Civic engagement in the face of democratic deficit | #TOpoli #cdnpoli

So I’ve been watching a BBC mini-series from 1988 called A Very British Coup. There’s an understated but powerful scene wherein the Labour cabinet is debating its spending proposals; at one point, a frustrated and beleaguered Chancellor of the Exchequer declares that there’s little point in further discussion. The Prime Minister, wonderfully portrayed by Ray McAnally, gently admonishes him: “Democracy takes time. Dictatorship is quicker, but too many people get shot.”

Lord knows, I’ve been known to go on about civic engagement and the responsibilities of citizenship. But they’re becoming an even bigger challenge nowadays, and the underlying reasons reflect not just on this or that facet of governance, but on the nature of democratic society itself.

I know, I know — “democratic deficit” has become one of those overused terms that gets thrown around so frequently and so carelessly that it starts to lose its impact. At some point, however, certain events or patterns can bring it back into focus.

Exhibit A: Toronto City Council voted, this week, to reverse an earlier decision and reject the notion of ranked ballots, in a pronounced FU to notions of accountability, representation, and years of effort and outreach by local activists. From what I’ve heard, the discussion lasted about a minute and a half. I’m not going to rehash the details here: my friend Daren does a far better (and angrier) job over at his place. Go read.

What does it say about democratic culture, though, when people supposedly charged with stewardship of the public good can blow off their responsibilities in such a cavalier and thoughtless manner, and face little or no political consequence?

Let’s chew on that a while, and then move on to Exhibit B: the cesspool currently masquerading as our national conversation in the context of the federal election campaign. Let’s forget about the Islamophobia, the manufactured controversy over the niqab, and the coded messages in expressions like “old stock Canadians” for a moment, and focus on something even more basic and troubling.

What if, on reflection, you’re not convinced that the current system really offers any meaningful choices? What if none of the established parties hold out any hope that they’re going to address things that actually matter to you? What if the current conversation isn’t speaking to you? What if, with all the sound and fury, you still don’t feel represented?

Is it so unreasonable to point out the arbitrary exclusion of certain viewpoints? Is it irresponsible to observe that the parameters for Serious and Reasonable Ideas are set by a very small, privileged, and insular class of people?

What if there’s no popular mechanism influencing whose voices matter and whose voices get shut out? What if the manufactured narratives in the corporate media aren’t resonating with you? What if all kinds of questions aren’t discussed in any detail because of an apparent tacit agreement among the major parties and media outlets?

Is choosing among a handful of pre-packaged brands on polling day really comparable to meaningful popular input? By the same token, if you’re not convinced that any of those brands are going to undo the damage of the past few decades, is refusing to participate in the charade really so unreasonable?

I don’t have any easy answers. Over to you, internetz.

Related posts:

• This Election, Let’s Talk About the Public Good
• Reviving #ThePublicGood, part 6: Government is not a business
• Nuance, complexity, and why progressives are frequently at a disadvantage
• Video: March for #SammyYatim

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Reviving #ThePublicGood, part 7: Getting around the public-transit roadblock | #TOpoli #onpoli

Are you stuck in traffic?

Waiting for a streetcar or bus that may never arrive?

Welcome to the state of getting around in Toronto, 2014. Essential reading on this from both Daren and John Lorinc.

We didn’t get here by accident, of course, and god knows there’s plenty of blame to go round. While the current mayoral administration bears particular responsibility for its consistent lies and pandering to an ill-founded sense of entitlement and manufactured resentment, allied to a transparent and patently destructive divide-and-conquer strategy, it did not do this damage all by itself. It’s had plenty of help, from the province and Ottawa, and from provincial agencies theoretically mandated to prevent this kind of thing from happening in the first place. From the Harrisite barbarians spitefully filling in a tunnel that had already been started, to the provincial Liberals’ initial decision to turtle on the shit-canning of Transit City, to the more recent nod-nod-wink-wink reactions to extravagant and undeliverable signals in the context of provincial by-elections, much of the blame can properly be laid at the doors of Queen’s Park as well. As John writes:

… we can — and should — ask what the orchestrated gutting of the $8.4 billion LRT master agreement, signed by Metrolinx, the City of Toronto and the TTC in November, 2012, will ultimately cost Toronto residents. And we can ask whether the Liberals, in effect, bought a Scarborough by-election last summer by agreeing to bankroll a subway while side-loading well over a billion dollars — the actual sum is unknown — in surplus cost to Toronto residents.
To re-cap: Between the feds, the province and the city, governments have committed $3.05 billion to a three-stop subway that will cover less ground and take longer to complete than the $1.8 billion, seven-stop Scarborough LRT.

