Rolling back the damage: are we a country, or a commodity? | #elxn42 #cdnpoli #TPP

Haven’t really crystallized this into a coherent argument yet, but I can’t remember feeling this disheartened about a federal election since 1997. Ever since then, there’s been a growing malignancy in our body politic — a malignancy that goes beyond partisanship.

Successive governments since then have, for whatever reason, surrendered more and more policy tools, and more and more of their innate capacity to advance the public good, in the face of supranational trade and investment regimes. Regardless of who’s been in power in Ottawa (and provincial capitals, for that matter), we’ve been watching the gradual but unmistakable enfeeblement of government, to the point where it may well be irreversible. As awful as Harper’s been on so many files — environment, the war on women, civil liberties, First Nations, the economy, health care, immigration, housing, veterans, integrity in government, climate change — this didn’t start with him.

What I still don’t understand is, why? Why is government, of whatever stripe, voluntarily abandoning its role? Free Trade, NAFTA, MIA, CETA, FIPA, TPP, whatever. Why are public institutions consenting to, and even participating in, their own enervation? Why are we, through our governments, surrendering our ability to protect ourselves and act in the national interest in favour of a few multinational corporations and allowing them to sue us for notional lost profits? Who benefits from this? Who’s looking out for the common good here?

And that doesn’t even begin to address the glaring faults in our current electoral system. The disfiguring effects of our antiquated, necrotic First Past The Post system have already been discussed, but if there’s any sustained discussion of alternatives or efforts to reform the voting system, or the so-called “Fair Elections Act,” it’s barely being heard above the manufactured controversies and distractions. The conversation’s being dragged into the sewer, and that’s no accident either.

It’s why I’ve been wondering, perhaps at odds with my arguments about the responsibilities of citizenship, about the efficacy of voting. If civic engagement is reduced to casting a ballot every few years for choices that have, in truth, been set out for us, then are we really participating meaningfully in our own governance? Is voting, even if it manages to end the Harper era, going to undo decades worth of damage to civil society? Is it going to put an end to this misguided fetish for austerity? Is it going to reinvigorate the notion of an activist government committed to using the power of public policy to cultivate the greatest good for the greatest number? Is it going to re-assert the primacy of the public sphere in the face of “free trade” regimes and investor-state protections? How likely is it that any government, even the best-intentioned, will move to roll back the damage in the face of the inevitable backlash from international finance, the small coterie of Serious and Responsible people who decide which ideas are “realistic” and which are “lunatic,” and their amplifiers in the media?

I don’t want to sound facile, but doesn’t it come down to the kind of government we want and the kind of country we want to be? Do we want to be governed by the people we elect, or by a small global oligarchy of unaccountable string-pullers? And is the simple act of choosing a brand on polling day going to affect that?

Related posts:

• Civic engagement in the face of democratic deficit
• This election, let’s talk about the Public Good
• In defence of the public sphere
• Bloody well right, we need to tax and spend
• Let’s stop fetishizing “The Market”

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Taxis, Uber, and how NOT to make decisions | #TOpoli

So I had a chance to observe City Council this morning, consumed as it was by the Uber/taxi debate and the attendant seas of yellow and blue T-shirts.

Let’s get this out of the way first: I’m not taking sides on this. I haven’t followed it closely enough to craft an informed opinion, and I’m not particularly invested in either side, except to the extent that I want whatever emerges from the process to advance the public good. (For a particularly trenchant viewpoint, however, I’d recommend following Karen Geier on the Tweeter.)

That the Uber/taxi debate is controversial and complex isn’t news. It’s not going to be resolved here, or elsewhere on this site, or over the course of this council meeting. No, what I took away from this morning’s deliberations was more general: the importance of acknowledging and engaging with complexity.

Easier said than done, of course. The council chamber was filled to capacity (particularly notable were the yellow-shirted taxi partisans), and there was a sizeable overflow crowd in the city hall foyer. Every few minutes, a remark from the council floor would trigger a roar audible from downstairs. In a situation like that, it’s easy to just play to the galleries.

