Posts from our progressive community

I have always been something of a reluctant warrior for the left. My reluctance was not motivated by lack of belief in principles because I really believe that corporatism and the rightwing ideology are spectacularly wrong and will lead to nothing but disaster. Furthermore, I believe that the only way forward for our race and our planet is a genuine pursuit of greater cooperation and equality. But my reluctance was motivated by the early realization that the majority of people not only tolerate their own exploitation and oppression, but they actually seem to revel in it. For reasons that I am sure I will never understand, the majority of people seem to actively court their own exploitation and want to cede power to those who will keep most people poor and powerless. And even when people work together to make things better, as when they form unions, they are surprisingly quick to create institutional frameworks that further solidify structural inequalities and  hierarchies.

Of course, on the other side of the argument, there has always been an indispensable group of tireless activists who have pushed back the tentacles of power and the only reason that we have any justice and generalized prosperity is because of these activists who have dragged the world forward despite the stupidity and reluctance of the majority.

But I feel like I have been fighting for a long time and on days like this I am looking into an abyss of depression and desperation. At least for now, I don't think I can fight any more. In my dark moments I just think that most people are stupid and probably deserve to be exploited and oppressed. If they can't act in their own interest (as the rich and powerful do all the time), I have to ask myself why I should bother.

With this in mind, I leave the rest of you to it, and wish you good luck. I am done.

BC #pollfail, in both senses, just as the Wildrose polling fiasco was beginning to fade from our memories. The Clark enviro-vandals are back in power, even if Christie herself is not, and the pollsters, once again, are left desperately searching... Dr.Dawg http://drdawgsblawg.ca/

Was there ever any doubt?

What happened with the polls? No one knows for sure.

But we just lost another whack of IQ points as a province.

A big ol'Fuck you to anyone who voted for the BC Lieberals, obviously you havent felt the pain so many of us have these last years. Masochism.

BC NDP leader Adrian Dix is a rare bird.  Or at least he would have been a rare bird if he'd actually won last night.   For that would have been his party's fourth win in the 15-provincial elections staged since they were formed in 1960.   As things stand this morning that puts the NDP at an underwhelming 3 for 15 in win/loss.

In a three or four-way contest, one out of five isn't great but it wouldn't be devastating, not necessarily.   But in a two-way contest that means your opponent has won four times as often as you which is awfully close to one-party rule.   And when you look at the gang of sots, crooks, manipulators and outright liars who have led the other team to their 12 for 15 win record it becomes even more remarkable - for them - miserable for you.

Dave Barret, Mike Harcourt, Glenn Clark (with unelected stand-ins Dan Miller and Ujjal Dosanjh) - that's it.  All of them one-term wonders.   Then stack that up against the rogues gallery of sots, crooks and liars who have so repeatedly trounced them.  Wacky Bennet, son Bill, Bill Van der Zalm, Rita Johnson (unelected), Gordo "one for the road" Campbell and now Christy Clark. 
Wacky was in for almost 20-years, son Bill logged more than ten, ditto Gordo Campbell and there is now ample reason to believe Christy Clark might have a decade-long run herself.

To today's Degenerate Red-Meat Right, British Columbians may seem to be a bunch of looney-lefties which is obviously a reflection of just how far to the radical right modern Canadian conservatism has strayed.

Or is it just us, the voting public.  On that score, I can't do better than this observation from The Sixth Estate:

"...it’s worth noting that so called “centre-right” political parties have correctly judged that the vast majority of Canadians are simply not interested in voting for anything other than a promise of budget cuts, tax cuts, and job growth, basically at the cost of anything else, whether it’s social services or accountability or even a minimal level of integrity and honesty in politics or the environment or our international reputation or anything else. ...These people will be basically evenly split between those who don’t bother voting at all and those who vote for whatever party they have a vague hunch will move in those directions."

Now, eat your gruel, there are fields to tend. 

There's been no shortage of things to do in Barcelona, we very easily filled 4-1/2 days, and we've skipped entire days of tourist destinations - Montjuic and Dali's Figuerres. This is a wonderful city, full of history, art, architecture, urban villages, great food, shopping - everything that makes a city great. Almost every sign is posted in three languages, and a huge percentage of people speak excellent English.

