Canada's Growing Empathy Deficit

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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.