I don’t like clichés, but calling it a charged atmosphere seems fair. (As long as we’re talking about clichés, though, I’m told some smartypants suggested that we take a drink every time someone said “level playing field.” I thought I also heard someone say “skin in the game.”) It was particularly hard not to sympathize with Municipal Licensing/Standards Executive Director Tracey Cook, whose report on the city’s taxi industry formed part of the background for the deliberations. At one point, she responded to Frank DiGiorgio with a wry suggestion that if she’d had the crystal ball he was apparently demanding that she consult, she might have thought twice about taking the job. It wasn’t the only eyeroll-prompting question she had to field.

Indeed, one has to respect the demands public servants are required to meet. They have to balance impartiality with their professional obligation to deliver the best possible advice in helping their political masters make good decisions. When that has to take place in an atmosphere of hyper-partisanship and demagoguery … well, remember Gary Webster?

The complexities of the Uber/taxi debate need more room than I’ve got here, but among the factors councillors need to consider are:

• insurance coverage
• training (at one point, someone compared the 17-day training regime for taxis with Uber’s supposed requirement that prospective drivers watch a video)
• distribution of income within the industry
• ridership numbers
• public safety
• amounts of money involved
• identification of stakeholders: drivers, operators, owners, brokers, passengers, other users of the roads and transit system
• how best to enforce regulations
• how to foster a workable business model in an industry badly in need of updating

And I’m not pretending for one second that this is a comprehensive list. The task for city council, with the assistance of Ms. Cook and her staff, is to find a balance among these competing interests, and craft a revised regulatory structure that achieves the greatest good for the greatest number. 

As an aside, it’s worth noting that while sound decisions should be based on the best possible information, that’s a particular challenge in this case. How much can we rely on data collection, and who collects the data? I drove a taxi in Toronto a couple of centuries ago, and while I’m sure technology has evolved, it’s hard to imagine how drivers are supposed to record, categorize and analyze data on top of everything else they’re doing.

Now contrast the insistence on hard data with more reliance on anecdotal, non-quantifiable, lived experience. It’s no less important, but it raises its own set of questions around whose experience gets taken into account and how much weight it’s given.

Again: I’m not taking sides on the Uber/taxi debate. But pretending they’re exactly the same thing, as was evident in one exchange between the current Chief Magistrate and his predecessor, displays a rather limited grasp of the complications inherent in making policy – and of one’s own responsibilities as an elected official.

Ultimately, things turn on your approach to governance. You can’t reduce things to wishful thinking, unsupported assumptions, or misleading comparisons, and you can’t just repeat slogans. Maybe it’s trite to repeat this, but: Public Policy Is Not Simple. Pretending otherwise does no one any favours.

Related posts:

• Let’s stop fetishizing “The Market”
• Reviving #ThePublicGood, part 7: Getting around the public-transit roadblock
• Getting past the “War On The Car”

From @alexhimelfarb on Harper’s omnibus crime bill / #C10 #cdnpoli

This legislation is transformative as it puts punishment and prison at the centre of our criminal justice system.

This has never been the Canadian approach; our balanced justice policies have always focused on safety and justice – and the best evidence of what works.  Such a change  in direction should never happen without a vigorous debate – a good fight.

That’s all the more important because as we have seen in the U.S., this punitive approach leads to more of the same. It feeds our fears and, when we see that we are no more safe, rather than reverse course we opt for even more imprisonment, even tougher sentences.  This beast, the more you feed it the hungrier it gets.

In the U.S., state after state is trying to reverse course but that is no easy task once you have built and filled all those prisons, once you have created a permanent underclass on the one hand and gated communities on the other.  We do not want to go that way.

via afhimelfarb.wordpress.com

A comment on Alex Himelfarb’s blog, which should be required reading for students of public policy and anyone concerned about the direction we’re taking on crime and punishment.