Today we went to La Boqueria, the main market. It is said that there has been a market on this site since the year 1210. The present one dates back to the late 19th century.

We love markets, and this one is huge and beautiful. The seafood stalls were especially amazing, offering an enormous variety of shellfish and fish. We must have seen a dozen different kinds of shrimp alone, along with giant, dark chunks of tuna, gleaming white salt cod, every manner of herring, sardine, and eel, calamari, snails, and on and on.

There were stalls selling 20 or 30 varieties of mushrooms, stalls with a dizzying array of dried fruit, cut-up fruit and batidas (fruit shakes), acres of ham. We were going to eat at one of the many food stalls, but ended up picking up tidbits as walked - empanadas, grilled shrimp piled on a wooden skewer, little dishes of calamari, spring rolls, figs.

The market runs off La Rambla, a long, crowded thoroughfare that used to be the city's main drag and is now a giant tourist trap. Time Out aptly says La Rambla exists only to separate tourists from their money, by any means possible, legal and illegal. It's extremely crowded and not very pleasant. We did negotiate it for a few blocks, to get to La Palau Guell, a mansion designed by Gaudi for the benefactors of Park Guell.

I went to this one by myself, and it's a good thing, as the 12 euro admission fee is overpriced. There are very few things to see inside. The main attraction is a roof terrace with a dozen or more chimneys covered in mosaics and topped with fanciful modernist fruit (See here.) I took a lot of pictures, and was glad I went, but it wasn't really worth 12 euros.

We then hopped back on the metro and got suitably lost trying to find the Palau Musica Catalana, the crazy modernist music hall, where we had an English-language tour booked for 3:00. We found the tour just before it started.

The construction of the Palau Musica Catalana was a point of great Catalan pride. It was paid for by public donations, featured all forms of music from classical to folk to popular, and has been (and still is) the home of the Catalan choral group, called an orfeo. It was the first choral group in Spain to admit women.

The hall is designed in a style that could be called modernisme on steriods - a dizzying array of mosaics and stained glass. But as the tour guide pointed out details, I saw a unity and a plan that I hadn't seen at first. The building was designed to let in a maximum amount of light in a very closed-in space, and features a giant, bell-shaped, stained-glass skylight. It was a good tour, worth doing if you want to see more interiors of modernist buildings.

We booked a table for dinner at El Bixto, the tiny place we enjoyed so much two nights ago, then went to pick up our laundry. It turned out the lavanderia was a very short walk from our hotel. D'oh! After dinner, perhaps we'll try again to see La Sagrada at night.

Tomorrow morning we pick up the rental car and head south to Granada. Adios, Barcelona.

PS, something I keep forgetting to say: would it kill the Red Sox to win a game while we're gone??? FFS.

Any politician knows that information is power.   Digital information is power on steroids at the speed of light.

Privacy is the best possible defence you have against enslavement and oppression.   America's founding fathers knew that all too well when they enacted the Fourth Amendment, the one against unreasonable search and seizure.   For when a government can freely enter you home or explore the most minute details of your life, your privacy is essentially gone.

The great British jurist, Sir Edward Coke, put it this way in 1604,  "The house of every one is to him as his castle and fortress, as well for his defence against injury and violence as for his repose," in ruling the King and his agents were prohibited from warrantless search.

Today, of course, the King's men don't have to come into your house to sift through your papers.   They can go to your internet service provider or the telephone company or your bank or credit card company and lay bare your life, who you spend it with, what you buy, what you read and all your likes and dislikes.   In places like the United States with "total information awareness" phone calls and e-mails are automatically intercepted and computer monitored.

Today you can become a suspect not by your actions but by your profile built up, layer upon layer, from electronically recorded data then processed through computer software.   Who needs a long form census when you can electronically intercept all the good stuff anyway?

Information is not only power.  It's money.

The biggest mobile company, EE (for Orange and T-Mobile) has been selling on its 27m mobile subscribers, including calls made, location of use, downloads and sites visited. Quick off the mark, Ipsos Mori offered to sell on the acquired material to the Metropolitan Police. EE protested that its data was "aggregated and anonymised to protect its customers". Why then did the Met want to buy it? Everyone apologised.

