The Silver Lining

While the world's unease continues to grow over the spread of coronavirus Covid-19, there is a kind of silver lining for that same world. In China, where the bug originated, air pollution is vanishing in its industrial heartland.
Satellites operated by NASA and the European Space Agency have detected significant drops of major airborne pollutants above vast swathes of the country.

Before-and-after images show how nitrogen dioxide levels plummeted in February compared to pre-lockdown January of this year. Nitrogen dioxide is a noxious gas emitted by factories, motor vehicles and fossil fuel-powered electricity generation stations.



The country's strong corona containment measures are largely responsible for this dramatic drop:

Researchers say China’s pollutant levels normally decline in February as factories pause for Lunar New Year celebrations, when the world’s largest annual mass migration occurs. But the usual rebound in pollutant levels did not occur last month, helping to illustrate the vast scale of shutdowns in the world’s second biggest economy.

“This year, the reduction rate is more significant than in past years and it has lasted longer,” Liu said. “I am not surprised because many cities nationwide have taken measures to minimize spread of the virus.”

Although such measures are taking an economic toll, not only in China but throughout the world (cancelled flights, reluctance to 'shop til you drop', stock market corrections, etc.), the natural world is in fact benefiting.

Homeostasis is a self-regulating process by which biological systems tend to maintain stability while adjusting to conditions that are optimal for survival.

I can't help but wonder if Covid-19 is part of nature's efforts toward that end.

Maybe We Need It After All, Eh?

In traditional conservative thought, the role of government is pretty narrowly defined; with the emphasis placed on individual liberty, government must minimize its intrusion into that liberty, providing only the necessities that promote security such as armies, police forces, and prisons. Taxes are bad, except as they support that security. The rest of life's activities should be largely self-regulating, the wisdom of the market prevailing in the bulk of those activities.

In her column today, Susan Delacourt says the times we live in challenge that notion.

If there is any upside to the ongoing blockades, strangled rail lines, the threat of a virus pandemic, even the struggle between environment and economy in Canada these days, it is this — very few people are arguing for the government to get out of the way.

Smaller government hasn’t looked like the answer to any of the problems besetting Justin Trudeau’s Liberals in early 2020. Less politics, maybe, but not less government.

Even that ardent Conservative, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, was musing this week about getting the government involved in financing the oil industry.

We have been hit hard lately, with crises ranging from the Iranian downing of a passenger jet killing many Canadians to the corona virus spread to rail blockades. None of those situations evoke cries for the government to mind its own business. Indeed, we look to government to address these issues and protect us from the vagaries of the world.

...the federal government has been very active this year in countries outside its jurisdiction — flying Canadians out of virus-affected spots in China and elsewhere, assisting families of the air-crash victims on the ground in Iran.

As well,

[i]t turns out ... that we do need the federal government to keep the rails running, or so Trudeau’s critics have been saying.

This past week, we learned that the federal government had been working quietly behind the scenes to get CN trains running on rival CP tracks, in a bid to avert total paralysis of train transportation. It would have been interesting to see the reaction if Transport Minister Marc Garneau had simply shrugged in the face of the blockades and said this was a matter for the private sector to settle.

The fact is, we do look to government not only for protection, but also reassurance:

...as the virus in China has been morphing into the threat of a global pandemic, pressure is building on the federal government to protect citizens. The markets may be freaking out, but the state is expected to be calm and non-panicky — and watching out for us. Rugged individualism is all well and good when we’re faced with paying our taxes, but perhaps not entirely our approach when it comes to safeguarding our health and lives. Questions are beginning to be asked as well about how the government will act to shore up any economic havoc wreaked by the virus scare

Delacourt's conclusion?

Government is based on the premises that citizens need the state. Sometimes it takes a crisis or two to remind us of that simple idea.

A Tonic For The Spirit

The older and more resigned about the world I get, the more I need this kind of story.

I posted recently about Quaden Bayles, the young Australian lad who has dwarfism. At nine years old, he wanted to die due to the relentless bullying he has experienced in his young life. After his mother posted a deeply disturbing video about the bullying, the better angels of the world descended in full force, starting a gofundme page to send Quaden and his mother to Disneyland.