Nasty, stupid, counterproductive, divisive, cynical, and very, very dangerous. But then we already knew that.

Harper’s been quite open about his intent to rewrite Canada’s entire narrative. It’s baffling and more than a little disheartening to watch the way we let him get away with it. Here we are, faced with what amounts to an existential threat to the kind of country we are, and we can’t even muster the energy for even the most minimal civic engagement?

It can’t be just the lingering after-effects of tear gas, truncheons and pepper spray. And it’s been clear since last May that the battle’s going to have to be fought through extraparliamentary channels.

And that’s where I start looking for plans that go beyond the hill-by-hill, street-by-street model. While we’re doing that, this bunch is effectively reshaping the very ground on which we’re standing. I’m all for fighting the good fight for the right reasons, but it seems to be that we’ve been doing that — and without much success. If anyone’s got any ideas about how to counter this guy, not just tactically but strategically, I’m all ears.

Related posts:

• Why conservatism needs to be rescued
• Harper Conservatives: stupid on crime, redux | via rabble.ca
• Harper Conservatives: stupid on crime | via @pogge411

The Sixth Estate on who pays for Canada’s right-wing think tanks | #cdnpoli

… where think tanks and the like are concerned, is that most of these groups routinely put themselves into a conflict of interest when they advocate policies which benefit their large donors (mainly foundations owned by large corporations and billionaires who own large corporations), and compound that conflict of interest by not disclosing it. This position isn’t about accounting transparency; it’s about basic public ethics.

Finding out where think tanks get their money from is exceedingly difficult in Canada because they are not required to disclose who funds them, and the Canada Revenue Agency does not list all recipients of grants from a charitable foundation (unlike in America, where this information can and is retrieved by organizations like MediaMatters. Still, I want to make use of some of the limited available material we do have to make some observations about how the Canadian think tank sector works.

via sixthestate.net

If you haven’t bookmarked this site, do it now.

Amid all the sound and fury generated by the Quebecor / Sun News jihad against the CBC (and we’ll save the inherent hypocrisy of that for another time), it’s worth asking who funds outlets such as the Fraser Institute and the like. And then wondering why that information is so much more difficult to get.

Related posts:

• @Cityslikr, @NickKouvalis, and the need for civility in public discourse | #TOpoli #TeamFord
• Why Unions Matter – excerpted from the CCPA
• Climate-change denial made even stupider
• Alex Himelfarb writes about the Inequality Trap: A Meaner Canada
• Au revoir, Jack – Funeral and People’s Procession
• Citizenship, critical thought and Giorgio Mammoliti | #TOpoli #TOcouncil #PlanetFord

@Cityslikr, @NickKouvalis, and the need for civility in public discourse | #TOpoli #TeamFord

Ah, nuance.

What a thing it is to contemplate. It’s so bracing. Complication. Reflection. Complexity. It’s what puts the real in real life.

My friend @cityslikr, who on his worst days is ten times more eloquent and compelling than I will ever be, was involved in one of those Twitter conversations the other night. Initially it was with some tabloid scribbler, but as the evening went on, he was joined by Nick Kouvalis.

Mr. Kouvalis, you may recall, was widely credited as the brains behind Rob Ford’s election victory. And full marks to him for that; a lot of people, including me, never thought it would be possible for a guy like Rob Ford to win the mayor’s chair. Regardless of what we may think of it, Mr. Kouvalis ran an effective and successful campaign. Whatever’s happened in the ensuing year can’t change that.

But watching that exchange and reviewing the duelling tweets prompted a couple of related observations: perhaps not especially original, but no less relevant for that, especially given the state in which Toronto now finds itself. The first concerns the difference between electioneering and governing; the second, perhaps more subtle but no less important, concerns the importance of framing (for which I’m also indebted to Trish Hennessy. If you haven’t bookmarked her blog, do it now).