Really, take a few minutes and read through the entire series. It isn’t pretty. Staff recommendations, expert advice, and evidence-based warnings all ignored. Public servants kneecapped. Persistent and calculated misrepresentation and lying. Well-considered and fully funded plans torn up for temporary political advantage. Millions of dollars down the toilet. Why, it’s as if we’d left essential matters of good governance in the hands of petulant four-year-olds!

And you’d think, what with us being in the middle of a provincial election, we might have a chance to discuss this intelligently. Yeah, well. Given the current state of public and political discourse, you might not want to hold your breath. I’ve tried, without much success, to get the #FactyEvidencyTransitStuff hashtag trending on the Tweeter, but a guy can dream. (What can I say? Perhaps I don’t have as much of a future in vaudeville as I’d hoped.)

But really, John’s already said it. We’ll return to this theme in the larger context of peak oil and the putative War On The Car, because this is just one symptom of a much more widespread social, political and discursive dysfunction, but at the end of the day, where has all this gotten us? Millions of dollars deeper in the hole and no further ahead on transit. How does this advance the greatest good for the greatest number? How does this represent pooling of resources, combination of expertise, or harnessing of collective efforts?

It’s hard to see how this serves The Public Good.

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• Reviving the Public Good, part 3: civic engagement | #TOpoli #onpoli #cdnpoli
• Reviving the Public Good, part 2: Winning back the words | #TOpoli #onpoli
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Reviving #ThePublicGood, part 5: Taxes and the role of government | #TOpoli #onpoli #cdnpoli

With today’s lesson, we focus on one of the most loaded topics in public conversation: taxation. Strap in, it’s going to get a little bumpy.

It’s easy to hate the idea of taxation, I know. And god knows, there’s a lot invested in cranking up that hatred. We’ll examine the reasons for that investment in due course, but for now, let’s just focus on first principles: taxes are the price of civilized society. We don’t live in Thomas Hobbes’ state of nature, wherein all are at war with one another; in return for a measure of security and as a step up from anarchy, barbarism, and incessant war, we agree to surrender a degree of our autonomy to this larger thing called “society.” It goes back a ways — farther than Rob Ford, David Miller, or Mel Lastman, in fact. Farther back than Agnes MacPhail, Nellie McClung, John A. MacDonald, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, John Locke, the Magna Carta, Jesus Christ, and maybe even to the point where humankind started to record history. It’s a robust and resilient thing, civilization is, but it’s not unbreakable.

And what is the fundamental characteristic of civil society? It is a collective commitment to pool our efforts, to live by common norms and rules (more on that later), and to combine our efforts to accomplish, as a group, that which we cannot accomplish on our own. You know — roads, hospitals, civic infrastructure, collective defence, electricity, running water, clean air, and other things conducive to the public good. We act together to do things for the collective benefit.

And how do we accomplish those things? By pooling our resources. By paying taxes. That, in its most basic terms, is what taxation is. We determine collectively, through the democratic process and our elected representatives, what our social priorities are, we pool our resources, and then we allocate our pooled resources in accordance with those priorities. In other words, we “tax” and “spend.” It’s not right or left. It’s not socialism. It’s not capitalism. It’s not liberal or conservative. It’s not evil, it’s not confiscation, it’s not theft, and it’s not dictatorship. It’s government. It’s what government does. All the frippery and bullshit that’s been thrown at it just clouds the issue.

So now that we’ve established what taxes are and what they’re supposed to do, let’s talk about their role in democratic governance. Healthy, livable and functional communities, I’d respectfully submit, are not built by people who focus on keeping taxes low. Let’s make our biases clear straight off. Emphasizing low taxes at the expense of everything else isn’t just shallow thinking any more. Given the failures of far-right governance and the damage inflicted by years of devotion to so-called “austerity,” I’d submit that it verges on sociopathic.

Make no mistake, dear friends. When you cut taxes, you kneecap government’s ability to act in The Public Good. And that’s its role.  Government is there to enhance the public good by working to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number. It’s not there to make a profit, it’s not there to strengthen the brand, it’s not there to generate returns for shareholders. There will be more about the fetishizing of The Market and The Private Sector later, but for now, let’s just focus on government’s core function.

And it’s here that we must re-emphasize the non-partisan nature of this little project. It’s not as if I’ve made my feelings about the Toronto mayoral shitstorm a secret, although I’ve been trying to dial it back for a while, but let’s be clear: this is not about Rob Ford. It’s easy to get caught up in the crack, the coarse boorishness, the racism, the sexism, the homophobia, and the other non-stop embarrassments, and lose sight of the fact that it’s the whole small-government, private-sector-market-fetishizing, low-taxing, union-hating mindset that’s toxic. It’s a mindset that rejects the whole notion of the public sphere as such. That’s what’s captured the mantle of “conservatism,” and that’s what needs to be pushed back.