But the story doesn't end there.

The family of Quaden Bayles, an Australian boy with dwarfism seen crying and expressing a desire to kill himself in a social media video last week, has declined a trip to Disneyland following a GoFundMe campaign, saying it will donate the funds to charity instead.

"What kid wouldn't want to go to Disneyland, especially if you have lived Quaden's life. To escape to anywhere that is fun that doesn't remind him of his day to day challenges," Bayles' aunt Mundanara Bayles told Australia's NITV News on Thursday.

"But my sister said 'you know what, let's get back to the real issue'. This little fella has been bullied. How many suicides, black or white, in our society have happened due to bullying?" she added. "We want the money to go to community organizations that really need it. They know what the money should be spent on, so as much as we want to go to Disneyland, I think our community would far off benefit from that."

While I really think they should use a bit of the money to take the boy to Disneyland, his mother's heart is in the right, life-affirming place.

The family noted Dwarfism Awareness Australia and Balunu Healing Foundation as two organizations they would like to see benefit from the fund.

"We need to come together and work out how to make sure young people like Quaden don't have to deal with what they have been dealing with," Bayles said. "We've had seven kids at the Murri School in Brisbane, where I am on the board, take their lives in the last ten years."

In these dark days, I appreciate whatever rays of light I can catch.

A Vile Image

It is good that this pathetic, disturbing attempt by Alberta energy company X-Site to incite hatred and sexual violence against Greta Thunerg is being widely denounced within Alberta. Surely, there is no place in our country or anywhere else for this kind of violent, misogynistic backlash against someone corporate Canada feels threatened by.



Rocky Mountain House, Alta., Councillor Michelle Narang summed up the revulsion all right-thinking people should feel this way:

“This company represents everything that the oil and gas industry needs to fight against,” Narang said to Global News while reading what she had posted online.

“I am absolutely sickened that X-Site Energy Services would think that the hard-working men and women in the energy industry would condone this representation of a child clearly being raped.”

“We do not rape women and girls to teach them a lesson. This is not our oilpatch,” Narang said to Global News. “We can’t have this representation of the oil patch and the oil companies and of our industry be accepted as normal. People need to start speaking out about it.

“It’s not OK.”

I guess X-Site just didn't get the memo, eh?

This Is Unbelievable

I've seen a lot in my life, but I am still trying to process this story:

At a carnival procession in Spain, participants dressed like Nazis and Jewish concentration camp prisoners while dancing next to a float evoking crematoria.

A video of the procession shows the participants marching in their fake Nazi uniforms. Behind them, dancers wearing striped outfits evoking concentration camp uniforms followed while waving flags of Israel. They were followed by the float shaped like a train locomotive with two large chimneys.

On Sunday, a carnival procession in Aalst, Belgium, featured costumes of ultra-Orthodox Jews depicted as ants. Dozens of other participants wore fake hooked noses based on Jewish stereotypes.

And here's the kicker:

The group that created the float said it was meant to protest the rising cost of living.

This Is Heartbreaking

... and believe me, I am not one easily moved. It is must-viewing for anyone who has ever bullied or been bullied, but it is very, very hard to watch:

Bullied boy's heartbreaking video sparks support - and suspicion

Hearts have been breaking across the internet over a viral Facebook Live video of Quaden Bayles, a nine-year-old Australian boy with dwarfism who tells his mother he'd rather die than endure the bullying he faces at school. "I want someone to kill me," Quaden says in the video, as he sits and cries out of an open car door.

Forgetting Their Purpose

There is little doubt that politicians' constituency work can be onerous, eroding personal/family time while home on the weekends and perhaps compromising the work they do in Ottawa. It is not a task I envy.

Nonetheless, there are those who, obstructed by overweening ego and ambition, refuse to acknowledge that serving their constituents is or should be their primary task. This might seem to be stating the obvious, but it is a truth some would-be Titans of the political universe seem to largely ignore, local scutt work apparently beneath their political dignity.

