Friday, March 1, 2013

They Still Walk Among Us

I have always felt a deep, abiding respect and affection for people of integrity. During my career as an English teacher, I took special delight in teaching plays like Arthur Miller's The Crucible and Robert Bolt's Man For All Seasons, which told stories of real-life people who made the ultimate sacrifice to stay true to themselves and their beliefs.

Happily, those with integrity are not confined to either the history or literary pages. They still walk among us. People like Munir Sheikh, the former head of Statistics Canada who resigned his post rather than have his name, reputation and work brought down into the slime by the Harper regime. People like Nelson Mandela, who, rather than grasping at early release from prison in exchange for renouncing the African National Congress, served 27 years in prison and later became both the president and moral leader of South Africa.

People like Kevin Page.

Page, the Parliamentary Budget Officer about whom I have written several times on this blog, will be completing his mandate and leaving office on March 25, no doubt much to the relief of the Harper regime, which has been persistently reminded of its fiscal ineptitude, lies, and manipulation of public information by his indefatigable quest for truth and accountability. The F-35 fighter jet debacle is perhaps one of the most obvious examples of the above litany of Harper shortcomings, and a steady target of the PBO, but not the last.

The Star's Tim Harper has a profile of the self-effacing Page in today's edition that is well-worth reading. As well, this editorial in the Montreal Gazetter, this piece in The Star, and this article from Macleans are also well-worth perusal.

For the sake of our national psyche, I believe it is incumbent upon us to honor heroes while they still walk among us.

Thursday, February 28, 2013

One Book

Although it has been many years since I read it, I was very pleased to see that the Toronto Public Library has chosen Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 for its One Book annual community reading event. Although first published in 1953, this eerily prescient novel tells the story of a world where people are globally deterred from thinking by the banning of books, the addictive use of 'seashells' that whisper sweet nothings in their ears (read IPods), and the constant diversion of omnipresent large-screen televisions that broadcast the most empty forms of diversion imaginable. Sound familiar?

Without question, Fahrenheit 451 puts to the lie the fashionable notion that fiction has little to offer for the mind. And if that whets your appetite, give Aldous Huxley's Brave New World a try. Again, the parallels to today's world are stunning.

On Child Poverty

Late last year I wrote a post expressing my discomfort with the proliferation of foodbanks. Despite the fact that I volunteer at one, I can't escape the notion that it has become an enabler of government inaction on poverty in this country. As well, the fare available from foodbanks is generally of the canned and processed variety, high in salt and preservatives, hardly the basis of a healthy diet.

Over the years I have volunteered there, I have noticed that more and more of the clientele is not the chronically unemployed, but rather the chronically under compensated, those who are working at minimum-wage jobs that are wholly inadequate to meet their and their families' needs. I especially feel for the children who often accompany their moms on their monthly visits to our establishment.

While Ontario has made some progress in reducing child poverty, austerity measures and corporate tax reductions that have yielded few jobs have halted that progress. A story in this morning's Star paints a rather grim picture of what life is like for the 383,000 Ontario children still ensnared in rather dire living conditions:

In 1989, 240,000 Ontario kids lived in poverty, when the child poverty rate was 9.9 per cent. The rate in 2010 was 14.2 per cent, representing 383,000 kids.

One in 10 Ontario children in 2010 lived in households that couldn’t afford things like dental care, daily fruit and vegetables and “appropriate clothes for job interviews,” up 15 per cent from 2009.

35.6 per cent of kids in a household with a single mom lived in poverty in 2010.

92,500 Ontario kids living in poverty still have one parent who works full time, year-round.

In 2010, 7.1 per cent of children in the province lived in “deep poverty,” where household earnings amounted to less than Ontario’s median family income.

You can read the entire sad story here.

This One Isn't Much of a Challenge

But apparently our Prime Minister heartily disagrees, constitutional requirements notwithstanding (BNA Act 23:5).

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Villagers With Pitchforks

Looks like these folks need some direction:

I suspect young Tim Hudak would like to provide it for them.

Tim Speaketh Again

The only trouble is, everytime he does, he affirms his incompetence. Yes, young Tim Hudak, the leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party, has weighed in on yet another 'obstruction' that he believes can be remediated through his simplistic prism. This time it is that pesky perennial problem of those darned endangered species, or more specifically, [g]overnment regulations protecting endangered species [which] are throttling business:

In a speech Tuesday to the Rural Ontario Municipalities’ Association (ROMA) conference at the Fairmont Royal York Hotel, ... Hudak told 700 rural municipal politicians he would slash “the more than 300,000 regulations, outdated rules, and runaround that you have to cope with just to get something done.”

To drive home his point for those listeners whose thoughts might have wandered away from the prattling stripling in their midst, the lad who would be Ontario premier pronounced:

“The problem is that these rules are ... not allowing our agriculture and business sectors to grow.”

As an illustration of the evil obstructionism of government, Hudak tartly observed: In 2003, there were exactly 19 species listed — today, well over 121” - clearly a sign of government regulation run amok, and surely not an indication of a deteriorating ecosystem, a concept I doubt that young Tim subscribes to.

Unaware of his irony, he vowed to use “verifiable science not political science” to determine what animals to protect. This, despite the fact that, as pointed out by Natural Resources Minister David Orazietti, the assessment and classification of endangered species is conducted by experts on the arms-length Committee on the Status of Species at Risk in Ontario.

But then again, I doubt that the hapless Hudak ever lets facts get in the way of a good ideological rant, and would seem to prefer this as the only sign of real progress:

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

The Precariously Employed

The other day I made reference in a post to a study showing that half of the workers in the GTA are precariously employed, meaning they have unstable and unreliable employment with no benefits, a reality sharply at odds with the triumphalism of the right over the putative unalloyed good achieved by free trade.

This morning's Star editorial calls for changes in social assistance programs to ease the plight of these workers. Among the ideas being bandied about are more flexible child care, reforms to pensions, and new insurance models “that could create more economic certainty for people in precarious employment.”

While these ideas undoubtedly have merit, I think it would be a profound mistake to exclude corporations from the solution; despite the fact that it has become conventional wisdom that governments cannot consider increasing taxes, direct and indirect, on large businesses, that is one of the many reforms that needs to be included. Otherwise, of course, the rest of us will be alone in picking up the tab.

Canada in general, and Ontario in particular, offers a host of advantages to business ranging from a well-developed infrastructure to an enviable health-care system and a very educated workforce. Being able to shrink its permanent work force while exploiting these advantages has added tremendously to the corporate bottom line. It is time they started paying a larger portion of their lavish profits for those privileges.