Without a digital personality and a "verifiable" past, we will not be trusted by bank managers, employers, border guards, even spouses. Our teenage years will haunt us, perhaps rendering millions unemployable. Such people are Orwell's unpersons. When the internet, a sensational tool for living, crosses the frontier and becomes a life in itself, it risks destroying life.

Already the implied omniscience of the digital revolution is a gift to power. The American justice department was apparently angry with AP because it revealed details of a CIA operation in Yemen  without Washington's permission. In days of print – of Watergate and Spycatcher – power had to bow the knee to the media and the law. There is no such bowing now. The American government is about to open in Utah the greatest surveillance centre and storehouse on Earth, hoovering data from satellites and cables everywhere.

Government efforts to stamp on free information and opinion are usually a cloak to conceal executive embarrassment in "national security". It dusts secrecy with good intent: say a word and the dreaded al-Qaida will get to hear. Britain's Ripa dragnet, which the present home secretary still wants to extend, subjects the entire electronic realm to secretive state surveillance.

 Some of this intrusion may be useful – for example, in exposing tax evasion or paedophile websites. Every cloud can be found a silver lining. But two things are frightening in the Schmidt-Cohen futurology. One is the near total absence of accountability or redress – little beyond pleas for voluntary protocols and codes of corporate behaviour. Relying for personal privacy and security on corporate virtue – remember, the virtual world is entirely corporate – is like relying on Google to pay taxes.

Far worse is the boost the internet offers to state paranoia. The US justice department professes to decide for itself how to balance press freedom against national security. How does it come by this licence? As the security industry goads ministers to ever more purchases, the ratchet is always towards control and against freedom.

It can be no accident that the systematic destruction of the privacy of the individual parallels the ascendancy of the corporatist state and the relentless degradation of democracy.  What a wonderful tool to facilitate the restoration of both oligarchs and their essential companion, serfdom.   We not only invite them to steal our privacy but we permit them to commodify it.

There was a time that events and trends like this mattered.  We would argue endlessly about them among ourselves and they would be debated on the floors of our legislatures.  Ask yourself how that all fell silent?   Are we simply too busy spilling our guts on Facebook or to Amazon or Gmail to notice that we're spilling our guts to those who can find more than one handy use for our information, most of which may be against our individual and collective self-interest?

That's why I'm beginning to think one Anonymous might not be enough.   Somebody has to watch the watchers and show us what they're actually doing to us - to you and me - today and tomorrow.  They will not tell you and you will not know.   If governments wield great and dangerous powers that we haven't given them, they are not governing with our consent.   They have only two sources of powers - those that we have given them and those they have stolen from us when they thought we wouldn't catch on.

By now the entire country  knows what happened here in BC…the re-election of the Provincial Liberals (or Con-Lites) …to say that  I am depressed is to  state the case in an all-too delicate way.

If I can derive any tiny bit of  satisfaction  from the election, it is that… a) my old home riding, Kitsilano in Vancouver, did not elect Christy Clark  as their MLA – and this is Gordon Campbell’s old riding, where we fought long and hard to unseat him (unsuccessfully, I should add)… and b)   Vancouver Island, my current  home base, stubbornly true to form, went almost all NDP,  and even elected our first Green MLA, leaving only one seat left for the Fiberals  in,  inexplicably, the Comox Valley……

So, here’s my plan for the future..that the Island declare Independence  and break away from the rest of the Mainland, becoming their own  Province…and why not?  We have a very large land base, and grow an increasingly large amount of our own healthy food. We have a thriving  tourist industry, beautiful natural places (that we want to maintain and protect) and we are willing to fight hard to protect, and work with, not destroy, our  well-appreciated  natural resources. We have elected politicians willing to thumb their nose at the status quo and protect children’s health and education, and show some respect for our  seniors…

I have a strange sort of feeling that other  places might actually wish to join us..the Gulf Islands, Haida Gwaii, etc….(well, Haida Gwaii as a friendly sovereign nation, then)

It will take me a long time to recover from this  major defeat of principles and social justice..but, of course, the work continues, because I just know that  the Feds will look on this  rightwing triumph as a green light for the pipeline push…and that is something that should be fought with everything we have…it’s the only important fight we have left.

