The True Voice Of Canada

As we well know after enduring almost 10 years of darkness, sometimes the loudest and ugliest voices are the ones that command the most attention, thereby skewering our perceptions of reality. If the Harper government had been the true voice of Canada, we would have had to resign ourselves to being an intolerant, suspicious, mean-spirited and xenophobic people, a people who despised logic, science and any whiff of 'the other.' A very similar scenario, of course, is playing out in the United States today under the demagoguery of Donald Trump. The American people have my deepest sympathies.

No, I much prefer the voice of tolerance, moderation and compassion, the voice that is surely being cultivated by the new Trudeau government these days. And it is heartening to know that that voice is not limited to government circles, as the following letters from today's Star heartily attest to.

Canada does well by immigrants, says integration study, Dec. 27

Some Canadians say Syrian refugees are not welcome because there may be terrorists among them. They need to relax. We must never fear accepting refugees. Even if there will be problems with this newest wave of refugees, and there are bound to be some, goodwill and compassion must always triumph over fear.

Even though we presently have problems meeting the needs of many poor Canadians, our doors for refugees must remain open. The larger problems this will produce will no doubt require our larger effort but we must not be afraid of this task.

We must never fear refugees or the challenges they will bring. Our freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes. Whenever we do make them, this is Canada and we will overcome them.

It would certainly be a real black mark on Canada, or any other country, that reduces or stops the process of helping refugees because of fear or a lack of compassion.

Canada is proud to be a country known for tolerance, goodwill, compassion and respect for others. Let’s hope that never changes, and let’s hope other countries will follow our lead.

Bob Hicks, St. Catharines

Love is batter than hate. How wonderful to be inclusive rather than exclusive. It’s the heart of all world religions. It’s the base to our understanding of who we are, and what our society aspires to. It’s a resolution of our conscience to accept those in need.

I’m proud that our Prime Minister welcomed Syrian refugees into Canadian society personally. Donald Trump’s rhetoric exposes his insecurity and feeds to the protectionist mindset of those with a need to hide in their homes with a gun.

Surely the citizens of the U.S. deserve the respect of a higher standard of conscience. He might note that our Prime Minister’s ratings have soared while he shot himself in the foot.

Our world society’s hope is that of acceptance, not rejection. Its populace needs to accept a basic love of each other, if we, as an international community, are to survive. A narrative of prejudice has no place in it.

Keep it up Mr. Trudeau. Make us proud to be Canadian.

John Wiggins, Collingwood

This holiday season has been eventful in its gift giving, spending quality time with family and enjoying a much needed break from our jobs, schooling and other commitments.

For myself personally, I’ve had the special privilege of enjoying dinner with a Syrian refugee family who just recently immigrated to Canada. After spending an evening learning about their experiences, I’ve realized that – despite our differences – we were all vocal in expressing our gratitude and loyalty to Canada, and shared the desire to be contributing and productive citizens in this great country.

I hold Canada’s value of freedom and liberty – irrespective of religion, culture or ethnicity – very important and ideal for any modern country. As Canadians, we must value our diversity, and realize that our differences make us unique.

Arslaan Khokhar, Brampton

A Tale Of Two Canadas

That is the title of a very interesting piece by Michael Valpy in today's Star that is well-worth reading. His thesis offers something of a challenge to a post I put up the other day talking about the fact that our core values as Canadians managed to survive 10 years of dark rule under the Harper Conservatives.

While admitting the recent election was a rejection of a policy direction that was simply alien to most Canadians, Valpy notes that it was the participation of a certain demagraphic that tipped the scales against Harper:

What shifted on Oct. 19 was the appearance of three million more voters than in the previous election of May 2011 — most of them young and wanting to declare that the Harper government was alien.

What shifted were the significant numbers of small-l liberals who had voted NDP in 2011 and large-L Liberals who stayed home, but not this time. As well, in the last days of the campaign, what shifted was a significant chunk of the over-65 vote from Conservative to Liberal.

Citing pollster Frank Graves' analysis of the election, this past election differed from the one in 2011 thanks to values and emotional engagement,

values that said Harper’s-Canada-is-not-my-Canada and an emotional engagement largely absent in centre-left voters in 2011. Emotion is what gets people to the polls.

Whether it was tough-on-crime, the passivity toward climate change, the diminution of the federal state to an unprecedented 14 per cent of GDP, the shuttering of research and evidence-based decision making, or a much more militaristic foreign policy with an unblinking pro-Israel stance, collectively those positions were increasingly disconnected from what the majority of Canadians considered their country’s core values and the public interest, says Graves.

However, Valpy points out that there is another side to this picture:

The popular vote that gave Harper his majority in 2011 — 39.6 per cent — was almost identical to the popular vote that gave Trudeau his majority in 2015: 39.5 per cent.

Harper’s absolutist approach to government with the backing of not much more than one-third of ballots cast (and the support of only 24 per cent of all Canadian voters) was branded a debasement of democracy.

That assessment will likely not be made of the Liberals, Valpy suggests, because theirs are values represented by a larger proportion of Canadians. However, the fact is

the roughly one-third of voters who stuck with the Conservatives on Oct. 19 are real people, with a very distinct profile in terms of both demography and values. Conservative Canada is older, more likely to be male, less educated, rural, and focused to the west of the Ottawa River.

Valpy concludes that

there are two Canadas, each with seemingly irreconcilable values, maybe bringing us to the necessity of seeing the country in a new light — as a modern, pluralistic society with no national consensus, with only limited harmony at the political level, with tensions and contradictions cemented into the basic operating DNA of the country.

It means that while the positive response to the new Trudeau government is the highest this century, the idea of common values in Canada is a chimera, a fantasy.

While his last sentence may be a source of discomfort for some, and certainly challenges my notion about Canadian core values, the tension between opposing visions is also something that should remind all of us of the importance of political engagement and the nurturing of our voices and values. It should also prompt an acknowledgement that a competing vision and competition for our vote is an absolute necessity in a healthy and dynamic democracy, preventing to a degree both governments and voters from taking things for granted.

Geoengineering: A Technology Fraught With Consequences We Can't Anticipate, Or Saviour Of Humanity?

I was watching The National last night, which presented what I felt was a too-cheery piece on geoengineering, the process whereby climate is purposely altered through human intervention. The report looked at the aspect of climate intervention known as Solar Radiation Management, a process that involves putting materials into the air (often the stratosphere) to reflect sunlight and thus reduce global warming. The problem with the entire concept is that it has the potential to adversely affect billions of people.

One point that sticks in my mind from the report, however, is that the scientist interviewed stated, in answer to the objection that artificially altering our climate would be undesirable, that we are already doing so by the billions of tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions that have already accumulated in the atmosphere since industrialization began.

Take a look and see what you think. Is geoengineering inevitable? Will it become a necessity? I would be especially interested in reading the thoughts of The Mound of Sound, whose recent post explored the fact that carbon being released from our soil is about to become a huge problem in our attempts to confront climate change.

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.