Category Archives: Government

Oct 23 2013
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Government, Politics

The Canadian Senate sends in its clowns

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The federal Conservative government’s point man in the Senate now hopes to preserve the “dignity and integrity” of the Red Chamber by forcing three of its members, who have not yet been charged with the crime of expense-fiddling, to take a long, unpaid hike off a short pier.

Senators Pamela Wallin, Mike Duffy and Patrick Brazeau are, apparently, an affront to this august body, where near-lifetime tenures proceed at the pleasure of the sitting prime minister and regional “representation” is a function of Victorian-era definitions of residency.

Still, says Tory Senate leader Claude Carignan, off with their heads.

Hear, hear, agrees his Liberal counterpart James Cowan: Suspend the rascals and be quick about it.

“It’s not a Liberal, a Conservative or an Independent (thing),” Sen. Carignan told The Toronto Star last week. Referring to Sen. Duffy, he said, “(Here’s) a senator that . . . didn’t respect the dignity and the rules of the senate. . .It’s not a question of money. It’s a question of gross misconduct. . .It’s a very severe sanction but I think it’s appropriate.”

Added Sen. Cowan: “I certainly have no sympathy for those three senators who we found deliberately breached what were clear rules and were ordered to pay significant amounts of money back. We need to take disciplinary action. These were not simple mistakes, bookkeeping errors. There was, the Senate found, a deliberate attempt to abuse the rules.”

The accused and their legal eagles say exactly the opposite is true.

According to The Canadian Press this week, Sen. Duffy’s lawyer, Donald Bayne, “spent nearly an hour (on Monday) alleging how Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s staff and key Conservative senators developed a scheme to have Duffy take the fall for wrongdoing that even they agreed he had not committed.”

What’s more, the news wire reported, “Five allegations emerged from Monday’s event.” Among these: “Government Senate leader Marjory LeBreton allegedly told Duffy in a letter that residency is not clearly defined in the Senate’s rules. . .Nigel Wright, the prime minister’s former chief of staff, allegedly told Duffy in an email last December that he had not broken any rules in relation to his housing expenses.”

Declared Bayne: “The whole political decision-making about this has been a fiasco. . .From the get-go, rather than letting the truth out, that there are flaws in the Senate system and rules, it’s the old story. The cover-up is always more damaging than the original issue.”

It’s hard to know who to watch, let alone whom to find credible, in this three-ring circus. One assumes that the serious deliberations the Senate is supposed to undertake as a large part of its official function are underway somewhere behind the curtain. But, it’s safe to say that “sober second-thinking” are not words most Canadians would associate with the Upper Chamber these days.

All of which leaves reform-minded parliamentarians in something of a quandary: How do they reconstitute the Senate and restore its reputation without appearing to admit that Senators Duffy, Wallin and Brazeau are, in fact, victims, rather than opportunists. The rush to judge the individuals involved now seems calculated more to uphold the principle of honesty in public office untethered from the institutional context – a context that may well be so fundamentally flawed that technical breeches of the rules are, under even normal circumstances, almost inevitable.

Summary suspensions, at this point, are patently unjust. They are, naturally, politically expedient courses of action. But they won’t address what is, almost certainly, a much bigger problem in the Senate. It’s a problem to which Conservative Senator Hugh Segal alluded in an interview with CBC Nnews last week.

“The notion that we would move to a sentencing process, which this motion is. . .is just completely unfair and a violation of every principle of fairness,” he said. “Some folks think the best way to deal with these problems is to throw everybody under the bus. Well guess what? You’re going to run out of buses and you’re going to run out of people.”

Just so.

And so goes with it dignity and integrity.

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Oct 21 2013
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Government, Oil and Gas, Politics

Douse the fire that rages beneath

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Nothing ignites media coverage and inflames public opinion quite like images of burning cop cars. The realization that authority’s symbols can go up in smoke, just like anything else, with the strike of a match is horrifying to many; strangely satisfying to some.

But though news and opinion will inevitably focus on who started the conflagration (both literal and figurative) on a rural stretch of New Brunswick highway last week – a bonfire that claimed five police cruisers and resulted in the arrest of 40 native people protesting shale gas development in the province – the rooted issues are harder to untangle in an era when disenfranchisement is the normative language of public engagement.

Adam Huras’s excellent first-hand account, in the Telegraph-Journal, of the Thursday-morning raid of the protesters’ encampment near Rexton suggests that the RCMP may have overdosed on bowls of Wheaties the night before.

