The Folly of Harper's Economic Emphasis

While no reasonable person would suggest that Canada should immediately turn its back on it resources, the folly of self-described economist Stephen Harper is the undue weighting his regime has placed on that sector for fiscal health. Other countries have been looking toward the day when our dependence on fossil fuels will be diminished and are therefore diversifying, and a strong case can be made for the economic benefits of renewable and other green energy projects. However, our Prime Minister has continued in a full-court press as if the Alberta tarsands were the only game in town.

The folly of that approach now becomes evident with the precipitous decline in oil prices, largely due to a slowdown in growth worldwide that, ironically, may very well be the key to curbing climate change. However, even if this a temporary blip, the warning should be heeded.

An analysis by Don Pitt makes for some sobering reading:

About a year ago, I read a report forecasting this would happen. It wasn't exactly top secret, and hardly from a subversive group. Titled, The future of oil: Yesterday's fuel, it was published in the right-of-centre Economist magazine.

The Economist article suggests that this is not going to be just a blip but more of a sea change, as global oil demand plunges permanently. The article quotes a study by Citibank saying that oil use is already falling in rich countries. Most oil is burned to propel vehicles, and increasing fuel efficiency, including conversion to electric and hybrids, means we are using less for that.

It rejects the argument that growth in places like China will push oil use ever higher, saying emerging economies will see the advantage of leap-frogging to new technology and won't pass through the first world's gas-guzzling phase. In the year since that report, an explosion of solar in India, and an analysis by Lazard saying renewables had become as cheap as fossil fuels, only made the case stronger.

The implication for job losses in Canada goes well beyond employment in the oil patch.

“Canada’s economy is now very oil dominated,” economists Rory Johnston and Patricia Mohr at Scotiabank said a few months ago as the Northern Gateway project was being approved by Ottawa.

Businesses based across Canada that feed into the sector, like railroads, engineering firms, construction companies and equipment makers will also be sideswiped if the decline leads energy producers to pull back production. Twenty-five cents of every dollar invested in new business plans goes toward oil and gas projects, Scotia estimates.

If exports and investment in the energy sector take hits, experts suggest the broader economy will feel the chill and begin to slow.

It would be nice to think that these hints of things to come would have an impact on the monomania that the Harper regime is seized of. Unfortunately, past ideological performance suggests nothing will change under the current administration.

Rick's Latest Rant

In his latest, Rick Mercer turns his acerbic wit on the theft of copyright being engineered by the Harper regime to facilitate its campaign of attack ads.

On Encouraging Political Participation

The other day I wrote a post on John Cruickshank's TED Talk about the low level of political participation among young citizens. His thesis was that as a society, we are losing our news-reading and news-watching habits thanks to the myriad options offered by our current technologies. Asserting that news reading is a skill, the devolution of that skill has affected our ability to think critically and be civically engaged.

A well-considered letter to The Star, however, argues that without structural changes in our political system, measures to encourage participation will be ineffectual:

Re: What's the big threat to democracy? Distraction, Insight Oct. 11

I read the dissertation by John Cruickshank on the threats to our democracy. Unfortunately, the analysis and subsequent conclusions are flawed.

The real threats to our democracy come not only from a disengaged younger electorate (understandable given the hardships they face relative to older generations in income, housing and equality of opportunity), but rather from a perversion of the existing democratic institutions by our current plutocracy.

Political parties have “gamed” the system to their advantage. Our current body politic is often about demagogues using power seized through campaigns of fear or misinformation to obtain power; with little recourse for voters if perverse and discriminatory policies ensue.

The newly elected representative quickly finds out that they are merely trained seals, told what to say and when, with little chance to have their views fairly considered on important matters.

To just encourage people to vote no matter what is not the answer. I would proffer that an uninformed voter is more dangerous to our electoral system than one who is informed but chooses not to participate. It could be argued that the uninformed who choose to exercise their right to vote are willing participants to the demagoguery that is pervasive.
Merely asking relatively uninformed citizens to go out and vote once every four years in the current antiquated system is not the answer. The answers will begin once we seriously consider measures to not only encourage civic engagement, but with an accompanying corollary of institutional reform.