Sideshow Steve Harper and his British counterpart, Austerity Dave Cameron, may be widely disliked by their citizens, but they are taking care of business.

Cameron, according to documents leaked to The Guardian, is running interference for Steve with the same E.U. his party is constantly threatening to divorce.

The E.U. is contemplating restrictions on high-carbon transport fuels, which is code for Athabasca bitumen.   The European commission has proposed labelling Alberta heavy oil as "highly polluting" to deter countries importing it.   Cameron is moving to derail that initiative.

But of six options put to EU countries in April on how to implement the proposal, the UK chose the two that would make no differentiation between the carbon content of fuels.

"Based on the findings so far, it seems clear that [these two] seem to meet the policy aims of the directive with the least risks of unexpected consequences," the UK said in the documents. It firmly rejected others that allowed a difference.

Charlie Kronick, senior climate campaigner at Greenpeace, said: "Labelling oil from tar sands as highly polluting would strongly discourage tar sands imports into the Europe and possibly other markets. It could also discourage planned tar sands extraction projects in other parts of the world, such as Madagascar.

"If you're not serious about keeping tar sands oil out of Europe, then you're not serious about climate change."

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Michael Babad takes a look at Bureau of Labor Statistics data on wages and employment levels - reaching the conclusion that the corporatist effort to drive wages down does nothing to improve employment prospects. But the absence of any remotely plausible policy justification hasn't stopped the Sask Party from "modernizing" the province's rules governing work by setting them back upwards of half a century.

- Meanwhile, Pat Atkinson rightly notes that the most important problem with the Cons' push for temporary foreign workers is the "temporary" part. And Nicholas Keung and Dana Flavelle report on the start of an investigation into the permit granted to convert RBC jobs in Canada into outsourced jobs overseas (with the "temporary" part consisting only of the transition period).

- The Star takes aim at the Cons' attempt to posture against tax evasion while slashing the resources the Canada Revenue Agency needs to do something about it:
Revenue Minister Gail Shea warns that miscreants with undeclared taxable assets offshore should come clean and “declare all their assets now before the agency (Canada Revenue Agency) comes after them.” Her colleague Max Bernier, minister for small business, boasts that a “SWAT team” is being readied to chase them down. Certainly, that’s what hardworking, taxpaying Canadians might hope. There’s nothing more demoralizing than seeing people scam the system.

But for all that, Ottawa’s crackdown looks to be more bark than bite. The opposition New Democrats and Liberals have ridiculed it as “window dressing” and a “shell game” designed to defuse public criticism more than anything else.

While that may be harsh, the Conservative government does appear to be trying to spook wealthy tax dodgers into voluntarily declaring their assets with a crackdown on the cheap. Of the $30 million Shea announced for new measures to track down tax evaders and aggressive avoiders — spread over five years, no less — just $15 million is new money; the rest is recycled. And the so-called SWAT team is shaping up to be a 10-person outfit at best. Meanwhile, the CRA is expected to trim $300 million from its budget in the next three years and cut 3,000 jobs, a prime victim of federal deficit-cutting.

While it’s good to see Ottawa taking some action, it’s hard to believe this modest initiative can have much impact on a hugely complex offshore tax-dodging industry. Canadians for Tax Fairness, a group that campaigns for sharing the burden more equitably, estimates that affluent Canadians have put $160 billion into offshore havens, costing us nearly $8 billion a year in foregone tax revenues. The scofflaws among them have a lot invested in not being easily rattled into declaring their assets.
...
(G)lobally, offshore tax havens have burgeoned into a $20-trillion business that in the government’s own words encompasses everything from “complex corporate schemes, individuals using offshore jurisdictions of concern, ‘tax havens,’ or tax shelter schemes that are used to avoid or evade tax.” Are we to believe that a small CRA team is going to be able to police so wide a waterfront? That’s a stretch.- Chris Plecash writes about the Cons' choice to slash public and social services based on nothing more than blind faith in the free market. And Frances Russell is right to point out that social impact bonds look to make for a particularly toxic mix of corporatism and laissez-faire social policy - though I do have to wonder why she thinks for a second that the Libs are part of the solution rather than the problem given their own corporatist positioning.

