Year in Review: Canadians No Longer Have Reason to Feel Smug

There was a time when Canadians could feel a quiet pride about their country: peacekeeping roles with the United Nations, generous social programs, young Canadians cavorting around Europe with Canadian flags stitched onto their backpacks.

We were the quieter, gentler version of America.

Well, this year all those notions got dumped.

Over the last twelve months, we witnessed an unprecedented number of political scandals: Senators bilking taxpayers, corruption left, right, and centre in Quebec, and then there was spectacle of the crack smoking mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford.

I think the reason his antics got so much media play around the world, especially in the US, was that the world experienced a great deal of schadenfreude seeing Canada embodied by such a crass individual, a long way from the Dudley Do Right image that we had cultivated over the years.

Indeed, it is difficult to maintain the holier-than-thou attitude when our past sins of the wide spread systemic abuse of First Nations children in our residential schools and our present disregard for the environmental consequences of extracting oil from the tar sands, a practice that has earned Canada the label of an environmental rogue nation in the world press, are repeatedly brought to mind.

Even our traditional practice of making ourselves feel better by comparing ourselves to the Americans brings little solace since third world conditions have taken hold, for example the bankrupt City of Detroit, and are continuing to spread amongst a beleaguered people.

WTF Canada, get your shit together, make some New Year resolutions, do something.

Let's not waste another year pretending that we are some how morally superior to our neighbours.

Just like everyone else we have our fair share of problems, and the first step in meeting these collective challenges is admitting that they exist and that they are there for everyone to see.

Merry Christmas America: You've Been Scrooged

As the holidays draw nearer, it appears that, judging from president Obama's speech on economic inequality last week, he finally gets it: America has been scrooged.

I think that this year enough people finally honed in on the fact that while many Americans stuffed themselves at the dinner table on Thanksgiving and then went on a spending binge the next day after, commonly known as Black Friday, there was something amiss.

Lo and behold, in all this glorious consumption, the people who had to work on the holiday in the retail sector as wage slaves, making it possible for those better off to gorge themselves on the savings, are not being paid enough so they to can partake in the spirit of giving thanks for the bounty of material wealth.

In fact, companies like WalMart, run by the richest family in America, have taken to organizing charity food drives for their workers who have difficulty putting a meal on the table for their families given their abysmal wages.

Scrooge would have approved, that is the Scrooge before he was visited by the ghosts of Christmas.

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Hopefully, families in need won't have to go without food at the end of December because they decided to put a turkey on the table with all the accompanying dishes, thereby using up all of their remaining food stamps which were recently reduced in number by a vote in the Grinch-like US Congress.

Looking at how firmly entrenched is the practice of scrooging the common folks in America, it would take a miraculous intervention by a benevolent spirit on a massive scale to remove the chains around the hearts of those who run things.

But lets stay real.  Nothing of the sort is going to happen.  Changes of heart like that only happen in the wonderful world of fiction.  In the real world, the monied folks in America will continue to shirk their social responsibilities and take comfort in the fabulous wealth that the Good Lord has arranged to have come their way.

Merry Christmas America.  I hope that someday the Spirit of Christmas will descend and remain upon you, from the mountains, to the prairies, to the oceans.

God don't forsake America.

The top 1% already has.

Canada's Rob Ford Is Far Too Canadian

In other words, just dessert Canada for not taking care of your political institutions.

Take a look around: an out-dated voting system, scandal in the Senate, documented voter suppression through robo calls, rampant corruption in the province of Quebec, and a big, fat, crack smoking mayor of Canada's largest, world class (but not for the right reasons) city -- Toronto.

Yet Canadians are so nice.  How did they end up being led by such a pathetic lot?

They couldn't be bothered to do much if anything to change the status quo.

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Canada's Lamentable Lack of Imagination

Let's face it.  Most Canadians couldn't give a shit about the way they are governed.  As long as they can make the payments on their mortgage, cars, credit cards and make believe that hockey is their game, they'll let someone else to do the heavy lifting.

Inappropriate behavior brings about unpleasant consequences, and in the case of Rob Ford, Canada is looking at the consequences of neglecting the development of its political institutions. 

We still employ the same methods of governance that predate the harnessing of electricity, the commercialization of the internal combustion engine, and the rise of information and communications technology.

As a result, we are the joke.

Like it or not, Rob Ford is far too Canadian and the world has taken notice.

Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Play Football

That's it.  After forty years of watching NFL football, it's over.  I cannot in good conscience watch another game, especially knowing what I know about the league and the devastating effects playing the game can have long after the players have hung up their cleats.