“On Thursday morning, at either end of the protest encampment were only a handful of RCMP officers learning up against a few cars,” he wrote for Friday’s edition.

“‘It was a slow night, you didn’t miss much,’ said one officer. ‘It’s quiet,’ added another.

And then it wasn’t. In an instant, two police cars flashing red and blue lights, closed off the road. ‘Move!’ yelled an officer. ‘And don’t you text anyone, not one person. Don’t touch your phone.’ I was being walked back to my car when the order was given to move in.”

At which point, he reported, the stuff really hit the fan: “Roughly two dozen unmarked cars, a large police van and a bus converged on the area at 7:15 a.m. – the vehicles flying down both the on and off ramps of Route 11. Jumping from them were police in full camouflage brandishing guns. About 20 Mounties entered the protest area and 20 more stood at the barricade. Wave after wave of reinforcements arrived.”

Then came the fires, set by angry protestors.

It’s tempting to think that the violence on both sides is exclusively about natural gas. The Elsipogtog First Nation, like many other groups in New Brunswick, is genuinely  concerned about the effects of hydraulic fracturing on supplies of drinking water. In this, they’ve chosen to believe fellow opponents from other parts of North America who have longer experience with the industry.

But gas merely fuels the fire that lies beneath.

An inchoate rage burns across the land. For Canada’s First Nations, it finds expression in the Idle No More movement. For others in towns and cities just about everywhere in the western world, it generates an irresistible desire to “occupy” something – a public park, a government quadrangle, the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral in downtown London.

The suspicion that governments no longer represent the interests of average people, but only those of powerful lobbies and corporate interests has evolved into a conviction. The evidence, many believe, is everywhere.

What, they point out, was the financial meltdown of 2008 and subsequent Great Recession except an implosion of greed and avarice perpetrated by the few at the expense of the many?

What, they ask, is behind widening gaps in income and economic opportunity except the wholesale abrogation of democratic principles of equal and fair representation before the juggernaut of privilege?

Why can’t legislators in Washington keep their nation open long enough to do the people’s business? Why can’t lawmakers in Ottawa respect their own environmental regulations?

Shale gas protest, though specific in its own  right, in New Brunswick is also a species of this unease with, and mistrust of, public institutions.

The only way to address it is to talk candidly and openly with one another.

No long ago, Premier David Alward and First Nations leaders in the province made a good start. In fact, according to The Canadian Press on October 6, they arranged to “continue talks Monday in an effort to resolve a growing dispute over shale gas exploration. Alward and three of his cabinet ministers met Sunday with Elsipogtog council members and other opponents of the shale gas industry at a hotel in Moncton, N.B., in an effort to end a protest that has closed a highway in eastern New Brunswick for a week.”

If last Thursday’s events are any indication, the need for dialogue has never been more urgent.

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Oct 11 2013
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Business, Climate, Government

Counting down the days to the Great Transformation

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The world as we know it has been coming to end for years now. We haven’t had to look far to perceive the portents of impending doom: in the entrails of Wall Street corpses; in the tea leaves of governments that no longer work; in the uromancy that predicts widening income gaps between the rich and the rest.

We just haven’t been able to reliably nail down a year for the Great Transformation. Until now.

A researcher at the University of Hawaii, who used to work at Dalhousie University in Halifax, N.S., thinks he knows. The point of no return will arrive. . .wait for it. . .in 2047. . .give or take.

Camillo Mora, who studies numbers for a living, tells the Globe and Mail’s science reporter Ivan Semeniuk that, overall, this is the year in which climate change will become a permanent feature of life on Earth. . .more or less.

According to the article, “The turning point arrives. . .as a worldwide average, if fossil fuel consumption continues unabated; as late as 2069 if carbon emissions are curbed. City by city, the numbers are a bit more revealing. In Montreal, for example, the new normal will arrive in 2046, and for Vancouver not until 2056. But the real spotlight of Dr. Mora’s study is the tropics, where profound changes could be entrenched in little more than a decade.”

As the good doctor says, “Today, when people talk about climate change, the images that come to mind are melting ice and polar bears. People might infer from this that the tropics will be less affected.”

People would be wrong.

But, then, there’s nothing new about that.

