The Long Reach Of Partisan Politics

h/t Montreal Simon

In Ontario, we noticed the long federal reach of divisive partisan politics during our recent election. Joe Oliver, our alleged finance minister, interposed his views, lamenting the fiscal state of Ontario that, according to him, is bringing down the rest of Canada. Of course, the disingenuous Uncle Joe denied trying to interfere in our electoral contest. Indeed, he kept up his unsolicited advice post-election, suggesting the following to Premier Kathleen Wynne:

“We hope that her government will follow our lead toward a balanced budget,” he said. “Canada cannot arrive at its potential if the biggest province remains in difficulty.”

In her column today, The Star's Carol Goar offers a pungent rebuttal and some advice to the minister and his government:

He ignored the fact that Ontarians had just rejected his formula, championed by defeated Conservative leader Tim Hudak. He ignored the fact that Ontario is struggling to replace its manufacturing base. And he ignored the fact that Ontario, unlike Ottawa, doesn’t have resource revenues pouring into its coffers.

Compounding the problem, observes Goar, is the fact that the Harper regime is doing nothing to help the province regenerate its economy. In my view, this sad state is the result both of partisan prejudice and a paucity of ideas from the regime's braintrust, Nonetheless, The Star offers some suggestions that we can be certain will be ignored:

- Close the multitude of tax loopholes that allow the country’s wealthy elite to stash income in shell companies that pay low corporate taxes; hide assets in offshore tax havens; write off personal expenses and exploit all the tax credits, deductions, refunds and allowances in Canada’s 3,236-page Income Tax Act.

While the late Jim Flahety closed some loopholes, much more needs to be done.

- Restore Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.’s original purpose.... If the federal government made it clear that CMHC’s first job is to make housing affordable, it would alleviate the need to build social housing, remove some of the risk from the real estate market, encourage residential construction and boost employment — all of which would benefit Ontario.

- Pay as much attention to Ontario’s mineral wealth as Alberta’s oil reserves.

While the regime can't do enough to promote and develop the tarsands, it has shown no interest in helping Ontario finance the infrastructure needed to mine the Ring of Fire and its rich chromite reserves.

- Fix Ottawa’s unfair equalization system.

Oliver ignored Ontario’s claims that it was being shortchanged by hundreds of millions under the convoluted formula Ottawa uses to ensure the financial burdens of all the provinces are comparable. But now Parliamentary Budget Officer Jean-Denis Frechette has confirmed Ontario is being underpaid by $640 million this year. That revenue would allow the province to knock 5 per cent off its deficit.

I expect that little attention will be paid to these sensible suggestions. As we have all learned over the years, Harper and company have developed a long list of enemies. Given its ideology and its resounding recent rejection of Harperesque medicine through his surrogate, Tim Hudak, there is little doubt that Ontario has a prominent place in that pantheon of distinguished Canadians.

Calling Stephen Harper

It is always heartening when young people get involved in issues that should matter to everyone:

Making Church Relevant?

Somehow, I think Pastor Heath Mooneyham of Joplin, Missouri took the wrong religion marketing course:

Gay Pride: A Proviso

Yesterday I wrote about the considerable pride that we should all take in the progress we are making as a society, World Pride in Toronto being a sterling example. However, as Star letter-writer Blair Bigham of Toronto points out in today's edition, there is still room for improvement:

Political stripes aside, Ontario (population 13.5 million) elected the first gay premier in Canada. Other than Iceland (population 300,000), no other people has elected a gay leader.

The fact that Kathleen Wynne’s sexuality was not even an issue throughout the campaign speaks to the equity and inclusivity Ontario offers. What a place for gay people to grow up in.

And yet, despite living in one of the most gay-friendly places on earth, I learned being gay was wrong long before I learned it wasn’t. Still today slurs are thrown my way by strangers, words are chosen carefully in new social settings, and there is the perpetual evaluation of every person I come in contact with, a super-subconscious Gestalt judgment about how welcoming they would be if they “could tell.” Like the annoying buzz-hum of a wonky fluorescent bulb, barely noticeable, but oh so persistent.

The constant stress that we face here, rarely acknowledged because it shames us that we can’t just accept ourselves, cannot compare to what people feel elsewhere. Minority stress affects me, and surely as an Ontarian I have it better than nearly everyone else.

So while I offer Ms Wynne and all of Ontario accolades for making history and demonstrable progress, I pause to think of the rest of the world, and check my privilege. If anything, it recommits me to spread the amazing agency I have as a gay person in Ontario with those elsewhere and take nothing for granted.

World Pride: Our Pride

While it is never good to feel smug or self-satisfied (we've seen where that takes the right wing), there are things about which we should feel very good. Although I do not live in Toronto, as I was watching the news last night covering the opening of the 10-day World Pride Festival being hosted in that city, I said to my wife that it really is something that we should all feel proud about. The fact that Toronto, and indeed Canada as a whole, is looked upon as a place where diversity is embraced is a measure of our potential for growth as a species.

I was struck by the essential truth in the words of Mr. Gay World, Christopher Olwage, who said, "It should just be a matter of being human and respecting that fact."