I loved football and I loved to watch the show.  Following in my father's footsteps, I played the game from an early age until high school, when fortunately for me I decided to switch sports and took up rowing.

My father was not so lucky.  He went on to play professional football, suffered a number of concussions, one of which ended his career.  I had the unenviable task of watching him decline both physically and mentally, most probably suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a disease that attacks the brain to bring on memory lapses, personality disorders, and progressive dementia.  He died prematurely, like most professional football players, at the ripe old age of 56, some twenty years less than he could have otherwise expected to live.

Personal family tragedy aside, what has really turned me off the NFL is how it treats its players and how it exploits its fans.

Half of the owners of NFL teams are billionaires.  Together, they make over 8 billion a year from football operations, yet they are incredibly cheap bastards. I guess that's how they became billionaires.

Repeatedly, the owners hold their loyal fans hostage by threatening to move the team if taxpayers don't come up with the cash to build a new stadium at public expense.  Moreover, the league is exempt from anti-trust legislation and, get this, was determined to be a non-profit organization.  WTF?

When it comes to the players, it is a plantation mentality that rules, which is not surprising since 70% of the players are black.  Keep in mind there are no African Americans who own a NFL team.

Essentially, the players are cannon fodder.  The average career lasts three years.  Long enough to incur long-term debilitating injuries, but not long enough to qualify for disability insurance, which is only in effect up to five years after a player retires from the game, a detail that disadvantages the players since the long-term effects of playing the game tend to show up later.

In short, the owners transfer the health costs of treating the broken shells of former players to the taxpayers.  Having to deal with the pain and the disabilities, many former NFL veterans are unable to hold onto a job and fall into poverty, leaving the state to pick up their medial bills.

What's worse is the league has been in a state of denial over the long-term consequences of repeated head injuries associated with CTE and only recently settled out-of-court with the former players who had filed against a class action suit against the league.  The settlement, a paltry $750 million, which may seem like a lot but in reality is the revenue generated by only 8 televised Monday-night games. This works out to be only $150,000 per former player named in the suit, not nearly enough to cover the long-term care that many of the former players will need.

All in all, the players get screwd by the owners, the fans pay dearly for having the pleasure of watching the violence-ridden spectacle, and the owners are laughing all the way bank.

No wonder NFL football is by far the most popular professional sport.  The league is quintessentially American in the manner it conducts its affairs.

But count this boy out.  The air waves are glutted with sports programming, and I have decided to boycott the NFL and watch something else.

I encourage you to do the same.

Catastrophic Climate Breakdown: Ho Hum, We All Got ADD

Over the last few days, I have watched with great interest how the media and people I know reacted to the latest release of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report that updates its prognosis for the planet.

As you can well imagine, there wasn't much of a response nether in the traditional media, nor in my personal network, despite the report's apocalyptic content.

Unfortunately, the report got swallowed up by the media attention surrounding the series ending episode of "Breaking Bad" and the imminent shut down of the US federal government.  Dramatic climax in rather meaningless narratives once again trumped the possibility of a slumbering population's awakening to the documented evidence that if humanity doesn't do something significant soon to curb its green house gas emissions, we could render the planet inhospitable for humans.

Maybe an earth devoid of humans would be a good thing.

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In any case, we missed yet another opportunity to connect to the one big, inescapable, motherfuckin, meta narrative that will in the not-so-distant future come back to bite us in the ass.

Doesn't register, no matter what tone of voice I use.

It's as if the entire North American population suffers from a collective case of attention deficit disorder, easily distracted by stuff that really doesn't matter and failing to attend to the stuff that really does.

In the words of Neil Postman, we are literally "Amusing Ourselves to Death".

Note to Self: Canadians Really Like First-Past-The-Past Voting

Truth be told, I was a political activist that worked for about ten years trying to get the voting system changed so that each and every vote cast in an election would count and that the composititon of our elected legislatures would reflect accurately the manner in which people had actually voted.

It was the democratic thing to do.

Now that my days of a political activist are over, I have started to think it was nothing more than a wild goose chase that attracts delusional optimists.

Deep down, Canadians really like the first-past-the-post voting system because it allows them to be what they truly want to be -- Canadian.

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Democracy, after all, is very messy.  Try to find a consensus with all those opposing views.  Good luck with that.

Also, it is very time consuming: keeping up on all the issues and going to meetings.  Who has the time?  Trying to live the Canadian version of the American dream is very demanding.  A house in the burbs means two incomes, two cars, daycare, and a day planner. 

What Canadians really want is to go about doing what it is they do without being burdened with having to get involved in the collective decision making process other than every once in while having to cast a ballot. 

On second thought, looking at the plummeting participation rates during elections, it appears that even showing up to vote is too much of a burden for about half the electorate.

And that's the beauty of the first-past-the-post voting system.  It reduces the complexity of politics to a simple choice between the red or the blue party.  Collectively, we are empowered to throw the bums out if we so desire because, in reality, what we do when we are voting using the first-past-the-post system is decide whether or not to give the ruling party another mandate.

What could be easier?  Minimum engagement yet with maximum effect.  It takes less than 40% of the popular vote to form a majority, and a 50% popular vote for the party in opposition effectively reduces the former governing party to a handful of seats. 

That will teach the bastards a lesson they'll never forget.

Fuck democracy.  I'm a suburbocrat and the less time I have to put up with the bullshit that passes for politics here in the Great White North, so much the better.

I have better things to do like clean the pool, mow the lawn, clear the driveway, wash the dishes, whip up a meal, get an oil change, remodel the kitchen, take the dog for a walk, drive my son to his hockey practice, watch Netflix, and put on weight.

After a hard day's work, I got enough on my plate, thank you very much.

Burbocracy Drives North American Politics

The most tangible cornerstone that lies at the heart of the American Dream, at the heart of middle-class life, is the chance to own your own home.     (Barack Obama)

Before I get started, here's a quick glance at the history of political geography.

During the classical period, politics referred to a set of human activities circumscribed by a polis, an urban centre and it's outlying regions in proximity to the city walls. According to Aristotle, a man should be able to walk across the polis in about a day.  This meant that chances were that a citizen would be able to recognize a good number of his fellow citizens, bringing about a network of "weak ties" between them, and this formed the basis of democratic rule.

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With the rise of empires, the basis of political rule was a hierarchical order backed by military force.  The vast majority of people were subject to imperial rule, and the art of politics was largely the ability to advance one's interest during a time where life was nasty, brutish, and short.

Over time, empires gave way to nations, and citizens within a circumscribed territory regained some influence over who would govern them and the political agendas to be followed, butter or bullets.

In North America, during the second half of the twentieth century there was a great migration to the expanding housing developments on the fringes of the city limits that required a car to get around.  At first, sometimes referred to as the good old days, a family could afford to buy a house in the burbs with only one breadwinner, but by the time I bought my first house after graduating from university, it would require two salaries to get a piece of the American dream.

In my opinion, we would do well to forget Jane Jacobs and ignore the retro-urbanists who blather on about the creative class.  What drives politics in North America and in its ever expanding sphere of influence around the world is people's overwhelming desire to buy the biggest fucking house in the most expensive development that they can afford to live in, with a set of wheels that matches the house.  According to the latest census statistics, approximately 70% of Americans and Canadians live in the burbs.

What do you think brought about the near collapse of the global financial system and the subsequent Great Recession?  Nothing less than a giant Ponzi scheme in which "subprime" mortgages for houses were pawned off on people who could never afford to live in them, and the debt was then sliced and diced and sold to clueless investors as Triple A grade securities according to Wall Street's rating agencies.  When it came to light that many of these securities were worthless, the scam came to an end, the global economy tanked, and the future of an entire generation was cast into doubt.

Speaking about the lost generation, much has been written about the millennials as being different in their political views as compared to previous generations.  Certainly, their access to suburbia has been hindered by a weak economy that does not produce a sufficient number of good paying jobs and their level of personal debt, but I wonder if the prognostications of the rise the new left is not somewhat premature.  Yes, it will take them longer to gain access to the cornerstone of the American dream, the house in the burbs, but once they're in, slowly but surely their political beliefs will reflect where they live, and the Occupy Wall Street moment will be eventually captured in a film or in a sit com that they can watch nostalgically on their big, flat-screen, HD television, while sipping on a glass of Chardonnay, the kids sleeping soundly upstairs.

Remember, since rural regions are overwhelmingly conservative and the urban areas are predominantly progressive, they effectively cancel each other out.  As a result, it will be the suburbocrats that will decide the outcome of the next round of general elections.

How will they be swayed?  Tax deductions for home renovations?  State-subsidized child care?  Tougher sentences for dog owners who don't scoop the poop?

It's anybody's guess how the votes will be bought, but at the end of the day and when all the votes are counted, suburbia will remain North America's promised land.