The pushback starts with the shallow and destructive fixation on “respect for taxpayers.” Forget about the current administration’s spectacular failures and hypocrisy in that regard for a moment, and let’s focus on the misdirected emphasis and the attendant enfeeblement of any collective commitment to The Public Good. When you reduce the relationship between people and government to one of taxpayer and tax collector, you’re inevitably setting up a dynamic of resentment, hostility, smallness of mind, and meanness of spirit. It’s a very sad, angry and limiting view of citizenship, of our collective well-being, and of public life. This isn’t conservatism. It’s destructive, atavistic bullshit.

You want evidence? Well, let’s work those critical-thinking skills, shall we? Just ask yourselves whose interests are served by such a poisonous agenda. From this, healthy communities, committed citizens, and well-appointed public spheres do not spring. It’s fine if you’ve got the resources to buy your own infrastructure and retreat behind the walls of your private enclave, but I’d submit it’s not too healthy for the rest of us.

We are citizens, not just taxpayers. Not residents, not customers, not voters, not consumers. We are more than that. It is with the idea of citizenship that we express our sense of community and our aspiration to  work together for the greater good. As citizens, we have obligations to one another, and to something bigger than our individual interests — and it is through our collective action and our contribution to public resources that we fulfill those obligations.

I don’t mean to sound sanctimonious (strangled derisive laughter — ed.), but I haven’t got much time for people who bitch about “goddamn government wasting my tax money.” News flash, folks: it’s not your money. It’s society’s money, to be spent in accordance with duly determined public priorities. You get to have a say in that determination through your elected representatives and the democratic process, but you don’t get to take your ball and go home if you don’t get the results you want.

You can bitch and moan and begrudge every nickel you pay in taxes, or you can have a healthy society. I know which way I’d go.

ETA: I’d be remiss if I failed to acknowledge the guidance of my wise friend Alex Himelfarb here. He’s more eloquent in his sleep than I’ll ever be wide awake.

ETA: Trish Hennessy also. She and Alex are the finest civic and moral guides a fella could ask for.

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Reviving #ThePublicGood, part 4: civility and inclusion |#TOpoli #onpoli #cdnpoli

One of my favourite stories about Canadian politics (just when we thought you couldn’t possibly get any more insufferable — ed.) involves Dalton Camp. It may be just about the best illustration, not only of the points I want to make about civility, but about conservatism itself — and why it needs to be rescued.

I’m not going to try to give a comprehensive history of either conservatism in Canada or the Progressive Conservative Party. I’m referring to Mr. Camp because, it says here, he personifies the Red Tory tradition, and the kind of decency and civility that badly needs to be restored to public life in general and to Canadian political discourse in particular. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone with more than two brain cells that the public conversation has been debased, shot through with venom and hostility, and dragged into the gutter over the past couple of decades; reversing that trend is in everyone’s best interest, except perhaps those who benefit from it.

Imagine a gentler time, when political differences did not lead automatically to scorched-earth hatred. You didn’t have to agree with your opponents, but you could acknowledge there was merit in their arguments, that they were decent human beings, and that at the end of the day, you were all committed to … The Public Good. You could argue, you could seek advantage, you could undermine, contradict and mischaracterize, but once it was all done, you could sit down with them and have a beer. (I know, I know. Not everyone has a cabinet full of sherry and a closet full of tweed jackets with elbow patches.) 

I’m not about to nominate Dalton Camp for sainthood. Anyone acquainted with Canadian political history knows about his role in bringing down John Diefenbaker. But while I wasn’t there, I’m fairly certain he never used words like “gravy train,” “teat-sucker,” “despicable,” “pathetic,” “union scum,” “silly socialist,” “illegal coup,” or “child pornographers” in his public or political life. Maybe it’s just a naive delusion on my part, but for me, politics as practiced by Dalton Camp involved camaraderie, reaching out to your opponents, and a willingness to set partisanship aside occasionally for the sake of the greater good. Decency. Such a quaint notion.

Anyway, the story. I wish I had video of this, but some years ago, Dalton Camp appeared on a televised panel discussion with some worthless little pisher whom I will not identify. Suffice it to say that said little pisher is among the worst offenders in terms of venom, gutter politics, name-calling, and smearing; he’s exactly the sort of malignant tumour that needs to be excised from both contemporary discourse and conservatism itself. So there’s Dalton Camp, trying to make his points in a calm, quiet, reasonable way, and listening to the others like the decent and honourable gentleman he is — and there’s the little pisher, jumping up and down, interrupting, shouting down Camp and the other panelists, and giving a perfect demonstration of what it means to be an obnoxious jerk. I wanted to reach into the TV and smack him. To this day, I will never forget the expression on Camp’s face. It wasn’t disgust — it was incomprehension. If I had to read minds, I’d suspect he just could not fathom how anyone could possibly be so ill-mannered, let alone be invited to mix with decent people or debate public affairs.