- Finally, I'll have a bit more to say later on about B.C.'s alarming election results. But Bill Tieleman offers an overview of the lessons to be learned from yesterday's election.

It must be very comforting indeed to the increasingly odious Senator Duffy that his relationship with the Prime Minister is so 'special' that the latter is willing to exercise unethical, perhaps even illegal interference on his behalf during the Senate's investigation into his fraudulent expense claims.

For the rest of us, the stench of corruption has reached near-asphyxiation levels.

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Tom Walkom writes that when it comes to residency, Senate rules are unambiguous:

The constitution act is crystal clear on this. It says a senator must be at least 30 years old, own $4,000 worth of real estate in the province he represents and be “resident in the province for which he is appointed.”
And, try as he might, the Artful Dodger can't dodge certain facts:

As the Senate’s own internal economy committee found, Duffy does not hold a P.E.I. health card. He does not pay income tax to P.E.I. He spends only 30 per cent of his time in the province. How then can he be resident in P.E.I.?
And if he’s not resident in P.E.I., he cannot be a senator from that province. Indeed, the constitution act specifies that if a senator is found not to live in the province he was appointed to represent, his seat is deemed vacant.
The Senate has always been a home for political partisans. But, under Stephen Harper, the Senate has become the last defense against the will of the House of Commons. Micheal Harris reminds his readers that it was the Senate which enforced Harper's denial of climate change. It was the senate which killed

by stealth Bill C-311 after the House of Commons had passed the climate change bill. And this under a prime minister who once promised that he would never allow an unelected Senate to go against the will of the majority of Members of Parliament.
Walkom puts the case succinctly:

Mike Duffy came from P.E.I. It is a heritage of which he is justly proud. He vacations on the island. But he doesn’t really live there any more. And because of that, he cannot — by law — represent P.E.I. in the Senate.

 

As you know I have long believed that Stephen Harper's Cons are not a political party like any other Canadians have ever known.

That they are more like a cult than a party.

But even as their deranged leader drags us into his ghastly  darkness, muzzles the truth, lies about everything, and bullies his opponents, still some of my friends say to me: Simon, don't exaggerate, it couldn't happen HERE.
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After breakfast in our room with our own goodies, we went into the old city - Ciutat Vella in Catalan - to the Museu Picasso. There are Picasso museums in many cities and I'd love to see them all. He is among my very favourite artists. The Barcelona Picasso museum was planned by the man himself, a gift to the city of his birth, and focuses on his earliest work - when he was a child, and then an unknown artist developing his own styles - and on a collection of later works he left to his friend and secretary, Jaume Sabartés.

Seeing the young Pablo's work was so interesting. He was clearly very talented at a very young age, winning admission to prestigious art academies, then quickly realizing that formal art training had nothing left to teach him. He spent time copying the styles of famous painters to understand their techniques... and then he went to Paris. It was also cool to see him toying with different signatures, until he developed what would become one of the most famous signatures in art.

The best part of this collection, for me, was the small cubist section - maybe 6 or 7 wonderful cubist paintings - and Picasso's Las Meninas cycle. Picasso took Las Meninas, a very famous painting by the Spanish master Velasquez (see here), and riffed on it, creating 45 new versions, many focusing on one or two details, and none of them looking anything like the original. You can see some of them here.

This was really a marvel. However, the museum gets huge points off for not having a single reproduction of the original Velasquez painting for reference. Could it be that The Prado (the museum in Madrid where Las Meninas lives) won't let them? It was a terrible omission. But a terrific small museum.

After leaving the Picasso museum, we wandered a big more in the Barri Gotic, and found a tiny cafe for lunch. I think I now understand the difference between pintxos and tapas. Traditional tapas is a small plate of something - sausages, cheeses, fish, olives, whatever. The tall creations of combinations of food, on a piece of bread with a toothpick through the whole thing, displayed at the bar or on counters, is pintxos. But when the host or server is adding up your bill, they will say "tres tapas" for the three pintxos you ordered, using the terms interchangeably.