Back to @cityslikr and Mr. Kouvalis. Rather than put words in their mouths, I’ll let them speak for themselves (guys, if I’ve left anything out, or if you feel I’m taking your words out of context, please feel free to write. I’ll publish your comments as you submit them).

To the extent that you can have a compelling policy debate via 140-character bursts, that’s what appears to be going on. And I can’t help but contrast that with the themes that dominated last year’s mayoral contest, thanks in large part to Mr. Kouvalis: Gravy Train. Respect for Taxpayers. Wasteful spending. We don’t have a revenue problem. War on the Car. Those of you bored or desperate enough to read my stuff regularly know what I think of those memes, but that twitter exchange illustrated, beautifully, the gulf between electioneering and governing.

Admittedly, this isn’t a new lesson, but it’s no less worthwhile for the repetition. Democratic governance, whether it’s at the local, provincial, or federal level, is a complex, multifaceted exercise. It involves balancing of multiple interests, looking at issues from both a long-term and short-term perspective, analyzing costs and benefits, identifying opportunities and stakeholders, allocating resources in accordance with needs, recognizing that community is evaluated not just in fiscal terms, but also in terms of aesthetics, cohesion, and sense of common purpose, and above all, trying to fashion public policy in a way that produces the greatest good for the greatest number. Ideally, it’s informed by devotion to things like citizenship and stewardship, a resolve to enhance the public good and leave the public sphere just a little better than we found it. In sum, it’s complicated. It’s not something that can be reduced to sound bites, lapel buttons and bumper stickers.

It’s been instructive, watching the direction the conversation’s been taking, most notably with the recent comparisons likening Toronto’s municipal finances to the impending cataclysm in Greece. Do we really have to go there? We’re not Greece. Greece itself isn’t Greece, at least not in the apocalyptic way the tabloid brayers have been portraying it. But that’s the problem with caricature, hyperbole and simplistic thinking. It may play well on the campaign trail or in tabloid columns written by or aimed at people with limited attention spans and cognitive faculties, but it rarely translates into effective and responsible governance.

Simplistic narratives depend on fudging the truth, on omission of nuance, on leaving out and glossing over anything that complicates things or gets in the way of delivery of an easily digested and manipulative message, like … oh, like “public-sector workers are lazy overpaid unionized thugs. Unions are to blame for the mess. David Miller left the city on the verge of bankruptcy because he was their puppet. Who the hell are these greedy bastards?” It plays right into prevailing attitudes of envy and intellectual laziness. Why bother to think things through? Certainly, it’s easier to be a disengaged dullard who gets information from tabloid headlines and Don Cherry’s yargle-bargle, if that’s the extent of your civic engagement.

Which brings us to the source for most of those simplistic narratives: the city workers’ strike of 2009.

It’s no great secret that Ford’s strategy was to tie it to Miller. (Indeed, he wasn’t the only one.) It’s also not much of a revelation to suggest that much of Ford’s mayoralty is predicated on payback for that, most apparent in the drive to privatize or contract out waste collection. Once again: Respect for Taxpayers. Stop the gravy train. Greedy unions. An easily digested, simplistic message which may be short on facts but resonates emotionally with the target audience. Truth and reality are just a bit more complex than that, but you won’t read about that in the tabloid press. It’s much easier, and a more effective means of manipulating people, to keep recycling spite, hatred, misdirection and disinformation.

Good for campaigning, no doubt, which may be why the tabloid press seems to be in permanent campaign mode. Not so good for citizenship or governance.

It’s all in how you frame things, really. Not to take anything away from Nick. Guy ran a successful campaign, based largely on his ability to frame things. Can’t argue with it. He won. His boy’s the Chief Magistrate now, ably backed by the drooling cheering section in the tabloid press. But at what cost? I’d argue that it’s been at the cost of reasonable intelligent discourse, and of effective and responsible governance. The very tone of public conversation has been debased by the constant flow of bullshit and sloganeering. To the extent that we can, it’s worth considering the way issues are framed nowadays, because that’s how the stage is set for public discourse.