This is the tale of one such person.

I speak from personal experience here as I write about the consistent unresponsiveness of my Liberal MP, Liberal Filomena Tassi, to my phone calls and emails, and it stands in marked contrast to the relationship I had with my former MP (we had boundary changes in our area), Conservative MP David Sweet. Although he and I never saw eye-to-eye on any issues I raised with him or his office, the fact that Sweet would always respond to my emails, either by email or personal phone calls, earned my deep respect, and I like to think that we had some quite civilized exchanges.

Unfortunately, Ms. Tassi is an entirely different story. After a career helping others as a chaplain at a Catholic high school, her leap into politics looked like a good transition, one that would enable her to help even more people. Sadly, that has not turned out to be the case. Rising quickly within the government power structure, she is currently the Minister of Labour, a position she no doubt attained through both talent and party fealty.

And that fealty was obvious from the beginning, not only through the many photos of her with the movers and shakers of her government, but also what I regard as her strategic decision to refuse to acknowledge those who ask where she stands on an issue. That I am not alone in being ignored is attested to by a letter to the editor that appeared in The Hamilton Spectator back in 2017:

My MP ignored my voice

RE: Pensions in crisis
As a longtime resident of Ancaster, and a former Sears employee for over 30 years, I thought it was important to write my member of Parliament regarding my concerns about the financial future of thousands of fellow Sears pensioners locally and across Canada. It would have been nice to know that my elected representative from the Liberal government, shared my concern, and may have some input into its final conclusion.

This is the first time that I have contacted an MP on anything, and unfortunately, after an initial email over three weeks ago, a followup email and then a phone message to her Ottawa office a week ago, there has been no reply. I guess Ms. Filomena Tassi does not place a high priority on aging pensioners problems, but politeness and common courtesy should have resulted in some sort of followup!

I would like to thank MP Scott Duvall of the NDP for his efforts to bring this plight to the forefront and to The Hamilton Spectator for printing articles on pension shortfalls.

Ms. Tassi — is anyone manning the communications in your office — do you care?

Don Backman, Ancaster

Backman's letter prompted me to write one of my own, a truncated version of which follows:

Liberal MP Filomena Tassi must have missed the orientation given to all newly-elected federal representatives when she took office just over two years ago. Had she attended, she would have understood that one of the most important roles of parliamentarians is to represent and help their constituents on both big and small issues.

Her failure to even acknowledge Don Backman's emails and calls on the very important pension issue do not surprise me in the least. The emails I sent her on two separate occasions, one shortly after she was elected and another about six months later, netted me the same result. Her failure to respond to the first I attributed to the fact that she was new to office. The silence that met my second missive, regarding Canada's unconscionable sale of arms to the Saudis, was harder to explain away.

.......

Perhaps the current representative of Hamilton West-Ancaster-Dundas has reasons for her silence. Is it possible she is angling for a role higher than that of backbencher in the Trudeau government, her strategy being to avoid any contentious matters in order to demonstrate unflinching fealty to Justin Trudeau? Cabinet positions are often built on such absolute loyalties.

If that is the case, Ms. Tassi has a gross misunderstanding of where her first allegiance should lie: her constituents.

I might add that I recently wrote to her again, despite her communications embargo, expressing my opposition to the Teck Resources' Frontier Mine and asking where she stood on the issue. Again, no response.

So is this post simply an expression of egoistic frustration, an old guy angry that he is not being heard or acknowledged by his Member of Parliament? Not at all.

It has become increasingly apparent that our governments no longer feel responsible for representing and advancing the public interest, unless that public interest happens to coincide with economic and corporate health. The wants, needs and expectations of the general public are rarely regarded as imperatives except during election campaigns; such a cynical manipulation of the electorate, in my view, goes a long way toward explaining the alienation and disengagement far too many Canadians feel.

Whether or not MPs agree or disagree with their constituents' views and values is ultimately secondary here. It is their failure to even acknowledge them that betrays one of the basic tenets of democracy and the implicit covenant our elected representatives have with all of us.