That episode symbolizes almost everything that’s gone wrong with public conversation. Over the past few decades, we’ve allowed it to be dominated by the tabloid-press screamers, the talk-radio yellers, and the barking monkeys of lowbrow cable-news TV, and the effect is obvious. Instead of discussion, we have insults. Instead of reason, we have name-calling. Instead of respect, we have gleeful contempt. There’s no reflection, no nuance, no critical thought, no exchange — just the continuing cultivation of stupidity and debasement of conversation itself. And it’s hard to see how that can be anything but antithetical to the public good. Difficult though it may be, it’s past time to push back. Once again, I’ll recycle my own argument:

Listening to your neighbours and giving your opponents the benefit of the doubt isn’t a sign of weakness, and it isn’t a class thing either. And by the same token, demonizing, misrepresenting, name-calling and smearing isn’t a civic virtue. It contaminates public discourse and lowers us all, and it needs to be called out for what it is.

The other element, of course, is inclusion. In case it isn’t obvious by now, I’m a straight white guy, and because of that, I enjoy privileges that many people don’t. Straight white guys could remind themselves of that every now and then, and consider that other people have to face barriers to participation that they never even perceive. So while you’re working to revive the public good and encourage civic participation and enable decency in public discourse, spare a thought for your friends and fellow citizens who aren’t straight, white and / or male — and make room for them.

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Reviving the Public Good, part 3: civic engagement | #TOpoli #onpoli #cdnpoli

Good day everyone. When we left off yesterday, we were talking about vigilance and dedication regarding the meanings of words.

Let’s review: the main takeaway from the last post should be that words are the most basic currency of citizenship because they’re the means whereby we share ideas and communicate with one another. It’s for that reason that we have to respect their meanings and guard against attempts to subvert them. We can’t allow words to be stripped of their meanings and repurposed; if we allow our opponents to do that, to define the terms of the conversation, we’ve lost before it’s even started.

However, all that vigilance about words, language and clarity isn’t going to be much use if we don’t use those words to advance The Public Good (Chuck Heston voice — ed.). This brings us to today’s subject: civic engagement. One of the obligations of citizenship, it says here, is participation in the civic life of your community. (Suppose I should have a widget that flashes and makes “woop woop” noises when I get all sanctimonious or something.)

This project is going to stay resolutely non-partisan because I don’t want people to blow it off for ideological or political reasons. At least not until they’ve read the first two or three sentences. But it’s no secret that low voter turnout is a matter of concern, not only in Toronto, but at the provincial and federal levels as well. And it’s not just in Canada.

So, back to first principles. The right to participate in matters of public concern isn’t a given. Not everyone in the world enjoys that right. (Let’s just set aside, for a moment, the question of whether the mechanisms whereby we exercise that right are working as well as they should.) And if you don’t participate, you don’t get to complain when things happen that you don’t like. If you want good things to happen, if you don’t want debate to be consumed with stupidity or irrelevancies, you have to take part. It’s no guarantee, of course, but sitting at home with your thumb up your ass pretty much guarantees the opposite.

No easy way around it, my friends. You leave it to others, you have no right to complain, and as we’ve seen from the past couple of decades, you end up with dictatorship or the corporatist equivalent, whereby governments are systematically stripped of the ability to act in the public interest when it conflicts with private profit. The decline in public participation is part of what makes such arrangements easy to tart up and pass off as “free trade.”

As I often do, I’m going to cite my good friend Daren on this one.

They’re all crooks and liars anyway. Nothing you say or do will change anything anyway. What’s the use? Just keep your head down and blindly lash out every 4 years or so in the voting booth. Throw the bums out! Keep my taxes low. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Democracy in a nutshell.

Sorry, no sale. This is an abdication of the most basic responsibility of citizenship. When you take that attitude, you enable the worst elements and instincts in the body politic. The non-stop clusterfuck on display at City Hall over the last three years ought to be all the evidence you need. And really, it’s not much of a leap to draw the connections between that and the resources invested in keeping us lazy, cynical, and disengaged, because truth told, democracy is messy. I think it was someone much smarter than me who once described it as the worst form of government in the world, except for all the others. Couple that with the so-called Fair Elections Act, which has been described as a cynical and misleading effort at voter suppression, and the importance of civic engagement becomes even more evident.