Pintxos look very appealing, all piled up the counter. The server will point and explain each one. You can't necessarily tell what they are, as the combinations are unusual, and some things are made into croquets or otherwise disguised. We had these: a croquette of octopus and shrimp, a piece of breaded chicken cutlet with a fried egg on top, and smoked salmon topped with brie. Plus a cafe con leche for me and a vino tinto for A.

After lunch we walked around the old area looking for Roman remains, both through our guidebook and historic markers posted around town. There is a section of Roman wall, some arches now built into the cathedral but originally part of an aqueduct, and some amazing intact columns, now hidden in an alley, but once incorporated into the meeting room of a local hiking club! A huge Roman excavation is now part of the museum of the history of Barcelona - a giant room of pieces of columns and arches and such. We didn't go in, but it looks very nice.

We also passed a small but spirited demo, in front of a bank. The demonstrators were all middle aged or older, and they looked very organized and very angry. The object of their anger: the ladrones banqueros - bank thieves.

We then walked further down into the Born district, adjacent to the Barri Gotic. It's a very old part of town that's been gentrified and upscaled. Allan wanted to see Santa Maria del Mar, a church from the 1300s. (I just peeked in, then rested on the entrance steps.) The neighbourhood is full of very upscaled tapas and pintxos bars, with huge plates of inventive pintxos piled up on the bars. We did go into this very clever and silly candy store: Happy Pills.

We walked across town to the Palau de La Musica Catalana, a crazy modernist concert hall, right near El Bixto, the wonderful place where we had dinner the other night. I took a lot of pictures of the exterior, but we had missed the last interior tour for the day.

Then it was back to the room to rest, then back to the Barri Gotic for dinner. First, we ducked into a store we had seen in our first hour here, Vaho, which sells all sorts of bags, backpacks, wallets, totes, and such, made from recycled vinyl posters that were hung in Barcelona. I absolutely loved them, and we had a mental note to come back and shop. For a cute visual story of how these "trashion" bags are made, go here.

The restaurant we picked out for dinner was - of course - not there, but the search for it took us down many tiny, narrow, out-of-the-way streets in the Barri Gotic. And by narrow, I mean pedestrian or cycle only. Historic markers said we were in the Jewish Quarter from the 12th and 13th centuries, near the central synagogue. That can only be up to the 13th century, before Jews were expelled from Spain, one way or another.

We finally gave up on our restaurant search and chose another place we had seen in the book, La Vinateria del Call. (The Call was the old Jewish quarter.) This one served traditional tapas, where you choose plates from a menu. We had a plate of incredibly delicious smoked fish (salmon, cod, herring, eel), jamon de pavo (ham made of duck), traditional catalan sausage called bull, and a potato fritata, and of course plenty of wine. Then we made a mistake: we ordered dessert paired with more wine. I only tasted the Catalan creme caramel - somewhere between creme brulee and flan - but I did drink the sweet vino de naraja (oranges). Remind me not to do that again!

After dinner, which began around 10:30 p.m., Allan whisked us to the subway and up to La Sagrada Familia, as he wanted to see it at night, lit up. (This is amusing, as I usually eat dinner very early and am getting ready for bed at 10:00 or 10:30.) When we exited the metro, part of La Sagrada was lit. Allan took a couple of pictures and... the lights turned out. Damn, too late! While we were there, a group of young men arrived by taxi, jumped out, took their picture in front of the dark church, and jumped back into the cab and sped away.

Then we had a bit of a mad race home, as the subways were about to close for the night. We took the very last train. The station master was waiting til we left to close the Tetuan station. Whew.

It was the New Dems' election to lose and that's just what they did.  They lost to a government that was roundly despised with a record rich in corruption, scandal, manipulation and dishonesty.

Tonight the public's distrust of the NDP trumped its disgust for the Liberals.   Tonight the NDP showed just how soft and unreliable its support can be and how easily even a rotten rival can pry those voters out of its hands.

Adrian Dix wasn't some firebrand socialist.   He was genuinely moderate and woefully lacking in the killer instinct of the blood sport of politics.   Dix foolishly took the high road and refused to engage, blow for blow, with Christy Clark's negative campaigning.

He needed to remind people every day all the reasons they had to loathe this woefully corrupt government but he wouldn't and didn't and his party, not to mention our province, paid the price for that.