This isn’t about elitist sneering at coarse, loutish, vulgar behaviour any more. At the end of the day that’s a matter of personal taste, and that’s not what this is about.

Public conversation and civil discourse are the currency of citizenship. They are the means whereby we conduct public business and ourselves as citizens. Maintaining standards for them is in everyone’s interest, regardless of whether we’re left or right or liberal or conservative or socialist or whatever. Allowing them to degenerate to the level currently practiced by the Ford administration and enabled by the tabloid press (half-truths, distortion, misdirection, name-calling, screeds) makes it that much harder to have civil conversations with one another. Our ability to talk to each other like sane, intelligent and reasonable human beings is undermined.

Effective, responsible governance has suffered as well. (No point in rehashing the campaign-trail guarantee of no service cuts, except to contrast it with current fiscal discussions, dominated as they are by the song of the chainsaw.) The Port Lands clusterfuck may be the most high-profile example, but it’s not an isolated one. When you consider the underhanded, sandbagging way that Team Ford does things, it’s hard to see how things are better than they were under the previous administration.

Again: framing. It isn’t even about whether Rob Ford can grow into the job any longer. If we allow tabloid screed-writers and astroturfing operatives to set the terms of the discussion, we’re screwed. We’ll waste God knows how much time and energy distracted by Shiny Objects and manufactured controversies (polar bear versus beaver, anyone?) instead of having the conversations we really need to have.

Let’s move beyond slogans.

Related posts:

• Revisiting #FordNation: some hard truths
• Further thoughts on the Long War
• If Team Ford’s Port Lands plans are truly dead, would someone mind driving a stake through them?
• From the Star: Land transfer tax will put Toronto finances in surplus
• Beyond the Port Lands: Dragging Swamp Ford for the remnants of civic engagement
• Not Your Grandaddy’s Conservatism

Harper Conservatives: stupid on crime, redux | via rabble.ca

Stepping out of a cold, windy Toronto Wednesday night and into the Church of the Redeemer on Bloor street, I’m a little shocked as the warmth of the standing room only crowd hits me. Hundreds of people are here to listen to a panel discussion on Bill C-10, a crime bill being introduced by the Canadian government. The panellists sitting on the stage look small and unobtrusive in comparison to the high ceilings, big stained glass windows and large yellow brick walls with the words “I know that my redeemer liveth” looming over them. But the mental contrast tonight is between the vast open space of the church we’re in and the small confines of a seven square metre prison cell.

Bill C-10 is a massive piece of legislation of roughly 100 pages that rolls nine laws from organized and drug crime, to pardons, to child sex offenders, to migrants entering Canada and young offenders into a single omnibus law. The panel is focusing on how the bill’s policy on mandatory minimum sentencing for selling, or even giving away a small amount of drugs, will criminalize a generation and attack some of the most vulnerable people in our society.

“I teach an third-year criminology course at the University of Ottawa. Eighty per cent of my students are criminals under this legislation. About 10 to 20 per cent of them would be liable to a mandatory minimum sentence in a federal penitentiary of two years for simply passing a tab of ecstasy at a party on university campus,” said Eugene Oscapella, a lawyer who was a founding member of the Canadian Foundation for Drug Policy and has appeared many times before Canadian Parliamentary committees on drug policy issues.

“I am not pro-drug, I am pro-sensible drug policy and there is a very, very big difference between the two. I’ve never even tried cannabis, which makes me probably a minority in my age. So I’m not here to advocate for drugs,” Oscapella quipped with a laugh before returning to a more sombre tone. “I’m here to discuss how we can best manage the drugs that are available in our society. This bill that is introducing these mandatory minimum penalties is not going to be the way to do it.”

While occasional recreational drug use might not be the most healthy thing to do, it’s a very common one with 25.1 per cent of youth 15-24 years of age reporting using cannabis and 7.9 per cent using other drugs according to Health Canada. So what Bill C-10 could do with mandatory minimum sentencing for non-violent drug offences is turn a generation of young people into hardened prisoners for something that’s as common as taking public transit to work in a major Canadian city.

When asked what he saw in terms of rehabilitation in the bill, Greg Simmons, a 46-year-old African-Canadian who spent almost 14 years of his adult life in prison, paused for several seconds to consider the question and then answered, “Nothing.”

After waiting for the chuckles to subside Simmons said, “I don’t know if you’ve seen any movies, ‘I’m not going to prison, I’m never going to let them take me back.’ Well, this bill creates that mind-set even further. When you look at the states it hasn’t worked, the crime rates went up, the victim rates went up. I can’t think of anything more harmful to society than this bill.”

The bill also has a serious impact on Aboriginal Peoples’ rights. Krysta Williams, an indigenous feminist and Lead Youth Advocate with the Native Youth Sexual Health Network said, “A supreme court decision came down about 10 years ago, it’s now called Gladue, what it said was that when a judge is sentencing an aboriginal person they have to take into account the historical context. They have to take into account the current systemic injustices we face just because of who we are. What this bill is actually trying to do is take that away. Taking away our rights in terms of saying to the court that there’s been a lot of damage done now and in the past and that needs to be recognized when talking about sentencing.”

Along with the criminalization of youth and drug users, Bill C-10 also puts public health at risk through a lack of support for harm reduction programs in federal prisons, such as a lack of a needle exchange program for injection drug users. These conditions cause HIV and hepatitis C rates to rise inside the prison population and once released will spread into the community at large as people continue to use or unknowingly infect their sexual partners.

Bill C-10 will give people who might not have drug problems a drug policy problem. And that is a bad policy for everyone.

Mick Sweetman is the news intern at rabble.ca. Follow him on Twitter here.

via rabble.ca

So you take a relatively harmless activity that many people, including political and business leaders, have indulged in from time to time, and make it a crime.

Then you provide for disproportionately harsh punishments that cost millions of dollars and have irreversibly damaging effects on people’s lives. Even Texas — Texas, for God’s sake — is starting to see the folly of this approach.

And for what? So you can posture about being Tough on Crime for your drooling, knuckle-dragging base? On what planet is this sound public policy?

Oh, but you betcha — you can have all the long guns you want (wink).

Related posts:

• Harper Conservatives: stupid on crime | via @pogge411
• 10 reasons to Occupy Canada
• A sickening new low in police brutality
• I refuse to believe corporations are people until Texas executes one

CRTC is peddling broadband Kool-Aid, @peternowak writes

http://wordsbynowak.com/2011/08/02/crtc-broadband-communications-internet/

In short, Canada’s upload speeds are an embarrassment. Not a good thing if you’re trying to foster innovation and creativity.

Once again, the Sex Bombs and Burgers guy shows why he’s a must-read.

Sent from my BlackBerry

Over at @SixthEstate, an important contribution to the health-care debate

The author of this blog has launched something he calls the Doctors Project.

In it, he’s attempting to provide a counterpoint to the narrative, pushed by institutions like the Fraser Institute and the like, that says Canada’s public health care system is out of control and unaffordable, and that the only solutions lie in privatization, cuts, and “adult conversations” about the “demographic time bomb.”

BBC News – Global war on drugs ‘has failed’ say former leaders

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13624303

It’s a BBC story, but the dynamics are very much reminiscent of all the “tough on crime” rhetoric we’re hearing in the context of Canadian politics these days.

It’s not as if expensive and ineffective policies are anything new. Other than providing short-term political boosts, one wonders what good they accomplish.

Indeed, the facts seem to indicate that they do more harm than good. This raises the question, of course, of why they’re pursued at all, and why governments continue to embrace them in the face of all the evidence that suggests that they don’t work … 

(h/t Alex Himelfarb)