Ultimately the only source of legitimacy is a mandate from the electorate, regardless of the dysfunctions of the FPTP system or the ease with which institutions of governance can be captured and subverted. Certainly one can raise questions about the source of that mandate or the mechanics of how it is generated — in fact, raising such questions is at the very heart of civic engagement.

It’s worth noting, for that reason, that that’s why the corporations and lobbyists and string pullers do not want engaged citizens — we just gum up the works and get in the way. Democracy, as someone once said, can be messy. But that is all the more reason to stress the obligations of citizenship, and the need for people to participate actively in the civic lives of their communities.

I’m dwelling on this at some length because it’s important to push back against the regrettable and, frankly, indefensible tendency for people to blow off their civic responsibilities with the arch suggestion that they “don’t want to get mixed up in politics.” As I’ve written previously,

One of the hallmarks of contemporary political discourse, or more accurately, the sewer into which the modern right has dragged it, is the characterization of undesirable things as “political,” and the corollary implication that anything tainted by the stench of “politics” is undesirable.

Sorry, nope. Governance is, at its essence, a process of determining public priorities and allocating public resources in accordance with those priorities. Inevitably, some of those priorities will be judged more important than others, and therefore assigned more resources. That process is a series of value judgements — judgements that are informed, one hopes, by a commitment to the public good (Chuck Heston voice again — ed.) and to arriving at solutions that achieve the greatest good for the greatest number. Again, I’ll recycle my own argument (Sanctimonious Wanker warning):

In prioritizing things and deciding how much to spend, we are invariably making value judgments. We are negotiating with others and making trade-offs. In other words, we are Engaging in Politics. There’s nothing to be gained by deluding ourselves or trying to convince others that we are not.

In sum, then, politics is inherent in civic engagement. It’s not dirty and it’s not sordid and it’s not icky, despite the efforts invested in trying to make people think it is.

Dirty, icky and sordid. That’s not what politics is, and it’s not the tone that should characterize our public conversation. We can do better. We can demand better. We can establish a context wherein both we and our representatives and public servants are induced to do better. Tomorrow: inclusion, privilege, and above all, a call for a return to civility.

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Elections and renewing our commitment to the #PublicGood | #TOpoli #onpoli #cdnpoli

Sorry, dear friends. More sanctimonious wankery coming. It’s what I do.

It’s election season in Toronto, and now in Ontario as well. My good friend Daren’s been on top of the, er, developments at City Hall in more detail than I can possibly match; if you’re not reading his updates, then start. Today. (Guy’s got a stronger stomach than I have.) Ed Keenan, Jude Macdonald, and Neville Park should also be on your must-reads.

Nothing new there. What I’d like to do, rather than compete with their everyday engagement, is to set out a broader context within which I hope we can approach the choices we’ll have to make in the next few weeks and months. In an ideal world, those choices would be informed by a thoughtful commitment to the public good; that sounds fairly obvious, but as we’ve seen over the past couple of years, things are never that clearcut.

So what do we mean when we talk about The Public Good? Over the next little while, I’d like to set out the essential elements. (I’m upper-casing it because I want it to sound as if it’s being read by Chuck Heston. Please note as well that I’m not using it in the narrow economic sense.) Broadly, it includes, but isn’t limited to:

• Critical thinking
• Clarity and accuracy in language
• Civic engagement
• Civility and inclusion
• A realistic and mature appreciation of the role of taxation
• Recognizing the role of government as an agent of our collective well-being
• Embracing the notion of citizenship and its obligations
• Appreciating that governance, good or bad, is a complex endeavour
• A realistic approach to transit, energy use and efficiency that recognizes the unsustainable nature of reliance on private automobiles
• A rededication to the seemingly quaint notion of truthfulness
• Demanding more of ourselves and our would-be representatives
• Respect for the public sphere

This is not intended to be partisan. It is not about the mayor, nor is it about any individual councillors. Those of you depraved enough to follow me on the Twitters know what I think about the day-to-day craziness of municipal politics. This is, I hope, a much broader and longer-term program geared to renewing and enhancing our understanding of, and dedication to, The Public Good. As we evaluate candidates — incumbents and challengers alike — policy statements, proposals, track records, and the public conversation itself, we must ask ourselves: Does this further the public good? Will it help to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number?

So let’s talk about critical thought and the public conversation.

Critical thought isn’t an elitist skill, and it’s not the same thing as criticism. At its most elemental level, it’s simply the ability to evaluate evidence and follow chains of reasoning. It’s about being able to see shades of meaning, and recognize that things are rarely black and white. It’s about the ability to hold more than one idea simultaneously, and seeing merit in positions that contradict one another. In sum, it’s about being willing to embrace complexity.