Once, not very long ago, people assumed that economic globalization would insert several chickens in pots from Beijing to Kalamazoo – that gross domestic products around the world would rise like juggernauts, heedless of any and all counterforces they may encounter.

Once, not very long ago, people assumed that democratically elected governments served the best, common interests of the majority of voters – that reason and circumspection would effectively quell fanatical and reactionary figures intent on reshaping the public sphere in their own ideologically pinched and impoverished image.

Now comes word from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that, generally speaking, the world’s got itself in an economic ringer – one from which it is not likely to emerge any time soon. Welcome to the age of slow growth.

“Emerging economies have cooled off,” an item in The New York Times reveals. “Europe remains in the doldrums. The United States is facing fiscal uncertainty, and its powerful central bank is contemplating easing up on its extraordinary stimulus efforts, with potentially global ramifications.”

As things stand, the IMF “foresees the world economy increasing by about 2.9 per cent in 2013 and 3.6 per cent in 2014. That is down from 5.4 per cent in 2007, before the global recession hit.”

If its predictions pan out, a few will be spared, thanks to their impenetrable cocoons of wealth and privilege. But most can expect lower standards of living, fewer good jobs, higher costs and increasing poverty and homelessness.

Meanwhile, over in Washington, D.C., legislators are twiddling their thumbs.

“The federal government shutdown and looming deadline to raise the debt ceiling have merged into one major problem on Capitol Hill, though neither issue has a resolution in sight as the government shutdown heads into its second week,” CBS News reports. “Democrats and Republicans (have) dug further into their respective positions: Republicans are calling on Democrats to negotiate over a short-term spending bill and a debt-ceiling increase, and President Obama says he is ready to negotiate over any topic – once the Republicans pass legislation to re-open the government and raise the U.S. borrowing limit without any conditions.”

All of which prompted Laurence Booth of the University of Toronto’s esteemed Rotman School of Management to tell the Toronto Star, “Any sane person obviously believes the U.S. isn’t going to default. That would cause an earthquake in financial markets around the globe.”

Of course, once upon a time, any sane person obviously believed that climate change could very well spell the end of the world – at least, as we know it.

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Oct 08 2013
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Government, Politics

Who watches the watchers?

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The mind of The Great White Spook is more scrutable today than it was merely a week ago. But only a shade, and only thanks to the whistle-blowing of a certain, former National Security Agency (NSA) operative now on the lam in Russia.

Edward Snowdon’s data dump of super secret NSA documents on American scrivener Glenn Greenwald and his associates now implicates Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), which was, until recently, tucked safely behind an opaque veil.

In the spy world, Canada has never commanded much more authority than a handmaid in the U.S. and British intelligence establishment (or so “they” would have us believe). The news, this week, out of Brazil puts paid to that quaint conceit.

“Brazil’s flagship Fantastico investigative program on the Globo television network revealed leaked documents suggesting that Communications Security Establishment Canada has spied on computers and smartphones affiliated with Brazil’s mining and energy ministry in a bid to gain economic intelligence,” the Globe and Mail reported on Monday.

“The report. . .includes frames of a CSEC-earmarked presentation that was apparently shared with the United States and other allies in June, 2012. . .The presentation. . .rhetorically asks ‘How can I use the information available in SIGINT [signals-intelligence] data sources to learn about the target?’ before delving into specific hacking techniques.”

Former intelligence officials were quick to dismiss the report. Ray Boisvert, an ex-director general of counter-terrorism for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service told the National Post that there wasn’t much up-side in crawling through Brazil’s underwear drawer.

“Like any crime drama, you look for capability and intent,” he said. “Could CSEC do Brazil? Of course, it has significant capability to collect intelligence in the national interest. But on motive, you come up way short. If it was Iran, nobody would be surprised. But this is Brazil. I’m really short on motive.”

Perhaps, but the point is not whether Canada is poking its nose into places where its nose doesn’t belong; it’s whether it can. An even more interesting question is what prevents CSEC from doing just about anything it likes in the name of national interest and domestic security.

On June 27, the organization modified the content of its website, though it’s not clear how or where. Still, the spy agency describes its mandate, thusly: “To acquire and use information from the global information infrastructure for the purpose of providing foreign intelligence, in accordance with Government of Canada intelligence priorities;

to provide advice, guidance and services to help ensure the protection of electronic information and of information infrastructures of importance to the Government of Canada; to provide technical and operational assistance to federal law enforcement and security agencies in the performance of their lawful duties.”

