Liz Sandals, Part Two

Liz Sandals, Guelph's MPP
from 2003 to 2018
Image from Ontario Legislature Website

In the previous part of my interview with Liz Sandals we had been talking about the problem that the "Not In My Back Yard" (NIMBY) phenomenon was causing in the creation of affordable housing for Guelph. We continued by moving on to the sex ed curriculum that was a "hot button" in the last election.

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Hulet:  Well it seems to me that the problem comes down to 70% of people in Guelph own their own homes. And two things make people very conservative: their home and their children. If anything looks like it might affect either one of those things,  they instantly go into fear mode.

Yeah. Yeah. 

Hulet: As education minister I'm sure you've seen that with regard to children.

Sex ed actually started off as an off-shoot of the "safe schools" work when I was Minister of Education. So that's been my file all the way through by reporting to Kathleen first as her PA and then as the Premier. That's been my file all along. 

One of the things that I found really interesting was the perception that older people are automatically going to be against this. But I've had all sorts of seniors come up to me and say "It's about time someone actually did this right". And my suspicion was that probably they knew somebody. The teen that had gotten pregnant. Or the friend who was gay and always got bullied, or whatever it was.  They had some life experience of someone who had suffered because someone hadn't gotten the right education. 

So it was very interesting that the opposition was very much specific pockets. When we did the polling, when we first introduced it, it was one of the most popular things that we ever did. It was just that the opposition was extremely vocal. 

Hulet: So it was that "how deep is the support---or the opposition?" thing.

Yeah. When you did polling that was random---if we've learned one thing, it's that if you do random polling, it really isn't anymore. For example, if you do phone polling you're over-sampling seniors. But it was still one of the most popular things that we'd ever done!  

So the perceptions about how the population split on that one---. The perceptions weren't the truth. But a lot of the opposition wasn't about sex ed, per ce. It was about homophobia. Seeing the emails that came in on that---because a lot of that was directed on me---and what was directed at me wasn't nearly as vile as what was directed at Kathleen. It got to the point where my constituent staff and the Ministry staff wouldn't show me the stuff that we were getting anymore. 

Hulet: Well, I can attest that at my family events that things were said and all I could think was "What the Hell do you do about this?"

Yeah. Yeah! So much of the information that was going around was sheer nonsense. It was people who were deliberately misinforming other people in order to crank them up. 

Kathleen Wynne photo
c/o Australian Ministry of Trade
Public Domain, c/o Wiki Commons

Hulet: This gets into the "Ontario Proud" thing. There was just recently a Toronto Star article saying that there was a bit more to this than met the eye. And Jesse Brown at Canadaland did a piece saying that when he interviewed the people behind "Ontario Proud" they had been disingenuous about their funding---which now seems to have come mostly from a small number of wealthy developers.

I can't really speak about "Ontario Proud" but I can certainly say that social media was clearly what was driving the "We hate Kathleen" thing. There's no doubt that that was driven by---and I first saw it on sex ed---and that was pure, unadulterated homophobia and misogyny. But it wasn't just on the sex ed. What you could see happening was you would get a cluster of correspondence all of which would repeat one or two phrases. You could tell "Oh yeah, you're on that chain" because here are the talking points. 

I would never have seen the original, what was out on social media, or email groups, or whatever---but I would know what was in it. That's because I'd get a bunch of stuff with a cluster of talking points, and then three months later I'd get another bunch of stuff with a different set of talking points that would come back through the echo chamber. There's no doubt that social media has a huge part to play in stirring up this "I hate Kathleen" stuff. And, if at the door you asked "why?", then they often couldn't say why.  

