Let's Not Feel Smug

After almost 10 years' dalliance with darkness, Canadians certainly have no reason to feel smug. That we survived with our core values intact, something I was far from certain would be the case should, however, be a source of pride. A story in today's Star makes the case quite nicely, I think.

Contrasting Canada and France's welcome and integration of Muslims is instructive:

Canada ranks among the best countries in the world for integration, according to the 2015 Migrant Integration Policy Index, a study of 38 developed countries. Canada scored highly — No. 6 — for its open job market, pathway to citizenship, investment in language training, settlement services, cultural diversity and training programs. The government has pilot programs in specialized language training, helping newcomers strengthen language skills in occupational areas so they can get jobs that reflect their qualifications.

Jeffrey Reitz, a University of Toronto sociologist, found that while employment rates for recently arrived Muslim women in Canada are low at first, and they are less likely to work outside the home, they catch up over time.

“Group differences fade for those with more than 10 years in Canada, and completely disappear for their children born here,” he noted. “This is not the case in France.”

The same cannot be said for France, a fact that some suggest is one of the causes of the country's homegrown jihadism.

In contrast, even French-born Muslim women in France are 13 per cent less likely to find work than the mainstream population, said Reitz. He attributes the discrepancy, in part, to the French ban on wearing head scarves in public. “The ban is punitive and ends up pushing more people into poverty,” he says.

The November terror attacks in France highlight again how vital it is for host societies to ensure newcomers and their families can succeed.

Success, in turn, may be the perfect antidote to second-generation Islamic radicalization.

A country must always guard against hubris, often a pathway to the kind of jingoistic imperialism that so hobbles countries like the United States. A modest national pride, however, is a totally different matter, and one we should all embrace.

One Thing Is Clear

The older I get, the more I realize that there are no simple solutions to problems, be it world hunger, war and conflict, climate change, or something as seemingly straightforward as getting along with that difficult guy down the street. And while I have cast aside most of the facile answers I thought I had in my youth, one thing remains, for me, an immutable truth: the power of education.

In a world beset by extremism and creeping demagoguery, some of it very close to our doorstep, the only real inoculation, although hardly a foolproof one, is that which is conferred by being as well-educated as possible. Had I not believed this, I doubt that I could have managed 30 years in the classroom.

Knowing things, especially how to think critically, provides tools that can help prevent people from falling into an insularity that ignores the larger world and allows for the construction of a world based, not on reality, but rather the prejudices and values that appeal to the lowest instincts of humanity.

A well-considered letter in today's Toronto Star addresses this issue quite nicely, I think:

Re: Fear of Donald Trump is overblown, Dec. 18

Wondering why Donald Trump has so much support for his racist views?

Two anecdotes: In 1941, when I was four, my parents moved from Chicago to a suburb that had good schools. So by 1941, long before the documented flight of whites from U.S. cities, some U.S. school systems were in trouble.

Fast forward to the mid-1960s when I was the manager of Actors’ Theatre of Louisville, Ky., the local professional theatre company. In an attempt to sell tickets, I visited an official at the Jefferson County Board of Education, responsible for Louisville schools. When I suggested that the board consider buying play tickets for their students, the official told me that they had trouble finding dollars to buy chalk, paper and pencils, and couldn’t think about theatre tickets. He said that any increase in school funding had to be approved in a plebiscite, and citizens always voted “no.”

In addition to poor investment in education, many U.S. citizens have no experience outside of their country. In the far west and far east, near the coasts, people do travel, but in most of the U.S., including the giant midwest, people don’t even have passports. Plus, their slimmed-down, dumbed-down media are mostly controlled by big corporations whose civic responsibilities are thin.

So who better to respond to a demagogue’s simple, angry answers to complex questions than people who have been poorly educated, don’t know the rest of the world, are poorly informed by media, and have been fed a diet of myths about U.S. greatness. All this while their higher-paying union factory jobs have gone to low-wage countries.

Little was learned from the loss of the Vietnam War, other than learning not to allow the media unfettered access to what is really happening in U.S. wars. Little has been learned from the 1940s and 1950s McCarthy “Red Scare” blacklisting of supposed Communist sympathizers, another time in which politicians deliberately stoked U.S. citizens’ fears, ruining the lives of thousands.

And, most people are unaware that, beginning in the 1930s, large corporations deliberately and successfully courted U.S. Christian leaders in an attempt to counter Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. The message was, and is, that Christianity and capitalism have similar goals.

We in Canada, my chosen country, can’t be smug. We are the people that elected Rob Ford, and Stephen Harper three times, and “the base” in both countries is angry for real reasons, but instead of real solutions being offered, “the base” is fed fear and hatred of others by cynical opportunists. Unfortunately, hate boomerangs.

The solutions lie in better education and more opportunities for all, and in setting strict limits on how much wealth or power any person or corporation can amass.

A long, dangerous path is ahead of us. The enemy, and our better selves, are within each of us. In the words of W. H. Auden: “We must love one another or die.”

Douglas Buck, Toronto

The Illusion Of Separateness

Developed in the late 60's by British Scientist James Lovelock, the Gaia theory states

that the organic and inorganic components of Planet Earth have evolved together as a single living, self-regulating system. It suggests that this living system has automatically controlled global temperature, atmospheric content, ocean salinity, and other factors, that maintains its own habitability.