Approaching an argument critically means evaluating its validity in the face of supporting evidence, of competing claims, of analogies and comparisons, and separating what is worthwhile and convincing from what is not. Does this follow logically? Is it on topic? Is it supported by the evidence, and does the evidence relate to the point being advanced? How well does it stand up under examination? How well does it stack up against other points of view? If we accept A, does it mean we must accept B as well? Do the arguments and evidence marshalled in support of A necessarily apply to B?

It’s not high-level elitist academic thinking. It’s simply what equips us to filter out bullshit and trivialities, and identify and retain valuable information. It’s what enables us to think for ourselves, rather than just swallow what other people want us to believe. It’s the first thing we apply in deciding whether or not something advances The Public Good. It is, as I’ve said, the most essential thing in the Citizenship Toolbox.

So. Now that we’ve established the intrinsic value of critical thought, let’s look at the medium whereby we exercise it: language. Like critical thought, words and language are the most basic currency of citizenship. They’re the means whereby we communicate with one another.

Obvious, one would think. So why are we focusing so hard upon words? Because for the last few decades, if not longer, words themselves have become a battleground. Their meanings have become contested; one of the most insidious attacks on the Public Good has manifested itself in campaigns to strip words of their meanings and repurpose them for other ends. It’s not just about their definitions, but their connotations and the contexts within which they’re used. Stripped of their meanings, words can become weapons. Instead of enlightenment, they can become tools of obfuscation, manipulation, even violence. Part of the obligations of engaged citizenship, I’d argue, is winning them back and reinvesting them with their original meanings.

I can’t overstate the importance of this. Since words are the most fundamental things we use to communicate and exchange ideas, we cannot leave their definition to those with nefarious agendas. If we let others define the terms for debate, we’ve lost before we’ve even started. Reclamation of the discursive turf is fundamental not only to critical thought, but to the greater good. Whose interests are served by the debasement of public discourse? Who benefits from muddy thinking, manipulation, and volatile emotions rather than calm, rational, civil debate?

Tomorrow, we’ll examine some of those words and attempt to rescue them.

Related posts:

• Community, citizenship, The Public Good, yada yada yada. More to come | #TOpoli #onpoli #cdnpoli
• The Ford follies, and framing the discussion | #TOpoli
• Robert Reich: The Decline of the Public Good
• Toronto’s transit future, LRT, and the need to win back the words | #TOpoli
• Politics, decency, and finding common ground: the restoration of civility | #TOpoli #cdnpoli
• Citizenship, critical thought and Giorgio Mammoliti

Via @yvonnebambrick, working to eliminate the door prize | #TOpoli #bikeTO

http://bcove.me/xp3vq2gk

The amazing and energetic @yvonnebambrick appears in this timely report wherein the chairman of the Toronto Police Services Board calls for an updated and responsive approach to the way dooring incidents are tracked.

No point in going through all the facts, again, about how and why cycling is growing in popularity — exercise, agility, gridlock, environment, and all that. Working to make cycling safer, as a matter of public policy, ought to be a no-brainer, no?

And yet, incredibly, it seems we’re still having to fight this battle from square one. Not only are we ripping out bike lanes, we’re still hearing braying from certain Neanderthals for the removal of even more cycling infrastructure. The current administration’s hostility to cyclists and cycling is a matter of record, of course, but it’s not just a matter of stupidity or coarsening public discourse; it has real and tangible effects on public safety.

In some of my smart-assier moments, I quip about this being another front in the War On The Car. I kid, of course, but we all know there are people, too many people, who actually see it that way. They’re serious. I don’t know how to educate, reach out, or engage them, and I’m the first to admit that’s probably not one of my strong points, but then I’ve got cyclist friends who’ve almost gotten killed by asshole motorists, so forgive me if my first reaction isn’t one of diplomacy and understanding.

Really, this isn’t a Downtown Elitist thing. Plenty of people ride bicycles, for whatever reason. They shouldn’t have to feel that they’re taking their lives in their hands every time they mount up.

Related posts:

• Cycling in Toronto and the toxic effect of consistent anti-bike rhetoric | #TOpoli #BikeTO
• Albert McWilliams: You’re Going to Kill Someone
• the penalties for motorists who door cyclists …
• Cyclists, New York, and the Wall Street Journal
• It’s not a War on the Car, it’s a war by cars on everyone else | #TOpoli #TOcouncil #bikeTO

Related articles

• Police board wants Toronto cops to review ‘dooring’ policy (metronews.ca)
• Toronto police won’t track ‘dooring’ until they’re ordered to do so (metronews.ca)
• Toronto Bikers Beware: Surviving Toronto’s Most Dangerous Streets (johndiogenous.wordpress.com)
• Why dooring cyclists is like a sunny day (treehugger.com)
• Bike Safety (insureyes.com)
• I was still drunk and ran a cyclist over on purpose, woman tweets (thetimes.co.uk)

Cycling in Toronto and the toxic effect of consistent anti-bike rhetoric | #TOpoli #BikeTO

https://twitter.com/kiwinerd/status/349540526325903360

Bit of a change-up here, folks.

Usually it’s Daren who gets into the specifics and applies his wonderful witty blend of deconstruction, observation and analysis, while yours truly drops in every now and then with the windy, sententious “let’s all take a step back and put this into a bit of historical context,” yada yada yada.

Bit different today. I had some friends over yesterday, and one of them, a far more committed cyclist than I, was describing a confrontation she recently had with a motorist. She brought video. Because the matter’s still before the legal system, I won’t name names or get into specifics.

In brief, she had words with a guy in a van who yelled at her to get off the road, arguing that “roads are for cars.” Now where have we heard that before? She retorted, quite correctly, that as a cyclist she had just as much right to be on the road as him. Next thing you know, the son of a bitch literally ran her off the road with his truck. On purpose. She had to be hospitalized. She needed stitches. Thank god she didn’t break any bones.

But there’s a lesson here, and it goes beyond the specific circumstances of this one incident. Anyone who rides a bike in Toronto’s more than likely to have had words with a hostile motorist or gotten the door prize or any of a number of hazards that cyclists have to face on a regular basis.

Now, recall one of Daren’s recent posts about some of the people who drive private automobiles and their sense of entitlement:

There’s no war on the car going on. It’s the exact opposite. This is all about the over-weening sense of entitlement and primacy in the minds of those using their private vehicles as their sole source of getting around the city. … a car driver’s sense of their right to the road is boundless.

That’s part of the context. Add to that the consistent drumbeat of hostility and vindictiveness toward cyclists from certain sectors of Toronto’s political sphere and it’s not too hard to draw the connection to my friend’s experience. In brief, as I’ve argued previously,

it’s become more socially acceptable, among a certain segment of the population, to abuse, threaten and even assault cyclists and other users of the road.

Now, maybe it’s just me and my white male privilege talking, and / or my middle-class upbringing, and / or my fetish for principled conservatism, and / or maybe even just my bourgeois nostalgia for civility, but how is this making our city better? Isn’t it in all our interests to push back against this? We’re all in this together.

Happy Canada Day, y’all.

Related posts:

• Albert McWilliams: You’re Going to Kill Someone
• the penalties for motorists who door cyclists …
• Bikes, BIXI and the public good | #TOpoli #onpoli
• The four-wheel fetish: moving beyond the car | #mobilityTO #moveTO
• From @justinsb: Why Rob Ford, and His Supporters, Need to Avoid a War on Bicycles
• It’s not a War on the Car, it’s a war by cars on everyone else | #TOpoli #TOcouncil #bikeTO
• War on the Car, redux | #BikeTO #TOpoli

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• Nuance, complexity, and why progressives are frequently at a disadvantage | #TOpoli #onpoli #cdnpoli (solchrom.wordpress.com)
• ‘Dooring’ feared by Toronto cyclists, ignored by police (metronews.ca)
• Why dooring cyclists is like a sunny day (treehugger.com)

Nuance, complexity, and why progressives are frequently at a disadvantage | #TOpoli #onpoli #cdnpoli

https://twitter.com/sol_chrom/status/262306392432582657

Couple of quick thoughts about efforts to reform the voting system, spurred, as is often the case, by another thoughtful and well-crafted post from Daren.

I’ll confess at the outset that I haven’t really given that much thought to the various options, be they ranked ballots, single transferable votes, pure proportional representation, or whatever. The debate’s been carried by smarter and better-informed people than me. I’ll also disclose that I consider Dave Meslin, one of the guys working on RaBIT, a friend and a civic hero, even if I haven’t always agreed with him.

But that’s not my purpose today. As Daren observes,

those speaking under the banner (if not official endorsement) of Fair Vote Canada – the side of proportional representation and against ranked ballots – did themselves no favours.

I’m not taking sides in that particular debate because, as I’ve admitted, it’s complicated and I haven’t given it as much thought as I should. That the dysfunctions of our current First Past The Post system don’t really serve the needs of democratic governance ought to be self-evident by now; it underlines the need for serious and well-considered electoral reform, at every level from the municipal to the federal.

