the rising levels of green house gas emissions? Comically, Quebec’s Vice Premier, Nathalie Normandeau, said at the press conference that Quebec would be replacing Alberta natural gas with gas produced from Quebec. Frankly, nobody in their right mind (those who get climate change) gives a damn where the gas is extracted from because when it is burned it adds CO2 to the atmosphere regardless of where it is burned on the planet.

Third, why the rush to bring this non-renewable resource to market? Ever heard of Peak Oil? Well, the same principle applies to natural gas. So, if this is a question of energy security (it’s not), let us leave something behind for future generations since fossil fuels will eventually become a precious commodity. Exit the boomer mentality to burn through as much as you can only to leave a scorched earth for generations to follow.

Finally, and this is where the crap gets pretty thick, for god’s sake Madame Normandeau, if you are going to make some maudlin reference to Quebec’s recent past, the Quiet Revolution, get it right. The expression “Maître Chez Nous” (masters of our own house) refers in this context to the nationalization of the hydro-electric sector in Quebec some fifty years ago. In other words, the exploitation of a huge natural resource was taken out of private hands for the benefit of the entire population. In this case, the exact opposite has taken place. Up until 2007, the mineral rights for the exploitation of shale gas belonged to the state owned Hydro Quebec, whose profits go into the public purse. Those rights were transferred to the private sector so that once again we have a situation where potential profit is privatized and potential risk is socialized.

When I hear such a clumsy attempt at propaganda in order to pass off what should be a serious concern to all Quebecers, I can only respond, FRAK OFF!

Would You Buy A Used Car From Quebec's Premier Charest?

2010-08-24T21:05:00.002-04:00

I wouldn't and by judging by the latest polls, only 12% of the Quebecers believe the Premier's version of the events as compared to the 60% who believe the version put forward by the former Minister of Justice, Marc Bellemare, neither would the majority of Quebecers.

In short, today Mr. Bellemare detailed his accusations that as Minister Justice he was subject to undue pressure from some of the principle fundraisers of the Quebec Liberal Party to accede to their desires to have three candidates named to the judiciary. Moreover, he alleged that when he expressed his concerns to Premier Jean Charest, the Premier replied that if the fundraisers in question wanted these three candidates named, Bellemare was to heed their request.

In response, Jean Charest, in an unusual move, called a press conference to deny the allegations instead of waiting his turn to testify.

Methinks he doth protest too much.

After all, the fashion that the commission has been convened is wholly to the advantage of the Premier. His government chose the judge that would preside over the commission, who subsequently denied intervener status to the opposition Parti Quebecois and to Mr. Bellemare. Consequently, all the counter interrogation aimed at Bellemare and the following thirty something witnesses will come from the lawyers representing the Quebec government, the Premier, and the Quebec Liberal Party. As well, Mr. Charest said repeatedly when previously questioned about the allegations that it was important to let the commission do it's work. Yet, during the first day of testimony, Charest jumps the gun in an attempt to publicly undermine the credibility of the principal witness, which in my opinion is a lack of respect for due process and for the commission that he put in place.

The other thing to keep in mind is that Quebecers are much more concerned with the link between Quebec's construction industry and the financing of its political parties than this particular instance of influence peddling. Two Ministers were ousted from Charest's Cabinet for irregularities in the process of distributing contracts and licenses, and three other Ministers went on the public record to erroneously declare that companies could make donations to political parties. Finally, an engineering consortium was found to have participated in fraudulent practices with regard to making false declarations concerning donations made to Quebec's political parties.

Here in Quebec, we, the people, are like lobsters caught in a trap of a dysfunctional political system that forces us to decide whether we want to be governed by a party that regularly engages in practices that are an abuse of power or by the other that wants to have Quebec become an independent state. These are our political choices, forced to decide which is the least desirable of the two.

Faced with the choice of having to buy a car from either one, I opt for my bike.

The Westminster Parliamentary System Is Showing Its Age

2010-08-22T13:53:00.000-04:00

Hung parliaments have become the norm in the UK, Canada, and now in Australia, which should give cause for concern. In short, it now appears that as a system of governance, the Westminster system can no longer furnish stable, single party, majority governments, which raises the question: why are we hanging onto this political vestige of the British Empire?

Essentially, by using a single member plurality electoral method for electing representatives in the lower house, Westminster is an adversarial system that gives strong institutional incentives to vote for either of two parties that can offer a government option because only the votes that establish a plurality within an electoral district are effective. All other votes, often more than 50 percent of the total votes cast, are simply discarded. Consequently, electors who may prefer a smaller party with little are no chance of forming a government are encouraged to cast their vote for the "lesser of the two evils."

Regardless of Westminster's systemic design, voters are rejecting the notion of being channeled towards two voting options, and it is this emerging pattern that renders the system obsolete. Simply put, Westminster is not designed for coalition governments. Yet, in each of the last elections in UK, Canada, and Australia, voters have collectively refused to give a single party a majority of seats, which is significant since the single member plurality voting method has a built in bias that has as an effect to manufacture majority governments for parties that have received less than 50 percent of the popular vote.

What we are witnessing is a splintering of the electorate. Over the years, sustained immigration combined with the decline of the influence of the mass media as a result of the rise of the Internet has multiplied the poles of attraction. No single party can capture the allegiance of enough voters to form a majority government.

In each of the three countries, a single party can no longer effectively advance a legislative agenda, which results in varying levels of stalemate. In the UK, a ruling coalition formed between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats; however, the price to pay was a referendum on the voting system that could make coalition government a permanent fixture. In Australia, both the Labour Party and the Liberal-National Party Coalition will attempt to form a majority with the single Green and the four other Independents in the lower House, while the Greens hold the balance of power in the Senate. Finally, in Canada, the Conservatives cling to a single party minority government, having had to prorogue Parliament in order to avoid a non-confidence vote that would have toppled the government in favor of a coalition between the Liberals, the New Democrats and the Bloc Quebecois.

Given that single party majorities are rapidly giving way to coalition governments and the current economic situation demands a coherent, stable government to enable states to adapt to the changing conditions in the global economic order, nations governed by the Westminster system are in dire need of revamping their political systems. Unfortunately, the political parties that are used to forming majority governments are slow to accept the fact that their political reality has changed, and, in the meantime, the electorate is held hostage by those who steadfastly refuse to move ahead with systemic change.

Putting the Cart Before the Horse: the Economy Before Public Health

2010-08-17T19:23:00.000-04:00

We often hear politicians say that it's all about the economy. Well, it's not. In fact, recent developments show that the excessive pursuit of economic growth has a negative effect upon the health of the population by promoting increased levels of inequality.

Everyday we are bombarded by news concerning how the economy is performing and how the financial markets are responding. Yet, scant attention is paid to the fact that for the average person real wages (taking inflation into consideration) have stagnated for the last 25 years. As well, despite its daily gyrations, the Dow Jones has hovered around 10,000 points for the last ten years, meaning that for the average investor the buy and hold strategy has been a losing proposition

In reality, measuring and managing the economy is all smoke and mirrors for the benefit of the super rich, the top one tenth of the top one percent of the nation's wealthiest.

All the boats definitely don't rise on the same tide. The trillion dollar transfer of wealth from the lower, middle and upper classes to the super rich as result of the bailout of the financial industry bears this out. CEOs within the financial industry continue to receive their multi-million dollar bonuses while millions of formerly employed workers exhaust their unemployment benefits to face a perilous future and, at the same time, miraculously disappear from unemployment statistics so not to disturb the rosy picture those who are supposed to be managing the economy would have us believe.

Even Paul Krugman, the left-of-center nobel prize winning economist, has fallen into the trap of criticizing US economic policy that would have the US fall at its peril into the Japanese syndrome of protracted anemic economic growth. In a brilliant rebuttal, Steven Hill of the Guardian points out:

Japan has been getting a raw deal from the so-called economic experts. Consider this: in the midst of the great recession, the United States is suffering through nearly 10% unemployment, rising inequality and poverty, 47 million people without health insurance, declining retirement prospects for the middle class and a general increase in economic insecurity. Various European nations also are having their difficulties, and no one knows if China is the next bubble due to explode.

How, then, should we regard a country that has 5% unemployment, the lowest income inequality, healthcare for all its people and is one of the world's leading exporters? This country also scores high on life expectancy, low on infant mortality, is at the top in numeracy and literacy, and is low on crime, incarceration, homicides, mental illness and drug abuse. It also has a low rate of carbon emissions, doing its part to reduce global warming. In all these categories, this particular country beats both the US and China by a country mile.

As we can see, higher levels of economic growth do not necessarily bring about an improved quality of life for the majority of people. How the wealth is distributed has a huge impact on the health of population. Consequently, narrowing the public's focus to a single measure, GDP growth, is extremely misleading. Quality of life is measured better by other indicators, the social determinants of health, and in the case of Japan and in other countries where material wealth is distributed more equitably, these nations score much higher on the indicators of public health.

Indeed, sustained annual economic growth of more than 3 percent inflates the value of assets to such a degree that recessions are inevitable, thereby creating opportunities for significant speculative financial gain both on the up and down swing, much to the chagrin of those in the labour market. Such movement creates wealth in the zombie economy at the expense of the value created in the real economy. As a result, income disparities widen within the society, which research demonstrates has a negative effect on the social determinants of health.

So, perhaps a lost decade could bring about some significant improvements to the overall well-being of the population. If there is no or little growth, people no longer subscribe to the believe that because the economic pie is getting bigger, we don't need to look at issues of wealth distribution. On the contrary, sustained periods of no or little economic growth create the political climate from which progressive legislation can be enacted. Furthermore, reduced economic activity also brings with it reduction in levels of green house gases from which everyone gains.

Yes, we need to recalibrate the economy. It's time it served the well-being of the majority of the population instead of increasing the wealth of a privileged few.