In other words, everything within this living breathing organism we call Earth is interconnected; make a change in one part of that organism, and those changes will reverberate throughout the system until a new equilibrium is reached. As we now know through the destructive forces unleashed by climate change, that new equilibrium is not necessarily hospitable to existing life, including that of our own species.

As I observed in a post a few years ago, every impact humanity has on the earth, whether intentional or unintentional, has far-reaching ramifications. I was reminded of that fact the other day while reading an article in Scientific American. Entitled Missing Tropical Animals Could Hasten Climate Change, the piece asserts that

the hunting and poaching of tropical animals could change the face of rainforests such as the Amazon, diminishing their ability to store global carbon dioxide emissions by up to 20 percent.

The study by scientists at Sao Paulo State University in Brazil presents solid evidence that the heedless activities of humans is exacerbating the almost out-of-control climate change we are already experiencing:

Hunting and poaching threatens 19 percent of all tropical forest vertebrates, with large vertebrates, including frugivores, disproportionately favored by hunters, the study says. As the frugivore population declines—a process called “defaunation”—fewer seeds of carbon-dense trees are spread throughout the forest, study co-author Mauro Galetti, a Sao Paulo State University ecologist, said.

“The result is a new forest dominated by smaller trees with milder woods which stock less carbon,” study lead author Carolina Bello, a Sao Paulo State University PhD student, said in a statement.

These two graphics amply illustrate the problem:



The equation is rather simple: killing the animals=reducing our longterm chances for survival.

José Maria Cardoso da Silva, an environmental geography professor at the University of Miami, said many studies, including some of his own research, have been published over the last 15 years showing that big, carbon-dense trees could go extinct without the large animals that spread their seeds.

“We demonstrated that by eliminating the big frugivorous birds, the big trees in the region will move towards extinction,” Silva said. “All studies afterwards have confirmed the trend. (Bello and Galetti’s) paper adds one more step to the chain. It shows that if the big trees go extinct, then the capacity of the forest to store carbon is reduced. If forests cannot store carbon in the way that they usually did, then the negative effects of climate change can be exacerbated.”

The folly of humanity continues apace.

A Brief Programming Note

Although the right-wing would heartily disagree, as amply pointed out by Montreal Simon today, my sense is that the waters perpetually roiled by the Harper government and their spawn have finally settled down. While there will undoubtedly be countless times in the future when I take the Trudeau government to task, for now I am content to let things unfold in their natural course. Therefore, I suspect (although I may be wrong) that I will be blogging more sporadically in the next little while.

I shall continue to read and benefit from the contributions of others, however. Enjoy a good Christmas, everyone, although I shall likely post more before December 25.

Taking The Time To Get It Right

Rather than plunging headlong into the legalization of marijuana, it sounds like the Trudeau government is taking the time to ensure that the legislation achieves its stated goals: keeping it out of the hands of young people, diminishing the black market, and not using it as an opportunity to make windfall profits:

Trudeau promises to set up a task force with representatives from the three levels of government and, with input from experts in public health, substance abuse and policing, design a new system of marijuana sales and distribution.

It would include federal and provincial excise taxes. However, Trudeau cautioned against imposing steep levies designed to discourage its use.

"The fact is that, if you tax it too much as we saw with cigarettes, you end up with driving things towards a black market, which will not keep Canadians safe — particularly young Canadians."

I Guess The Barbados Has An Open-Door Policy Toward Felons

Few Canadians will forget this scene:



The people of The Barbados, however, apparently hold no animus toward foreign felons:

Dean Del Mastro and his cousin David are establishing a $26-million solar technology manufacturing plant and solar farm in Barbados, according to a report Thursday in the online newspaper Barbados Today.

The Del Mastros' company is called the Deltro Group, and Barbados Today states that David Del Mastro is the president and Dean is company director.

The article states that Deltro Group is expected to represent “stiff competition” for Barbados Light and Power Company.

“We are not just excited for ourselves,” Dean Del Mastro told Barbados Today. “We are excited for Barbados because we believe it has potential to really transform the economy in Barbados.”

The plant is expected to hire more than 160 people by next June, the article states.

Dean Del Mastro is Peterborough's former MP. He is currently free on bail after he was sentenced to a month in jail for electoral fraud.

He spent one night in jail in June, and then was released on bail pending an appeal. The appeal is going to court Jan. 4 and 5 in Newmarket. He was convicted of having overspent on his electoral campaign in 2008.

David Del Mastro is the owner of Deltro Electric in Missisauga. He'll be on trial in February over allegations of wrongful contributions to his cousin's 2008 campaign.

He allegedly had 22 of his employees and their friends each contribute $1,000 to his cousin's campaign, and then reimbursed them with cheques from Deltro Electric for $1,050.

But Barbados Today doesn't mention any of that. It is reporting that the Del Mastros' solar plant will be operating by March or April, 2016.

It's expected to include a solar farm that will produce electricity for sale at rates less expensive than Barbados Light & Power Compan

David Del Mastro told the newspaper that Barbados was chosen as a location to establish the plant because the government there was “dedicated to incentivize us to come here.”

Out of either politeness or ignorance, the online newspaper, Barbados Today, made no reference to Del Maestro's criminal conviction. You can read their story here by going to page 2 and 3 of the publication.

Am I Wrong To Feel Contempt For The Unhinged Right-Wing?

You decide.