No, what concerns us today is the challenge posed by complexity itself. Daren’s not the first observer to note the internecine warfare among various progressive factions, whether they’re championing electoral reform, a particular set of social or economic measures, or even discursive change. It’s never especially easy to analyze arguments, to evaluate evidence, and to follow chains of reasoning — hence this little corner’s continuing fascination with the notion of critical thought and its importance to the demands of engaged citizenship.

It’s difficult to approach this without sounding all preachy (really? we hadn’t noticed — ed.), but that’s inherent in any worthwhile public-policy discussion. Anything that involves multiple objectives, multiple stakeholders, conflicting priorities, and finite resources is going to require a difficult process of analysis and evaluation. It takes time, concentration, and a willingness to embrace complexity, as well as an acknowledgement that such things rarely boil down to simple answers. In short, it’s about seeing nuance, making tradeoffs, recognizing shades of grey.

And that, I’d submit, is why those willing to engage that way are so often at a disadvantage. Not only are they asking more of their fellow citizens than the purveyors of simplistic catchphrases and lapel-button slogans — they’re also more prone to thrashing out their differences in public. The term “message discipline” isn’t an accident. When you can reduce complex issues of governance to bumper-sticker memes like “gravy train” or “strong stable majority,” you demand far less of people, and you give them an excuse to turn off their critical faculties.

It’s effective, but it’s also wrong, and it betrays not respect for people, but contempt. We needn’t delude ourselves that engaging our fellow citizens critically is an easy thing, but ultimately it suggests a great deal more respect for them.

To nuance, then, and to raising the conversation.

Related posts:

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• Via @meslin and @DesmondCole: Thanks for your support | Mez Dispenser
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• Toronto budget 2013: economics cannot be separated from politics | #TOpoli
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• Toronto ranked ballot voting proposal survives committee vote (metronews.ca)
• Rob Ford serves up McDonald’s for McHappy Day (o.canada.com)
• Fouldis v. Ford Decision in ORs today #cdnlegal #topoli #onpoli #litigation (sabaahmad.wordpress.com)

Adult conversation. Is it too much to hope for? | #TOpoli #onpoli

Well, what can you do? Thrilling as the #Fordcourt ride was, we’re back to where we started. Ford Nation, such as it is, can enjoy its little victory lap.

We can debate, at our leisure, whether conflict-of-interest proceedings and campaign-finance audits are preferable to the electoral process in circumstances such as these. Again, though, those questions have already been addressed by smarter people than me, and right now, they’re pretty much academic. We’ve got less than two years to put together a constructive, progressive, alternative vision that addresses Team Ford’s shortcomings and takes a realistic approach to the things we have to deal with. I really don’t care, at this point, who fronts it.

Team Ford … well, it is what it is. The defections of some of its, er, “brighter lights” may make for momentary drama and passing headlines, but ultimately its small, divisive and simple-minded approach to governance is more important than Mike Del Grande’s martyr act, or Norm Kelly’s skepticism about climate change, or some numbskull’s gibbering about conspiracies.

We can’t ignore context, of course. The City of Toronto, like any other municipality, is limited in what it can do by the province. Dalton McGuinty had ten years to undo the damage inflicted on us by the Harris years, but we all know how well that turned out. Kathleen Wynne’s talked some encouraging talk about revenue tools and gridlock and such, but in the short term she’ll be more concerned with shoring up her own base than with a realistic and workable approach to dealing with the city. And in the meantime, there’s a lot invested in the austerity dogma that continues to be pushed upon us.

Well, whatever. For the moment, there’s not much we can do to change the political dynamics at Queen’s Park, the manufactured narratives that we’re hammered with day after day, or the governing structures whereby the province and the city carry out their functions. What we can do, however, is take a mature and responsible approach to the way we engage with our community and with one another.

So. Back to Toronto Council, and its individual members. They’ve shown that they can work together to rein in the mayor and the brother, and put forward an alternative agenda, regardless of their individual leanings and ambitions. Now would be a good time to show that they can continue. Over the next 20 months or so, they’ve got an opportunity to prove it.

How can they do that? By talking like thoughtful, reflective adults. They don’t have to agree on everything. They don’t have to gather for group hugs. All I ask is that they set aside the slogans, the catchphrases, the childish vindictiveness, and the belligerent, tribal ignorance that’s characterized public discourse in Toronto for the last two years.

Honestly. We’ve got crumbling infrastructure, an overloaded transit system, a growing sense of inequality and disengagement, a dysfunctional and misfiring governance structure, and a chief magistrate who’s clearly in over his head and can’t be bothered to do anything about it. We need a public discourse that goes beyond the fantasies peddled by casino lobbyists, gravy trains, war on the car, and subways, subways, subways. We can do better than that.

For god’s sake, let’s have an adult conversation.

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• 2012: The Year of Conversing Dangerously
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