Although it has been many years since I read it, I was very pleased to see that the Toronto Public Library has chosen Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 for its One Book annual community reading event. Although first published in 1953, this eerily prescient novel tells the story of a world where people are globally deterred from thinking by the banning of books, the addictive use of 'seashells' that whisper sweet nothings in their ears (read IPods), and the constant diversion of omnipresent large-screen televisions that broadcast the most empty forms of diversion imaginable. Sound familiar?
Without question, Fahrenheit 451 puts to the lie the fashionable notion that fiction has little to offer for the mind. And if that whets your appetite, give Aldous Huxley's Brave New World a try. Again, the parallels to today's world are stunning.
Late last year I wrote a post expressing my discomfort with the proliferation of foodbanks. Despite the fact that I volunteer at one, I can't escape the notion that it has become an enabler of government inaction on poverty in this country. As well, the fare available from foodbanks is generally of the canned and processed variety, high in salt and preservatives, hardly the basis of a healthy diet.
Over the years I have volunteered there, I have noticed that more and more of the clientele is not the chronically unemployed, but rather the chronically under compensated, those who are working at minimum-wage jobs that are wholly inadequate to meet their and their families' needs. I especially feel for the children who often accompany their moms on their monthly visits to our establishment.
While Ontario has made some progress in reducing child poverty, austerity measures and corporate tax reductions that have yielded few jobs have halted that progress. A story in this morning's Star paints a rather grim picture of what life is like for the 383,000 Ontario children still ensnared in rather dire living conditions:
In 1989, 240,000 Ontario kids lived in poverty, when the child poverty rate was 9.9 per cent. The rate in 2010 was 14.2 per cent, representing 383,000 kids.
One in 10 Ontario children in 2010 lived in households that couldn’t afford things like dental care, daily fruit and vegetables and “appropriate clothes for job interviews,” up 15 per cent from 2009.
35.6 per cent of kids in a household with a single mom lived in poverty in 2010.
92,500 Ontario kids living in poverty still have one parent who works full time, year-round.
In 2010, 7.1 per cent of children in the province lived in “deep poverty,” where household earnings amounted to less than Ontario’s median family income.
The only trouble is, everytime he does, he affirms his incompetence. Yes, young Tim Hudak, the leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party, has weighed in on yet another 'obstruction' that he believes can be remediated through his simplistic prism. This time it is that pesky perennial problem of those darned endangered species, or more specifically, [g]overnment regulations protecting endangered species [which] are throttling business:
In a speech Tuesday to the Rural Ontario Municipalities’ Association (ROMA) conference at the Fairmont Royal York Hotel, ... Hudak told 700 rural municipal politicians he would slash “the more than 300,000 regulations, outdated rules, and runaround that you have to cope with just to get something done.”
To drive home his point for those listeners whose thoughts might have wandered away from the prattling stripling in their midst, the lad who would be Ontario premier pronounced:
“The problem is that these rules are ... not allowing our agriculture and business sectors to grow.”
As an illustration of the evil obstructionism of government, Hudak tartly observed: In 2003, there were exactly 19 species listed — today, well over 121”
- clearly a sign of government regulation run amok, and surely not an indication of a deteriorating ecosystem, a concept I doubt that young Tim subscribes to.
Unaware of his irony, he vowed to use “verifiable science not political science” to determine what animals to protect. This, despite the fact that, as pointed out by Natural Resources Minister David Orazietti, the assessment and classification of endangered species is conducted by experts on the arms-length Committee on the Status of Species at Risk in Ontario.
But then again, I doubt that the hapless Hudak ever lets facts get in the way of a good ideological rant, and would seem to prefer this as the only sign of real progress:
The other day I made reference in a post to a study showing that half of the workers in the GTA are precariously employed, meaning they have unstable and unreliable employment with no benefits, a reality sharply at odds with the triumphalism of the right over the putative unalloyed good achieved by free trade.
This morning's Star editorial calls for changes in social assistance programs to ease the plight of these workers. Among the ideas being bandied about are more flexible child care, reforms to pensions, and new insurance models “that could create more economic certainty for people in precarious employment.”
While these ideas undoubtedly have merit, I think it would be a profound mistake to exclude corporations from the solution; despite the fact that it has become conventional wisdom that governments cannot consider increasing taxes, direct and indirect, on large businesses, that is one of the many reforms that needs to be included. Otherwise, of course, the rest of us will be alone in picking up the tab.
Canada in general, and Ontario in particular, offers a host of advantages to business ranging from a well-developed infrastructure to an enviable health-care system and a very educated workforce. Being able to shrink its permanent work force while exploiting these advantages has added tremendously to the corporate bottom line. It is time they started paying a larger portion of their lavish profits for those privileges.
Well, in the tried and true tradition of governments announcing embarrassing news on Fridays, 'P.E.I. Senator' Mike Duffy kinda sorta admitted to maybe an error, thanks to 'confusing senate forms' asking for his primary residence. Not that he did anything wrong, of course, but after 80 days of what Tim Harper calls a sideshow, the rotund representative of the island province told CBC that the issue has become a "major distraction" from the work he's trying to do for Prince Edward Island, the province he represents in the Senate.
"We are going to pay it back, and until the rules are clear — and they're not clear now, the forms are not clear, and I hope the Senate will redo the forms to make them clear — I will not claim the housing allowance."
The following video offers some analysis from Terry Milewski:
How complex or confusing is the form? For a person of normal intellect, not very, as The Rabble points out:
The form Duffy found so confusing asks first of all if a Senator's primary residence is within 100 kilometres or more than 100 kilometres from Parliament Hill.
You don't need an advanced degree in geography to figure that out.
For instance, if you live, as Senator Duffy now admits he does, in the Ottawa suburb of Kanata you are about 20 kilometres from Parliament Hill, maybe less.
The form then asks for the address of the Senator's primary residence in the province or territory he or she represents.
Given the good senator's confusion, I also can't help but wonder if there is a story here that the media are missing out on. Mr. Duffy has made much of the fact that he had open-heart surgery in 2006, hence the need for an OHIP card, granted only to those who spend at least 153 days a year physically present in Ontario. As he told CBC,
"I had open heart surgery, ... I'm being intensively followed. The other day I counted up, I have six different doctors … so I have a lot of health problems, and the advice of my doctors was not to make a switch, to stay with them at the Heart Institute in Ottawa. And that's what I've done."
Open-heart surgery, with which I have some familiarity within my own family, entails the heart being stopped and the patient placed on a heart-lung bypass machine for varying lengths of time. An unfortunate byproduct of the procedure can be cognitive imnpairment, known colloquially as 'pump head', with a wide range of cognitive impairments and deficits that can persist and worsen for years. And while I realize that such dysfunction may go largely unnoticed for a long time in our senate as attested to by recent events, it does seem to be a legitimate question to raise in Mr. Duffy's case.
Of course, another legitimate and related question to raise is that if he indeed found the senate forms too confusing to correctly and honestly complete, can he really be competent to discharge his senatorial duties, given that one of them is exposure to excruciating legislative minutia that demands a clear mind to read, understand, and make informed decisions on?
Just wondering, is all.
UPDATE: Here is more analysis by the CBC's Terry Milewski on the issue.
