Too High A Price To Pay

This year, The Star has been running an Atkinson Series entitled The New Newsroom, which looks at both the challenges and the possibilities facing journalism in this age of Internet freebies. It is an excellent series that I hope you get a chance to check out. Here is an excerpt from a recent installment and the theme of today's post:

When the news industry and its supporters seek government funding to give it time to find a new business model, it’s because of the role news plays in maintaining a strong society — protecting democracy, in the phrase often used. If we don’t know what our governments are doing, we don’t control them. If we don’t know that hospitals have long waiting lists, we can’t find a solution. If we don’t know a development is planned, we can’t fight to protect the green space instead. Without information, we can’t have knowledgeable conversations with each other. We don’t have a voice. Our communities then belong to the powerful.

It is one of the key reasons I subscribe to The Toronto Star, which has a remarkable record in effecting change at the local, provincial and federal levels thanks to its many investigative reports. Without those investigations, public awareness of problems and injustices would have been quite limited.

To read a daily newspaper is to facilitate something all citizens should have: critical thinking skills. Without those skills, and without the information needed to inform those skills, we really are at the mercy of forces that would prefer us to be in darkness so they can carry out their agendas, agendas that rarely coincide with the public good. A column today on increases to the provincial minimum wage by provincial affairs reporter Martin Regg Cohn amply illustrates this fact.

Despite the scare stories, a proposed $15 hourly wage in 2019 is proving wildly popular. By all accounts, it is a vote-winner.

The usual suspects are upset: TD Bank, Loblaws, Metro, the Chamber of Commerce and the small business lobby are warning higher wages will hit hard, and hurt the working poor by costing them jobs.

It’s a recurring tale of two competing victimhoods — businesses at risk and jobs in jeopardy — but people aren’t buying it. The old fable about the boy (or business) who cried wolf is a hard sell when few believe the wolf is at the door.

Were the business perspective our sole source on this issue, we would likely be inclined to believe the hike is going to wreck our economy. Having a countervailing view assists us in making a more measured judgement. And, as Cohn points out, there are other factors to consider here, such as societal consensus:

Perhaps people are waking up to the impact of poverty amidst plenty. And are prepared to pay more at their local Dollarama — rebrand it Toonierama if need be.

Canadians who were content to live alongside the working poor are increasingly sensitized to the argument for a living wage. Times change.

For the longest time, people put up with second-hand cigarette smoke, drove while drunk, forgot their seat belts, or sneered at nerds who wore helmets for motorcycling, cycling, hockey or skiing. Now, cigarettes are taboo, drunk driving is anathema, seat belts are the law, and helmets are de rigeur.

Add to that some hard facts that demonstrate the one-sidedness of the business argument that the sky will soon fall:

A previous column about the business lobby pointed to the flaws in outdated econometric modelling that vainly tries to foretell future job losses from doomsday scenarios. Their conclusions are contradicted by more advanced research that looks retrospectively at recent history, showing negligible or unmeasurable impacts from minimum wage hikes.

Yet major retailers keep warning that automation is the inevitable result of higher wages. Been to a Loblaws, Sobeys, or Canadian Tire recently? Seen those automated check-out counters, even at today’s minimal minimum wage?

Automation is inevitable. Lowering the minimum wage won’t bring back full-service gas station attendants, or persuade the banks to remove automated tellers from your local branch.

Economic disruptions are also unpredictable. Even if business scaremongering about a wage hike were remotely true (at the margins), the reality is that a rapid increase in interest rates would have far more impact, as would a collapse in the housing market.

We all have our biases and values. The fact that I subscribe to The Star attests to mine. However, I also am free to reading countervailing views from conservative and pro-business organs like the National Post and The Globe and Mail, and frequently I will not dismiss out-of-hand some of their perspectives. The point is, however, that the more information I acquire from a legitimate news source, as opposed to fringe Internet sites that feel no obligation to abide by the rules of evidence and reason, the more equipped I am to draw reasoned conclusions.

Journalists do the heavy lifting for all of us. To lose them would be to lose any chance to have a healthy and sustainable democracy. That is surely too high a price to pay.

Suppressing Dissent

Like countless others, I support those protesting both the wicked legacy and current practice of North American racism. While more egregious perhaps in the United States, Canada's own shameful racist history and practices leave little to be proud of either. For that reason and others, I cannot support the decision of Sidney Crosby and his fellow Canadians to visit the Trump White House as the Stanley Cup champions.

Consider the following:

Sidney Crosby and the rest of the Pittsburgh Penguins view their trip to the White House on Tuesday as the final moment of celebration for a championship season, not some sort of statement about where they stand on President Donald Trump.

"From my side of things, there's absolutely no politics involved," Crosby said Monday. "Hopefully it stays that way. It's a visit we've done in the past. It's been a good experience. It's not about politics, that's for sure."

Perhaps the concussion-prone lad is not thinking straight or is unspeakably naive in thinking that interacting with Donald Trump is like past visits to the White House; in that he is sorely mistaken, as the following clip makes abundantly clear:



And let's face it. Crosby and the others are filtering an increasingly fraught reality through the prism of white privilege, something The Star's Emma Teitel takes him to task for:

Like any white person who shares Crosby’s “side of things” and whose government does not devalue his life on account of the colour of his skin, he has the luxury of regarding politics as a force too far away to complicate his day to day.

It was this luxury that enabled him to smile and shake hands with a U.S. president who recently asserted that “very fine people” existed on both sides of the summertime march in Charlottesville, Va., where neo-Nazis walked unmasked and triumphant down a city street and a 32-year-old woman died at the hands of one of them. (Very fine people indeed.)

Having been born and raised in Nova Scotia compounds the grievousness of Crosby's moral blindness:

Being Black was tough too for the more than 400 hockey players who comprised the Coloured Hockey League in Crosby’s home province of Nova Scotia from 1895 to 1930. CHL players did not have the privilege of political indifference when their league disbanded due to a number of factors, racism included. Later the government would demolish Africville, the African-Canadian village in Halifax, in which many of the league’s members lived and played.

Penguin coach Mike Sullivan is also complicit in this misdeed, despite his stout denials:


Sorry, Mike. You just can't have it both ways.

I shall leave you with a reminder of who ultimately has the real power and now seems intent on abusing it to suppress dissent, and this should come as no surprise to anyone: it is the predominantly white 1% who are committed to maintaining the status quo.



Both Mike Sullivan and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell can talk all they want about respecting their players, but in the end, as always, actions speak far, far louder than words.

This Is What A Complete Absence Of Integrity Looks Like

You can read more about this pathetic example of humanity and avid courter of political favour, William Wehrum, here.

UPDATED: On The Petering Out Of Pipelines

While Andrew Sheer's Conservatives will undoubtedly wring as much political capital as they can out of the cancellation of the Energy East pipeline, less partisan people will see it as the inevitable outcome of two facts: the current low price of oil and the necessity of phasing out fossil fuels if we are to have any chance of mitigating the worst effects of the climate change now well underway.

Fortunately, Star readers are sufficiently sophisticated in their thinking to understand that new pipelines have no place in our world today, as the following letters attest:

TransCanada pulls the plug on Energy East pipeline project, Oct. 6

Politicians fuming about TransCanada’s cancellation of the Energy East pipeline apparently believe that short-term profits for Big Oil trump not only the welfare of the communities the line would run through, but the welfare of all Canadians, since the bitumen it would have carried worsens the devastating impact of climate change. Mimicking U.S. President Donald Trump’s futile quest to bring back coal, Big Oil’s apologists try to focus the public’s attention on jobs, ignoring the fact that green energy already employs more Canadians than the oilsands. TransCanada’s decision is in line with a worldwide trend away from oil and towards a sustainable energy future. It’s time that politicians faced the truth and stopped propping up fossil fuels with billions of dollars in subsidies every year.

Norm Beach, Toronto

I expect Prime Minister Trudeau and Environment Minister Catherine McKenna are now, finally, after all, getting the message. It’s time to stop approving and building more pipelines. This is not the way to the low-carbon economy, to the clean-energy future we desperately need.

In addition to other compelling reasons against pipelines, it is now abundantly clear that building more pipelines does not make economic sense. When called to give full account for the pollution up and downstream, considering the return on investment of extracting and processing the dirtiest fuel on the planet, the plug has been pulled on the Energy East Pipeline. And rightly so.

There are court cases currently underway in B.C. to challenge the seriously flawed decision to approve the Kinder Morgan expansion. I ask the Trudeau government to reconsider the Kinder Morgan approval and other such decisions as they come up. Extracting energy from tarsands is disastrous, doesn’t make economic sense and must be ended sooner rather than later. This means phasing out, not expanding, the extraction and use of fossil fuels, particularly from the tarsands.

We must not move forward with a project that does not assess and take into account the downstream as well as upstream emission impact. It’s not acceptable to export pollution and emissions. We must not continue to use, build or support the fossil fuel industry to finance the transition to a sustainable economy based on renewables. Rather than supporting jobs in tarsands extraction, help workers move toward greener occupations. We must honour our commitment to reduce our emissions.

Jill Schroder, Vancouver, B.C.

Meanwhile, today's Star editorial offers some astute observations:

Canada has been slower than other countries to see that climate change is changing the calculus of national interest. China, choked by air pollution, has aggressively invested in renewable energy, driving the price of wind and solar power precipitously down. Last year, renewables matched fossil fuels for the first time both in price and power capacity. [Emphasis added] As countries seek to meet their climate targets, demand for the sort of energy that depends on pipelines seems bound, even if slowly, to decline.

...our long-term competitiveness, including but not only in the $5-trillion global energy business, depends on our ability to look beyond fossil fuels and foster clean-tech and alternative-energy innovations and industry.

No one would suggest that there will be no economic repercussions of moving away from oil. But the longer we delay the transition, the longer we pretend that it can be business as usual, the greater that impact will be.

UPDATE: Thanks to The Salamander for providing this link to an excellent article analyzing the failure of Energy East.

On This Thanksgiving Day

Clearly, we have much to be grateful for.


H/t Greg Perry

A Truly Alien Nation

This weekend we celebrate with family and friends our Canadian Thanksgiving. As is the custom, we reflect upon the things for which we are grateful, and duly give thanks for them. This day, I am particularly thankful for what I am not - a resident of the United States.

The benighted nation south of us, which calls itself, without a hint of irony, "the greatest country on earth," suffers from a serious rupture from reality. To me, it is an egregiously failed country, one so foreign from my experience and understanding of what constitutes a civilized and mature society that it might as well exist on a another planet. It is truly an alien nation.

In today's Star, Daniel Dales writes about the most conspicuous aspect of the United States' moral sickness: its insane gun laws which, signs suggest, are about to go even further down the rabbit hole.

Even with so many deaths and grievous injuring marring the American landscape, including the latest massacre of 58 people in Las Vegas, the full-court press to make guns even more accessible proceeds apace:

This year, for example, Missouri Republicans allowed people to carry guns without obtaining a permit. Georgia Republicans allowed permit-holders to carry on college campuses. Ohio Republicans allowed gun licence holders to carry their guns at daycares that don’t put up No Guns signs and to store their guns in their cars on school property.

Before the Las Vegas shooting, House Republicans had been pushing a bill to make it easier to buy gun silencers [the euphemistically-titled Hearing Protection Act] . They have now delayed that effort a second time. The first delay came after a shooter attacked party congressmen on a baseball field in nearby Virginia — which, tellingly, prompted some to talk about loosening gun laws, for self-defence.

While a few states have slightly tighted rules, most are embracing, even extolling, looser restriction:

Charles Heller, a spokesperson for the Arizona Citizens Defense League, a gun rights group, said Arizona has passed “58 positive bills, signed by three governors, over 13 years.” He is pushing for more — such as a law allowing people with gun licences to bypass metal detectors at government buildings, as at the Texas state capitol, and a law making it legal to brandish a gun against assailants who have not yet caused physical harm.

Americans, it seems, have become inured to statistical evidence of the carnage caused by guns:

More than 33,000 Americans were killed by guns in 2014 — more than 90 per day. In 2015, the Washington Post found, 23 children were shot every day. Almost two-thirds of the gun deaths were suicides, which tend to receive the least attention.

One always reads that the main obstacle to passing laws controlling and restricting these weapons of mass destruction is the NRA. Of that I am not so certain. Sure, that dark organization has an almost unlimited war chest when it comes to influencing and buying legislators, but I doubt its agenda could reign supreme without one other element: a citizenry so deeply flawed, so deeply divided and so deeply fearful of their neigbours that only brute force and personal arsenals can offer a balm to their deeply, deeply debased psyches.

His Name Was Patrick Harmon

Only a failed nation perpetrates the kind of atrocity depicted in the following video. While difficult to watch, what other choice do we have but to bear witness?