Real Thinking Requires Hard Work

I have thus far refrained from writing anything about the atrocities taking place in The Middle East. I have nothing constructive to add to the debate. However, I can't help but make an observation and reproduce the thoughts of another writer, who I will get to in a moment.

First, a walk down memory lane: the immediate aftermath of 9/11 saw this famous declaration from then-president George Bush:

Such a proclamation, that you are either "with us ...  or you are with the enemy" is clearly the product of an untutored mind, a mind that sees the world in bifurcated, absolutist terms. It is the favoured stance of both the simple-minded and the extreme radical, on both the left and right of the political spectrum. They allow for no nuance, no willingness or capacity to hold two conflicting views at the same time. God forbid that reason should enter into the calculus.

And so it is in the current war between Israel and Hamas/Gaza, the refusal to allow for the fact that the terrible attack on Israel did not happen in a vacuum, and the suffering inflicted on both sides is horrendous and worthy of condemnation. 

I came upon a very thoughtful and thought-provoking article today by The Star's Shree Paradkar, one that doubtlessly will bring about a severe reaction from some. Because many readers do not subscribe to newspapers, I am taking the liberty of reproducing the entire piece, something I don't think I have ever done before in this blog.

See what you think:

I’ve been sick for a few days. Now I’m sick at heart. Sick in body and spirit. Like many in Canada, I’ve spent a sleepless night that’s reverberating with the sound of a clock a world away. Tick-tock, tick-tock.

More than a million people given 24 hours to get out, or else.

How are they planning it? What will the elderly and disabled do? Are there roads?

Will they send the minors first? Half a million of them?

Bombardments on the way.

No water.

No food.

No electricity.

The babies on incubators in hospitals? The people in the ICU?

No beeps there.

Tick-tock, tick-tock.

What about the Israeli young ones who died?

That, too, is a tragedy. Of course, it is horrendous.

Hamas is bad. The Israeli government is bad. Innocent Israelis and Palestinians are being targeted and killed.

See, it’s not difficult to believe more than one thing is true at the same time.

But since the Hamas surprise attack last weekend in Israel that included mass killings and hostage taking, and Israel’s vicious retaliation including tightening its 16-year-long illegal blockade on Gaza, we have been fixated on a fake litmus test that decides whether we care for humanity or whether we support terrorism. The test question: “Do you condemn Hamas”?

Of course I condemn them — but why must I be made to say it?

Have we lost our reason? Or have we simply pulled off the mask of reasonableness?

When Hamilton NDP member Sarah Jama released a statement in solidarity with Palestinian people, the response in corners that usually see chest thumping about free speech became chilling very quickly. First there was her own party leader Marit Stiles publicly throwing her under the bus, asking for a retraction. There was Premier Doug Ford demanding she step down, falsely claiming Jama was “publicly supporting the rape and murder of innocent Jewish people ” Of course, she had done no such thing, but the howls became louder.

A Black, Muslim disabled woman was being hounded. Then the racists smelled blood and came rushing up to say, “Go back to where you came from,” and much worse.

Eventually Jama apologized.

Her sin? She hadn’t condemned the attack.

But not condemning it does not mean support of it, or of Hamas. It’s not so hard to understand the reluctance to condemn the Hamas attack on demand, horrible though it is. The Palestinian ambassador to the UK, Husam Zomlot, who lost family to Israeli attacks, puts it this way: “It’s the Palestinians that are always expected to condemn themselves,” he told the BBC in a now viral video. “How many times has Israel committed war crimes live on your own camera. Do you start by asking them to condemn themselves?”

He’s right.

Palestinians are so rarely defended. More than a million people in north Gaza, half of them children under 18 who have never voted, and certainly not for Hamas? Abandoned by the world, how can they be saved? Tick-tock, tick-tock.

So now, in a cruel twist, it has fallen upon Jews — the very people whose trauma was triggered by the Hamas attack — to put aside their own grieving, their own coping and become the voice of restraint.

That’s why Jewish groups such as Independent Jewish Voices Canada are calling for a ceasefire. Or why we see Daniel Levy, president of the U.S.-Middle East project, getting so blunt on TV. When a BBC reporter said: “The Israelis would say we’re targeting Hamas,” he said, “Do you really keep a straight face when you say that? Do you think terrorist organizations embedded in populations who are denied their most basic rights are ended once and for all in a military campaign? Does that happen in history?”