Part of that was if the real reason was homophobia and misogyny they weren't going to tell me---the MPP, standing at their door. They aren't going to tell that they hate her because she's a lesbian. So they have to pull something out of the air:  "Hydro". Because that's what they've heard the most about. But there was a total mismatch between "do you approve of the policies?"---full day kindergarden, childcare, pharmacare for the young, free university tuition for low income youth,---. If you went through the list: "do you like that?" "oh yes", "do you like that?" "oh yes", "do you like that we closed the coal plants?" "oh yes", "cap and trade?" "don't really understand it, but we should do something about climate change", etc. People at the doors liked our policies---except selling "Hydro", and that's because they didn't understand that "Hydro One" wasn't "Ontario Hydro".      

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Just to give people an understanding of what "Ontario Proud" is, look at the following video. As the Podcast by Jesse Brown says in the headline: "This Facebook group gets more engagement than the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail combined."

Originally, Ontario Proud said that they were funded by small contributions by ordinary citizens. But in a December 11th report by the CBC, it turns out that a small number of companies with links to the development industry donated most ($459,000) of the half million dollar budge that the social media company used to fuel their message---including $50,000 from Nashville Developments (a developer based in Vaughan), and, another $50,000 from Merit Ontario (a group that represents non-union construction companies.) I'm not going to get much into the content, but the fact that the ex-Premier is portrayed by a man in a dress who smokes cigars might just be construed as slightly homophobic. As for the electricity policy, you might want to read a previous article I published on that subject to suggest an alternative point of view. If you do, you might be surprised to find out that there are really good reasons why some people's electricity bills are more expensive than others.

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As for the point that Sandals makes about the distinction between "Ontario Hydro" and "Hydro One", "Ontario Hydro" doesn't exist anymore. In 1998 it was split up into five different companies: "Ontario Power Generation", "Hydro One", the "Independent Electricity System Operator", the "Electrical Safety Authority", and, the "Ontario Electricity Financial Corporation". It's really important to keep these six different corporations (Ontario Hydro plus the five other entities it was broken into) separate in your mind. "Ontario Power Generation" is a crown corporation that is still owned by Ontario and it is in charge of major power generation stations---think nuclear power and Niagara Falls. The "Independent Electrical System Operator" is a different crown corporation that manages the electricity market in Ontario. It is what allows giant nuclear power stations and people with a few solar panels to be able to trade freely on a very dynamic electricity spot market. The "Electrical Safety Authority" is a corporation that sends out that guy who inspects your home wiring to ensure it won't burn the house down. The "Ontario Electricity Financial Corporation" manages the finances of all the different elements of previous obligations taken on by the old "Ontario Hydro", and, new obligations of it's successor organizations (where appropriate.) And "Hydro One"---the only privately-owned company---is in charge of all the power lines and transformer stations that connect all the places that generate electricity with the people who use it.

"Hydro One" was sold off because the government of the day decided that the general public didn't want their taxes increased to pay for all the deferred investment (in things like transit) that previous governments had simply "kicked down the road" for future generations to deal with. Ontario retained enough shares to believe that they still had power over the agency, although the opposition parties complained bitterly that this simply wasn't true. (Since Doug Ford was able to replace the CEO when he wanted, and a regulatory board in the USA has decided that Ontario still controls Hydro One, it would seem that the Liberals have been proved right. But what do I know? The Conservatives have a man in a dress smoking a cigar that says otherwise---.)  

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Later on in the conversation, I raised the issue of how well the government is able to communicate with the public.

Hulet:  When I was researching the stories I did on solid waste I was amazed at how much quite progressive legislation had already been passed by the government.  Even though I generally think of myself as being quite well informed about these sorts of issues, I had no idea about most of this. Why do so few people know about much of what gets done by government? Is it just that complex stuff just doesn't make it into the conversation?

Complex stuff doesn't make it. The other thing is the mainstream media---in addition to what I've said about social media---the mainstream media is part of the communication problem. Because there's no place where people actually get good descriptions of what's going on anymore. Newspapers that have lots of long, thoughtful, well-researched journalism on this topic or that topic---most people don't access it, and, it doesn't happen much. When I was young everyone turned on the tv to watch the CBC 11:00 news. So there was a common understanding from a neutral provider---maybe you tuned into CTV and they're more rightwing---so there was a bit left of centre and a bit right of centre. 
But there was a centre and everyone was working from the same facts. And then you could have the debate about the facts. But there's no central repository of where people go to get facts, because people go to the outlet that produces the facts that they like. 

So there isn't even a common understanding of what the facts are anymore. There's very little in terms of places you can go to get a detail understanding of anything even vaguely complicated. For example, cap-and-trade. So anytime I was doing an announcement in Guelph related to cap-and-trade money I would take the time to explain how cap-and-trade works. I would explain that there's a carbon reduction fund and all the money that comes from polluters buying carbon credits has to got here, and has to go into greenhouse gas reductions, and you can go see about the climate change action plan on line if you really care and it will tell you all the ways the money can be spent.  

When I did this you could see the media go "Oh crap. There she goes again. Another cap-and-trade speech." I doubt if any of the media ever tried to explain it the first time, but it was certainly usually "Oh, there she goes again!" But when I walked back into the audience, their response was "Oh. I didn't know any of that! I'm so glad you explained it." But when your audience is only 20 or 30 people---. You had to be in the audience during one of those announcements to get one of the detailed explanations. 

The same thing with the tuition. Well, I did tuition workshops all over the province. I would explain "this is how it works, this is what the math looks like, if you are of this income and you do this you get this much of your tuition paid". I'd walk through with parents, counselors, social workers, etc---this was eight months into the process---and again it was "I didn't know that". You feel like you are doing it, and doing it, and doing it, but no one in the mainstream media ever talks about it. In any depth---other than the headline. And if you work in the mainstream media you get rewarded for posting the short version on the Internet before the next guy does. So the shortest headline, and the guy that tweeted first, is what gets rewarded. It isn't, "Did you come back and write a thoughtful article and actually explain what's going on?" Or explain the implementation as its going---say this month, the next month, and the month after?               

Donald Trump, now there's a guy
who gets good press coverage!
Photo by Gage Skidmore
c/o Wiki Commons

Boring, bland Bill Davis.
Premier of Ontario for 14 years.
Photo by Hans Blohm,
c/o Wiki Commons 

Now Bill Davis---everybody said of him "bland works"---I don't think Bill Davis would get elected in today's media market. Because they're looking for something more interesting. They want to talk about Doug Ford, or Donald Trump, because that's what sells media. 

Hulet: There was that quote from CBS chairman Lesli Moonves about giving Trump so much free airtime "It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS" .

Yeah. Yeah! 

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Here's a graph from an analytics firm, "MediaQuant", that was quoted by a New York Times article published in March of 2016. It deals with a specific period in the election cycle, but it gives an idea of the grotesque disparity in coverage that the corporate media gave to Donald Trump's campaign. This illustrates their support of Trump that Sandals mentions above.

Image from New York Times, used under the "Fair Use" provision of the Copyright Act

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Looking at the above graph and seeing the "Ontario Proud" rap video you see the stark alternatives that people face if they refuse to pay for their news. You can have propaganda machines or advertising-based media constantly sinking lower and lower in a desire for more "clicks". If you want the sort of in-depth coverage that Sandals says that most journalists won't give you, you are going to have to support indie media like "the Guelph-Back-Grounder". Fortunately, it's easy. All you have to do is go to the Patreon Page and sign up, or, toss something in the "tip jar". (Thanks Andrew for being so awesome and increasing your subscription!) You don't have to pay a lot, indeed some of the folks I personally support only get a dollar a month or a dollar a post from me. It doesn't seem like much, but if only 5% of Guelph residents gave a dollar a month for real news, this news blog would be making over $5,000/month.

So what's stopping you? 

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At this point our conversation veered off into a sort of generalized question about why it is that people vote for populists like the Doug Ford Conservatives.

We know that there are all sorts of people that voted for Ford, and given that we know that they liked that catalogue of things, but they had no idea that they were voting for getting rid of things that they liked. If you'd asked them "Would you vote for getting rid of pharmacare for children and youth?" they would have said "No. I'm not voting for that." But that's what he turned around and did within a month of being elected. 

And this is where we go back to the "short form". Then people are voting against something. So they're voting against Kathleen. But they haven't really thought about what the consequence of that is because it wasn't as if they wanted to undo everything she'd done. It was "We're just voting against Kathleen." 

Hulet: I wonder how much of that was just voting against "the world".

I think that's a lot of it. I'm mad, so I have to show that I'm mad.   

Hulet: I'm an "early adopter", but even I get sick of the rapid pace of change in our lives. I just get worn down. I think that there's a lot of people who are just mad about that part of the world.

There's also this change in civil discourse. I first ran for the school board about 30 years ago. So in one way or another I've been doing elections and politics for over 30 years. People will say things to you now that they would not have said to you ten or fifteen years ago. 

Hulet: Nasty things?

Yeah. Yeah. Just the nastiness of the conversation. The way in which people are "invited" to be angry, and then the way that they express their anger has gotten worse and worse. 

Hulet: When I was doing my research on the Carnegie Library being torn down I was struck by how polite the letters to the editor were at that time.

It's not universally true, but it's generally true that if people have written something long hand or something that they've done on a word processor then they've edited it, and shaped it, and sent off the final version; that comes out way more civilized than if they've sent something out on email. 

Hulet:  Fair enough.

People will put the craziest stuff in emails. 

Hulet: I will admit that I'm one of those people who have just hammered stuff out and sent it off when I was upset about something. This has caused a certain amount of embarrassment on my part---. Do you think it's just that change in technology? Or do you think people feel a little more empowered to just vent? Or maybe they are angrier? Or that they just feel more frustrated about the way the world is going? I think this a core issue---that anger is driving this populism. I think that this needs to be something that any politician has to wrestle with.

I agree with what you're saying. People feel angry and they feel entitled to be angry, and they are angry because people are feeding them things that are often untrue, and that makes them even angrier. I see the stuff that they've been fed in what would bound back at me---and it was patently untrue. People are deliberately feeding them things that make them angry. It isn't that if they were sitting on an island by themselves that they would be as angry. They're angry because they are living in an echo chamber and what keeps getting echoed is more anger. 

I honestly don't know how we counteract that. If we had the answer, we would obviously just do it.  

Just to get back to Bill Davis. I've gotten to know him a bit because of both having been Education Minsters. I like him. But I don't know how well he would play today as he did then. Because there's a constant need to "fill the space", the "media space"---be it social media or conventional media---with stuff that's loud and noisy and controversial. If what you are reporting is good news or responsible progress on a responsible project---it's not news.  

Hulet: From that point of view Donald Trump is great, he makes good copy.

And ironically CNN spends as much time on him as FOX, and in spending time on him, they're feeding him.   

Hulet: I'm glad politicians are thinking about this stuff, even if I don't read any news stories about them doing so.

One of the frustrations when you are in government is "How do you communicate to people what you are doing?" My experience being in government is that when you are able to communicate with real people---"this is why we are doing this"---when you have a conversation where you can actually explain "this is why it is this way instead of that way"---"yeah, I hear you. We could do that better, but this is 'baked-in' for this or that reason"---. People's response is "Oh. That's very helpful, thank you." 

You can have that human discourse, but how do you replicate that when what's bouncing around in the real space that people are living in is a whole lot of anger and a whole lot of five second clips? 

Hulet: We really do have to rethink the media. The funding model of supporting the most outrageous stories is dangerous. It's damaging to society.

I have obviously not figured out what we do about this. Going back to the Trudeau quote [In the previous article: "The art of leadership is staying exactly seven inches ahead of popular opinion"], there's another part to the problem. People don't think very far ahead. That's really what he's talking about. And there's a difficulty if you get too far ahead of the voters. But the problems that we need to address are long-term. So if you're talking climate change---that's not something you can fix in a three or four year mandate. If you're talking public transit, that's not something you can fix in a three or four year mandate. If you're talking about affordable housing in Guelph, that's not something you can fix in a three or four year mandate. If you're talking about public education, that's a twenty year journey to get a kid through post-secondary.  

All of these things that you need to do take a long time. 

Hulet: And it always seems easier to sabotage an existing program than it is to build a new one.

Exactly. 

If what the public reacts to---in terms of electoral support---is short-term anger, and short-term goodies. Like, "Are you going to give me a tax break?", then how do you fix any of the real problems---that arguably is what government is supposed to do because it's the stuff that you and I can't do as individuals. Increasingly what government needs to do are long-term projects. 

Maybe they always have been long term projects. You can look at the CPR crossing Canada. That was certainly a long-term project. 

Hulet: And there was a lot of political controversy about that too---.

Yes. Yes there was---.   

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The thing about real conversations about substantive issues is that they never really come to an end. What does end is the time we can spend on them. And that's how my conversation with Ms. Sandals ended, with a glance at a clock and a hurried "I'd better be on my way." But I was very happy to have had the time to talk to a person that I hadn't really known that much about, but now I am very happy was my representative at Queen's Park for fifteen years.

Identity Politics

Years ago there was a big debate among the very small number of people who actually care about "big debates". It centred around whether activism should be put into "single issues" or "political organizing". That is to say, in the grand carnival of society the question raised was whether it was better to organize demonstrations, mount petition drives, fundraise, issue press releases, and, so on for one specific social issue, like wage discrimination against women; or; whether it would be make more sense to put all that effort into building a political party that would fight for that issue plus others like ending carding, gay rights, unions, higher minimum wages, fighting climate change, etc. No one talks about "single issue politics" anymore (mainly because people have learned that it is possible to "walk and chew gum at the same time"), but the discussion continues in a slightly different form in arguments for or against "identity politics".

What distinguishes this new iteration from the old one is that the focus of organizing isn't on the specific social problem---such as police violence---but instead on a specific, sub-group of the population, such as blacks, and their unique experience of the problem, as in the "Black Lives Matter" movement. The argument being that white people have such a profoundly different experience with authority over their lives that you simply cannot understand the problem without actually having lived it yourself as a person of colour.

Public Domain photo by Johnny Silvercloud, c/o Wiki Commons

This change in focus can be threatening to people who are not members of that specific group because it seems to be arguing from a position of "privilege". That is to say, for example, if you simply cannot understand a significant aspect of policing unless you are a black civilian, it feels to some that your point-of-view as a police officer (or white civilian) simply doesn't count. 

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To political organizers (ie: those folks who see the "big picture" and want to build political parties), identity politics is really scary and dangerous. This is because the classic way that populations are manipulated and controlled is through "divide and conquer" tactics. For example, racism has traditionally been a wonderful thing to use against poor whites---because if you could convince a lot of them that they were so much better off than people of colour they would believe that they had a "stake" in the system. And if you identify with the people exploiting you, you don't want to change things.  

Unfortunately, however, understanding the danger of "divide and conquer" doesn't alter the fact that some fractions of the population simply do not have the same experience as others. The vast majority of men have no idea at all about what it's like to be sexually harassed. Most whites have no idea what it's like to be "carded" or stopped by the police for "driving while black". Nor do heterosexual people have any understanding of what it's like to go through life being gay or trans. And the really important thing to remember is that while something like being "carded" or harassed because of your sexual orientation is a totally incidental and minor thing in the life of people that it almost never happens to---it is a huge, big deal if it is a routine part of your life. And because of this tremendous difference in the perception of importance, it has tended to be extremely easy for organizations like political parties, unions, etc---who have tended to be overwhelmingly composed of white, straight men---to simply "bargain away" any movement on these "lifestyle" issues when "more important" stuff like tax rates, minimum wages, base salary, etc, came up for negotiation. This is why groups have recently started to mobilize around the sub-population instead of the issue, and focused on the single issue instead of the broader, political party.

The "divide and conquer" tactic has been attempted, and it has met with mixed results. Some police unions and elements of the Republican party have tried to create a "blue lives matter" campaign to divide people who are concerned about the problems police officers face from the people who are concerned about the problems of blacks---and pit one against the other.  

Public Domain photo by Daniel Oines, c/o Wiki Commons
Image has been cropped by Bill Hulet

This has managed to develop some traction, as the sign above would indicate. In contrast, an earlier attempt to divide divide blacks and gays over same-sex marriage (using appeals to conservative black churches), seems to have fizzled out before it actually got any momentum. Primarily, this happened because the black population is more sensitive to "civil rights" than the general public. They seemed more interested in helping others gain rights that they had to fight for themselves than they disliked gays. (There are still inter-racial couples alive who were forbidden to marry under the old Jim Crow laws. The parallel with laws forbidding gay marriage were obvious to many.) 

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There is an element to identity politics that scares a great many folks. Once you start looking at the world this way there is a danger that it can become a bit of a Pandora's Box---the identities will start to multiply to the point where there will no longer be any sort of majority left. Just to illustrate with my own example, consider the following. I'm a straight, white male. But I'm also someone who grew up in a poor, working class family. I'm a union member in what is considered a good place to work. But I've always worked at physical labour and as a result, various parts of my body have been damaged in ways that cause me considerable pain (arthritis, tendinitis, sciatica.) Moreover, I am married to a woman who has a psychiatric illness that has kept her from being employed for a large part of her adult life. Moreover, I am planning on sponsoring her to come live with me as an immigrant (she's an American citizen.) Also, I am a survivor of an abusive, dysfunctional family, and, as a result, suffer from PTSD. 

Any one of these issues could become something I identify with and see as being key to who I am. I could go on about class discrimination, the casually brutal way people treat the mentally ill, the way managers routinely ask people to do jobs that wear and tear on the body without bothering to think about the cumulative impact that this has over a person's lifetime, and, so on. But the fact of the matter is that compared to many others, I'm doing pretty good. And I understand that---just like everyone else---I have to pick and choose my battles. As a result, I've made it a practice to try to identify my struggles through issues instead of identity. I am not about to cast aspersions on others who emphasize their own specific experience even though I choose to emphasize the value of seeing things within a larger context. We all bring different experiences and gifts to the table, and diversity is generally a strength instead of a liability.

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Just a reminder. If you like this blog, please think about subscribing through Patreon. Even a dollar a month will make a difference. I work hard on it, and if you want to have an independent, local media that isn't beholding to corporate owners or based on an editorial policy of maximizing advertising clicks, you have to be willing to support it. If you don't want to commit, feel free to toss something in the Tip Jar. Finally, if you are afraid of using your credit card, I'd suggest signing up for either PayPal or mailing me a cheque at:  124-A Surrey Street East, Guelph N1H 3P9. 

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This raises one last point. 

It's a natural thing to always try to generalize from our own personal experience in order to understand someone else. For example, I was able to scrimp and save, put together a down payment, and, buy my own house---even though it was a slum and I had to gut and rebuilt it over 20 years. So what's stopping someone else? Well, lots of people didn't grow up on farms and learn that they can do just about anything if they put my mind to it. Moreover, houses cost a lot more now than they used to---even slums. I know this stuff logically, but it is still emotionally easy for me to forget about it. How can I avoid making similar judgments about someone else? 

What I try to do is remember the following statement: "I may think I know what that person's life is like---but I really don't. So the rational, the kind, the enlightened thing is to simply suspend judgment. Maybe I will be able to learn a little bit about that person's life, but until then I will just take what they say on its own terms." I know that it's really difficult to remember to suspend judgment, but when you can it is useful to try. And if you continue to try, after a while it becomes easier and easier to do. And at that point you begin to start to listen to what the other person is saying and you also start to lose any resentment you might feel towards granting that person anything that you might have once thought of as being "special privileges".
 