I think something else we learned tonight is that New Democrat support is soft and unreliable.  It's a lesson that Tommy Mulcair and the federal Dippers should heed.  Jack Layton brought the NDP to official opposition on a groundswell of voter support in Quebec.  Where is that support today?  It's evaporating.

Well at least the night wasn't a total write-off.   My party, the Greens, won their first seat in B.C. provincial politics.    And what a win that was.   Andrew Weaver, U. Vic. professor and world renowned environmental scientist, will now replace the inept New Dems as the government's opposition on climate change and the security of our coast.

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I’m not terribly interested in speculating, at least for the moment, about why the pollsters would be devastatingly incorrect — again — about a provincial election campaign. My guess is that in this case it has something to do with young people not voting, but again, the answer will become clear over the next couple of weeks. Mainly because that’s what the media will be focusing on.

Instead I have something else to get off my chest. I’m disappointed every time a far-right anti-government political party led by ignorant, unimaginative, corrupt, pro-global warming oligocrats wins an election. But to be honest, I’m not entirely surprised, and I’m actually surprised I’m not more disappointed. Being a leftist of my generation — I’m almost 30 now, so I can no longer truly claim to speak for the youth, but I am part of a generation that elects not to vote in unprecedented numbers — is a lonely lot. It’s also a thoroughly depressing lot, to the point that you sort of get inured to this kind of thing.

In my lifetime, I have not witnessed the creation of a single truly significant social program of any kind. I almost share a birthday with the Constitution, which I revere, but it’s pretty much downhill from there: the erosion and now open elimination of universal healthcare; the rise of free trade and the consequent devaluation of Canadian citizenship; the selling off of most of the profitable elements of the public sector at both the federal and provincial levels; the beginning of the end of Employment Insurance, public pensions and Old Age Security; the rise of a political culture of naked deceit and overt criminality of a sort not normally tolerated in democratic countries with the rule of law and not seen in Canada for a century; the slashing and burning of public education…

And, last but quite the opposite of least, the great turning away from scientifically informed climate policy. That one may sound a bit unfair, since my lifetime also saw the rise of scientifically informed climate policy. However, since the year I was old enough to vote, there has been nothing but setbacks on the question of whether dangerous climate change will be mitigated, let alone prevented. Emission regulation ideas surfaced, and were defeated by the right on the grounds they were inefficient. The carbon tax arose, and was defeated by the right on the grounds that it was a punitive move. Cap and trade arose, and was defeated by the right on the grounds that it was unnecessary government intervention in the economy.

Speaking of the economy, it’s worth noting that so called “centre-right” political parties have correctly judged that the vast majority of Canadians are simply not interested in voting for anything other than a promise of budget cuts, tax cuts, and job growth, basically at the cost of anything else, whether it’s social services or accountability or even a minimal level of integrity and honesty in politics or the environment or our international reputation or anything else. This is precisely the result which my series on evolution and the future of humanity was building towards, so I’ll probably feel a little vindicated on that front if nothing else. These people will be basically evenly split between those who don’t bother voting at all and those who vote for whatever party they have a vague hunch will move in those directions.

Which is why, if there was an actual far-right-wing party, one defined by an actual commitment to the free market or an actual commitment to social conservatism or anything like that, it would actually garner very few votes. Because nobody would vote on principle for that either. I believe that most people assume that the social services they personally require will always be there for them, just as they assume that the environment they need to survive will always be there for them. And they vote, or don’t vote, accordingly.

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Canada learned a lesson tonight on how fiercely negative campaigning can salvage the electoral fortunes of even a dishonest and corrupt government.

The British Columbia NDP, by everyone's assessment, was to win a strong majority government tonight.   The governing BC Liberals were to be left with a weak minority.

Upset.   Despite having been 20 points down in the polls at the beginning of the election campaign, the Liberals pulled out one of the most amazing upsets in Canadian politics, not only winning another majority but picking up an extra three to four seats.  Those seats were lost by the NDP.

This resets the clock on British Columbia politics.   Adrian Dix chose to take the high road in this campaign.  That was a colossal blunder.

Kitchen help cats.