Tick-tock.

A day after the Hamas attacks, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said, “Canada unequivocally condemns” them and that Canada reaffirms its support for Israel’s right to defend itself in accordance with international law.”

Other Western leaders condemned the attack, with U.S. President Joe Biden calling it “an act of sheer evil.” But all pretended that this was happening in a vacuum. Nobody is asking them to justify it, but there wasn’t even an attempt to acknowledge how we got here.

The international law is now being openly broken. Forced deportation or forced transfers are defined as both a war crime and a crime against humanity.

Could the international community now condemn Israel?

No. The U.S. sent weapons.

Could other people protest on behalf of Palestinians?

No. Germany, France and many European nations banned them (some rightfully when they descended into antisemitism).

Could the politicians at least acknowledge that Palestinians have been denied basic human rights?

No.

Could the politicians say: Palestinians have a right to live?

Apparently even that is too much.

While Gaza starts to get closer to extinction, all Trudeau managed were a few waffling words about unilateral military actions “not contributing to the kind of future we all want to see.”

U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken asked Israel to show restraint.

Tick-tock.

History needs to know we saw this happening, we understood what it was and we did nothing to prevent it.

We need to know that to be on the right side of history requires that we grow a backbone in the present.

Real thinking requires hard work. It would appear that many of us are not up to the task.

Forgive And Forget? Never

 

There is a saying that, in many cases is a mere platitude: "Time heals all wounds." Often said to the bereaved, it is meant to impart that there are better days ahead; things will get better. Unfortunately, that is not always the case.

Take, for example the destruction wrought by a former premier of Ontario, Mike Harris. Lionized by some as a politician "who kept his promises," those without cognitive impairment will recall the reign of ugliness he unleashed in Ontario, the effects of which are still felt today. More about that momentarily.

The Star's Robert Benzie recently reported on a new book about the loathsome Harris, a collection of essays by the likes of David Frum, Terrance Corcoran and Jack Minz. When I read the article, I expressed to my wife the ardent hope that the tome finds its home in the remaindered bin very quickly.

Harris seems to have lived a charmed life, presently the chair of Chartwell's, the retirement and long-term care home chain that, amongst others, Premier Doug Ford indemnified against lawsuits related to Covid-19 deaths cause by negligence. Pays to have friends in high places, doesn't it?

In any event, as is frequently the case, Toronto Star readers have long memories and are happy to set the Harris record straight.

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Before Ford, there was Harris — and it’s still his Ontario, Oct. 10

In Robert Benzie’s interesting account of a new book of writing about the Mike Harris regime by Mike Harris’s friends, there is no mention of what many feel to be his largest legacy. By persuading Ontarians that cutting taxes, firing nurses and teachers, and downloading provincial responsibilities onto municipalities would make life better for us, he created most of the problems that we face today — including the feeling by many that governments have let them down.

It is tragic that so many lives have been made worse by these policies. It is also tragic that progressive forces have still to find a way to respond to their aftermath.

Julie Beddoes, Toronto

Harris policies still plague Ontario

Before Ford, there was Harris — and it’s still his Ontario, Oct. 10

A long list of policies implemented by the Mike Harris Government are still adversely affecting the people of Ontario.

Let’s start with the more than 4,000 people who died during the pandemic mostly in Harris privatized long-term-care homes. Harris has also profited handsomely on the board of Chartwell, one of these private homes.

Next is the privatization of hwy. 407 now the world’s most expensive toll way. That same year he privatized the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station in a long-term lease. In a deal far worse than the 407 where the profit was privatized but the debt, risks and pollution remained public.

After going fishing with Kenneth Lay of Enron, Harris had Enron and a who’s who of private investors design Ontario’s electricity market. It is this electricity market that is still to this day causing rate spikes subsidized to the tune of $7 billion a year.

Hardly a success story as claimed by editor Alister Campbell.

Much of the health-care crisis we have today came from Harris slashing of funding, which caused the loss of more than 10,000 nurses.

The Harris education funding formula is still causing underfunding and a crisis in our public education system.

The Harris legacy is nothing to celebrate and most of his policies and legislation need reversing or the people of Ontario will continue to pay the cost of his many failures.

Paul Kahnert, Markham 

Like the above citizens and many others, I shall never forgive nor forget what Harris did to Ontario, I wish him nothing but ill in his remaining years.

Great Happiness!