As well, those of Christopher Wee, Mr. Gay Canada: “It shows how progressive we are in Canada and in Toronto about our human rights direction and the LGBT direction.”



No one would dispute that we are deeply flawed. A recent trip to The Royal Tyrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta reminded me once again of what an incredibly small space we occupy on the timeline of earth's evolution. So many species came before us, and so many will continue after we are gone. Yet there are days when I think that were our world not so environmentally imperiled, making our own continuation very questionable, we really could evolve into something quite special.

Guest Post: The Mound Of Sound

Yesterday, inspired by a link sent to me by The Mound of Sound, I wrote a post on some of the dire implications of the surveillance state and the preparations being made by The Pentagon to deal with mass civil breakdown.
Today, a guest post by The Mound offers a sharp counterpoint to the pessimism of that post:


I thought I was a pessimist until I began delving into online courses on war studies, globalization, global food security, etc.

As Doyle’s Holmes said, “the game’s afoot.” Stuff that would have been considered alarming a generation ago now occurs daily and almost without notice. Our privacy, that one right to which all others are anchored, is gone. Instead of fighting to protect us, our governments increasingly employ the latest technology to intrude on our daily lives. By stripping away our privacy, governments are able to redefine democratic dissent as subversion, even treason.

There’s talk of revolution seemingly everywhere. It may be the inevitable end result of the world paradigm shift enacted by Reagan, Thatcher and Mulroney. Today the Pentagon is preparing for ‘mass civil breakdown’ and preparing to use military force within the United States against civilians in flagrant violation of that country’s posse comitatus rule. Open the link, read it and see if it doesn’t make your stomach churn.

In yesterday’s Guardian there’s an exploration of ‘open source revolution.’ It’s an idea from former CIA spy, Robert David Steele, and it’s an idea worth considering. It may even be our kids’ last, best hope.

Last month, Steele presented a startling paper at the Libtech conference in New York, sponsored by the Internet Society and Reclaim. Drawing on principles set out in his latest book, The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth and Trust, he told the audience that all the major preconditions for revolution – set out in his 1976 graduate thesis – were now present in the United States and Britain.

Steele's book is a must-read, a powerful yet still pragmatic roadmap to a new civilisational paradigm that simultaneously offers a trenchant, unrelenting critique of the prevailing global order. His interdisciplinary 'whole systems' approach dramatically connects up the increasing corruption, inefficiency and unaccountability of the intelligence system and its political and financial masters with escalating inequalities and environmental crises. But he also offers a comprehensive vision of hope that activist networks like Reclaim are implementing today.

"We are at the end of a five-thousand-year-plus historical process during which human society grew in scale while it abandoned the early indigenous wisdom councils and communal decision-making," he writes in The Open Source Everything Manifesto. "Power was centralised in the hands of increasingly specialised 'elites' and 'experts' who not only failed to achieve all they promised but used secrecy and the control of information to deceive the public into allowing them to retain power over community resources that they ultimately looted."

Today's capitalism, he argues, is inherently predatory and destructive:

"Over the course of the last centuries, the commons was fenced, and everything from agriculture to water was commoditised without regard to the true cost in non-renewable resources. Human beings, who had spent centuries evolving away from slavery, were re-commoditised by the Industrial Era."

Open source everything, in this context, offers us the chance to build on what we've learned through industrialisation, to learn from our mistakes, and catalyse the re-opening of the commons, in the process breaking the grip of defunct power structures and enabling the possibility of prosperity for all.

"Sharing, not secrecy, is the means by which we realise such a lofty destiny as well as create infinite wealth. The wealth of networks, the wealth of knowledge, revolutionary wealth - all can create a nonzero win-win Earth that works for one hundred percent of humanity. This is the 'utopia' that Buckminster Fuller foresaw, now within our reach."

The goal, he concludes, is to reject:

"... concentrated illicitly aggregated and largely phantom wealth in favor of community wealth defined by community knowledge, community sharing of information, and community definition of truth derived in transparency and authenticity, the latter being the ultimate arbiter of shared wealth."

This is the stuff of the ‘social contagion’ that so worries the Pentagon. Whether it will be anywhere near as utopian as Steele envisions is far from clear. If so, it certainly won’t be democratic if it’s to be truly benevolent.

It’s obvious that Steele supports Steady State economics and the rejection of neo-classical economics models of the type still taught in our universities. We will shift to steady state principles because it’s what is demanded when the world runs out of stuff – and we are. It is a transition from a perpetual, exponential growth-based system to an allocation-based system, the sort of thing we have resorted to during wartime. The only alternative to that is a fairly-brutal neo-feudalism but the peasantry is too well armed this time around.

I don’t know if I’ll see this in my lifetime but I expect many of you will. History has shown that, while revolutions can be foreseen (as the Pentagon is doing right now), there’s no way to determine when the actual tipping point will occur. These things usually take everyone at least somewhat by surprise which explains, in part, why they often become ugly, brutal and confused.

Let’s hope Steele is right because what he foresees is not revolution as much as a massive reformation that overthrows our political, social and economic models. Bliss.

Not Good, Not Good At All

The following requires no commentary from me: