A hate law v. freedom of speech, in Canada

By Lysiane Gagnon, Globe and Mail, October 17, 2011
Each country has its share of bigots and racists. If they’re silenced and excluded from the public sphere, they’ll go underground and perhaps do more harm than if they were openly contested. Why did our courts have to persecute Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel? Targeting this man didn’t erase anti-Semitism – it only provided exposure to his previously obscure pamphlets.

The reason why bigots and racists should be free to express their opinions, as unpleasant as they are, is that when the state starts repressing “bad” ideas, it ends up repressing other ideas, too, especially those that go against society’s predominant views. Remember Galileo, who was tried by the Roman Inquisition for saying the Earth revolved around the sun? Today’s Galileos should be encouraged to defy public opinion and express unpopular ideas.
A liberal, open-minded law against hate speech? That’s an oxymoron. There’s no possible reconciliation between freedom of speech and hate-speech laws, however they’re written or reformulated. A civilized, progressive society should opt for freedom of speech, period.
If we wish to see what a society looks like when freedom of speech is unbridled, we have only to look south of the border. With Obama characterized as another Hitler, by people like Rush Limbaugh every day on national radio (while earning some $40 million a year) and little, if anything, stopping him, since there are people paying for that kind of "reporting". In the U.S., the tabloid press has made an industry out of hatred, bigotry and character assassination. It is now considered a normal part of the political dialogue. Does that kind of use of words as bullets constitute "freedom of speech"? Or is that kind of hate-mongering really another excuse to justify the Second Amendment right to bear arms?
Almost all of the people who consider themselves "scribes" oppose any form of hate legislation. Most of the ones whose recent pieces I have read condemn homophobia, the primary cause of the individual who has brought the case to the Supreme Court, as do I.
However, I have never been convinced that the Jews or any other group whose honour and dignity and reputation are do damaged by the words, acts and hatred of another (group) should not have recourse to the law to seek justice. A hate law, while somewhat offensive, might, just might restrain our relentless slide into the mire of linguistic "war" in which the reputation and the honour and the dignity of an individual/group/religion through the "acceptable" use of words that wound even kill is, in fact destroyed.
Once uttered, bigotry and hate words are impossible to retract. Once uttered, they reinforce the option of others to follow. Once uttered, they open the public discourse to words and meanings that result in a holocaust. It is impossible to say that a hate law would have prevented the holocaust. However, one of the lessons of that profound tragedy is that if we can restrain the human impulse to destroy another through the use of contemptible language ever so slightly, even if the motive  and definition are both difficult and vague and subjective to ascertain,
then, far from creating a "nanny state" where victim seems to be the goal, we might preserve a modicum of self-respect and dignity and honour, and that just might prove worth our complicated consideration.
As an unapologetic liberal, the idea that "there must be a line drawn" with respect to certain forms of discourse is more important than the difficulties that arise in administering such a law. Better to have one than to remove all restrictions so that at least there is a place and a reason to have a hearing, where the language is the most important instrument in the dialogue, the Supreme Court.

Dr. Brooke Jeffrey on The Liberal Party of Canada (an exclusive interview)

Dr. Brooke Jeffrey wrote Divided Loyalties, The Liberal Party of Canada, 1984-2008. She worked as part of the Research arm of the party for much of that time. Currently she teaches Political Science at Concordia University in Montreal. The acorncentreblog.com interviewed her on Monday September 26, at Starbucks in Gloucester, off Montreal Rd. in east Ottawa.

Naturally, the primary question of the interview was, "What's wrong with the Liberal Party and what can be done about it?"

Dr. Jeffrey:

Leadership selection has been flawed for at least the last three leaders. With Mr. Trudeau, the party selected him and he turned out to be a 'white knight' but this was the exception.

The party has to get past the "white knight syndrome" in its selection of a new leader. As part of this, the party has to know what it "thinks" and also what the new leader "thinks". In the recent past, there has been a disconnect between what the party believed and what the leader thought. And, with respect to the leadership convention, I do not subscribe to the "one person-one vote" process for the election of the new leader. It should be a delegated convention. I was pleased to see that this was recommended in 2006; however, I have not seen any evidence that a delegated convention is going to fix all the problems of the party. And then there was the appointment of Mr. Ignatieff, who was not actually selected by the party, which is highly irregular.

So the first issue is how the party selects a new leader and what qualities are important in that new leader.

Policy and opening the party

The second issue is party policy and the opening of the party to policy formation.
Jim Coutts (from 1975 to 1981, he was the Principal Secretary to Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau) tells me that (Prime Minister) Mackenzie King used to write 100-200 letters a week to riding presidents across the country asking them for their perspective on current policy and on plans for the future. Jim's point was that the party had been consulted regularly both before elections but also during the time when the party was in power. And of course those same people would feel free to tell the Prime Minister their views.

Two things happened. Mr. Trudeau professionalized the public service so now the party can turn to it for policy formation. And since the party is not "expert" in the same way, the party leadership did not consult with the grassroots as much any more, but rather with the public service on policy ideas and proposals. The second part is the evolution of polling, which increasingly tells the party what Canadians think; so when you put those two together, there is so little need to consult with the party membership.

This puts even more emphasis on the policy process within the party. Back in the 1980's, Mr. Turner got elected on the promise of opening up the party, and began that process, but by the time Mr. Martin became leader, all of that process did not seem to matter and the party simply rolled over. And Mr. Martin's selection as leader brought with it his commitment to asymmetrical federalism, an example of the disconnect between what the party thought and what the leader believed. I think the grassroots is largely to blame because they let it happen.

Fundraising

And that brings us to the third issue, money and fundraising.
The ridings are being asked for money but not for policy.
Maybe the president's council from 2006 will go some distance to help.
This points up the need for a very strong party president, at this next convention. (No, I am not going to endorse a candidate!)However, the party president has to be very strong in representing where the party stands. Also a newsletter would help. The Laurier Club is doing that. (The Laurier Club comprises party donors of $1000 or more.) There is no reason why a newsletter cannot make party information available as well as asking what the membership thinks about policy.
I am not familiar with the details of fundraising, but I do know we are the last people who can raise money from single-issue interest groups, the way the Conservatives do. They receive money from groups who oppose various government programs and policies. But we were in power for so long and our pitch for money would have to be, 'we have been in power for so long and you like us'...and that is a very difficult pitch. Canadians do not give money to political parties as compared, for example, with Europe. In the past we were able to overcome it, because we came to power. This time, it is very serious, because we are not going to be able to go back to the previous fundraising sources and Mr. Harper is cutting off funding for political parties that Mr. Chretien, (I think rightly) introduced.
I was at a conference of Political Scientists at Waterloo in May where my colleague, Tom Flanagan (former chief of staff to Prime Minister Harper), who teaches in Calgary, was in attendance. He chose to come to my session, where of course I was speaking about Mr. Harper's policies. Mr. Flanagan chose to speak following my paper, and without paying the least attention to what the paper was about he spoke at some length about fundraising. 'Brooke and her Liberal friends will have to get used to the idea of no public funding and will have to raise funds from the private sector,' he warned, and of course he was right. It was only one week after the encounter in Waterloo that Mr. Harper announced his intention to remove public funding from political parties. And yet I have read that, now that his party is in power, those interest groups will no longer accept a failure to enact their desired political objectives either, and their willingness to contribute may decline, so he may want to think twice about this.

The Future of the Party

Let me say first of all that I am strongly opposed to any attempt at merger with the New Democrats. These are two completely different parties, with different values, and a merger makes no sense at all. And Canadians have not moved to the left, or to the right for that matter. Mr. Rae has indicated that some 70,000 new Liberal Party memberships were taken out immediately following the last election. I am also quite optimistic for the future given the party's opportunity to rebuild in Quebec, given the demise of the Bloc and the NDP vote, dependent as it was primarily on the leadership of Mr. Layton.

Remember that (Leonard Cohen) song, "first we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin"...well I believe, that first we take Quebec, then we take Ontario and then we take the West, where we have always had difficulty. But to do that, we need to rebuild from the bottom up, and to choose our next leader carefully, after the heavy lifting is done.

Coptics killed by Egyptian army...sign of ethnic exclusions to come?

By Ross Douthat, New York Times, October 15, 2011
THE Coptic Orthodox Church in Egypt is one of the oldest Christian communities in the world, tracing its roots to St. Mark the apostle and the first century A.D. Coptic Christians have survived persecutions and conquests, the fall of Rome and the rise of Islam. They have been governed from Constantinople and Ctesiphon, Baghdad and London. They have outlasted the Byzantines, the Umayyads and the Ottomans, Napoleon Bonaparte and the British Empire.

But they may not survive the Arab Spring.
Apart from Hosni Mubarak and his intimates, no group has suffered more from Egypt’s revolution than the country’s eight million Copts. Last week two dozen people were killed in clashes between the Coptic Christians and the Egyptian Army, a grim milestone in a year in which the Coptic community has faced escalating terrorist and mob violence. A recent Vatican estimate suggests that 100,000 Copts may have fled the country since Mubarak’s fall. If Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood consolidates political power, that figure could grow exponentially.
This is a familiar story in the Middle East, where any sort of popular sovereignty has tended to unleash the furies and drive minorities into exile. From Lebanon to North Africa, the Arab world’s Christian enclaves have been shrinking steadily since decolonization. More than half of Iraq’s 1.5 million Christians have fled the country since the American invasion toppled Saddam Hussein.
More important, though, this is a familiar story for the modern world as a whole — a case of what National Review’s John Derbyshire calls “modernity versus diversity.” For all the bright talk about multicultural mosaics, the age of globalization has also been an age of unprecedented religious and racial sorting — sometimes by choice, more often at gunpoint. Indeed, the causes of democracy and international peace have often been intimately tied to ethnic cleansing: both have gained ground not in spite of mass migrations and mass murders, but because of them.
This is a point worth keeping in mind when reading the Big Idea book of the moment, Steven Pinker’s “Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.” Pinker marshals an impressive amount of data to demonstrate that human civilization has become steadily less violent, that the years since 1945 have been particularly pacific, and that contemporary Europe has achieved an unprecedented level of tranquility.
What Pinker sometimes glosses over, though, is the price that’s been paid for these advances. With the partial exception of immigrant societies like the United States, mass democracy seems to depend on ethno-religious solidarity in a way that older forms of government did not. The most successful modern nation-states have often gained stability at the expense of diversity, driving out or even murdering their minorities on the road to peaceful coexistence with their neighbors.
Europe’s era of unexpected harmony, in particular, may have been made possible by the decades of expulsions and genocide that preceded it. As Jerry Z. Muller pointed out in a 2008 essay for Foreign Affairs, the horrors of the two world wars effectively rationalized the continent’s borders, replacing the old multi-ethnic empires with homogeneous nation-states, and eliminating — often all too literally — minority populations and polyglot regions. A decade of civil war and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia completed the process. “Whereas in 1900 there were many states in Europe without a single overwhelmingly dominant nationality,” Muller wrote, “by 2007 there were only two, and one of those, Belgium, was close to breaking up.”
Along the same lines, the developing world’s worst outbreaks of ethno-religious violence — in post-Saddam Iraq, or the Indian subcontinent after the demise of the British Raj — are often associated with transitions from dictatorships or monarchies to some sort of popular rule. And from Kashmir to the West Bank, Kurdistan to Congo, the globe’s enduring trouble spots are usually places where ethno-religious communities and political borders can’t be made to line up.
This suggests that if a European-style age of democratic peace awaits the Middle East and Africa, it lies on the far side of ethnic and religious re-sortings that may take generations to work out.
Whether we root for this process to take its course depends on how we weigh the hope of a better future against the peoples who are likely to suffer, flee and disappear along the way. Europe’s long peace is an extraordinary achievement — but was it worth the wars and genocides and forced migrations that made it possible? A democratic Middle East would be a remarkable triumph for humanity — but is it worth decades of sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing?
I don’t know the answer. But maybe we should ask the Copts.
If state boundaries must conform to ethno-religious communities, in the 'brave new world,' then ethnic cleansing has, is and will continue to trump diversity. If such a model of new statehood constitues one of the main building blocks of the global society of the twenty-second century, then we will leave our great grand-children a kind of lie. We will have constructed, not only academically pure silos, and racially pure blocks in racially diverse cities, and racially homogenized states where children grow up in a ghetto of single language, single religion (if any) single culture and single race schools, hospitals, churches, universities and corporations, either unaware of or seriously devoid of contact with people of other backgrounds, languages, histories and cultures.
In short, we will have left a wasteland far more life-defying than Eliot's room where the 'women come and go talking of Michaelangelo'...We will have left a world in which ethnic cleansing is normalized to prevent something far less heinous...some conflict, some turbulence, some debate and compromise and some human interraction.
We are moving so quickly in a direction that can be described as "pain repressant" not only for those in palliative care units facing their own mortality, where such interventions are necessary, but everywhere.
Our capacity to tolerate differences, diversity, people with whom we disagree, and even people whom we genuinely dislike is shrinking, as the Douthat piece illustrates.
While in Canada we celebrate our differences, borne as this nation is, of different races, languages and religions (English, French and Native), and we continue to "welcome" people from particularly the Pacific Rim, from China, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and others, we nevertheless see little interraction between those different ethnic groups, with the possible exception of a few more "mixed race" couples walking together on college campuses.
That is one small pin-light, in an otherwise dark tunnel of separation, exclusion, alienation and racial and religious purity.
If the migration of hundreds of thousands of 'minorities' from potential extinction through military, political or pseudo-legal measures, characterizes the next wave of nation-building, then we will have reduced or even eliminated potential access to significant learning opportunities that bring a new awareness of different world views, and while we may have made it possible for some women to climb the economic ladder, in some localized spots on the globe, we may have missed the forest for the leaves on the trees. It new nation states cannot and will not accept diversity among their peoples, then what hope is there for the acceptance of an even wider range of diversity in international relations?
While headlines cry out for collaborative and co-operative actions among all leaders, on the economy, on the environment, on the elimination of poverty, disease, and on the development of access to education and employment with dignity, we read stories like Douthat's that remind us of our lesser and less admirable qualities to exclude, to alienate and to even drive out those with whom we do not agree.
There is so much work to do on this file, and it affects all the other files, including the current global economic crisis, and yet, even our academic traditions militate against cross-border, integrated studies, as the current crisis in economics demonstrates. If ever there were an academic "field of study" that needed and resisted integration with several other academic disciplines, it is economics.
And just like racial, ethnic and cultural purity in nations precluding full development of their people, academic disciplines too require the fertilizer of differences in order to grow their own "best." And academic leadership, far from demonstrating an openness to differences, too often excludes those whose willingness to conform is less than acceptable.
Cultural, religious, ethnic homogeneity must not become another form of efficiency, especially in the evolution of nation states facing new governments after their dictators have been driven out, or have fallen out of public favour. It is to the idol of efficiency that the corporate world genuflects, because they believe, wrongly of course, that efficiency brings the biggest bang for the smallest buck, in all enterprises. Through that world view, human differences are merely another bucket of sand in the gears of efficient generation of profit, dividends and thereby "success"....
I recall being asked by an entrepreneur a few years back to make a proposal for a new newspaper, covering local politics in a city of some 50,000. After the presentation of some 90-plus minutes, he politely thanked me, and expressed an observation that seems appropriate for this space.
"City government is a lot more complicated than I ever thought;  before tonight, I believed that city hall could and should be operated as a business, generating the most efficient and thereby the most effective use of tax dollars; but now I can see that it not only does not but cannot work that way and still function given all the variables that it faces!"
And the subject of ethnic homogeneity was not even mentioned in the presentation, or in the de-brief.

Voter turn-out falling "like a stone" in Canada (Ibbitson)..little wonder!

By John Ibbitson, Globe and Mail, October 15, 2011
Voter turn-out declining, "like a stone" according to Ibbitson.
Recent provincial, territorial and federal elections saw the following turn-outs:
                                                              Ontario...49%
                              Newfoundland and Labrador...58%
                                         Prince Edward Island...76%
                                                           Manitoba...56%
                                                              Canada...61%
All of these figures are well below previous figures for the same jurisdictions.
A study for Elections Canada published earlier this year found that as each new cohort reaches the age of 18 and becomes eligible to vote, its members participate in fewer numbers than the cohort that came before. Only a third of first-time voters today are actually voting, half the rate of a generation ago.

Statistics Canada asked Canadians who didn’t vote in last May’s federal election – where turnout was a near-record low of 61 per cent – what kept them away. Twenty-eight per cent said they just weren’t interested. Twenty-three per cent were too busy. The rest said they were out of town, ill or didn’t like any of the candidates.

lections Canada is hoping to launch a pilot project using Internet voting, perhaps during the next by-election. Marc Mayrand, Canada’s chief electoral officer, thinks it might encourage some people to vote who are out of town, far from polling booths or who have mobility issues.

“But whether it will change the turnout dramatically in elections, I think that would be putting hopes far too high,” he said in an interview.
Samara, a non-profit that studies and promotes citizen engagement, recently convened eight focus groups of people who don’t vote.
Heather Bastedo, who conducted the focus groups, says most people said the same thing. “They feel a sense of powerlessness,” she reported. “They’ve absorbed the lesson that they can’t effect change.”
The less educated they are, the lower their income, the less engaged they are in social or other media, the less likely people are to vote.
(Ibbitson points to a dramatic rise in young voter turnout in 2008 when Obama became president, as well as a rise in the Toronto vote earlier this year, when then candidate Rob Ford promised to lower taxes. Change the messenger and change the message and voters seem to show up at polls, is one of Ibbitson's observations.)
Let's look a little more closely at Ms Bastedo's observation:
“They feel a sense of powerlessness,” she reported. “They’ve absorbed the lesson that they can’t effect change.”

The less educated they are, the lower their income, the less engaged they are in social or other media, the less likely people are to vote.
Political parties are like other organizations seeking to get the biggest bang for the smallest buck. With limited numbers of contributors and limited amounts in many of their donations, the focus of each political party is to "get out their vote"..and not to waste time with those whose votes are questionable. So much energy is dedicated by mostly volunteers to anyone who, regardless of how 'token' the support, indicates a preference for "our" candidate. That means that there is little energy from the parties to enlarge the voting base generally.
In fact, we often read that political parties "hope" for a bad-weather voting day, so voter turnout will remain low, and more likely result in a return to office of the encumbents.
Then there is the usual advantage on the encumbent side, given the repeated use of their names in news stories over the past four years, so at least most people who could vote will have heard those names.
Here is an example of how many of us felt, while casting a ballot in the last Ontario election.
(By  David Berlin, Globe and Mail, October 14, 2011)
In last week's provincial election in Ontario, I held my nose and voted for the incumbent.
What irked me was not his integrity or dedication to public service, both well-proved, but that along the way, this once-bright-eyed idealist had been slapped by his party to show him who was boss. After a one-year stint as minister, he was chucked out of office. From that day on, he become party property. A conscionable person became a mouthpiece who stuck out his nose only to be led by it – a hack.
Worse, this hollowing out is commonplace – the fate of all those who pursue their ideals through our party system.

In Canada, the only exceptions are to be found in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, which have managed to keep political parties out of their legislatures. Municipal politics sometimes seem party-free, but in most places, some councillors and hard-nosed city mayors usher parties in through the back door. In Toronto these days, you are either for or against the Conservative-aligned Ford brothers. Unaffiliated councillors who make up the mushy middle are relics of the past.
Also, over the last twenty or thirty years, the policy input from the ordinary voter has largely been replaced by the "professional" civil service, whose expertise, linked with their history of mentoring their political masters and their academic qualifications make them far more expert than "ordinary people. Another replacement of "ordinary voter" preference emerges from polling data, given the volcanic eruptions of dozens of these companies especially with the equally explosive amount of data available from all forms of technology. Even our cell phone companies are collecting our habits, for their own commercial purposes.
So, if and when you get that proverbial call from "Harris Decima" for example, you know they are calling for their client(s) to gather information that can and will be used by those clients, especially the political parties, to shape both policy and message in the upcoming campaign.
And, if anyone wonders about feelings of powerlessness, we just have to look at Zucotti Park in New York city, where a tent city speaks volumes to the feelings of disaffection, disillusionment, alienation and, yes powerlessness of ordinary, often quite educated and often also unemployed people of all ages.
(By Jeremy Torobin, Globe and Mail, October 15, 2011)
The Occupy Wall Street demonstrations and other expressions of frustration with the global economic and financial system highlight the need for policy makers to show they are serious about forcing change, Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney says.

In a television interview, Mr. Carney acknowledged that the movement is an understandable product of the ``increase in inequality’’ – particularly in the United States – that started with globalization and was thrust into sharp relief by the worst downturn since the Great Depression, which hit the less well-educated and blue-collar segments of the population hardest.
"You’ve had a big increase in the ratio of CEO earnings to workers on the shop floor,’’ Mr. Carney said, according to a transcript of the interview with Peter Mansbridge of CBC News, parts of which aired on Friday evening. "And then on top of that, a financial crisis.’’
So, compared to marking a ballot with an "X" beside a name, indicating a preference for a political party and candidate, pitching a tent, opening a thermal sleeping bag and joining hundreds if not thousands of others, no matter how disjointed the movement may appear in its early stages, is far more "activist" and engaging.
And potentially, far more effective in getting some notice for the 99% who refuse to be dominated by the 1%.
As Chris Hedges notes, "the elites are in trouble"...and they should be.
(By Chris Hedges, on truthdig.com, October 9, 2011)
The lords of finance in the looming towers surrounding the park, who toy with money and lives, who make the political class, the press and the judiciary jump at their demands, who destroy the ecosystem for profit and drain the U.S. Treasury to gamble and speculate, took little notice of Ketchup or any of the other scruffy activists on the street below them. The elites consider everyone outside their sphere marginal or invisible. And what significance could an artist who paid her bills by working as a waitress have for the powerful? What could she and the others in Zuccotti Park do to them? What threat can the weak pose to the strong? Those who worship money believe their buckets of cash, like the $4.6 million JPMorgan Chase gave* to the New York City Police Foundation, can buy them perpetual power and security. Masters all, kneeling before the idols of the marketplace, blinded by their self-importance, impervious to human suffering, bloated from unchecked greed and privilege, they were about to be taught a lesson in the folly of hubris.

Even now, three weeks later, elites, and their mouthpieces in the press, continue to puzzle over what people like Ketchup want. Where is the list of demands? Why don’t they present us with specific goals? Why can’t they articulate an agenda?
The goal to people like Ketchup (one of the participants) is very, very clear. It can be articulated in one word—REBELLION. These protesters have not come to work within the system. They are not pleading with Congress for electoral reform. They know electoral politics is a farce and have found another way to be heard and exercise power. They have no faith, nor should they, in the political system or the two major political parties. They know the press will not amplify their voices, and so they created a press of their own. They know the economy serves the oligarchs, so they formed their own communal system. This movement is an effort to take our country back.
This is a goal the power elite cannot comprehend. They cannot envision a day when they will not be in charge of our lives. The elites believe, and seek to make us believe, that globalization and unfettered capitalism are natural law, some kind of permanent and eternal dynamic that can never be altered. What the elites fail to realize is that rebellion will not stop until the corporate state is extinguished. It will not stop until there is an end to the corporate abuse of the poor, the working class, the elderly, the sick, children, those being slaughtered in our imperial wars and tortured in our black sites. It will not stop until foreclosures and bank repossessions stop. It will not stop until students no longer have to go into debt to be educated, and families no longer have to plunge into bankruptcy to pay medical bills. It will not stop until the corporate destruction of the ecosystem stops, and our relationships with each other and the planet are radically reconfigured. And that is why the elites, and the rotted and degenerate system of corporate power they sustain, are in trouble. That is why they keep asking what the demands are. They don’t understand what is happening. They are deaf, dumb and blind.
In Canada, where every political story is sanitized, if not homogenized into just another political "mess" but certainly not serious enough to become agitated over, we risk, as does Ibbitson's column, reducing the problem to a manageable, "statistical" and "merely a generational thing".
That is like saying, of a person who is a complete control freak, "She certainly lacks social graces!"
The Hedges rhetoric, unlike the Ibbitson "establishment" rhetoric, faces the problem head-on; calls a spade a shovel, points to the "elite" whose support and encouragement all journalists require in order to continue to do their job, so, as Evan Solomon says in the commercial for Power and Politics, "We've never had people say that coming on our show was unfair; it may have been hard, but not unfair."
And so the establishment continues to blather on, as most of Solomon's guests do, with occasional insightful observations by the pundits, whose job is not dependent on the voters directly.
Canada needs more public comments and commentators like Hedges, and Keith Olbermann (currently on Connect TV in the U.S. but so far as I can tell, unavailable in Canada) speaking truth to power from the left.
This voter apathy, powerlessness, alienation may seem merely statistical to Ibbitson and others; in our view, it is far more serious, as is the detached, and 'establishment' and "politically correct" culture in Canada that produces stories like the one last night on CBC's The National, about the cover-up by politicians of all political parties, of the expenses of Members of Parliament.
The Board of Interior Management, a group of MP's charged with oversight of the expenses of their peers...
has to be one of the most heinous holdovers from the feudal days of centuries past. It is time to dismantle the Board and leave the job to the Auditor General. But don't hold your breath.
Just another of many pieces of evidence that voters have no real influence whether they vote or not.
(I invite your comments, via e-mail to jta@kingsston.net)

Let's stop the Canadian apartheid of First Nations

By Steven Chase, Globe and Mail, October 13, 2011
The head of Canada’s largest aboriginal group is denouncing the military for using its counterintelligence unit to keep an eye on native organizations and their protest plans, saying this implies such advocacy can be compared to terrorism.
The Canadian Forces’ National Counter-Intelligence Unit, meant to address “threats to the security of the Forces and the Department of National Defence” such as espionage, terrorists and saboteurs, assembled at least eight reports on the activities of native groups between January, 2010, and July, 2011.
Shawn Atleo, national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, said he was offended to learn that native activism is considered “threatening to national safety and security” in Canada.
“The fact that Canada would expend national defence resources to monitor our activities amounts to a false and highly offensive insinuation that First Nation advocacy is akin to terrorism or threats to national security,” Mr. Atleo said in a statement. “The reality is that all of the events monitored in the documents released were peaceful demonstrations conducted with the full co-operation and notification of all relevant authorities.”
Critics on Thursday called for Canada to subject the military’s counterintelligence unit to monitoring by independent overseers in the same way that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service is scrutinized by the Security Intelligence Review Committee.
Navy Captain Dave Scanlon, a National Defence spokesman, said the Canadian Forces “do not spy on Canadians, nor do we monitor aboriginal or other groups.”
“We’re not keeping watch on aboriginal groups,” he said. “We’re keeping a watch on activities in Canada that could affect Canadian Forces operations. It doesn’t matter [which] group. It’s the activity that matters.”
He said when choosing what to watch, the counterintelligence unit also anticipates where it might be called on to help. The Forces insist the unit doesn’t do any snooping itself, but receives intelligence from other government agencies.
"We don't spy on people, only on activities"....is something we might read in Orwell's 1984. How dumb is that, as a public relations cover? Who is carrying out "activities" if it is not people?
There is no gender, race, ethnicity, language, history or culture to an activity.
There is a gender, race, ethnicity, language, history and culture to every person, and to groups of people who are, and have been documented to be, discriminated against in this country for centuries. The Canadian history of relations with First Nations people is so abominable as to have been legitimately compared with the former South Africa's apartheid, imposed on black Africans by white governments.
Governments of all stripes have been negligent in the treatment of First Nations people. That is not to say that any future negotiations must start from the position that aboriginals are and always will be victims. However, it does mean that the Canadian body politic has to recognize their legitimate human rights, including the right to clean water for their people, the right to adequate and accessible health care, the right to decent housing, to affordable housing, to jobs and to some form of self-government. And there is at least a century of work to do to accomplish these goals.
It is the perception of the urgency to achieve these goals that separates First Nations peoples from the Canadian people and government. On a scale of 1-10, (10 being most urgent) the Canadian people and government would rank these issues about a 1 or 2, whereas the First Nations people would rank the urgency at 10+. In reality, that leaves the First Nations peoples struggling to be heard, on the national stage, for air time, for negotiating time, for fiscal commitments, and for recognition and respect.
Why, for example, does the Harper government not commit that silly $30 million it has allocated to the celebration of the War of 1812, to the  resolution of First Nations grievances?There have been so many funding allocations from this government that trump any real commitment to First Nations issues, and this "slur" from the military, noted by Shawn Atleo, that peaceful protests by First Nations is akin to terrorism is legitimately considered a slap in the face to First Nations people.
Where is there more alcoholism in any single community than on First Nations reserves?
Where is there more diabetes in any single community than on First Nations reserves?
Where is there more unemployment in any single community than on First Nations reserves?
Where is there more family violence in any single community than on First Nations reserves?
Where is there more school drop-outs in any single community than on First Nations reserves?\
Where is there more untreated water, polluted water, unsafe water for drinking purposes, in any single community than on First Nations reserves?
And the military can call planning a protest by these same people analogous to terrorism? Let's get real.
It is long past due that this conditions need to be curtailed, reduced and even eliminated. And only by a concerted political effort of the will of the Canadian government, supported by the Canadian people, will these human rights grievances, or perhaps better, discriminations be eliminated.
This discrimination takes the form of "state negligence" in the case of the First Nations. And, if the case were to be brought to the Supreme Court of Canada, there would likely be a guilty verdict perhaps even of criminal negligence against the people and government of Canada.
Canadians from all provinces and territories should be ashamed, not only of the meeley-mouthed defence of the military on intelligence on "activities" by First Nations, but by the glaring negligence of all Canadian governments on this file, inspite of some serious attempts to resolve many of the difficulties over the last century.
(I invite your comments, via e-mail, to jta@kingston.net )

Hybrid Corporations, the next wave? Possibly and isnt' it about time

By Stephanie Strom, New York Times,  October 12, 2011
 A new type of company intended to put social goals ahead of making profits is taking root around the country, as more states adopt laws to bridge the divide between nonprofits and businesses.
California is the latest state to adopt a statute permitting what is called flexible-purpose corporations, new companies that are part social benefit and part low-profit entities. The companies are now allowed under laws in more than a dozen states and two Indian tribes.
States like New York and Massachusetts are weighing comparable legislation — sometimes also known as low-profit limited liability or benefit corporations — and efforts are afoot to get federal legislation passed that would lower hurdles to the creation of such companies, including a quiet push to get preferential tax treatment for them.
Many of the companies adopting the new structures provide services to nonprofits or are food purveyors that, for example, might employ the disabled. Perhaps the best known is MOO Milk of Vermont, a group of small dairy farmers.
Unlike a straight nonprofit group, these businesses can tap into conventional capital markets as well as philanthropy.
And unlike a for-profit corporation, the structure allows investors to emphasize the social mission over making money, and to be supported by money from foundations.
“Directors of many companies want to do the right thing, but they’re so busy looking at how not to get sued for failing to maximize profits that they don’t think more aspirationally about creating a great company that helps the planet and people and also makes money,” said R. Todd Johnson, a lawyer who is among the leaders of the movement to get states to create new legal structures.
Not surprisingly, the trend concerns some executives in charge of charities, who fear increased competition for philanthropic dollars fueled by the enthusiasm for the new formats among foundations, many of which have been lobbying hard for new laws to foster this type of business.
Many corporate lawyers and regulators also are wary. The California Department of Corporation and the business law section of the corporations committee of the state bar association opposed the law, as have similar organizations in other states. They argue that the new structure holds an inherent conflict of interest and that it will lower standards of fiduciary duty.
“There’s a marketing job that’s being done that somehow these are special,” said William Callison, a lawyer in Colorado whose opposition helped defeat efforts to pass the hybrid incorporation law in his state. “I think they’re anything but special.”
But proponents, like Jed Emerson, a pioneer in developing what he calls “blended value investing,” contend that many of the new organizations do not fit neatly into what have been the accepted models. “Over the last 10 to 20 years, there’s been a host of organization managers and financial investors saying the traditional approach to investing in this bifurcated framework of for-profit and nonprofit doesn’t capture what they’re really trying to achieve,” Mr. Emerson said. “Alternative structures like this allow investors and entrepreneurs to pursue social and environmental impact together with various levels of financial performance.”
One such company, ardentCause, was about to become a traditional limited liability company, or L.L.C., when Michigan began allowing businesses to incorporate as low-profit, limited liability companies, or L3C’s.
The company, founded by three veterans of the automotive industry, develops database software to help nonprofits manage and share information. “It was perfect for us because we believe businesses and nonprofits alike should run sustainably and profitably, but the main motive for us was the mission,” Rosemary Bayer, ardentCause’s chief executive, said of the L3C structure.
Its first product was introduced last fall with support from the First Step Fund, a pool of venture capital drawn from Detroit foundations as part of a broader effort to reinvigorate the city’s economy. Ms. Baer said ardentCause was currently negotiating with another foundation for investment.
Hybrid companies seeking both social utility and profit are long overdue. And, wouldn't it be wonderful, surprising and even a little revolutionary, if individual people could come to be seen, perceived and valued for being more complex than their single-adjective stereotype box will permit. In the U.S., corporations are still considered "individual people" in the law; while there are many who argue in favour of changing the law, the corporation is KING in the U.S. Hence, if the corporation can be shifted out of their unilingual, single-minded purpose of generating profit, there is hope that such a complexity might begin to apply to individual human beings. The tragedy is, in the U.S., people are considered as mere "fodder" or mere "raw materials" for the corporate engine to devour, deploy and then cast on the inevitable trash-heap of broken bodies, broken spirits, broken lives when the corporate profit-driven corporations are finished with them because they can no longer generate those profits demanded by investors.
Such a multivariant perspective of each human being would require schools to be able to accommodate individual child differences in body, in mind and in spirit, and would also require those schools to be administered differently, not exclusively "for profit" as some currently operate. If corporations can be bi-focal (and let's not permit bi-polar in this context) then surely, the schools can also encompass both effectivness and efficiency.
And then, (aren't dreams exciting?) just imagine if men and women could be released from their stereotypical gender box, respectively, to honourably possess and express qualities of both genders without recrimination, embarrassment, bullying or even violence.
Now if we could only get some corporations to acknowledge that their clients do not fit into a single category, like business, or farm, or charity, or educational institution....but they cross two or more categories, making it uncomfortable for those in the statistical arena to compute...we could be well on our way to seeing a degree of "truth-telling" in its most basic form where it currently is absent.

New Rules for Royal Succession: British Prime Minister

Cassandra Vinograd, Globe and Mail, October 12, 2011
Britain’s government is pushing its plan to change the rules on royal succession to provide equal treatment for princes and princesses, the Prime Minister said.

Under the proposal, the first child of Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge would eventually become monarch – regardless of gender. As the law stands now, an elder daughter would be passed over in favour of a younger brother. Experts say they hope the matter will be resolved before they begin having children to avoid a confusing line of succession like that in Sweden, where a rule change led to a title being passed from a prince to his elder sister.
David Cameron said he has written to 15 other Commonwealth nations where Queen Elizabeth is head of state, requesting their views on modernizing succession.

“We espouse gender equality in all other aspects of life and it is an anomaly that in the rules relating to the highest public office we continue to enshrine male superiority,” Mr. Cameron wrote in his letter.
The changes would also lift a centuries-old ban on British monarchs marrying Roman Catholics – a rule Mr. Cameron described in his letter as a “historical anomaly” since it does not bar those who take spouses of other faiths.
“We do not think it can continue to be justified,” he said.
Mr. Cameron said he will be discussing the proposals when he meets with leaders from Commonwealth countries at a summit in Australia later this month.
There are so many aspects to keeping the monarchy "up-to-date" and these two are among the most prominent.
Princess Diana, without changing any formal rules, dragged the monarchy on her back into the twentieth century, singlehandedly, in her approachability, her compassion for the homeless, and the victims of minefields, and her insistence, as much as possible, that Princes William and Harry be exposed to people and situations in all parts of society, and culture. And her legacy is already honoured by both young men, in their chosen charities, their demeanour and their youth and vigour, sometimes even if it might embarrass Buckingham Palace.
From the Commonwealth, there will likely be little, if any, protest against the gender changes proposed; from Northern Ireland, there might be a whimper of protest about the right to marry a Roman Catholic, given that part of the island's history with sectarian violence. Whatever the undercurrent of discontent, we can all be sure it will be contained in the private papers, phone calls and letters from the various heads of state to the British Prime Minister, and will not likely be made public, unless some specific recommendation is incorporated into the proposed legislation.
Nevertheless, with continuing dialogue between the Church of England and the Roman Catholic church, allegedly aimed at eventual union, this proposed move will only enhance the road to that historic finish line, should union ever become a reality. The British monarch, as head of the Church of England is one thing; the British monarch will unlikely even become the replacement for the Pope. The Vatican will never move to London. More likely, from this vantage point, is the British monarch relinquishing the title and role as Head of the Church of England.
In that possibility, the British Prime Minister might encounter some headwinds as he navigates this proposal through some normally calm and easy passage. The British are less likely to move comfortably away from their traditional "church heritage" than they are to accept gender equality in royal succession.