 

I've been feeling pretty disgusted lately with our world, given our impending climate doom and the humanitarian crises and wars going on. Those pungent testaments to our profound failures as a species (from which not one of us can be excluded) make me angry, disgusted and sad. However, something happened today that has temporarily roused me from my melancholy:

The RCMP has launched a criminal investigation into Premier Doug Ford’s $8.28-billion Greenbelt land swap scandal.

In another stunning setback for Ford’s embattled Progressive Conservatives, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police is formally on the case.

“Following a referral from the Ontario Provincial Police, the RCMP ‘O’ Division’s Sensitive and International Investigations (SII) unit has now launched an investigation into allegations associated to the decision from the province of Ontario to open parts of the Greenbelt for development,” the RCMP said in a statement Tuesday.

It was a day I feared wouldn't come, given our national police force's reluctance to delve into things that might be politically messy. The outrage of the public, however, was something it couldn't ignore. Henceforth, however, there will be a cone of silence on the investigation.

“While we recognize that this investigation is of significant interest to Canadians, the RCMP has a duty to protect the integrity of the investigations that it carries out, in order to ensure that the process leads to a fair and proper outcome. Therefore, no further updates will be provided at this time.”

Similarly, says the Ford cabal,

“[o]ut of respect for the police and their process, we will not be commenting further at this time.”

The government may think that this silence will lead to a quelling of outrage and grant them the benefit of time to do further damage control. However, given the tortoise-like pace of such probes, it will likely still be very much an active investigation at the time of the next election, which will give plenty of time for Marit Stiles' NDP to continue with their so-far effective interrogation of this corrupt regime. It will also afford plenty of time for the next Liberal leader to make her/his bones before that election.

NDP Leader Marit Stiles called the development “devastating” for Ford.

“I don’t think we can underestimate how serious it is that our current government is under criminal investigation,” said Stiles.

Interim Liberal leader John Fraser said “all roads lead to the premier’s office — there is no way that in a scandal of this size, one rookie chief of staff was the mastermind behind it.

“Where there’s smoke there’s fire, and we need to get to the bottom of why a handful of the premier’s friends and fundraisers were given the inside track for an $8.3-billion windfall,” said Fraser.

Green Leader Mike Schreiner said he was “pleased to hear that the RCMP is investigating the corrupt process that saw a few wealthy, well-connected land speculators cash in …

“The people of this province put their trust in the premier — and he chose deals for developers over everyday Ontarians,” said Schreiner.

According to Abacus Data polling for the Star, the debacle has hurt the Tories with their support dropping from 41 per cent in July to 38 per cent in August to 34 per cent last month.

And, given the latest development, they will have plenty of time to fall much, much further.

 

 

 

 

Happy Thanksgiving

 And let us give thanks that we do not live in the Benighted States of Amerika.

The Hits Keep Coming

If the Doug Ford government has any credibility left (a big IF), it has taken yet another hit, thanks to a Star investigation. Uncovered is yet another example of the cronyism that should be anathema in any healthy democracy: the weighting of The Species at Risk Program Advisory Committee with Ford's friends in land development.

The story is primarily about a a particular developer who has been ousted from the committee, after The Star started asking questions.

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The Ontario government says it’s removing a developer from an environmental advisory committee a month after appointing him.

The appointment of Sajjad Hussain to the province’s Species at Risk Program Advisory Committee was made on Aug. 31 — three months after he settled in court allegations that he and his business partner misappropriated millions of dollars in a Markham townhouse development.

The accusations were already detailed in court documents posted online at the time of Hussain’s appointment.

Apparently, Mr. Hussain and his partner, according to the  receiver appointed by the courts to oversee repayment to creditors of their company, Sunrise Acquisitions, 'misappropriated' $10 million of repayment funds.

The receiver alleged in a Dec. 2022 court motion that the directors then cooked the books, maintaining an inaccurate ledger to conceal the true nature of transactions that “only served to enrich themselves and non-arm’s lengths parties to the detriment of the company and its creditors.”

That such an unsavoury person should be on the Species at Risk Committee should surprise no one. However, in my mind the more troubling revelation pertains to the composition of the committee, whose purpose, according to a spokesperson for the Simcoe County Greenbelt Coalition, is "to ensure that government policy is protecting biodiversity and ensuring endangered species of the province have advocates".

It is not clear why the Ford government selected Hussain, a developer, for this position. In a 2021 report, Ontario’s auditor general criticized the process for appointments to the species at risk advisory committee for being not transparent. At that time, a majority of members on the committee worked for associations or companies, half of which were registered lobbyists, the report says.

I'm sure that this is business as usual in the corrupted currents of Ford World. It is not, however, normal in my world and the world of the people I know. On days like this, 2026, the year of our next provincial election, seems far away indeed. 

No Friend To The Environment

 

Readers will know that Ontario premier Ford cares little for environmental matters. One remembers his rash act upon assuming power of enthusiastically tearing up 750 green energy contracts, costing Ontario taxpayers over $230 million.

“I’m so proud of that,” Ford said of his decision. “I’m proud that we actually saved the taxpayers $790 million when we cancelled those terrible, terrible, terrible wind turbines that really for the last 15 years have destroyed our energy file.”

Now that the carbon is coming home to roost, one would hope Ford has gained insight into his monumentally stupid act. One would, of course, be wrong in that hope. Indeed, Ontario's reliance on fossil fuels has grown, seeking to meet energy demands that those torn-up contracts could have easily met, and at a much better price.

Take, for example, the gas power plants that are proliferating, originally touted for occasional use during peak-demand periods.

An investigation by the Toronto Star has found, however, that many of the province’s gas plants are operating far more often than their proponents say, effectively transforming them from rarely used peaker plants into baseload power plants that run almost all the time.

As a result, Ontario’s clean electricity is getting far dirtier, producing millions of tonnes of climate-destabilizing carbon emissions and spewing toxic pollutants into the air in some of the most densely populated urban areas in the province.

 “This will make air pollution worse, make climate pollution worse, and negatively affect Ontario’s competitive advantage in having a clean grid,” said Ontario Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner.

“And on top of that, because fossil gas is so much more expensive than solar, wind and water power, it’s going to increase our electricity bills.”

Like almost everything else this tone-deaf, environmentally-inimical cabal does, the destruction of green-energy projects fits the profile of an administration still stuck in a 1950s mindset, refusing to acknowledge the peril we collectively face.

Here is the view of two Star letter-writers:

A sweet deal for gas companies, not the Earth

• Toronto Star
• 6 Oct 2023

Toronto’s Portlands gas plant ran 21 hours a day this summer, Oct. 1 

Have I got this right? As the rest of us are trying desperately to cut back fossil fuel use, the Doug Ford government chooses to run gas plants almost full time in the GTA when cheaper and greener sources of electricity are available. And now the plan is to ramp up pollution and carbon emissions.

Who’s been having massages together to cook up this sweet deal for the gas companies?

Robin Wardlaw, Toronto

Solar power can meet the peak demand

• Toronto Star
• 6 Oct 2023

Toronto’s Portlands gas plant ran 21 hours a day this summer, Oct. 1

The Doug Ford government’s policy expanding gas-fired power generation is a far more egregious and expensive missstep than the much criticized move of a planned “peaker plant” by the former Liberal Dalton McGuinty government.

The article reveals that Ford’s current plans for expansion will cost at least an unnecessary three quarters of a billion taxpayer dollars.

Gas-fired power generation is a technology we need to minimize soon if we want to fight climate change, reduce deaths from polluted air, and save the taxpayer’s money that the government is now planning to spend on building power plants that must soon be phased out.

Gas-fired plants were originally introduced to meet themajor peaks from air conditioning demand. This peak coincides with maximum solar power generation, and experts tell us such solar generation can meet the peak demand. It is cheaper, non polluting, aids in tackling climate change, and can be placed close to demand (saving transmission costs and transmission power losses).

The Green Energy Act (scrapped by Ford) encouraged both the business and residential investments needed for growth in electrical demand, and did it without needing massive government spending, no depleting of finite natural gas resources, not polluting the air we breath, or worsening climate change.

I also wonder if the planned builders of the proposed gas generating stations are friends of Doug Ford.

Bill Chadwick, Newmarket

Still not convinced? Well, there is also the matter of the secret 95-year Therme Spa lease at Ontario Place that Mr. Ford has engineered, a contract that will cost taxpayers over $600,000 to build an underground parking lot for its customers. However, the real cost goes beyond the monetary. Building this thing will require the destruction of 1500 trees, but in the minds of the vandals, this is a small price to pay for a "world-class spa." The environment? What environment, they dismissively ask.

It is enough to almost wish that Ford's original vision of a giant ferris wheel, mall and monorail on the waterfront had come to pass.

Keeping Up The Pressure

Fires are burning in the House of Ford (not the fashion mogul's, but rather the corrupt and incompetent one that 'rules' our province). That increasing attention is being paid to the sometimes smoldering, sometimes white-hot combustions is attributable to citizen awareness, ceaseless probing by NDP leader Marit Stiles and her MPPs, media investigations, and the absolute arrogance of the now badly-wounded Ford cabal.

People feel rightfully emboldened now that the premier has promised to correct his Greenbelt 'mistake' by restoring the stolen lands. Ford, however, is sadly mistaken if he thinks that is the end of this very visible evidence of his corruption.

There are, for example, the pesky questions surrounding the provincial fiats declaring urban expansions in both Ottawa and Hamilton.

On the same Friday afternoon last November that Premier Doug Ford's government announced its plan to take certain developers' land out of the Greenbelt, it also made moves that benefited developers who own rural land on the outskirts of Ottawa and Hamilton. 

It did so by expanding each city's boundaries, instantly turning certain parcels of agricultural land from rural to urban, opening them up to future housing development and sharply increasing their potential value. 

Opposition parties believe these moves have strong parallels with what Ford's government did in selecting 15 parcels of Greenbelt land for housing development, potentially boosting their value by $8.3 billion, until ultimately reversing course last month.

That's prompting calls for investigations into the Hamilton and Ottawa boundary changes, focused on why certain land parcels were picked despite objections from each city council. 

"We see some connections … and we want to get to the bottom of it," said NDP Leader Marit Stiles. 

Stiles wrote to Ontario's auditor general's office on Friday to request an investigation into the government's expansions of urban boundaries in Ottawa and Hamilton, as well as its changes to other official land-use plans, such as Waterloo, Niagara and York regions.

Despite requests from both municipalities for a review, so far the government is hanging tight, with perennial carbuncle and toadie Paul Callandra, the current minister of housing, insisting that the expansions are needed to meet their housing goals, again ignoring all the data that show existing lands within the boundaries are adequate.

So who benefits?

The most controversial property captured by the province's expansion of Ottawa's boundaries is prime agricultural land on Watters Road in Orléans, more than 20 kilometres from the city centre. 

• In February 2021, Ottawa city council explicitly excluded that 37-hectare farm when it voted on its own plans to enlarge the city's urban boundaries. 
• In August 2021, a newly incorporated company called 1177 Watters Developments Ltd. bought the farm for $12.7 million. 
• In November 2022, the Ford government made the land part of the City of Ottawa with the stroke of a pen. 

The company's five directors donated more than $12,000 to the Ontario PC Party in 2021 and 2022, CBC Ottawa's Kate Porter revealed last November.

Liberal Party interim leader John Fraser, the MPP for Ottawa South, questions why the government put this parcel into the city's boundaries. 

"You've got a group of people who buy a piece of land in 2021", said Fraser. "This is land that you're probably never going to build on, because it's zoned agricultural. And then all of a sudden this piece of land, totally inappropriate, appears [within the urban boundary] and then the value of that land triples." 

Over in Hamilton, the stench of corruption and insider information is the same.

In Hamilton, the province ordered the city last November to add 2,200 hectares, despite council's previous vote in favour of maintaining existing boundaries. 

Among the properties that were wrapped into Hamilton's new boundaries: land owned by some of the same people whose holdings were among the 15 parcels removed from the Greenbelt last November. 

As previously reported by CBC Hamilton's Samantha Beattie, the land added to Hamilton's urban boundaries includes properties owned in part by developers Sergio Manchia of UrbanCore Developments and Paul Paletta of Alinea Group Holdings, formerly Penta Properties. 

According to the Ontario integrity commissioner's report into the Greenbelt, the two developers used the same representative to make their requests both for Greenbelt removals and for changes to Hamilton's official plan. The urban boundary changes were part of the government's amendments to that official plan.  

And earlier reporting shows that the government met with developers, giving them advance notice of expansion  before speaking to Hamilton officials. 

There is a long time to go before the next provincial election, but those four years cut both ways. Ford et al. likely hope to ride out the storm, while those who truly care about this province also have plenty of time to keep up their attacks and investigations, one of their prime motivations being the hope that the malodourous corruption enveloping this province will finally dissipate after our next visit to the polls.