As promised, I am steadfastly avoiding discussing the Globe & Mail, and its latest partisan salvo — a preposterous endorsement of the BC Social Credit-turned-Liberal Party that reads like it could have been written by said party’s PR hacks — doesn’t help matters. (The Globe describes the NDP leader as a “business-minded socialist,” which is sort of like calling someone a “nonpartisan Globe & Mail editor” — it’s an oxymoron. I do, however, continue to read the comment pages, because it’s unfair to punish them for the sins of the editors, and mostly because I just can’t help myself.

Which is why I feel compelled to respond, despite my sort-of boycott, to a recent op-ed by McGill economist Chris Ragan on the subject of climate change. Ragan and I appear to have very different political opinions, but he’s a serious, intelligent and responsible writer, at least so far as I know. Which, again, is why I felt compelled to write.

Ragan’s concern is that conservatives are not participating in the climate change debate. (On this part we agree: by and large they aren’t, even though they should be.) He goes on to argue the following: first, we need to have a “real conservative” alternative to the “left of centre” big-government types who currently dominate the climate change scene. Second, the conservative option would involve a mix of market-based pricing and taxing solutions as opposed to regulation. Third, we need a nonpartisan think tank-style commission to steer the debate away from hyper-partisanship. Fourth, ideally, that commission should be led by economists.

Now, it should be immediately apparent here that the real problems are (1) lack of education and (2) hyperpartisanship on the part of people who call themselves “real conservatives.” I’m not the slightest bit interested in judging whether Ragan’s “real conservatives” or the pro-global warming crowd that also call themselves “real conservatives” have a better claim to the label, but it’s worth noting that reality-based thinking is not really a defining feature for the conservative crowd by and large, so it’s maybe kind of a moot point anyways.

Consider, as a starting point, Ragan’s points in order. First, it is not immediately apparent that we need a “real conservative” alternative to “left” solutions to climate change. Right now, the Conservative Party — who presumably have as good a claim to the title “real conservative” as anyone else — would be the first to admit that preventing and mitigating climate change is not exactly their highest priority. Maybe it should be, and it’s useful to understand why it isn’t — a point I’ll be getting to in my series on science and the future soon. I have no idea how to go about making them see it as a priority, though. The point is, it’s unclear what possible contribution could be made to the climate change discussion by conservatives who have thus far abstained from participating in it.

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// ]]>Second, and to continue on that point, if “real conservatives” are defined as those who favour carbon taxes and carbon pricing schemes, it’s worth pointing out that the NDP and the Liberals are the only “real conservatives” on offer in the Canadian political arena. The Conservatives have what Ragan calls a left-wing policy (since they currently favour a regulation-based approach rather than a tax- or trade-based approach). So in Raganian terms, the Conservatives are leftists and the NDP are conservatives. I know what Ragan is trying to say here, but I think he’s assuming that somehow conservative = free market capitalist, and that equation obviously doesn’t correlate to political reality in contemporary Canada.

Third, yes, it would be nice if we had a nonpartisan commission to study the climate change issue. In point of fact, we had such a commission. We called it the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy. The reason we no longer have such a commission is because the Conservatives abolished it.

Fourth, if we were to re-establish this commission, I fail to see why it ought to be dominated by economists. You can only decide which discipline’s expertise is best suited to a leadership role once you’ve decided what sort of questions the commission needs to answer. I think it’s safe to say that people who think the climate change debate is irrelevant or that climate change is bunk, whether they call themselves conservatives or not, are lacking first and foremost in science education. It doesn’t particularly matter what sorts of possible solutions a commission could contrive if they don’t think that climate change is a serious problem worth solving in the first place.

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// ]]>On the other hand, conservatives have painted themselves into an anti-intellectual corner with their paranoid anti-science rhetoric over the past few years. I don’t think any assortment of scientists, assembled by any government(s) to compile a careful and measured summary of what we know about carbon and climate change, would be taken seriously by large numbers of self-professed conservatives. Many right-wing commentators essentially equate concern about climate change with political leftism. That closes a nasty but effective political circuit on the political right: climate change alarmism is a feature of the radical greenie left, conservatives are responsible and independent thinkers who oppose radical leftism, therefore by definition conservatives are not alarmed about climate change.

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