This will include some type of proportional representation to better reflect the views of all voters, greater use of plebiscites, allowing recall votes, and having party leaders chosen by their caucus to make them more accountable to the members, rather the reverse. The guise of greater voter turnout will not lead us there.

However, if a major political party were to propose such visionary reforms, then we might experience a sea change in civic involvement.

David Dos Santos, Mississauga

Has Olive Garden Lost Its Way?

Although we didn't eat at The Olive Garden this year when we visited our son in Edmonton, last year we did. It was quite disappointing, a far cry from years ago when we had the restaurant chain in Ontario. The following video perhaps explains why:

The Globe And Mail: Same Old, Same Old

We are currently receiving a three-month free subscription to The Globe and Mail, a paper I supported for many years until it returned to its largely right-wing nature after vanquishing its putative competition, The National Post, and jettisoning many of its finer writers. At least getting it free for this period allows me unimpeded access to the front section of my paper of choice, The Toronto Star, since my wife very generously reads the Globe at the breakfast table.

When the free subscription period ends, I shall not continue with the Globe, as my wife and I are clearly not part of its intended audience. I was reminded of that fact this morning as I read what was essentially a two-part editorial on tarsands oil.

Part 1, entitled Canadian oil scores a well-deserved win overseas, begins on a note of triumph:

It’s encouraging that Canada was able to exert “immense” pressure (in the words of a European Commission official) so as to moderate the terms of a proposed EU fuel quality directive that would have discriminated against Canadian exports of bitumen from the oil sands. Canadian persistence has been admirable, and no doubt the successful Canada-EU trade negotiations helped.

The piece then appears to dampen its enthusiasm by broaching the subject of those pesky carbon emissions, but the basis of the paper's concern quickly becomes evident:

Even so, Jim Prentice, the Premier of Alberta, is right to warn that, though this is “positive news for Alberta, and for all of Canada,” this country cannot afford to appear to be a reluctant foot-dragger on the environmental front.

For example, the stalling of TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline is a result of immense pressure from the environmental movement, which harms Canada’s legitimate economic interests. (italics mine)

Which leads us to Part 11, Carbon policy: lagging on the home front. Intially, it appears to be offering a counterbalance to Part 1, faulting the Harper government for its sluggish pace and vague policies on reducing carbon emissions:

The government’s plans for limiting carbon emissions are vague and incomplete. Even at that, the work is lagging behind schedule. There is no clear path forward. And much of whatever progress Canada has made on these matters has been accomplished by the provincial governments, not Ottawa.

However, it emerges very clearly that it is the optics of this delay, not the ongoing environmental and climate degradation, that is The Globe's true concern:

Such silence and delay give Canada and Canadian oil a bad name, not least in the U.S. They amount to damaging weapons in the hands of the American opponents of the Keystone XL pipeline, a project that would benefit both Canada and the U.S.

So it is clear that nothing has changed at The Globe since I cancelled my subscription. The self-named newspaper of record continues to see the world through the bifurcated lens of business imperatives and those who oppose or challenge those interests; the paper clearly continues to subscribe to the notion that anything wrong with our version of capitalism can be fixed with a little tinkering around the edges and some effective spin.

I'll take The Star's social agenda and citizens lens over that any and every day of the week.

Fighting The Darkness

Knowledge is power, and withholding knowledge is crippling.

So states scientist Sarah Otto, in an op-ed piece in today's Star. Sadly, when we apply that truth to the Canadian reality, it becomes apparent that all of us are confined to metaphorical wheelchairs.

Referring to a report released last week by Evidence for Democracy, Otto laments the sad state of ignorance fostered by our repressive federal overlords:

Overall, we earned only a 55-per-cent grade, on average, for the openness of communication policies for federal scientists here in Canada. Compare that with the U.S., where the average grade using the same methods was 74 per cent in 2013.