You Can't Get There From Here

2010-08-11T16:18:00.000-04:00

The "there" that I am referring to is the magic number of 350 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This is the level of CO2 necessary to stabilize the climate change brought on by human activity, in particular the burning of fossil fuels, since the onset of the industrial revolution.

Problem is that we are already approaching 390 ppm with no signs of abatement on the horizon. Should we begin to prepare for the worst? I think so since it is highly unlikely that humanity will be able to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Essentially, we are playing out a cultural set of instructions that took hold in Europe during the Protestant Reformation, subsequently exported to the new world, and then transferred to Asia so that it has become the dominant global paradigm and carries with it the seeds of our own destruction.

At the heart of this cultural imperative is the sanctity of the individual and the belief that the unrelenting pursuit of self interest will lead to the advancement of the common good. This mindset may have made sense during the seventeenth century when there were less than a billion humans on the planet, but it makes absolutely no sense now that we have passed six billion and look to peak at eight billion, if we don't experience a massive die off beforehand.

Indeed, that might be nature's way to deal with our exponential population growth, 400% during the last century alone. Humans, like ancient bacteria, exploit their primary energy source, fossil fuels, until they alter their environment in such a way as to kill off the vast majority of their numbers, leaving behind a successive species better adapted to survive in the new environment.

Maybe that's what it takes to purge humanity from its folly, the idea that isolated individuals can remain unrestrained by the constants imposed by the physical limits to growth.

Until then, we can expect to witness autonomous nation-states spouting the need to come to agreement on how to curb GHG emissions all the while being unable to overcome the struggle between self interest groups within their borders so that the problem is never adequately addressed. At the same time the soft power of the US continues to expand and the number of people from developing countries imitating American consumption patterns grows, carrying with it disastrous consequences.

In some ways, the collapse of the financial markets and the ensuing Great Recession provide a model of what lies ahead but on a smaller scale. Failure to provide adequate regulation to those recklessly advancing their self interest brings about systemic failure, where the the negative consequences fall heaviest on the most vulnerable.

Likewise, climate change has already begun to impact substantially on those with limited means: pensioners in Moscow and the rural inhabitants in Pakistan, India, and China. Unfortunately, there is no bailout for climate change and by the time cataclysmic flooding wipes out New York and London, it will be too late. Dynamic Forces beyond our control will have been put into motion and the fate of humanity will be out of our hands.

Sounds like Armageddon to me, but the really scary part is that what should be a fate that humanity would like to avoid is actually a desired end-of-days scenario for a great many in the USA, the most powerful and influential nation in the world. Incredibly, there is still a great number of Americans who believe that life on the planet is but a point of departure for the life in the hear after. From their perspective, the sooner we get to make our maker, the better. That's if there were a maker to be met, but that wouldn't occur to them from within the confines of their belief system.

So, in a nutshell, a cluster of beliefs from seventeenth century Europe have found extremely fertile soil in North America, taken hold of a critical mass of the population, and made them impervious to the assaults of reason. Deluded to the point that they think their unsustainable lifestyle is their god-given right, they are more than willing to lead the rest of humanity to a bitter end.

350 ppm? Fat fricken chance.

Quebec's Pathetic Electoral System Part II: The Farce Continues

2010-08-07T14:37:00.001-04:00

This is no way to deal with illegal political contributions.
Just what does the chief electoral officer do with the $27 million he gets every year? Don MacPherson, THE GAZETTE, August 7, 2010

Another revelation this week concerning an engineering consortium engaged in electoral fraud and influence peddling made it into the news. This time, thanks to Quebec Solidaire's (QS) sole elected deputy Amir Khadir and a group of QS volunteers, it was confirmed by Quebec's Director of Elections that the Axor group had repeatedly used the names of its employees to make illegal donations to Quebec's three major political parties, the lion's share going to the governing Quebec Liberal Party.

The question that remains is whether this is an isolated case or the tip of the iceberg?

I got a laugh when then Minister responsible for the reform of Quebec's democratic institutions, Claude Bechard, appeared on television to do some serious damage control. For months now, the Liberals have been refusing to hold a public inquiry into links with province's construction industry and the financing of political parties. He denied that the problem was systemic, only an isolated case that did not reflect on the political parties, which of course raises the question that if this were true, why has the government tabled legislation to penalize companies who make illegal contributions.

Moreover, in what appears to be Premier Jean Charest's complete disdain for the intelligence of the population, we have Minister Bechard, charged with responsibility of ensuring the democratic nature of Quebec's political institutions, trying to reassure the population, yet this is the same Minister who has tabled another piece of legislation that would prevent the electoral map from being redrawn according to the democratic principle of one person, one vote, in order to prevent his own electoral district from disappearing. Talk about a conflict of interest.

As for the Director General of Elections, Marcel Blanchet, has this guy completely sold out? Where is the leadership? His office keeps saying that it is difficult to establish whether individuals are respecting the electoral law, yet a small group of volunteers backed by a very small research budget can uncover a major instance of fraud. Too bad, he doesn't utilize more of his department's resources to protect Quebec's democratic institutions.

But maybe that's why he hangs on to his job and doesn't do the honorable thing and resign like the Chief of Statistics Canada, Munir Sheikh, who had the courage of his convictions not to go along with what he felt to be an unacceptable compromise of the integrity of the institution he headed.

Perhaps, Mr. Blanchet is not really a democrat. Cutting a deal with Axor so that the group would only have to pay a fine and not have the details about how the illegal acts were committed made public suggests that his institution is also engaged in damage control and lends credence to Quebec's former Minister of Justice Marc Bellemare's refusal to appear before the Director General of Elections concerning his allegations of wide spread influence peddling within the Liberal government.

Things are starting to heat up during the dog days of summer. It's going to be very interesting once the fall rolls around. Unfortunately, it has already taken on the appearance of a farce, with the three stooges, Charest, Blanchet, and Bechard, leading the way.

The Limits of Political Messaging

2010-08-04T16:20:00.000-04:00

In politics, when reason and emotion collide, emotion invariably wins. Although the marketplace of ideas is a great place to shop for policies, the marketplace that matters most in politics is the marketplace of emotions.

Drew Westen, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation

In trying to understand why is it that climate change legislation is not gaining any traction among our elected officials, we run smack against the limits of political messaging.

From a rational perspective the case has been made. The data clearly shows the link between human activity and the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere, which in turn has led to an increase in global temperatures. Moreover, economic analysis shows that it is preferable to incur the short-term costs associated with the transition to a low carbon economy than the monumental costs associated with catastrophic climate change. However, the gratuitous dumping of green house gases into the atmosphere in North America remains unabated.

The problem is that the deniers can easily illicit an emotional response from a sufficient percentage of the electorate so that they can avoid taking action. In short, the deniers work diligently to cloud the issue so that their supporters will look to them for direction. Thereafter, they use the usual rhetorical slogans of bad for the economy and big government messing with free enterprise to communicate to their electorate that they should oppose any measures to address climate change, knowing that given the choice between accepting the validity of the disconcerting data that opposes the views expressed by the conservative clan's leaders and remaining within the fold, their followers will opt for the latter option.

Essentially, the emotional affiliation to the group that individuals attach their identity is so strong that the individuals in question will bend over backwards to rationalize away any cognitive dissonance that may cause them discomfort. As a result, the rational arguments from those outside the group fail to penetrate the individual and the group's psyche.

What emerges in the political arena is two opposing camps engaged in an adversarial contest for control of the middle. Traditionally, this has involved trying to swing the independents to one or the either side. Lately, this contest has sunk to the level of heaping as much abuse on the other side as possible with the goal of reducing the level of voter participation so that the contest becomes one of who can better mobilize their already established electorate to show up to the polls.

In this context, any advantage to be gained through the manipulation of the electoral system is extremely important. Consequently, laws concerning financial contributions to political parties and the manner in which votes are transformed into seats in the legislature becomes the new ideological battleground. Unfortunately, it lies with the courts to decide how the political game will be played and as a result we move further away from democracy and closer to a juristocracy.

In Greed We Trust, Markets Are For Chumps

2010-07-31T11:22:00.000-04:00

Why do so many people put their faith in market solutions when push comes to shove even the staunchest proponents, those in the financial sector, rely on the public sector to bail out their sorry asses?

Well, for one, discussions and negotiations are a lot less emotionally charged when we are focused on the machinations of the market instead of having to face up to the fact that we are engaging a group of greedy bastards who don't give a rat's ass about the consequences of their actions or inactions upon anything else than their bottom line.

It's all way too polite for me and shows an incredible naivety with regard to the motivations of those who seek to profit from the free market discourse. When it works in their favor, let us all adhere to the gospel of Milton Friedman and his disciples, when it doesn't, we're all Keynesians now.

When it comes to climate change legislation, forget the cap and trade market-based solution no matter what economic theory may say because the other side ain't buying it.

When facing a zero-sum situation, we shouldn't engage in magical thinking guided by the belief that we are going to find a win-win solution. In this case, take the stick over the carrot.

Indeed, the recent failure to secure meaningful climate change legislation is the latest instance of a myth of Sisyphus situation where the environmentalists are trying to roll a huge boulder up a steep political incline - we're not playing on a level field.

Given the unlikely eventuality of achieving meaningful results within the existing political frameworks, environmentalists should now shift their focus to the courts, politics by other means, and do so on two fronts: environmental issues and democratic reform.

One day the good fight may be taken to the political arena but not in the immediate future.

Democracy Undone: The US Senate Scuttles Climate Change Legislation

2010-07-25T15:22:00.000-04:00

Say good-bye to cap and trade. Once again a group of rich middle-aged white guys effectively veto climate change legislation already adopted by the House of Representatives that would have put a price on carbon emissions. Once again, the deny-and-delay faction chalks up another victory at the expense of everyone else on the planet.

What irks me - above and beyond that Canada is now off the hook to adopt any meaningful legislation to reduce its own CO2 emissions - is the way that it was done.

On one hand, there is the American President, elected by a majority of the popular vote and a majority of the electoral college and the democratically apportioned House of Representatives that support the principle of cap and trade and, on the other hand, there is the malapportioned Senate (each state elects two senators, which means that a voter in Wyoming has seventy times the voting power than a voter in California) that prevents the proposed legislation from coming into force. Taking into consideration that it requires a supra majority of 60 percent to adopt a bill in the Senate, it takes as little as the votes from the states representing 12 percent of the population to block any legislation from passing.

This state of affairs flies in the face of the principle of one person, one vote upheld by the US Supreme Court in Reynolds vs. Sims. Indeed, the Supreme Court has repeatedly struck down state legislation that deviated from the core democratic value of electoral equality. Yet, the inherently undemocratic composition of US Senate remains.

So what gives?

How is it that given we are most likely at a critical juncture of human history that the most influential nation in the world can experience a systemic failure of its democratic institutions and, as a result, jeopardize the long-term well being of the rest of the planet's inhabitants?

Simply put, the probability of catastrophic climate change increases as a consequence of the refusal of the North American English settler states, the US and Canada, to make a break with their colonial past and to fully embrace democracy.

At the heart of the problem is the bicameral Congress in the US and Parliament in Canada. They are both modeled on the British Parliament, which is comprised of the House of Lords and the House of Commons and has a long history of resisting democratic principles: an antiquated voting system, dubious electoral districts, and an unelected upper house that has wielded inordinate political power over the elected lower house. It is this latter feature that the former British colonies retained that allows the US and Canada to circumvent the democratic will of the people.

Although there are significant differences between the American and Canadian Senates, both institutions place significant limits on the democratic aspirations of their respective populations. Most notably, since any proposed legislation in either country must gain approval in the Senate, each body effectively grants a veto to its nation's upper class. In North America a monied aristocracy finds its political leverage in a democratically compromised upper house much in the same way the British hereditary aristocracy exerted its control over the lower classes.

The most important limit concerns the rules from which the economic game is played. Any legislation that proposes a qualitative change to the way money is made is unlikely to pass in the Senate since the monied class has a vested interest in maintaing a status quo that has proven to be very beneficial to its economic well being.

Let's make no mistake. Effective climate change legislation disrupts the status quo and will change the distribution of wealth, and this is the real reason why such legislation will never make it through either upper house.

All the talk about the negative effect on the economy is just a smokescreen for protecting established fortunes and societal status of an existing elite. Indeed, a retooling towards a low carbon economy makes sense both in the short term (millions of jobs and increased expenditures) and the long term (it's cheaper to incur the preventative measures than the economic costs of catastrophic climate change). However, since no one can predict who will come out on top if such game changing legislation were ever enacted - there are always winners and losers as a result of fundamental change - the status quo remains.

I've always wondered who was the bozo that in the distant past cut down the last standing tree on Easter Island. After seeing how the Senates in both Canada and the US have killed climate change legislation, he was probably the Easter Island equivalent of a senator, using an ax furnished by the members of the ruling class.

(To learn more about how the Canadian Senate is in the process of scuttling climate change legislation, see my blog post: The Curious Case of Bill C-311)

Thanks George W. For Reducing America's GHG Emissions by Seven Percent

2010-07-17T10:56:00.003-04:00

While we're at it, we should thank him for reducing the green house gas (GHG) emissions for the entire OECD in 2009 as well. Hell, if it weren't for India and China, global emissions would be down. According to the latest research, the drop in emissions in the OECD was entirely offset by the rise in the Asian giants. Too bad they aren't in our economic sphere.

At first it may seem strange to associate the name of George W. Bush with environmentally friendly economic policies. It's certainly a case of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. The former American President was loathe to enact any environmentally progressive legislation for fear that it would hurt the economy.

Ironically, it was his unwavering belief in free market economics that paved the way for the onset of the Great Recession and the subsequent decline in economic activity that accounts for the drop in GHG emissions. Perversely, by pursuing the politics of maximizing economic growth at the expense of environmental degradation, the Bush regime actually plunged the developed world into recession and applied the brakes to the underlying cause of global warming: high-carbon economic activity. Talk about unintended consequences.

This raises a fundamental question: could the equivalent reductions in GHGs have been obtained in an intentional manner? I think not. Our ideological commitment to ever increasing economic growth would not allow us to reduce economic activity. As a result,
although we may have reduced the energy intensity of each unit of GDP, overall emissions would have continued to rise.

So, what lies in store for us as we live through what will probably be the hottest year on the planet since records have been kept?

There is the possibility that we will have more of the same. In the Anglo-American sphere, economic policy is moving toward imposing austerity measures in Canada, the UK, and the United States. This could spell economic disaster for the champions of economic growth. As the Nobel Prize winning economist, Paul Krugman, has pointed out, cutting public expenditures while the economy has yet to recover and record levels of unemployment still exist might have the effect of tipping the global economy into a protracted depression.

From an mainstream economic view, this scenario represents an unmitigated disaster. However, from the perspective of the planet, a lengthy period of slow or no economic growth could effectively cap the levels of GHG emissions while allowing us to retool for a low carbon economy. In fact, last year was the second consecutive year in which investments in the development of renewable energy sources outstripped the investments in the development of fossil fuel resources in the US and the EU. If these two trends continue, a scenario could arise in which the return to economic growth could be accompanied by a reduction of GHG emissions as more of the renewables come on line.

Perhaps, unbeknownst to the proponents of neoconservative economics, they could put into place further economic policies that would have the perverse effect of being beneficial to the environment.

Maybe, the invisible hand is connected to a being that has an ironic sense of humor.

Slaying the Deficit: Target the Innocent Victims or the Culprits?

2010-07-08T16:04:00.001-04:00

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the economists."

(Modern adaptation of Henry VI, part 2)

These are trying times for politicians who rely on the advice of economists. Now that the collapse of the financial markets has been averted, at great cost to the public purse, what do we do about the mountains of debt?

There are basically two schools of thought: implement austerity measures to reduce public spending or continue deficit spending to promote economic recovery and once this has been achieved, pay down the debt.

How you respond to this dilemma probably indicates whether you are on the right or the left of the political center. Those on the right prefer austerity measures while those on the left opt for continued deficit spending.

Unfortunately, economics (the dismal science) has little in the way of predictive capabilities, as born out by the massive failure of the vast majority of economists to predict the onset of the Great Recession. This raises the fundamental question, how are we to choose between the two aforementioned options if we cannot be certain of their effects upon the economy?

This is where the economy becomes political. In fact, given the level of uncertainty, this choice is entirely political, a question of with whom do your interests lie.

One thing that we must remember is how we got into this fine mess.

Lest we forget, the principal cause of the Great Recession was the unregulated trading of debt securities. Trillions of dollars from the public sector were then used to forestay a collapse of the financial sector and a subsequent economic disaster in the global economy.

So, who should pick up the tab to set things right, the innocent victims or the culprits?

Indeed, why should those who use public services be asked to bear the brunt of the economic and social costs of the malfeasance and the sector which is largely responsible for this disconcerting state of affairs should get off scot free?

In order to reduce the deficit, cutbacks to social services represent only one option. A second option is to maintain current expenditures and to raise revenues, in particular, a financial transaction tax that would in effect recoup the monies spent to prop up the financial sector and to decrease the possibility that speculative trading would again disrupt the lives of those who toil in the real economy.

Economic prognostications are just a smokescreen for the more fundamental question of whose ox is going to be gored.

For example, in the UK, the government just announced the annulation of a billion dollar expenditure to refurbish their aging public schools and in the United States, elected federal politicians just left for vacation while approximately 3 million unemployed workers were to see their benefits expire. Have a nice summer.

So, which path is Canada going to take? The last budget had a wait and see approach that given the circumstances, I thought was appropriate. In my opinion, the next budget should trigger a federal election since it will entail some very fundamental political choices that await.

This would be a good time to have an electoral system which would bring about a democratic result.

The Curious Case of Bill C-311

2010-07-04T18:00:00.002-04:00

We all have our prejudices, so before I begin, I will share mine. I am an ardent believer in the necessity of reducing global green house gas (GHG) emissions. The scientific evidence cannot be ignored. Severe climate change is occurring and it is being brought about by human activity.

Even if the validity of this premise is uncertain, from a risk management perspective, it is by far more prudent to incur the economic costs of moving towards a low carbon economy than to risk the catastrophic consequences of significant global warming.

Bill C-311 imposes the required limits on Canada's GHG emissions: 25 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050. The Bill was adopted by a majority vote in the House of Commons and is now stalled in the Senate.

Before it can become the law of the land, it needs to be passed by the upper house. However, it is expected that by November the Conservatives will have a majority in the Senate and, as a result, will be able to kill Bill C-311.

This state of affairs is extremely curious.

How is it that a bill adopted by the majority of the elected members of the House of Commons can be thwarted by the majority of an unelected Senate, especially when the recent appointments to the Senate are made by a Prime Minister of a minority government, one that has the support of only 23% of the electorate?

In this case, the Senate would not be acting as an instance of sober second thought; it would be acting in a manner diametrically opposed to the fundamental values of a free and democratic society.

Let us be clear. This is game changing legislation. If adopted, we would have to restructure our economy and the consequences of doing so are unknown.

The million dollar question is who decides?

Are we a democratic nation or are we still an English settler state in which an electoral system and constitutional convention allow a minority of the population to impose its will upon the majority?

If we are democratic, this situation demands an appropriate response to change our political institutions. An unelected body cannot be empowered to overturn the decisions of an elected majority, more so when the members of this body are appointed in a manner that reflects our pre-democratic colonial past.

Presently, Canada has a Prime Minister that favors an elected Senate, and if politics is the art of the possible, a possible solution to our democratic anomaly is to push for an elected Senate that uses a proportional voting method. This would be in keeping with our Commonwealth cousin, Australia, and wouldn't require any constitutional amendments.

As well, if it's still necessary to seek out the approbation of the mother of all Parliaments in Westminster, the coalition government in the UK has announced its intentions to undergo a modernization process that includes a referendum on the voting system for its House of Commons, a redrawing of the electoral map, and the possibility of holding elections for its upper house, the House of Lords.

It's time Canada leapt into the twenty-first century and addressed its democratic short comings instead of continuing to be a laggard with respect to the evolution of its system of governance.

The Big Sleep: The Quiet Revolt of the Quebec Middle Class

2010-06-28T18:44:00.002-04:00

I am a late arrival to the middle class. In fact, I've just arrived, so I am well placed to make some observations about how life is different here in the land of affordable luxury.

The reason I arrived late is that making money was never that important to me, but once I made that decision - it was payback time for the years of having someone else picking up more than her fair share of the tab - I have come to realize why the struggle to advance the common good is so difficult: those who have the capacity to make significant social contributions to society have opted out. With comfort comes indifference.

For someone who comes from a working class background in Winnipeg and went to the University of Manitoba, a university that will never make it to the top of the list of Canada's most prestigious post-secondary institutions since it strives to make a higher education universally accessible, it's easy to see that here in the land of skinny lattes and crossover SUVs hardly anyone gives a damn about the deteriorating quality of Quebec's public services.

Why would you if you can cherry pick? Leave it to the plebes to send their kids to public high schools where the drop out rates are around 40%, and leave it to the plebes to wait more than 24 hours to see a doctor at the emergency ward of a hospital since they don't have access to a family physician.

Of course, the rich don't use public services. We know that. But what is relatively new in Quebec is that the state actually encourages the middle class to make use of those publicly-funded services when they see fit and to become members of the petit bourgeoisie when it's to their advantage.

It starts with the publicly-funded daycare at $7 a day. It doesn't matter if you have a family revenue of $50k or $200k, the tariff doesn't vary, and the same rate applies for the before and after school supervision per day and for full-day supervision during professional development days while your child attends elementary school. Those of us with the means could pay more, but that would leave us with less disposable income.

The lack of progressive tariffs for social services constitutes a huge financial incentive towards establishing two income, two car families living in the burbs, where couples manage their small to medium enterprises (in French they are referred to as PMEs), which were previously called households, or in some cases, families. Essentially, the Quebec government subsidizes the middle class lifestyle.

For instance, once your children are ready for high school - and heaven forbid you send them to a crappy public school where every year the number of teachers without teaching certificates is on the rise - the state is there to pick up approximately 60% of the tuition fees. So, for about $3000 a year, you can send your child to a school where the chances of finishing secondary school within five years jump from approximately 50% to 98% as a result of the superior pedagogical program. This is a very sweet deal.

Thereafter, your children can then attend college in Quebec, which is a combination of community college and undergraduate university courses, for only a nominal fee. Then, university awaits with the lowest tuition fees to be found in North America.

With regard to health care, to make the system work for them, members of the middle class pay to get their diagnostics done in the private sector and then obtain the appropriate referral to the public system to have the medical service performed at a bargain rate. In the meantime, those with more limited means sweat it out waiting for their diagnostic examinations before receiving medical interventions.

Some would say that the presence of such affordable social services is the mark of a progressive society. Yet, something remarkable has changed in Quebec: the solidarity between the working class and the middle class that made the social gains brought on by the Quiet Revolution possible no longer exists.

Throughout the middle class, the triumph of individualism has occurred, and those who have the comforts as a result of having two professional incomes no longer are in the struggle to maintain the quality of public services. Instead, they have retreated to their enclaves, releasing their stress in the omnipresent above-ground swimming pools and hot tubs, while remaining more and more disengaged from the less well off. In short, the game has changed. Social causes have become a faded memory of a boomer past, and now when people march, more often than not, it's in support of the fight against cancer, the plague that respects no social boundaries.

The retreat from the social sphere in Quebec is best demonstrated by the precipitous drop in political activity. In ten years, the participation rate during provincial elections has dropped by 25%. Moreover, the number of electors who are members of political parties now resides at approximately 110,000 in an electorate of 5,400,000, about two percent - hardly a hot bed of democracy. This is a far cry from the 1995 referendum, which fell just 50,000 votes of having Quebec separate from Canada.

Today, it appears that the state's primary function is to be the port of entry into the middle class. More than 500,000 are employed in the public sector and salary scales have become much more important than the quality of government or the quality of public services. For example, Quebec's population is faced with a scandal-ridden government that refuses to hold a public inquiry into the connection between the construction industry and the financing of political parties in direct opposition to overwhelming public opinion. Elsewhere, this refusal would have been met with concerted action from the unions, leading to a series of public sector strikes in order to force the government's hand. Not here. Not now.

Two of the three major unions were in the process of negotiating their public sector collective agreements and third would have been part of the focus in a public inquiry looking at the construction industry. In other words, organized labour, which constitutes about 40% of the workforce, chose to cast a blind eye towards the legitimacy of Quebec's democratic institutions.

In a similar vein, there was an eerie silence in Quebec when it was announced in the last budget that there would be the equivalent of a $200 poll tax to raise monies for the health care system with an additional $25 charge per visit to consult a physician.

Without question this is a fiscal measure that drives a wedge between the middle and working class. For an upper middle class family, the $200 surcharge is the equivalent of the cost of a top-of-the-line hockey stick for junior, while for the working poor it may mean going without the essentials. Similarly, a $25 charge to see a doctor would not deter a middle class family from seeking an appointment, not so for someone with limited means.

The absence of a strong, vocal response to these regressive measures demonstrates the changes in Quebec since the days of the Quiet Revolution. The notion of creating an independent social democratic state is dead. Sovereignty has become an identity marker rather than a viable political option. Even the former Quebec Premier, Lucien Bouchard, publicly declares himself to be sovereignist while admitting that the movement is at a standstill.

It is as if Quebec, having failed at making the radical move of declaring independence, has lost interest in anything political, and when nothing stirs the passions, a great number will settle for material comfort. Politically speaking, les Quebecois have lost their collective mojo.

Yes, the culture and the language are alive and doing well, but other than the linguistic differences, there seems to be the boring North American sameness throughout Quebec. People here are in the same process of amusing themselves to death, only the cultural icons are different.

Canada Has Yet to Atone for It's Immoral Treatment of the First Nations

2010-06-20T15:21:00.002-04:00

As you are probably aware, this week marked a time of reconciliation between Canada and it's First Nations Peoples. At issue was the systemic government-sponsored abuse that was perpetrated against indigenous children by taking them away from their families, placing them in a residential school setting, where they were often subject to verbal, physical, and sexual abuse.

The federal government has apologized for the role that it played (for the record, the articles of the Indian Act that empower the government to behave so cruelly are still on the books), but in my opinion saying you are sorry doesn't go far enough in order to make things right.

What is required is that as a nation, we come clean with the magnitude of the abuse we have inflicted upon the First Nations and the precious little we have done to fix the problem.

No, we can't turn back the clock and erase the sins committed by this nation's forefathers, but we can own up to the fact that we as a people radically disposed the indigenous peoples of their land, ignoring for the most part the treaties that were signed and even the principles of our common law which holds that aboriginal title was never extinguished since it requires an act of Parliament with an explicit intention to do so.

Essentially, we pushed them off their land, forced them to live on reserves and administered a legal framework that treats aboriginal peoples as if they were subhuman. Case in point, the residential school system. Imagine, if you will, the international out cry if similar methods were imposed upon a white European ethnic minority. Without question, there would be mention of crimes against humanity, but in the context of the English settler states, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the US, the ill treatment of the indigenous peoples is thought of as the unfortunate outcomes of colonial expansion into virgin territory.

As could be expected, the four above-mentioned settler states rejected the adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples although Australia subsequently endorsed the declaration and New Zealand recently announced its intention to do so as well. That leaves the US and Canada as the only hold outs, much to the chagrin of the international community.

Canada's official position is to assert that we cannot sign the declaration because of our constitutional framework. How convenient. If we were serious about facing the unpleasant facts entrenched in our collective past, we would move beyond this institutional inertia and do what it takes to bring about a substantive and equitable reconciliation with the peoples we have oppressed for four hundred years.

For that to happen, we need to bury the two founding peoples myth and face up to the fact that we are a people comprised of successive waves of immigrants that have settled and occupied other peoples' lands.

In my mind, if Canada is ever going to evolve into a modern state of the 21st century, we will need to be honest with regard to how we got here and put aside the collective amnesia that we have found to be far too comfortable.

Obama Battles the Bonehead Factor in the US Big Time

2010-06-17T15:43:00.000-04:00

There are times when the bonehead factor in the US goes way off the scale. Having watched Obama's speech from the oval office and the following media reaction, I couldn't get over how much time is given to some really bonehead debate.

First, why do Americans think that the best way of fixing a problem is to declare war upon it? War on drugs. War on terror. Now, the war on the hole in the bottom of the ocean.

On CNN's Anderson Cooper 360, they actually discuss: "if this were a war, would we be winning?", and they are serious when they use military metaphors. I guess they were disappointed that Obama didn't give them a "we shall fight them on the beaches" speech.

Second, where do people come off cursing against the six-month moratorium on deep sea drilling? Holy moly Batman, don't they notice that the hole left over from where the Deepwater Horizon rig used to be is gushing out 60,000 barrels a day and that the emergency response plans from the other major oil companies all include plans to protect the walruses in the Gulf?

Dat don't matter. Drill, baby, drill. Whose you daddy!

Third, what's with all this paranoia with big government? I guess size is important for a lot of Americans and it appears that for many it's better to have a small one.

Don't they realize that size doesn't matter? Everyone knows that what counts is what you do with government and in this case it means having the proper regulatory framework so this shit doesn't go down. Didn't they learn anything from the collapse of the financial markets and getting tapped for a trillion dollar buy out?

Finally, Americans have to get over the belief that if declaring war on the problem doesn't work, technology will come to their rescue. It's as if everybody is extremely pissed off that Obama doesn't slip into some type of Iron Man web suit, dive down to the bottom of the sea and plug that damn hole with a giant stopper, kicking some serious BP ass while he's at it.

Fortunately, the President is a smart guy. He gets it. The era of cheap oil is over and the US needs to kick it's addiction to fossil fuels.

In conclusion, the situation is totally BP, beyond politics, and Americans are going to have to change their ways, no matter what the boneheads would have us believe.

Canada the Last Outpost of the Klingon Empire

2010-06-13T12:47:00.002-04:00

There is an interesting discussion going on in our colony. It appears that some would have us submit ourselves to the majority rule of the weaklings, those who did not win the sacred Klingon contest of winning the most electoral battles during the electoral wars.

Yes, these battles are hard fought on the ground and in the airwaves, and with the splintering of the tribes, no clear cut victory can be obtained. But that should not lead us to abandon our ways. Never mind what has happened in our homeland, where an unholy alliance has been struck between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, in which the strongest tribe must listen and act upon the demands of a much weaker tribe. It as if a plague has struck the homeland and feverish thoughts of ceding to the will of the majority has taken hold on the population, but this will pass and the rule of the strong man will return.

Remember the holy words, "losers don't get to form coalitions." If we were to let the losers make their unholy pacts, the strongman will lose his place and our guiding vision, our strong hand upon the tiller, will be no more. We will be reduced to having to listen to reason and to entertain compromise. No more will we be able to have our way by a show of force and bluster.

Yes, these are troubled times. The members of the Red and Orange tribes are already scheming against us. They talk openly about forming an alliance, but fortunately we can count on the leader of the Red tribe not to give in to the weaklings. His Klingon blood runs strong. He shares our lust for power and our need to dominate and control.

I know that some of you have heard the talk of abandoning the electoral battles altogether. There are some who believe that the winner of the electoral battle should not get all the spoils of victory. Imagine, they would have us count every vote, even those from the loser tribes, and enter them into a magical formula that would tell us who would and who would not sit in the great hall under the gaze of the great chief.

This will never pass as long as we can retain our dominance in the airwaves. As I speak, those who have our desire for riches strong in their hearts are coming together and will take to the airwaves and will denounce every unholy utterance, every abomination against the rule of the strong man and will fight until their dying breath to make sure that power is never shared and that we will always have our will obeyed.

This land is ours. We conquered it first and we will never let it be ruled by those who do not bow down to exalt the presence of a greater power.

argh`sffztckdul

(Klingon expression that when loosely translated means, please don't let me drown in my own bullshit)

Crimes Against the Planet

2010-06-06T19:35:00.002-04:00

There is something seriously wrong when a company like BP continues to pay multi-billion dollar dividends to its shareholders while millions of gallons of oil continue to flow into the Gulf of Mexico.

It is as though the oil spill that in reality is wreaking catastrophic environmental damage to the Gulf's ecosystems is simply a glitch in the company's cash flow. Nothing more, nothing less than an adjustment to the income statement.

Indeed, there is a tendency in the media to attempt to quantify everything: estimates of how much oil has escaped into the gulf, the economic loss to fishermen and to the tourist industry, and the size of the bill BP will be handed for the clean up costs, to mention just a few.

Yet, there is something much more fundamental at issue: when companies like BP are shown to have inflicted harm at this scale to natural ecosystems, charges should be laid against those who are responsible for having committed crimes against the planet.

This is a special category of crime similar in kind to the notion of crimes against humanity, which are are particularly odious offenses in that they constitute a serious attack on human dignity or grave humiliation or a degradation of one or more human beings. They are not isolated or sporadic events, but are part either of a government policy (although the perpetrators need not identify themselves with this policy) or of a wide practice of atrocities tolerated or condoned by a government or a de facto authority.

In this case, the odious offenses, the serious attacks, and degradation target many species and the underlying networks of relations from which the affected ecosystems emerge. These are not ordinary offenses and they should not be treated as such.

In fact, the perpetrators should be brought to trial in an international court beyond the protection of sovereign borders and without the limited liability afforded to corporations. If found guilty of crimes against the planet, justice should be met commensurate with the seriousness of the offense: top officials shall be jailed, corporate charters revoked, assists seized and sold off, and, when applicable, governments be held accountable for the absence of adequate regulatory frameworks.

Laissez-faire is dead.

The time has come to re-establish an order that no longer allows the violence perpetrated against the earth to continue unabated, Such atrocious behavior by individuals, corporations, and governments should no longer be tolerated.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

2010-06-03T21:11:00.003-04:00

Life is becoming far too complex. So much so, the complexity we create
brings about problems that we cannot solve. Things are out of control.

Take for example the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It's pretty
impressive to get a live video feed from the ocean floor, 5000 feet
below the surface. It gives me pause to wonder. How did they manage to
drill a well at such depths? How did they even know where to drill? I
guess some smart people can pull off some amazing feats.

Yet, the more fundamental question to ask is why are we even drilling
into the seabed to find and extract oil. This is where things become
complex.

In short, we have created a massive global economy that is predicated on
the availability of cheap oil. With regard to supply, the low hanging
fruit has been plucked off the tree, in this case conventional oil that
is easy to find and easy to extract - remember good old Jed Clampett
from the Beverly Hillbillies, "one day when he was shootin for some
food, and up through the ground came some bubblin crude, oil that is,
black gold, Texas tea.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkOGM6gHvao

Today, however, to keep up with the increasing global demand, we have to
go further and deeper, to the very limits of our technological capacity
in order to bring new oil reserves to market, and if something goes
wrong, we'll simply fix it.

Well, so we thought until we realized that plugging a hole in the seabed
quickly, where the pressure is about a ton per square inch, is extremely
difficult. In fact, as it turns out, it is beyond our technological
capacity.

It would appear that if we connect the dots, the picture that emerges
tells us that we need to kick our addiction to fossil fuels and power
down the economy towards a more human scale using more renewable energy
sources in the process.

Unfortunately for the planet, a small financial elite, less than
one tenth of one percent, has gained its fortune by ramping up production
of consumer goods to unsustainable levels while drawing down on our
non-renewable resources. This same elite is as addicted to material wealth
as is the rest of the population is to cheap oil and they are the ones
that hold the reins of power.

Faced with the choice between more modest returns on their investments
and greater financial gain as a result of engaging in higher risk
behavior, they opt for the latter and impose the cost of their repeated
failures on the rest of the society.

The collapse of the financial sector is another case in point. No
longer content with reaping financial reward the old fashioned way,
dividends payed out on retained earnings, financiers were able to
convince our political leaders that the best way to economic growth was
along the path of greater securitization, which means a greater capacity
to peddle speculative financial products and to earn higher fees on each
transaction. As a result, trillions of dollars of financial derivatives
were being traded until the house of cards came tumbling down when it
became apparent that much of the debt obligations that had been sold
were worthless. According to the risk management schemes that were
employed to sell the securities, a sudden market crash was extremely
unlikely, once in a billion years, and hundreds of thousands of
individual and institutional investors let themselves be bilked as they
went along buying and selling debt obligations that were too complex to
understand, being guided by dubious investment strategies that were too
good to be true.

That the global economy was plunged into a world-wide recession was an
unfortunate affair, especially for those without fortunes.

Upon reflection, I think that we need to own up to the fact that we have
put into process a chain of events that we are unable to control, the
results of which could lead us a species to a massive die off if we
don't come to terms with climate change.

Rather than pretending that we can deal with ever increasing levels of
complexity, we need to slow down and to simplify things and, like Mickey
in Walt Disney's Fantasia, give up the fantasy that we can control what we really don't understand.

Happy Reconnect to the Earth Day

2010-05-24T11:27:00.002-04:00

What’s with a national holiday being named after a dead foreign monarch? Give me a break. I know we were once part of the ‘glorious’ British Empire, but let’s get over it and move on. And that goes for my Quebecois friends, who today celebrate la fête des patriotes. Truth be told, almost no one here has the faintest recollection of what events we are supposed to hold dear in our collective memory.

So, let’s celebrate what we actually do on this much deserved long weekend. All across this country we get our hands dirty by planting vegetables, flowers, shrubs, and trees. Let’s celebrate our connection to the earth and let’s become faithful stewards of that part of the planet we call home.

One other thing, on this meaningful day let’s also pay homage to Canada’s First Nations Peoples, who struggle to this day to maintain their spiritual connection to the land and who have never defiled it in the name of unsustainable economic growth. We can learn a lot from them.

By the end of the day, I hope you have all had the opportunity to reconnect to the earth. Dig in the garden, spread some seeds, plant some flowers in a pot if you have to, swim in a lake, park the car, or ride a bike.

Let’s live in the present with an eye to the future and put aside things that no longer matter.

24 Hours for the Tax

2010-05-19T19:33:00.002-04:00

Today, people across Canada are speaking out in favour of a tax on financial transactions. Having written about this in the past, I want to add my voice to those who have identified a much needed measure to rein in the greed of those who would impose any cost to society in order for them to rake in unearned profits.

In case you haven’t heard, yesterday Germany took a bold step forward and banned a financial practice called naked short selling to take away one of the more popular financial derivatives that is purely speculative in nature. As could be expected, the financial markets took a tumble.

What must be remembered is that over the last ten years, the fuel of economic growth has been the rise of the importance of the financial sector. This has come at the expense of the real economy that produces goods and services that people actually use in their everyday lives.

In my early posts, I called the financial speculative economy the zombie economy because it sucks the life of real economy and everyday people.

From a purely economic perspective, a financial transaction tax makes a lot of sense. In fact, there is a great deal of empirical evidence that supports Hyman Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis, which explains that as assets rise in value, this rise sets into motion a dynamic in which increasingly riskier investments come to market that are gobbled up by investors without the means to withstand a sudden decrease in asset values. Eventually, when the downturn inevitably arrives, the decrease bursts the asset value bubble and everyone begins to scramble to protect themselves from the fallout of debt obligations that can’t be possibly be met.

This is the scenario that played out in the global financial markets, which necessitated a multi-trillion dollar intervention backed by public funds.

Of interest, the federal government recently intervened into the housing market to make it more difficult for financial speculators to flip a house. By increasing the required down payment from 5% to 20% for a CHMC backed mortgage for the purchase of a rental property, the government essentially squeezed the profit margins for those who would use the housing market for speculative gain.

Using a regulatory regime instead of a imposing a tax to achieve the same end is simply a matter of choice. Ideologically, both types of measures are consistent with the idea of state intervention into the market to advance the common good.

If anything, the present government is being ideologically inconsistent in its opposition to a financial transaction tax.

So, why are they giving preferential treatment to large investors and interfering with the ability of smaller investors to turn a profit?

Big money can afford to hire lobbyists to influence public policy.

Little folk like you and me can only get the government’s ear when we make some noise.

So, it’s time for ordinary folk to make some noise, and I’m not talking about setting fire to a local bank branch like what happened in a posh section of Ottawa last night by an anarchist group that certainly has a good grasp of how to use the media to get their message across.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/ottawa/story/2010/05/19/ott-fire-bombing-bank.html

OK, call me old school.

Power to the people, right on.

Quebec's Jean Charest and His Regressive Conservatives

2010-05-16T16:46:00.002-04:00

In today’s politics, the liberal banner can mean many things. In Quebec politics, it means a federalist party similar in kind to the Ontario Conservatives under Mike Harris.

As a personal aside, I moved from Ontario to Quebec to escape the ideological wrath of a government that was hell bent on sticking it to anyone who had come to rely on public services. One day, I got a call at work from my son’s Ottawa elementary school to tell me that my son had been hit in the face with a chair by a special needs child who had just lost his teacher’s aide because of a quick and no-too-well-thought-out staff reduction. I didn’t want to stick around to see what else Mike would be doing in one of the greatest bullshit political movements of recent memory: the common sense revolution, so I moved across the river to Gatineau.

I thought I had done well. Sure, the taxes were higher, but they paid for some very good social programs, like the $5-a-day, publically-funded day care program.

Little did I know, that a certain Jean Charest, who claimed to be inspired by Mike Harris’s Conservatives, would become the Premier of Quebec.

I remember him running for office in 2003 with his big electoral promise that he would reduce taxes by $1 billion a year for the next five years. Boy, when Jean wants to fib, he goes for the whopper.

Then there was his call of a snap election in 2008 after the financial markets had collapsed. According to Jean, everything was under control, just a little bump on the road, and then we found out that Quebec’s public pension plan had lost $40 billion in 2008. Moreover, in the next budget, we learned that we would be running record deficits for the next five years, and the government had no idea how it was going to balance its books as the law required. That’s when Jean decided that we needed to change that pesky law.

In March of this year, we learned that each adult would be required to pay a annual fee of $200 to help out with our out-of-control health expenditures, in other words, a poll tax. To add insult to injury, we would also be charged a $25 fee for each visit to the doctor.

Again, I don’t mind paying higher taxes if there is social gain that results. However, in this case, I’ll be paying the same fee as my son (who now is living on his own) in spite of the fact that I make about three times his annual income.

Now, that doesn’t seem fair.

When asked about the regressive nature of the tax, our brilliant Finance Minister, Raymond Bachand, replied that Quebec already had too much in the way of progressive taxes.

Wait a minute, I thought to myself when I watched the interview, did he actually say what I thought he said?

This is Quebec, not Alberta. Here, people don’t simply defer to authority when they disagree.

Well, it turns out he meant every word and that also went for the $25-a-visit fee, which if he had taken the time to look at the Canada Health Act, he would know that this would come back to bite him in the ass.

Maybe, this is what happens when fin de regime mentality sets in.

In any case, something that I find quite humorous has occurred. People in Quebec are now looking to the Federal government to intervene to make sure that the guiding principles of the Canada Health Act are respected.

Forget the fact that we haven’t yet ratified the Constitution. We’re stuck with this McBozo as a Premier, and due to our completely out-dated electoral system, we’re stuck with him for another 3 years.

Well, you know what they say, people get the government they deserve. I guess that’s what happens when you fall for the schtick: in tough times, it’s best to have only two hands on the steering wheel. One of Jean's best lines.

Remind me never to get into a car being driven by a neo-conservative.

Spill, Baby, Spill

2010-05-08T11:55:00.003-04:00

There is a reason why Canadians aren’t getting anywhere with meaningful climate change legislation. The other side just doesn’t get it, they never will, and they hold the reins of power.

Here’s my favourite quote from a recent editorial from the Ottawa Citizen, a newspaper I stopped buying ever since it was bought up by Conrad Black and then sold to CanWest, with regard to the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico:

We’d better get used to this, because unless we want to give up the precious gasoline for our commute to work, drilling for offshore oil is only going to expand. . . . We may not like blackened beaches, or the deaths of 1,600 birds in Alberta tar sands ponds, but these visible spectacles of environmental damage are not enough to stop us from drilling more wells – and guaranteeing there will be future oil slicks.

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/opinion/last+spill/2982726/story.html#ixzz0nLpqmqsJ

I find it intriguing that someone would actually publish this crap. Who really wants to get used to this? Not me and nobody I know. Consequently, I guess I don’t belong to this tribe.

Can these people be convinced of the error of their ways?

Nope.

No matter what evidence you bring up, no matter how sound your arguments, their brains are wired to maintain their allegiance to their group at all costs, and they will either deny a problem exists or they will create an elaborate rationalization in order to extinguish whatever cognitive dissonance that arises.

Cultural cognition is the mainstay of the political brain. As much as evidence-based dialogue offers a hope that we can exit from a tribal mentality, it is no match for our mammalian brains.

So, as long as we are ruled by the self-serving desires of a dominant ethnic group, the will of the stakeholders who support the god-given right to drive to work no matter what the distance, no matter what the size of vehicle prevails.

Spill, baby, spill.

Big Finance Leverages Territorial Representation in the US Big Time

2010-04-28T20:08:00.004-04:00

Watching the Goldman Sachs spectacle and at the same time watching the
Republicans perform in the US Senate brings home the point of how the
geographic bias built into the electoral system allows for and actually
encourages the systemic looting of the public purse.

Clearly, the charges laid by the Securities and Exchange Commission -
Goldman Sachs packaged and sold toxic debt securities and then placed
bets on the eventuality that the debt obligations would not be met -
should indicate that investment banks in the US were not properly
regulated. However, although Republican Senators would join in on the
public shaming of Goldman Sachs representatives that occurred during the
hearing, they all voted against beginning the debate to reform the
financial system in the Senate.

In the US Senate, it takes 60 votes from the 100 votes available to
approve a motion. In other words, only 40% of the votes, a clear
minority, is required to block something as important as reforming the
financial system. Keep in mind that the public funds allocated to
bailout the financial system are twice what has been spent on the war in
Iraq. Moreover, since each state is allotted two seats in the Senate
regardless of its population, the 40 votes needed to oppose any reform
can represent as little as 12% of the population.

Now, that's leverage.

With the mid-term elections coming up there seemingly is the possibility
that the Republicans could experience a net loss of seats in the Senate,
which would make qualitative financial reform inevitable.
Unfortunately, the US Supreme Court recently ruled that there can be no
limits to the amount of money corporations can give to political
parties, thus creating an extremely unlevel political playing field.
Without question, Big Finance will target the senatorial races where
their dollars will make the difference, and unless the Democrats can
successfully repeat their performance in getting out the vote last
November, Big Finance will reap huge rewards on their investment and the
industry will continue to suck out the life blood out of the real
economy and out of the nation.

God Bless America for the land is blighted by an amoral rapacious elite
with an insatiable appetite for acquiring riches that has no
reservations bringing misery to millions.

Peace, Order, and Crappy Government

2010-04-25T12:49:00.003-04:00

Despite the good intentions of the fathers of Confederation, who enshrined the phrase, ‘peace, order, and good government’ into our constitution as a guiding principle for our governance, I can’t help feel that we have strayed far from this ideal.

In reality, we have crappy government because we are unable to exit from the cul-de-sac of a system of governance that is set up to give domination and control to our two founding charter groups at the expense of having the capacity of delivering what the vast majority of Canadians want: a healthy environment, an effective education system, health care that is there when you need it, and a sense of individual and collective well-being.

I’ll start with an analysis of the problem and then finish with how our elected governments are not meeting the performance requirements that we should expect as citizens from a democratic government.

Canada is a large piece of territory carved out of the Americas as a result of the vagaries of European imperial conquest. When the first settlers arrived, they were met by indigenous peoples who had occupied the territory for thousands of years. We seem to have acquired a collective amnesia over this point, especially if we recognize that aboriginal title to much of Canada has never been extinguished by the state and that according to the principles of common law, as the successor state we are bound to uphold by our own constitution, section 25 of the Charter, the rights stemming from the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which recognizes the rights of First Nations peoples, including land rights.

In short, our political system was modeled on the British system, with an electoral system that initially gave the vote to white, male, property owners to the exclusion of everyone else. Although the right to vote evolved as our conception of human rights evolved, (yes women, people of colour, and non-Christians are also humans) the electoral system still has a geographic bias that gives disproportionate voting power to the descendents of the charter settler groups. For a more detailed explanation see my post: Canada at 150: Ethnocratic Settler State or Multi-ethnic Pluralist Democracy?

In this system, we divide up the territory into electoral districts and the declared winner of each electoral district those who got the most votes becomes the representative. There is no aggregation of votes or of political preferences. We are only concerned with who gets the most votes, not whether a majority has been established.

Given that the rural seats in a vast territory such as Canada comprise the majority of seats and the people who live there are mostly from the ethnic groups who first settled (appropriated?) the land, this electoral system awards effective political control over the territory to these groups at the expense of the democratic principle of one person, one vote. In other words, Canada is still a dominion in which French-Canadian Catholics dominate and control the territory of Quebec and Anglo-Canadian Protestants dominate and control the territory outside of Quebec.

In my view, there is a trade off between control and domination of the charter groups and good government.

At the time of Confederation, the settlers’ principle concerns were to protect borders, secure the territory and exploit the natural resources therein, and the system of governance put into place reflected those concerns. Today, however, we live in a world that is exponentially more complex, and we expect our government to be able to the meet the social and economic challenges within our borders and play a responsible and effective role with regard to global concerns.

Unfortunately, these expectations cannot be met by a political system that reduces the complexity of issues to for or against the question at hand, and a vote for either the red party of the blue party. Yet, that’s what the system gives, and those who have the power to change the system to make it more intelligent, to make it more democratic, prefer to hang onto the outdated system because at the end of the day, they retain the power to decide what makes it onto the nation’s political agenda and how it gets decided.

Take for example Canada’s woeful performance on climate change. How is it that we are signatories to the Kyoto Accord, the majority of the population supports that we respect our international obligations, and the majority of the members of Parliament think likewise, yet we do precious little to meet those obligations?

Put simply, the idea of reducing greenhouse gas emissions doesn’t fit into the Anglo-Canadian Protestant hegemonic idea that nothing can be done if it would cause harm to the economy. Forget science, forget risk management; it is sufficient to raise the spectre of less economic growth and to say this is a bad thing and the descendents of the charter groups fall into order and vote accordingly. Keep in mind that together the Liberals and the Conservatives have little more than the support of only one third of the electorate (38%) and the present government is there thanks to only 23% of the electorate or 17% of the population.

Of course, the situation would be much different if the make-up of parliament actually reflected the popular vote, but to do so would mean moving out of a control and domination mode into a consensual mode of government. Heaven forbid.

Here in Quebec, the electoral system gives us the choices between two government options: the red team, the federalist Quebec Liberal Party, an incompetent and probably the most corrupt government since the days of Duplesis, and the blue team, an equally incompetent party that reduces the complexity of Quebec’s social and economic problems to the question of sovereignty.

Yes, regrettably these are the choices.

Never mind that the public education system is a disgrace, the health care system is a bad joke – this week a fundraising raffle included as a prize, gaining patient status with a family doctor – the province has the highest level of public debt in North America and its citizens are among those who pay the most taxes.

Never mind that the obsession with a Westphalian conception of sovereignty hardly applies to a territory we occupy as a result of European conquest, and that the Council of the Federation, free trade with the European Union, and plans for turning Quebec’s North into the land of milk and honey or whatever cliché that you prefer are essentially political diversions to cover up the real problem: neither the blue team or the red team has the capacity to govern effectively.

If that’s the case let someone else into the game. Let my vote count as well as the hundreds of thousands of other voters here in Quebec and the millions of others in Canada who can think critically and who don’t let their ethnic allegiance determine how they vote.

Until that day arrives, I am and will be the disgruntled democrat.

Canada at 150: An Ethnocratic Settler State or Pluralist Multi-ethnic Democracy?

2010-04-19T20:57:00.000-04:00

In the near future, Canada will be celebrating its 150th birthday. Many would say the nation is still in its infancy, but within this relative short historical period our population has grown 30 fold, and the size of our economy allows us to be a member of the select G8, which demonstrates that we have become an important player on the world’s stage.

Certainly, Canada has evolved. Since confederation, our borders have expanded so that we are now the second largest country in the world. Within these borders, the demographic portrait has shifted from a population predominately of British and French origin, widely dispersed throughout our rural regions, to a population that is multi-ethnic and concentrated in our urban centers. Politically, a franchise that was limited to male, Protestant landowners gave way to universal suffrage, and with the adoption of the Constitution Act, 1982, which includes the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, we became the masters of our own political destiny. However, despite these changes, Canada remains a vestige of European empires that have long since receded. Although we have developed some of the political institutions that are normally associated with free and democratic societies, we have yet to fully embrace democracy, and we cling to our heritage as an ethnocratic settler state.

Essentially, what keeps us from becoming a full-fledged democracy is that we maintain the privileged position of the initial settler communities. Similar in kind to other former British colonies, most notably Australia and New Zealand, Canada embodies a system of governance that is, however, slightly different: it is “for” and “by” two charter groups rather than a single specific ethnic community: French-Canadian Catholics within Quebec and Anglo-Canadian Protestants throughout the rest of Canada.

Regrettably unfamiliar to most Canadians, the term “ethnocracy” was coined by political geographer Oren Yiftachel in his investigations concerning the role of law in creating and enabling ethnocratic land regimes. The use of the term as it applies to Canada sheds light on our historical past and helps to make sense of recent political developments.

As explained by Yiftachel, ethnocracy is a distinct regime type that facilitates the expansion of a dominant ethnic nation in a multi-ethnic territory. Within these regimes exists a constant tension between two opposing principles of political organization: the ‘ethnos’ (community of origin), and the ‘demos’ (residential community of a given territory). In the heydays of ethnocracies, the ‘ethnos’ enjoys clear legal and institutional prominence. Ethnicity, rather than citizenship, constitutes the main criterion for distributing power and resources.

The regime sub-type ‘settling ethnocracy’ stresses the ethnic settlement project as a constitutive element of the regime. In the formative periods of settler societies such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States, the state is usually deeply involved in a strategy of ethnic migration and settlement, which aims to alter the country’s geographic and ethnic structure. As the charter group of settlers usually refrains from mixing with indigenous populations and ‘inferior’ groups, such societies are based on deeply ingrained patterns of segregation frequently resulting in three major ethno-classes: founders, immigrants, and indigenous.

(a) The ‘Founders’ (also termed the ‘charter group’) – this group achieves the dominant status due to the high military, cultural, political, and economic standing established during the state’s formative years. Furthermore, intergenerational mechanisms, such as the land regime, together with rules of inheritance and transfer of property rights reproduce over time the ‘founders’ privileged position in different societal realms.
(b) The ‘Immigrants’ – this group comes from a different ethnic background from the founders (and is often split into a number of sub-groups based on ethnic background and race). Formally, the immigrants are part of the new nation built into the settler society. However, while they undergo a prolonged process of ‘upward’ assimilation into the ‘founding group’ they often remain in lower economic, geographical, and political positions.
(c) The Indigenous or ‘Foreign’ People – these groups, also termed ‘aliens’ or ‘natives’ or ‘others’, are characterized by long-term marginalization through the process of nation-and-state building; they are generally isolated in the geographical, economic, and social periphery of the settler society. Such groups include, for example, indigenous peoples such as Native Americans in nineteenth-century USA, the Inuit in Canada, the Aborigine in Australia, and the Maoris in New Zealand. They also include other ‘alien’ groups not fully included in the settling nation, such as the Chicanos in nineteenth-century southwestern USA, the Tamils in Sri-Lanka, or the Palestinians in Israel.

As explained by Yiftachel’s associate Alexandre Kedar, the establishment of ethnocratic settler states usually entails the construction of new property regimes. The acquisition of land is crucial component in this phase and often occasions a vast and violent dispossession of indigenous peoples from land they possessed for generations. While in most cases land is originally acquired by direct force, this violent acquisition is subsequently translated into institutional arrangements that represent and legitimize power relationships in the ethnocratic state.

As we have seen, ethnocratic settler societies usually contain three major groups: founders, immigrants, and natives. Ethnocratic land regimes reproduce and reinforce this social stratification. In the land regime they create, the founders control most land resources. Immigrants usually receive only a small part; while indigenous and alien groups, who often serve as the main contributors of the land, are generally denied a fair share of its allocation. By freezing this ‘initial’ spatial arrangement, the new property system facilitates the perpetuation over generations of the ethnocratic power structure.

The property regime also constitutes a legal-cultural order that reduces the necessity of direct force to maintain the ethnocratic system. Elites of the dominant ethnocratic group strive to institutionalize a hegemony that deflects open debate about the system and justifies their control of the territory. Under this hegemonic system, the ethnocratic spatial order is constructed as something ‘taken for granted’. Law and courts occupy a special place in the institutionalization and legitimization of these socio-spatial power structures.

With regard to the Canada’s indigenous peoples, the conflict caused by the imposition of the European property regime by the charter groups is intractable. In the famous words of former US Chief Justice, John Marshall, “conquest gives title that the courts of the conquerers cannot deny.” Consequently, aboriginal title to the lands obtained by conquest cannot be recognized in a meaningful way since to do so would require a complete transformation of the existing property regime.

As Canada continues its process of decolonization, however, further appropriation of indigenous lands will be curtailed, and we can expect that there will be some minor victories for indigenous groups in the Courts, but nothing of the sort that would threaten the existing order. Canadian Historian, Peter Russell, notes that “these juridical wins come with a downside – a reminder of the subordinate place of native societies within the larger settler societies in which they are embedded, and of their dependence on the courts that pronounce upon their rights in that larger society.”

Conversely, with regard to the relation between Canada’s charter groups and its immigrant population, there exists the potential for a significant realignment of the power relations between the two groups. According to Statistics Canada, by 2031 one in three Canadians will belong to a visible minority. One in four will be foreign born. Their ranks will grow from 5.3 million today to between 11.4 and 14.4 million. Between 29% and 32% of the population could belong to a visible minority group, nearly double the proportion reported by the 2006 Census. More than 71% of all minority people would live in Canada’s three largest metropolitan areas: Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal. The increasing tension between the ‘ethnos’ and the ‘demos’ brought about by the demographic change could cause a bifurcation of the nation: the ethnocratic settler state gives way to the creation of a modern democracy.

Historically, the charter groups in settler states have been able to maintain their position of dominance within their respective political systems by the use of malapportionment of seats between urban and rural districts, thereby ensuring the domination of the legislature by the rural regions where the members of founder groups form large majorities. However, reapportionment along the democratic principle of ‘one person, one vote’ disrupts the hegemony of the ethnocratic elite since the votes of the other ethnic groups cannot be controlled by traditional identity politics and cultural cognition.

Indeed, the election of President Barak Obama and the subsequent reform of the American health care system, which will extend health insurance to approximately 34 million previously uninsured Americans, for the most part members of visible minority communities, signal the end of the Anglo-American Protestant hegemony in the USA. In short, landmark decisions from the US Supreme Court, most notably Baker v. Carr (1962) and Reynolds v. Simms (1964) paved the way to equal representation for equal numbers of people, without regard to race, sex, economic status, or place of residence within a state. A complete redistricting of state and federal electoral maps ensued, and, as a result, a series of progressive programs such as Social Security and Medicare were enacted that empowered what previously had been an underclass to rise up and eventually elect one of their own as President of the United States.

Here in Canada, malapportionment has recently become a concern, but the context in which it is addressed is less fraught with inter-racial tensions because of the manner that the right to effective representation is protected constitutionally.

For example, a number of recent studies have demonstrated that urban ridings where immigrants comprise a significant percentage of the electorate have less voting power than those rural ridings where the electorate is comprised largely of members of the charter groups. For the most part, theses discrepancies (an urban riding in Alberta has three times as many electors as one in Prince Edward Island) are due to the constitutional guarantees afforded to the smaller provinces for the number of seats they are accorded in Parliament, in other words, an unintended consequence of Confederation. Moreover, section 51 of the Constitution Act, 1867 guarantees that, notwithstanding the measures taken to protect the representation of the smaller provinces, each province will be represented in Parliament with a number of seats that is proportional to its share of the population. Consequently, in April 2010, legislation was introduced to award 30 additional seats in Parliament to the provinces (most likely to be enacted after the 2011 Census has been completed) which have experienced marked population growth as a result of the growth of their immigrant communities in their urban and suburban regions. Furthermore, the substantive equality guarantees of section 3 of the Charter limits population variations between ridings within a province to 25% from the provincial average for the number of electors per riding. This is a far cry from the 400 to 1 and greater population ratios between urban and rural electoral districts to be found in the United States before Baker v. Carr. Finally, it should be noted that the decision to change Canada’s ethnic composition was taken, and is being taken by the legislative assembly, the Parliament of Canada, that is dominated by the two charter groups, and they are fully aware of the demographic consequences of their decisions.

More serious concerns with regard to malapportionment in Canada arise from the continued use of a Single Member Plurality (SMP) electoral system that dates back to medieval Britain. Essentially, the SMP system manufactures majority governments that require far less than a majority of votes from the electorate. Generally speaking, 40% of the popular vote translates into 60% of the available seats in the legislature and 100% control of the political process. Most often, a candidate requires only a simple plurality of votes to be elected, which means that the majority of votes cast are discarded and have no bearing on the electoral results.

Since representation is given strictly on the basis of winning territorial electoral districts, and the population of the charter groups is widely distributed throughout the major portion of the territory in sufficient number to form pluralities in most of the rural ridings, the SMP system gives charter groups considerable political leverage. Essentially, the property regime is the source of political power, where the territorial control of electoral districts, winning seats, translates into the effective control of the political process.

The degree of leverage arising from territorial control is considerable, especially when we consider the dwindling percentage of eligible voters that choose to exercise their right to vote. For instance, as a result of the 2008 federal election, the Conservative Party formed a minority government, which exercises the power of a majority government subject to the willingness of the opposition parties to plunge the country into another general election, having won 143 of the 308 available seats. What is remarkable from a democratic perspective is that the government was formed with the support of only 22.16% of the eligible voters or 16.5% of the general population. Moreover, this was done with only two seats from the metropolitan centres, of Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal, which indicates that the present government was elected for and by the charter groups, primarily by Anglo-Canadian Protestants.

As we could expect, this type of electoral result exacerbates the tension between the organizing principles of ‘ethnos’ and ‘demos’ within the country. Recently, the trigger events were the usually innocuous parliamentary practice of proroguing Parliament. However, in both instances, the act of proroguing Parliament – an anachronistic royal prerogative transferred from the British Monarchy to the Prime Minister – was widely perceived to allow the Prime Minister to escape the democratic will of Parliament: in the first instance, as a way to escape a non-confidence vote that would have surely brought down the government; in the second, as a way to delay the provision of potentially damming evidence to the opposition parties concerning the transfer of Afghan detainees. Shortly thereafter, hundreds of thousands of Canadians took to the streets in order to protest a practice, although legal and in keeping with a constitutional monarchy, because it was believed to arise from a flagrant disregard of democratic principles.

It is unlikely that the structural tension between ‘ethnos’ and ‘demos’ will subside. As a result of the Liberal Party losing its capacity to offer the electorate a government option, the historical alternation between the Liberals and the Conservatives forming governments since Confederation has been broken. In fact, the two charter groups now find representation in political parties that are diametrically opposed, Anglo-Canadian Protestants with the Conservatives and French-Canadian Catholics with the Bloc Québécois. Consequently, Canada’s system of governance inherited from the British is mired in successive minority governments with no immediate prospect of exiting from what is supposed to be only an irregular inconvenience.

Throughout the last decade, a number of citizens groups have contested the continued use of the SMP voting system in Canada because of its systemic distortion of the popular will in translating votes into seats in the legislature. No less than four provincial referendums were held without success to replace SMP with voting systems that gave more proportional results. Yet, the problem remains, especially for the supporters of the emerging Green Party that amassed approximately one million votes in the last federal election but gained no representation whatsoever. Of note, the Greens in their support of the environment reject the property regime advanced by the charter groups. Their core beliefs are much closer ideologically to those of the indigenous peoples.

Presently, the Greens are pushing forward with a Charter challenge of the constitutionality of the SMP system, having already won the equivalent of Baker v. Carr in that the question was ruled judiciable in the lower Courts and are pressing forward to have the Supreme Court rule that the continued use of SMP is in fact unconstitutional. Essentially, the Supreme Court will be asked, as much if not more as it did in the Saskatchewan Reference, to determine the nature of Canada’s electoral system and, as a result, its system of governance. In brief, by upholding the continued use of SMP, the Court will validate Canada’s continued existence as a ethnocratic settler state; by striking it down, the Court will put into place a process that will eventually bring to an end the hegemony of the charter groups in Canada as the territorial bias within the electoral system that is responsible for ethnic domination will be severely curtailed.

A second eventuality will also come into play that could cause Canada to deviate from its path as a dominant settler society. Indeed, the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign as Canada’s Head of State will create a window of opportunity for Canada to step away from its colonial past. When that day arrives in the not so distant future, Canadians will be faced with the decision of whether to allow for Prince Charles’s succession as Canada’s sovereign. Without question, royal succession will bring to mind the position of the dominant ethnic group and it will be debated in a far different cultural context than when Elizabeth II took the throne. For instance, when Elizabeth became Queen, Canada relied almost exclusively on Europe and in particular Great Britain for its immigrants. Today, Canada’s immigrants are primarily non-European and account for a far greater percentage of the population. Consequently, there will be far less identification with the new British Monarch, most probably the weakest identification with the Royals in Canada’s short history.

Given the scale of demographic change that will occur in Canada during the 21st century, a re-alignment of the power relations between the charter groups and Canada’s immigrant groups will most likely occur along the ethnocratic/democratic fault lines previously discussed. How and when these changes will impact on Canada’s democratic institutions is uncertain, but the trend is clear: Canada’s charter groups will enter into a new power sharing relationship with its immigrant communities.

Quebec Needs Its Own Gomery Inquiry

2010-04-13T20:16:00.002-04:00

In my last blog, I wrote at length of the pathetic state of Quebec’s electoral system, but yesterday’s revelations by Marc Bellemare, the former Quebec Minister of Justice and Quebec Attorney General, went way beyond what many of us here in Quebec had suspected.

In short, Bellemare stated that the Quebec Liberal bagmen had exercised undue influence upon Premier Charest’s Cabinet in order to make sure that their preferred candidates were appointed to the judiciary. A second unidentified source today confirmed Bellemare’s allegations.

As you can imagine, these allegations cut to the heart of the democratic legitimacy of Quebec’s elected government. So serious are these allegations is that the Premier finally capitulated and announced that he would be striking a public inquiry to examine the manner in which judges are appointed.

So far so good, but what about Bellemare’s other allegations: money in envelopes being transferred to representatives from the Liberal Party, undue influence by Liberal financial backers in other government appointments and interference in the legislative process?

Apparently, we are supposed to accept Charest’s word that everything is above board with the manner in which the party receives its funding in spite of the fact that three other ministers said publicly that they couldn’t prevent businesses in the construction industry from making financial contributions and that these donations are illegal.

Moreover, we are also supposed to put aside our desire to have a public inquiry into the financial link between the construction industry and the Liberal government because it struck an investigative task force called Operation Hammer.

Wow John, which comic book universe do you live in?

Apparently in John’s world, the very individual who has had some very serious allegations made concerning his behavior can exercise his judgment in setting the terms of reference for the public inquiry. Conversely, the entire political class here in Quebec has come out and said that Charest cannot be one of the principle targets of the investigation and decide how the very same investigation will be conducted.

John doesn’t get it, but Pauline Marois the leader of the PQ does.

It’s all fine and well to have a public inquiry, but the terms of reference in this instance need to be determined by an impartial, independent, competent person who has much needed experience in dealing with such matters. According to Pauline, none other than retired judge John Gomery would be perfect for the job.

Couldn’t agree with you more Pauline. Brilliant suggestion.