As for its role, CSEC declares that it is “unique within Canada’s security and intelligence community” as it “employs code-makers and code-breakers to provide the Government of Canada with information technology security (IT Security) and foreign signals intelligence (SIGINT) services.” The latter assists “government decision-making in the fields of national security, national defence and foreign policy. These functions “relate exclusively to foreign intelligence and are directed by the Government of Canada’s intelligence priorities.”

Nothing in the public record suggests that one of these prime concerns is a policy – official or otherwise – of conducting commercial espionage against our league of friendly nations, of which Brazil is a stellar member.

The Government of Canada’s own website happily declares that this country is  “priority market. . .It is a major economic player, not just in South America, but also globally, as our 11th largest trading partner.. . Bilateral trade has increased by more than 25 per cent over the last five years, reaching $6.6 billion in 2012. . .Canadian exports to Brazil were $2.6 billion. . .In 2012, Brazil was the 7th highest source of foreign direct investment in Canada, with $15.8 billion in cumulative stocks. Brazil was the 12th largest recipient of Canadian direct investment abroad, with $9.8 billion of cumulative stock invested as of year‑end 2012. Some 500 Canadian companies are active in Brazil (over 50 in the mining sector alone).”

As CSEC’s just-retired head, John Adams, tells CBC News, it’s not a bad idea that, henceforth, the agency receives a little more parliamentary oversight than it has in the past.

After all, he says, “We have got capability that is unique to this country. No one else has it.”

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Oct 01 2013
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Economy, Government, Politics

From less government to no government

Fences make good neighbours and poor legislators

Fences make good neighbours and poor legislators

The Commander-in-Chief was in no mood to dance when he declared, on Monday, “One faction of one party, in one house of Congress, in one branch of government doesn’t get to shut down the entire government just to refight the results of an election.”

Indeed, he roared, “You don’t get to extract a ransom for doing your job.”

The observation was, at once, brilliantly conceived and utterly incorrect.

At the stroke of midnight, despite Barack Obama’s imprecations, the U.S. government did shut down (everything but essential services, such as the army, energy grid and air traffic control) because a mewling bunch of far-right-wing crybabies in the Republican Party can’t take no for an answer.

Even so, the journey to ignominy is not yet over.

On October 17, Congress faces another battle, the consequences of which could be far worse than this present contretemps over the government’s spending authority: whether or not to raise the nation’s debt ceiling. Not doing so would inevitably lead to the United States defaulting, for the first time in its history, on its financial obligations.

Canadians might be amused to imagine that this begins and ends with health care reform, also known as “Obamacare”. Simply put, Republican tea party Representatives despise it and will do everything in their power to “defund” it.

They don’t have a chance, as the most important bits of the new law have already passed in Congress and been endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court. But that’s not stopping this bunch – the most bloody-minded cohort of rank politicians in modern times. As Michael Gerson, an opinion writer for The Washington Post, observes, “Few believe any longer that Republicans will be able to defund Obamacare in this session of Congress; it is the fight that counts. This is a word that crops up frequently in tea-party discourse. Not winning. Not strategy. Not consequences. The fight.”

In fact, this is where the rubber truly hits the road, and where Canadians will want to stifle their giggles. The conflict is only titularly about Obamacare. At its roots is a fundamentally radical conception of government, itself – one that’s counterpoised to mainstream Democratic and Republican political values; one that actually finds little purchase on most main streets of America.

Teaparty.org articulates its “15 non-negotiable core beliefs” thusly:

“Illegal aliens are here illegally; pro-domestic employment is indispensable; a strong military is essential; special interests must be eliminated; gun ownership is sacred; government must be downsized; the national budget must be balanced; deficit spending must end; bailout and stimulus plans are illegal; reducing personal income taxes is a must; reducing business income taxes is mandatory; political offices must be available to average citizens; intrusive government must be stopped; english as our core language is required; and traditional family values are encouraged.”

There’s nothing especially alarming to a “liberal” mind about most of this creed. But, it is in the practice of it – the widely varied interpretation of it – when trouble brews.

As often as not, tea partiers view capitalism not as an economic system, but as an ethical imperative and to justify their position they love quoting Ayn Rand, who wrote, in 1962, “The world crisis of today is a moral crisis – and nothing less than a moral revolution can resolve it: a moral revolution to sanction and complete the political achievement of the American revolution. We must fight for capitalism, not as a practical issue, not as an economic issue, but, with the most righteous pride, as a moral issue. That is what capitalism deserves, and nothing less will save it.”

In this conception of the cosmos, government – which, by its function, takes and distributes wealth to provide for the common interest – is a dangerously corruptible institution and must be stripped of most of its power to do harm (i.e. spending).

Such hardline thinking precludes any possibility of negotiating with mainstream or traditional politicians. It also suggests that a dysfunctional Congress will only hinder the administration of foreign diplomacy and economic policy.

Ultimately, when the U.S. pays a ransom to the tea party, at least some of the cost will be born by its trading partners, including Canada.

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Sep 30 2013
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Government, Politics, Security

Canada the war-friender?

Death in Dhaka...600 and counting

Death by unregulated guns…500-million triggers and counting

 

To the bemusement of many career diplomats and most human rights groups, standing apart – alone and aloof – has become the Canadian government’s preferred modus operandi to the United Nations.

In fact, one of the few truly substantial differences between the Tories in power and their Grit predecessors has been their unconcealed animus towards most things UN-related. The organization, they seem to believe, is broken, inefficient, hypocritical, duplicitous and needlessly bureaucratic. Worse, this cradle for the international community allows far too much license to rogue nations, and not enough to democratic, peaceful ones.

They have a point. But the federal Conservative regime would not be the first government in the world to question the value of its country’s membership. The organization is as flawed, or virtuous, as are its fellow states. Canada’s role and opportunity has always been to engage by setting a moral example – something which, until recently, it has been demonstrably willing to do.

The Harper government’s decision to delay signing the UN Arms Trade Treaty, which seeks to regulate international shipments of conventional weapons worth as much as $70 billion a year, is lamentably ironic. While it laudably pledges $3-billion pledge to improve the welfare of mothers and children around the world, the unfettered arms trade decimates the very people the Department of Foreign Affairs would otherwise help.

Even the United States, with its lock-and-load gun culture, has signed on to the Treaty, making it the 91st country to do so. “We are talking about the kind of export controls that for decades have not diminished one iota our ability in the United States as Americans to exercise our rights under the constitution,” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said of his nation’s decision last week. “This treaty will not diminish anyone’s freedom. . . .Make no mistake, we would never think about supporting a treaty that is inconsistent with the rights of Americans, the rights of American citizens to be able to exercise their guaranteed rights under our constitution.”

Ottawa’s position suggests it is not as certain about the safeguards protecting this country’s gun owners. According to the Globe and Mail last week, “Rick Roth, a spokesman for (Foreign Affairs Minister John) Baird, said Ottawa is still studying whether joining the accord would have consequences for Canadians. “It is important that such a treaty not affect lawful and responsible firearms owners nor discourage the transfer of firearms for recreational uses such as sport shooting and hunting.”

That’s fair as far as it goes. But while the federal government waits, the arms trade continues its vile business in some of the world’s poorest nations.

In his book, Public Corruption; The Dark Side of Social Evolution, Robert Neild of Cambridge University observes, “It has been estimated that there are now about 500 million small arms and light weapons in circulation in the world, one for every twelve people. Gone long ago is the time when we Europeans could subdue other continents because we had firearms and the local peoples had not. In 1999 it was reported that an AK-47 assault rifle could be bought in Uganda for the price of a chicken.”

Amnesty International states on its website, “War crimes, unlawful killings, torture and other serious human rights abuses have been committed around the world using a wide range of weapons, munitions and military and security equipment. These are often provided to perpetrators in almost unlimited supply, encouraging and prolonging unlawful violence. Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, injured, raped and forced to flee from their homes as a result.”

Appallingly, says the organization, “Worldwide, hundreds of thousands of children under 18. . .are recruited into government armed forces, paramilitaries, civil militia and a variety of other armed groups.  Often they are abducted at school, on the streets or at home. Others enlist ‘voluntarily’, usually because they see few alternatives.”

Like it or not, the UN is the proper deliberative body through which to combat such turpitude.

Notwithstanding its distaste for the organization, Ottawa should set an example and ratify the Treaty.

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Sep 16 2013
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Culture, Government, Politics

Quebec leaders sing a looney tune

State-enforced "neutrality" is for the birds

State-enforced “neutrality” is for the birds

Ranking high on the lengthening list of Quebec Premier Pauline Marois’s dubious political talents is her unerring ability to draw precisely the wrong conclusions from history – especially other people’s history.

Earlier this year, while on a trip to Scotland, the Partis Quebecois leader gamely offered her help to the independence-minded Alex Salmond, that country’s First Minister. She would, she said, send him a few morsels of information from her province’s 1995 referendum on sovereignty. His reaction, in turn, was to go out of his way to avoid being seen with her in public.

Then, last week, she told Le Devoir that ethnic diversity lies at the heart of social unrest in England, where, apparently, “they’re knocking each other over the head and throwing bombs because of multiculturalism and nobody knowing any more who they are in that society.”

Now, we discover through the Globe and Mail that she believes “France is a model of integration.” Further, she suggests that it is “the most beautiful example . . . (it) has a very impressive number of people (from North Africa) and has found a space to live well with immigrants from other regions.”

Wrong, wrong and wrong, again.

The roots of Scotland’s independence movement are so vastly dissimilar from Quebec’s, the comparison does not bear making. And even if they weren’t, what possible use would the PQ’s trove of documents from its failed attempt to sever Quebec from the rest of Canada be to the leaders of the Scottish National Party?

As for England, sectarian and ethnic violence — which, it’s worth noting, is no more rampant than it is in south-central Los Angeles — has less to do with “multiculturalism” than it does with the nation’s proximity to radicalized networks of European terror cells. This is a fact with which it and its continental neighbours have been dealing for decades.

And what of France, that “model of integration?”

An item from a BBC report this summer should settle the question:

“Crowds of youths have thrown stones at French police and set fire to cars in a second night of disturbances in the Paris suburb of Trappes. The trouble was sparked by the arrest of a man whose wife was told by police on Thursday to remove an Islamic face-covering veil, banned in public. He has been accused of trying to strangle the officer. Up to 300 people attacked a police station in Trappes on Friday night where the man was being held.”

Not for nothing, but methinks Ms. Marios’s staff might want to review the briefing notes they prepare for her before she finds occasion to pontificate in public. For them, and the rest of Quebec, this is getting embarrassing. And it seems to be going around.

In a recent column, my former colleague, the Globe’s Jeffry Simpson worried that Quebec’s leadership appears a tad unhinged, as Ms. Marois and company begin to “secularize” their civil service à la France. “These are the kind of policies that make Quebec look intolerant and slightly crazy in pursuit of some notional idea of the Quebec identity,” he wrote. “After all, the number of non-francophone employees of the province is tiny. From a practical point of view, this (charter of values) and the laws that might flow from it represent a fake solution to a non-problem.”

For Ontario, at least, this phony fix is turning into an opportunity.

“We don’t care what’s on your head,” an advertisement for Lakeridge Health of Oshawa reads. “We care what’s in it . . .Our focus is on safety and quality, and we’re looking for people like you to join our team of health professionals.”

If Ms. Marois cares nothing for most of what’s guaranteed by Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, she should nonetheless scrutinize Section 6, Subsection 2, which reads: “Every citizen of Canada and every person who has the status of a permanent resident of Canada has the right (a) to move to and take up residence in any province; and (b) to pursue the gaining of a livelihood in any province.”

It’s mighty tough to draw the wrong conclusion from that.

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Aug 07 2013
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Government, Society

Nudge, nudge: George Orwell is watching

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My telecom provider and I were texting each other one gorgeous, summer day a few weeks ago. It had sent me a reminder to pay my bill, which wasn’t actually overdue. I told it to quit bugging me. I did this even though I knew I wouldn’t get a reply from a faceless robot; somehow, the exercise appealed to my sense of mischief.

But a part of me wonders whether my communique found its way to a secret data bank, buried beneath a glacier in Finland, there to be used against me at some future date. I mean, isn’t it true that not one scrap of information nowadays is ever really lost? Isn’t that what we are told, over and over again?

Now we learn, courtesy of the Globe and Mail’s Bill Curry, that some government’s know all about using our personal information to mould us into good, little, bills-paying, law-abiding citizens.

“Canada is looking into (the) growing field of behavioural economics,” he writes. “Finance Canada documents obtained by The Globe and Mail through Access to Information show Michael Horgan, the deputy minister of Finance Canada, was recently briefed on the activities of (a) three-year-old British team, which has attracted interest from governments around the world. . .It’s known as the ‘nudge unit,’ because its mission is to ‘nudge’ citizens into acting the way the government wishes they would.”

Mr. Curry reports that the special bureau was “pioneered in Britain, (and) officially tagged with the 1984ish name Behavioural Insights Team – about a dozen policy wonks, mostly economists, who employ psychological research to subtly persuade people to pay their taxes on time, get off unemployment or insulate their attic. The goal: To make consumers act in their own best interests – and save the government loads of money.”

I’m all for governments saving money. But I’m also just a tad perturbed by the moral implications of this practice. For their part, officials at Canada’s Department of Finance concede that there is something big-brotherly about the whole thing, though they are sure that “transparency” will obviate any risk of ethical transgressions.

Uh-huh. . .How, exactly, would that work? By informing citizens that, henceforth, the long arm of the law will by “urging” them to fulfill their various obligations to the state through incessant, subtle, electronically communicated “pokes”? Hey, we may not like it. We may think it’s creepy. But, at least, they’re being “transparent” about it.

The fact is society can’t function without its various nudges. Arguably, society is nothing except one giant system of disparate persuading and coercing and kvetching and schmoozing.

Apple reminds me that it’s August. Shouldn’t I be thinking about a new iPad for autumn? Rogers wonders whether I’ve properly assessed my data and cable needs. Shouldn’t I reconsider my monthly package? Scholar’s Choice knows I’m a grandparent. Do I know about their fantastic discounts for folks in my purchasing demographic?

We nudge (sometimes, shoving) our kids to be kinder or more disciplined. We urge our educators to be more efficient and empathetic. Our courts call corporations “people”, hoping, perhaps, that they will not behave like the soulless, vacant entities that, in fact, they are. We nudge them to embrace the better angels of their various ventures in capitalism.

Does any of this work? Sometimes. Nothing’s perfect. And that’s the point: nothing should ever be perfect.

On the other hand, Government, by its very nature, is all about perfectibility. And when it says it wants people to “behave” accordingly, it’s not selling a product or a service or even an idea. It’s pushing an ideal of human conformation that simply makes its institutional life easier. That’s just one or two steps away from totalitarianism.

If George Orwell were still alive, he might say: “If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”

That is from his masterwork 1984, which is, in increasingly sinister ways, beginning to resonate in 2013.

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Jul 02 2013
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Business, Economy, Environment, Government

A cold-water wake-up call from Mother Nature

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As the flood waters in Calgary begin to abate, the question turns – as it so often does in such cases – to the issue of culpability. Who’s to blame?

Was Mother Nature having an especially bad day when she dumped more than 100 millimeters of rain in less than a day on the western city? Or was there more to the deluge than met the eye? Did we humans exacerbate the hydrological cycle through global warming and then promptly ignore the predictable consequences?

In his commentary, which appeared in major newspapers across the country last week, nationally award-winning energy writer and Calgarian Andrew Nikiforuk answers definitively. “If nothing else the city’s often arrogant elites have been reminded that the province’s Chinese-style economic growth is vulnerable to extreme events,” he notes. “A crowded and overdeveloped province of four million is nowhere near as resilient as a province of one million. . .Albertans have also learned that climate change delivers two extremes: more water when you don’t need it, and not enough water when you do. The geographically challenged have also become learned, once again, that water travels downhill and even inundates flood plains. So climate change is not a mirage. Nor is it weird science or tomorrow’s news. It is now part of the flow of daily life.”

In fact, according to a Global News report (also covered by other print and broadcast outlets), “Strategies to prevent another devastating Albertan deluge sat on the provincial government’s desk for more than half-a-dozen years. George Groeneveld headed a flood mitigation committee after record-breaking rainfall and river levels soaked the Calgary region in 2005. They were tasked with figuring out how to lessen the risk of a recurrence and spent a year coming up with 18 recommendations.”

The suggestions included ensuring the Alberta Environment “coordinate the completion of flood risk maps for the identified urban flood risk areas in the province; develop a map maintenance program to ensure that the flood risk maps are updated when appropriate; identify priority rural flood risk areas that require flood risk mapping and develop a program to prepare the maps.”

In an interview with Global News, Mr. Groeneveld said “Of course I’ve always been disappointed. . .People have very short memories with floods: Go through one good year and they start to relax again.”

The signature feature of climate change is the increasing occurrence of extreme weather events. On the East Coast, that means the number and severity of hurricanes is rising. On the Great Plains and prairies, the number of super cells producing supremely destructive tornadoes is on the upswing. It means more and longer droughts; more and deadlier wildfires; and it means more water falling from on high. Much more.

According to an item in the Calgary Herald, John Pomeroy, a Canada research chair in Water Resources and Climate Change, says the floods in the Alberta foothills has “changed changed the Rockies. . .forever. . .He says the overflowing waters have changed everything from how the landscape will handle future flooding to the animals that live in it. Pomeroy says Alberta towns and cities will need much better flood defences in the future to handle high rainfall events. He says the Bow River has swallowed so much silt from eroding banks that its status as a blue-ribbon trout stream is in doubt. Pomeroy says many of the developments that have been affected by the flooding should never have been built in the first place.”

Given the crucial role Alberta now plays in the Canadian economy, these so-called “natural disasters” are no longer local calamities; they are clear and present threats to national security.

And while it may be one thing to turn a blind eye to the science of global warming, it is quite another to reject the evidence one’s own eye gathers as the sky proceeds to fall on one’s head.

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Jun 23 2013
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Economy, Government

Are happy days here again?

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Here, in the shadow of the western world’s setting sun, we are languishing in a near-permanent state of decay – both victims and authors of our decidedly unenlightened self-interest.

This, at least, has been the received and incontrovertible wisdom, and there’s no longer any point in trying to save ourselves.

First, came the financial crisis of 2008, which effectively wrecked private savings, public accounts, the manufacturing sector, and the housing market. Then came the government bailouts (“stimulus” spending, if you prefer), which saddled states, provinces and cities across North America with spiraling deficits and structural debts.

Finally, came the language of the resignedly defeated: No growth is the new normal; quit your jobs and plant your gardens, for the end of our global, capitalist hegemon draws nigh.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the economic abattoir. Suddenly, with no portents or premonitions, everything got just a little bit better. How? Why? Economists, bankers, politicians are still scratching their heads.

“It’s been a long time coming,” Nariman Behravesh, the chief economist of IHS Global Insight, told The New York Times recently. “There is more optimism about the U.S. and in particular about the second half of this year and 2014. Three months ago, we wouldn’t have come to that same conclusion.”

Three months ago, no one, it seems, was ruminating on the efficacious effects of certain economic outliers, such as advancing technology, growing energy independence and the resurgence of what can only be described as a sort of gritty self-determination.

Referring to the future, George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen told The Times, “It’s better than it looked. Technological progress comes in batches and it’s just a little more rapid than it looked two years ago,” adding somewhat circumspectly: “The great stagnation will end for a lot of people but not everyone. I think there will be great breakthroughs but the distribution of those gains will go to owners of capital and intellectual property.”

Still, some economists predict the U.S. economy will outperform its average of two per cent per year growth rate by as much 1.5 percentage points over the next eight quarters, which would effectively close the doomsday chronicle of recent times.

A similar phenomenon is occurring in Canada. May was an astonishing month for employment in this country. The economy generated 95,000 new positions, most of which were full-time, private sector jobs. That was the single, largest monthly surge in more than a decade.

Again, in interviews with the Financial Post, the experts were gob-smacked. “Canada’s job gain. . .is simply stunning on the headline and most of the details,” said Derek Holt of Scotiabank Economics. It is equivalent to the U.S. adding over 1 million jobs in a single month.” Indeed, noted Douglas Porter of BMO Capital Markets, “Even outside of construction, which is definitely the eye-popping stat here. . . (May’s data) was still a mammoth number for employment.”

Naturally, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty prefers to take the long view. To the Post, he declared, “What’s more important is the positive long-trend when it comes to employment in Canada. . .We can’t be complainant. We are still facing a very volatile global economy. We recently saw European unemployment hit a record high. Canada is not immune to these challenges from beyond our border and we will be impacted.”

He is correct, of course. Canada is joined at the hip with the international community, and our national prosperity depends on the degree to which we diversify our goods and services and, crucially, our trading relationships.

And yet, the recent numbers suggest that rugged, defiant entrepreneurialism – inventiveness, creativity, opportunism – is not as easily squashed as the prophets of calamity (in whose company, I must admit, I have found myself) would have us think.

That’s worth remembering here, on the East Coast, as we gnash our teeth and wring our hands over the high cost of government, the seemingly endless string of failed economic development schemes and the hollowing out of our productive population.

The heart of true enterprise still beats. We can feel it if we try.

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