A few specific examples, only the tip of the iceberg according to Otto, attest to our government's contempt for openness:

- Scott Dalimore, a geoscientist at Natural Resources Canada, was prevented from doing media interviews about his research on a 13,000-year-old flood.

- Kristi Miller, a scientist at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, was prevented from publicly discussing work she published on salmon.

- David Tarasick, an environmental scientist at Environment Canada, was prevented from speaking publicly about his research on the ozone layer.

And this statistic should be quite sobering to all citizens:

A recent survey was conducted by the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, a union representing scientists in 40 federal departments. It found 90 per cent of scientists felt that they cannot speak freely to the media about the work they do.

Otto, who was asked by government scientists to speak up for them, learned some other facts about their muzzling that should outrage all Canadians:

I have been told, in confidence, about important results being held up from publication in scientific journals, waiting for approval, about missed opportunities to inform the public about research, and about cases where scientists were asked not to publish, chillingly because “we want the public to forget” about this issue.

While she ends her article with some specific suggestions to remediate this deplorable state of affairs, longtime observers will conclude there really is only one viable fix, the opportunity for which comes next year when, I hope, sufficient numbers of informed Canadians go to the polls to cast judgement on the current cabal.

Why So Much Ignorance In This Age Of Technology?

I have always thought it ironic that in this age of interconnectedness, when we have almost unlimited sources of information at our disposal, so many of us are abysmally ignorant of the things that should matter. The level of civic disengagement in North America, for example, has facilitated the devolution of so many of our democratic institutions into mere channels of undue influence for the minority, ensuring that the needs of the many are subjugated to the wants of the few. Inaction on climate change, the ongoing degradation of ecosystems, the ever-widening disparity of incomes and the erosion of social programs are but the more egregious examples of this decline.

John Cruickshank, the publisher of the Toronto Star, attributes this phenomenon to 'distraction.' In his paper, he writes about a recent Toronto Ted Talk (not yet available on the Ted site) in which he examined the problem through the lens of young people who, both in Canada and the United States, have a voter participation rate of about 40%. However, he points out that the lack of voter participation is merely the most obvious manifestation of the level of engagement:

Voting’s just the marker. More critical are civic interests, habits and knowledge: The debates in the lunchroom about taxes and spending or public meetings over a new airport or a mega-quarry. The less visible indicators of democracy’s vitality.

It’s no coincidence youth voting is so similar in the U.S. and Canada. It’s not a question of national culture. And don’t blame “the kids today.” It’s a decades-long shift. It spans generations and geography.

And it appears to be driven by the devices and content that now dominate and consume our waking lives — our smartphones and tablets, our laptops and PCs and, at least for a little while longer, our TV screens.

All of these devices, while potentially quite useful, also have a tremendous power to distract. How many times, for example, will you be at the computer when the email signal rings and you switch immediately to it? Or how about a link or a popup in an article that takes you far away from your intended purpose? (I'll just take a minute to watch that footage of George Clooney going to his Venice wedding. Oh yeah, now what was I just doing?)

All of which is to say that news has a far more tenuous grip on us than in days of yore. For Cruickshank, it becomes a simple equation:

No news habit. No engagement.

Those who have learned to pursue the news become politically active.

The drift away from substance actually began, he says, with the proliferation of cable channels that, for the less-than-committed consumer of news, offered a welcome alternative. Much Music, MTV, etc. had an allure that the nightly news didn't.

As soon as alternatives emerged, more and more younger people failed to learn news skills and habits.

They were looking for distraction, not information about the world.

But even if this population only reluctantly followed the news, their political behaviour was just like that of the most committed news junkies. They voted: 80 per cent of eligible voters went to the polls in the Canadian federal election of 1958 — the year the CBC television signal first went coast to coast.

Canadian citizens aged 65 and older were still voting at the 80-per-cent level in the federal election of 2011. But the participation rate of each successive age group Boomers, X’ers and Millennials were lower by a greater and greater margin.

Mirroring their increasing failure to develop news skills.

Cruickshank has some specific suggestions on how to reverse this terrible trend, which I will leave you to discover by reading his article.

You may also find these two brief videos about his Ted Talk of interest: