Security

There is an article in the print edition of the Globe and Mail today, claiming that national security is a winning issue for Prime Minister Steven Harper. Of course, six months ago the same pundits were claiming that the economy was the Conservative strong point. With the plunge in oil prices and the Canadian dollar and the delaying of the federal budget now revealing the paucity of economic policy emanating from the so-called professional economist leading our country, security seems a little like grasping at straws.

Harper doesn’t help himself by reverting to gross hyperbole. In his speech announcing legislation to increase police powers to combat terrorism (tellingly delivered outside of Parliament), he called ISIL the greatest threat the world has ever faced. Really? Did World War II not happen? Were the Nazis simply a friendly country club, a sporting rival? Or closer to the conservative heart, was the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation simply a walk in the park? ISIL has killed fewer people in the Western world that are typically slaughtered every week in the USA by idiots with guns.

I actually witnessed the shooting at the War Memorial while the PM was kept in protective custody (and rightly so) inside a closet. If that’s the best that ISIL can deliver, I have to say I’m not shaking in my boots — well, not since I’ve dealt with my PTSD anyway.

Still, I have no doubt that we need to take measures to protect — if we can —more Canadian soldiers or civilians being killed by lone wolf gunmen who may have been inspired by jihadist propaganda (not really convinced yet that this was truly the case at Parliament Hill) or worse yet by small organized cells of trained soldiers as in the Charlie Hebdo murders in Paris.

But let’s hope that we don’t overreact and give the police and CSIS so many powers that the real threats to our freedom begin to be generated by those who are supposed to protect them. New powers require stronger oversight and not simple assurances that we can trust the government. When we have the loose-lipped Finance Minister, Joe Oliver, referring to people who oppose pipelines and tarsands development as terrorists, what assurances can we possible have that we can trust the government not to use these new powers to crush legitimate dissent?

I’m no knee-jerk liberal who thinks we need to coddle misguided youth — though I do think we need to practice a lot more sociology to prevent them from becoming or staying misguided — but I’m certainly not a foam-at-the-mouth conservative either to think we can arrest and censor our way out of terrorism. Dealing with the very real threat posed by ISIL (not the greatest ever in history but still real) will require an intellectually rigorous and multi-faceted approach — not something this government has shown itself to be good at.

Just as they thought the economy could be dealt with by exporting oil and cutting taxes, it is doubtful they have more than a trick or two up their sleeves when it comes to terrorism.

As for it being a winning political strategy? Ask Tony Abbot, the right wing PM in Australia, who also tried to politicize security. The voters in Queensland just delivered him a stunning defeat and members of his own party are questioning his leadership.

But that’s ten minutes.

Death and Taxes

Steven Harper has been claiming all the credit for Canada’s relatively good performance in the world economy so I guess he’ll take all the blame if things turn sour. No? Quelle surprise!

Of course, the Canadian economy hasn’t really done that well over the last 7 or 8 years (collapsing manufacturing, rising debt loads, low growth, greater inequality, fewer good jobs and more bad ones). Some of that has to be attributed to events beyond the control of small national governments like Canada but things were undoubtedly made worse because the so-called professional economist at our helm actually has no economic vision for the country.

The conservative agenda seems to be sell oil, lower taxes and hope for the best. Now that the oil price has fallen, revealing critical flaws in our unbalanced resource heavy economic system, all they have left is lower taxes and hope.

But — the last few years have not so much been a case of tax reduction but rather inefficient efforts to buy people with their own money. Take for example the tax credit for bus passes. This was brought in, they claimed, to encourage the growth of public transit and to reduce carbon emissions. It has done neither. Finance department studies show that the increase in transit use was negligible and that in terms of alternative measures, this boutique tax is the single most expensive carbon reduction program ever devised — something like $1000 per ton.

Why was it done? To silence the critics mostly but also to give a little bribe to people for doing what they already do anyway. See — the government rewards your virtue, now vote for us.

Jim Flaherty did more than any other finance minister in the history of Canada to complicate the Canadian tax system and, through subterfuge, channel money from the middle class to the upper ten percent. But even he couldn’t stomach the latest plan — the income splitting plan that will shell out $2 billion to rich people.

When this fact was pointed out, the Conservatives deployed a classic strategy. They changed the definition of words, making sure that the middle class included families making more than $120,000 a year. Then they could claim that the middle class was benefiting. As long as you define ‘Middle’ as everything except the top 7% of people, we’re all good. Spin, spin spin — it’s what they do best.

So now all they have is hope. Well, hopefully this government will keep on spinning — in its grave while its replacement begins to reverse all the dumb things they’ve done over the last nine years.

And that’s ten minutes.

Newfoundland Sorrow

I’ve been to Newfoundland (really just St. John’s) four times — twice during my art education phase and once on Senate business, studying the oil industry. But it is the first visit — the one a week after my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer — that colours them all.

It was December 1995. Lynne had discovered a lump while showering on the day of her thesis defence. She said nothing to me — or to anyone else — but went to the defence, kicked ass and came home with her Master’s degree. It was Friday, so we had a party. On Monday, she went to her doctor and that night told me that she was scheduled for a biopsy the following Monday.

Given her age (41) and the rapidity of the lump’s growth (it hadn’t been there three months before during her exam), the biopsy was done in the morning and the results were delivered that afternoon. Stage 2 but aggressive.

They offered to do the surgery that week but we had a trip planned to Newfoundland to visit Lynne’s closest friends before going on to Nova Scotia to spend Christmas with my family. We had put a lot of resources — time and money — into the trip and she refused to give it up. The doctors agreed that there was no harm waiting a few weeks (it actually was optimal because it would then occur in the middle of her menstrual cycle — maximizing chances of success) so a few days later we were off to St. John’s.

Lynne was determined that the trip would be fun and focussed on our friends who were in Newfoundland teaching at Memorial on a term assignment. They weren’t all that happy and she didn’t want to make them unhappier.

So we didn’t say a word for four days. We visited museums and shops, climbed Signal Hill in the fog, ate and drank and listened to music at their house — a beautiful old place on the waterfront — or at the many bars and restaurants scattered through downtown.

Winter often comes late to St. John’s and so it was that year. It was mild — I doubt if it ever is warm there, at least not based on subsequent trips — with a couple of beautiful clear days, the sun shining like gems on the harbour, plus some real low overcast days with the banks of fog moving in and out with the tide. It was, in a word, perfectly beautiful. It was Newfoundland.

But sun or cloud it was all coloured with a deep shade of blue and the weight of impending doom.

On our final night there we broke the news. There was wine mixed with the tears but as the night progressed there was also love and laughter. That colours my memory, too.

Lynne was lucky. Her cancer was effectively treated and she is still well to this day, though we are no longer together. But I can never think of Newfoundland without thinking of that first visit and her toughness and tenderness. And the sorrow — not for her, but for those who weren’t so lucky.

And that’s ten minutes.

New Brunswick

Our cross country tour continues with the most schizophrenic of provinces: New Brunswick. When I lived in Amherst, Nova Scotia we used to say: 10 miles across the border and fifty years back in the past. It was all chauvinism, of course, yet there is a certain truth to the matter. In New Brunswick history never goes away and little can be understood about the place without understanding its divided history.

The northern part of the province is largely French — the descendants of Acadians who either refused to be expelled or who gradually filtered back from their land of exile in New Orleans. The southern half is populated by United Empire Loyalists — refugees of the American War of Independence who sometimes come across as more British than the British. Somehow these folks have managed to live together in the only voluntarily officially bilingual province in Canada (Manitoba only had its bilingual status restored due to a court case).

It hasn’t always been easy. For many years the north was solidly Liberal while the south consistently voted Conservative. Then they switched and recently they switched back again. The important thing was — they were never on the same side — except that time Frank McKenna won every seat in the province. And people in Alberta thought they had that one-party rule down pat.

There’s another way in which New Brunswick exceeds Alberta — the concentration of wealth. Practically the whole province is owned by two families — the McCains who dominate in the area of food production and the Irvings who pretty much own everything else — oil and gas refining and distribution, forestry, ship building and every media outlet except the CBC. They are not exactly two big happy families but they say that what they don’t own in NB isn’t really worth having. It may be a mere coincidence that NB also has among the lowest average wages and highest rates of poverty but I somehow don’t think so.

But wait there’s more. The province is notably small-c conservative and has tried harder than most (PEI has one-upped them on this) to limit the access of women to abortion services but, determined to be contradictory with itself, it is also the province that had the first non-openly gay Premier (who apparently had a fondness for marijuana). It was also the home of the Bricklin — a gull-winged sports car that was built 7 years before the similarly styled but more famous Delorean appeared on the scene.

Crazy as it might be — with quirky British-slang laden English and fractured French (no, really, I once heard a guy say: Je prend me auto a la mechanic et il dit, le carburetor, c’est all-fucked-up. Wrong on so many levels.) — but New Brunswick has its charms — nicest beaches on the east coast, the strange ‘garden pots‘ formations of the Fundy shore and the St. John river valley where your house only floods every fifth year. Crazy but determined to be so — it may be the most ‘Maritime’ of all the eastern provinces.

And that’s ten minutes.

Manitoba

Manitoba was founded by the Métis – some people seem to have forgotten that but the province was created as a direct aftermath of the first Riel rebellion. It was originally a small square around the Red River settlements. As the Northwest Territories were carved up into Saskatchewan and Alberta, Manitoba expanded north and, at one time, there was even talk of including what is now northern Ontario in the mix.

Located precisely in the middle of nowhere, Manitoba developed its own particular culture and politics. One of its first MPS, Louis Riel was elected several times but never permitted to take his seat in the House of Commons. Another Manitoba politician was Tim Buck, who, as a communist (he was party leader for decades), got 25% of the vote in the riding of Winnipeg North (losing to the socialist CCF candidate). Stanley Knowles, a bulwark of the CCF, was a long time representative from Winnipeg.

Winnipeg — which comprises 75% of the population of the province (the rest is scattered though a few modest towns and dozens of tiny, mostly aboriginal villages) — was forced by virtue of its relative isolation to look inward, developing strong ethnic neighbourhoods and its own particular cultural mix. Publishing and theater and music all thrived in the city where Christians and Jews and immigrants from across Europe and to a lesser extent other parts of the world formed prosperous and dynamic, if sometimes uneasy, relationships. The only people left out, it seems, were the original people of the province — the First Nations and Métis residents who had created the province and who now make up over ten percent of the city’s population.

When MacLean’s magazine recently called Winnipeg the most racist city in Canada (and I suspect, the competition was fierce), this is what they were talking about. The racism is not impartial; it is specifically directed at Aboriginal people. The reasons are complicated and the answers will be even more so.

A good place to start is, undoubtedly, to admit there is a problem. The difficulty will lie in figuring out what that problem is. A hundred or more years of colonial oppression will not disappear because people wish it so. The dysfunction of many First Nations communities will not be solved in isolation or by simple solutions of ‘more money’ or ‘tougher laws.’

The Supreme Court has shone a pale light on a possible path: reconciliation achieved trough good faith bargaining on both sides where the Crown and the colonists act honorably and where Aboriginal people assert their own cultural strengths. But the first thing we have to do is start talking — respectfully.

But that’s ten minutes.

British Columbia

I’ve always considered British Columbia to be my lucky charm — though perhaps the opposite is true. The first six times I traveled to the west coast of Canada the weather was perfect — sunny skies with nary a drop of rain. Every single time for visits that ranged from 3 to 10 days in every season of the year.

I began to suspect people in BC were lying about all the rain they got as a ploy to keep everyone in Canada from moving there. Of course, trip seven and eight more than made up for it. Torrential downpours and endless fog. Still, in subsequent visits I’ve seen more sun than anything else so my lucky string is still holding out.

But my luck hasn’t ended with the weather. During one particularly bad fire season I was heading to Salmon Arm. The previous days the roads had been closed due to encroaching fires and smoke but just as I arrived the fires were pushed back and I made it through — only to have them close again behind me until the day I was scheduled to leave.

Another time, in April, the main route out of Grand Forks back to Calgary was closed by snow. Following a map that showed an alternative way, we proceeded on smaller and smaller roads — from multi-lane blacktop to paved two-lane to gravel and finally to a muddy dirt road that wound its way up the side of a mountain. At one point we were on a stretch of single lane rutted trail (that we found out had only opened the day before) nearly a thousand feet above a beautiful lake. If we had met another vehicle I have no idea how we would have managed. But we didn’t and eventually we were back on gravel, paved road and after a ferry ride, the main highway home. We thereafter referred to it as super highway 44.

The best luck I ever had also involved a trip to Grand Forks to visit Liz’s parents. As the visit was coming to a close we took a day trip to Osoyoos. It was beautiful and warm (this was late May) and the lake was lovely. But I said it’s not like the ocean. So, on the spur of the moment we decided to go to Tofino on the west coast of Vancouver Island. With nary a thought to logistics we set off — arriving at the ferry terminal just in time to be the very last car allowed on the boat — avoiding a two hour wait. When we got to Port Alberni we thought — we don’t have a hotel reservation — but on our third try we got a cabin right on the beach.

We planned on only a couple of days but the weather was spectacular. In fact the five days we eventually stayed were the warmest ever recorded for that time of year in Tofino. That was only about 20C but with the pounding surf of the open Pacific and the long stretches of virtually empty beaches it was grand. We finally had to leave and although the return visit wasn’t so perfectly timed (a three hour wait in Nanaimo for the boat for example) it did involve an overnight stay in a hotel in Revelstoke which had a hot tub right in the bedroom.

And that’s ten minutes.

Alberta

Forty years ago, Peter Loughheed had a great idea. Let’s take all the revenues from oil and gas and other resources and put it in a heritage fund. We can spend the interest but not the capital. In the meantime, Albertans would live within their means and pay for stuff on a yearly basis from tax revenues in the good times and deficits in the bad. Eventually the Heritage fund would be so big they would have no debt and government could lower taxes for everyone.

It was a great ‘seamless’ web of ideas. Too bad Albertan politicians hadn’t implemented them all and not just picked and chosen those they liked at the time. Of course, the politicians weren’t entirely to blame. Albertans — true to their largely American heritage (Alberta’s first and biggest wave of immigration was from Utah and Montana) — hate to pay taxes. They therefore have no sales tax and the lowest rate of income tax in the country. Well, the lowest rate for rich people anyway. The flat tax means that poor people in Alberta pay more in taxes than anywhere else in this great land.

Oh, and that Heritage fund? Never really got off the ground. $85 billion sounds like a lot but it’s less than $20,000 per Albertan. The temptation was just too big to spend all those royalty revenues as they came in. Added to that was the fact that royalty rates were too low in any case — Albertans leading the race to the bottom was the usual scenario.

Conservatives said it couldn’t be any other way. It was the Alberta advantage. Meanwhile in Norway, the government charged among the highest royalties in the world and stuck it in a savings account. Norwegians now have enough set aside for the future that every citizen is worth a million krone ($170,000). And will keep growing despite the current downturn. Now that’s an advantage.

But the chickens are coming home to roost. With the dramatic drop in oil prices, Alberta has gone from a tiny surplus to a massive deficit — one that it will take years to crawl out from under. The government will use it as an excuse to cut wages and public sector employment and claw back services from the public.

But just maybe, Jim Prentice — blessed with a divided and helpless opposition — will use a renewed majority to fix Alberta’s finances in the long term. The proponents of the “Free Lunch” party (that is, his own colleagues) may grumble but with massive debt hanging over their head, they may have to acquiesce.

The real question will be whether Jim takes that final step and raises royalties on oil and gas and sticks the proceeds into an untouchable reserve, making savings as sacrosanct as low taxes and no debt once were.

Now that would make for an Alberta advantage — because without it, once the oil is gone, Alberta will be as empty as Montana is now. Roll, tumbleweed, roll.

But that’s ten minutes.

Pranks

When I was in university, we did things that, I am sure, would now get us expelled. I’m not talking here about inappropriate sexual conduct — though this was the seventies, so there was plenty of that. I’m talking about pranks. Or what today might be considered bullying or, in extreme cases, hazing. We probably considered it that too especially if we were on the receiving end but as long as no-one actually got hurt, everyone turned a blind eye to it. I wasn’t much of a participant and was never a victim (sometimes it pays to be shy and largely invisible) but I saw plenty.

Like the time they moved someone’s Volkswagen to the roof of a residence. Engineers love a challenge. Those kinds of things — the impersonal ones where no one was singled out (the car owner turned out to be in on it) or where it was rivalries between groups don’t seem so bad. The personal ones — where an individual was made to suffer — only encouraged those of us in the middle to stay unnoticed.

One memory sticks out. There was a freshman we referred to as ‘Grinnybear.” In part this was because he had a constant smile pasted on his face and in part it was because he was so like a teddy bear — and treated so by his well-to-do parents. They sent weekly care packages — candy (which he didn’t need), magazines and even condoms (which no one could believe he would ever possibly need). Grinnybear was a neat freak who happened to be rooming with a slob. He would lecture his cohabitant incessantly and became a target mostly because he refused to call anyone by their nicknames. He got pranked a lot — until he finally moved residences.

An example: Grinnybeat was a hypochondriac and took more supplements and medications than you can imagine. One of his daily rituals was to put drops up his nose, usually right before bed. One of the people on the floor one day poured out half the drops and replaced them with gin. His roommate knew and watched with gritted teeth as Grinnybear went a week before finally saying, eyes watering, Oh dear, I think my nose drops have fermented.

There were lots of other incidents — like the time someone had their entire room filled with crumpled newspaper. Sounds harmless enough but when I say filled I mean filled. This was in Truman house where all the doors had a window transom for ventilation. The entire house had taken against this guy and spent one weekend while he was away tossing balls of paper through the window. When he came back it had expanded so he couldn’t even get his door open. He had to take the hinges off before he could clean up.

It was all supposed to be good fun — but I sometimes wondered, even then, if the reason a fair percentage of kids didn’t come back after Christmas wasn’t just poor marks or homesickness but the failure of anyone — senior students, house dons, university staff  — to protect them from the worst of the pranks.

But that’s ten minutes.

Reincarnation

Back in the mid-nineties, the Alberta Playwrights Network had become a moribund organization. They had charitable status, they had money in the bank but they weren’t doing much in the way of supporting actual playwrights or playwriting. A group of us, led by Sharon Pollock and including such well-known artists as Gordon Pengilly and Eugene Stickland among many others, staged a sort of palace coup, taking over the board and instituting a number of measures to revive APN. I served first as Treasurer and later as President – though most of the real work was done collectively, harnessing the efforts of dozens of writers across Alberta.

It worked. Pretty soon we were running workshops, providing grants, promoting Alberta plays, To this day, APN remains an important part of the Alberta cultural scene.

A few years later, I was approached by the Board of Dandelion Magazine, another organization that had fallen into disarray. It had no President – a job I turned down – and the magazine had a number of administrative and artistic problems. Things had come to a head when a local poet (and university professor) complained to the Canada Council about the way his poems had been presented. He made a number of other accusations too, mostly unsubstantiated. The Council immediately launched an inquiry, cutting the magazine’s funding by half in the interim.

That’s when I arrived. Things were a mess. Of the 600 people on the subscription list, fewer than 60 had actually paid for a current subscription. With no external support (every other regional literary magazine in Canada was attached to a college or a writers’ guild) the burned-out volunteers could no longer meet deadlines. Quality control was almost non-existent. I persuaded the Board to come clean and propose a recovery program. The Alberta Foundation for the Arts went along with it. Canada Council cut funding altogether.

There was only one thing to do – throw all our money and resources into a final double 25^th anniversary edition and then shut the thing down. So that’s what we did. I was only the administrator and had nothing to do with the final creative production – other than suggest it – so I guess it was no surprise that everyone got thanked but the person who came to be viewed as the executioner.

I did get interviewed by Michael Enright on the national CBC morning show that he had taken over after Peter Gzowski died. I explained that everything had a lifespan including arts organizations and that the end of a magazine did not mean the end of art. I predicted that writers in Alberta would find or create a new venue.

And so they did, though not in the way I expected. That professor who complained about his poems? He lead the charge to revive Dandelion by taking it under the wing of the University of Calgary though apparently the reprieve was only temporary. Still, who says guilt is a useless emotion?

But that’s ten minutes.

History 2

Burke said that those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. Marx added that all history happens twice: first as tragedy, the second as farce.

I’m in the midst of reading about the history of France between the wars. Well, actually this book spends most of its time on the period before World War I – laying the groundwork for the madness that gripped all of Europe in the thirties.

It is hard to read about Barrès – one of the intellectual leaders of the right in France during the Belle Époque – without seeing his echo in the intellectual right of modern America. The appeal to instinct over reason, the hatred of the Semites (Jews then, Muslims, now), the belief that war and armed conflict bring out the best in a nation. All of these commonalities make it quite spooky. Oh, yeah, they clutched the mystical to their breast as well. In France it was a primitive form of Catholicism while in America it is an even more primitive Christian fundamentalism. I have to admit it is deliciously ironic to think of the Tea Party as descended from the thinking of a French essayist.

But it is the attack on reason that I find most sensational. The utter dismissal of rational thought during an era when France was leading the world in technology and scientific research. Yet, often that technology was used for the most interesting purposes. France was so far ahead in personal surveillance of both criminals and the immigrant populations that Britain and American sent their own police agents there to learn at the feet of the masters. The modern surveillance state owes much to the ideas of late 19^th Century France. (As does Times Square since the French invented the neon light.)

Sometimes reading history can be terrifying – especially when you see it all being repeated in modern times. One might take some relief in knowing that we survived it all and now, generally, live in more advanced and progressive societies than our distant ancestors (well 120 years is not exactly distant but it is outside living memory).

But the cost! Two devastating world wars, dozens of totalitarian regimes, the Holocaust, the Cold War and its proxy battles that ripped apart South America and Africa and so much more. All so we can do it again.

I hope that when some other blogger looks back a hundred years from now, he or she might say that we did a better job during the current embrace of unreason. Not that I’m sure we will. But I hope at least that there is enough of the world left over that someone will still be around to look back in shock and awe at what we threw away.

But that’s ten minutes.