People-in-the-Know: Liz Sandals, Part One

One of the advantages of developing a little bit of a profile in the community is that I've begun to find it easier to get time from busy people in order to do interviews. Not only does this allow me to develop better stories for my readers, it also gives me the ability to spend some time with some really interesting persons. In November I had the pleasure being able to interview our previous MPP, Liz Sandals. She represented Guelph for 15 years---from 2003 to 2018, and ended up as the Minister of Education.

I thought that Sandals would especially interesting to talk to because she is ostensibly retired from

Former Guelph MPP and Education Minister, Liz Sandals
Ontario Ministry of Housing Photo,
c/o Wiki Commons

politics. I've found that a lot of people in authority often only really say interesting stuff after they've walked away from their careers. Before that, they are something like actors on a stage. They are concerned about the impact of what they say to the point of not feeling free to speak their minds. She acknowledged the truth of my opinion, and suggested that yes she is a little freer to speak. But she also cautioned me that she still won't share the total truth. IMHO, that's a statement by someone with self-awareness. I came away with a feeling that Sandals is a pretty sharp cookie. I think we could have done far worse during the 15 years she represented us.

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I started off asking Ms. Sandals about climate change. The Conservatives under Doug Ford had just announced that they were ripping up the agreement that the previous Liberal government had undertaken to create a cap-and-trade carbon market in conjunction with California and Quebec. For those readers who didn't know much about this program, it was a mechanism designed to put a price on carbon that would encourage businesses to make reducing their carbon foot-print part of their design criteria. All the money raised in Ontario---by law---had to be spent on programs that was meant to help Ontario move towards a carbon-free economy. The first auction under the program was held on February 21rst of 2018 and the Ontario proceeds amounted to $471 million. Now that that program has been eliminated, the Financial Accountability Office says the government is forgoing future revenue of $3 billion over the next four years. It will also have to spend about $600 million to wind down programs that were to be funded by the cap-and-trade system, as well as an estimated $5 million to settle lawsuits with businesses that made decisions based on the assumption that Ontario was going to continue to be a member of this trading system.

My first question was background about how Sandals felt about the issue, so I asked her "What do you think about climate change? Do you see it as an existential threat to human civilization?"

I'm not sure that I would choose the world 'existential' because I don't use that word a lot, but that's one of the 'biggies'---we have to solve that. It isn't "Do I want to solve it?" It isn't like---because it's really important to me---that we have to teach math better. But it's not like the world is going to fall apart if we don't learn to teach math a bit better. Whereas, we have to solve climate change. It's not an option. 

If we don't find ways to at least reduce the impact, we're going to have terrible consequences. So the whole thing that we see---first in the US and now increasingly in Canada---and---God help us---in Ontario. Where climate change is treated as something that we can choose whether or not to address it. That's like turning off your brain. 

Doug Ford. Is he stupid? Or evil?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Image by Andre Forget, c/o Wiki Commons

This led to my second question, namely, if she believes climate change is something that we absolutely, positively, have to deal with, what did she think was going on in the head of Doug Ford? This is a dangerous thing to ask anyone, as people don't generally think it is fair to question the motives of people, just their actions. But that doesn't mean that motives aren't important, just that it can lead to very strong emotions if people suggest that there is a difference between why someone says they are doing something, and why they actually are doing it. In light of this, I decided to just put the issue as bluntly as possible to see how Sandals would react. I asked "Are the conservatives evil? or are they stupid?"

I don't think all conservatives are evil or stupid, and the fascinating thing is that Patrick Brown started off speaking the party line that "all taxes are bad, therefore no price on carbon" but had come around to "yeah, we have to have a price on carbon". So, you saw him going on this journey of maybe getting out from under Stephen Harper where he came to the view---which was probably a step too far for a lot of his colleagues---that there has to be some sort of price on carbon. 

I think that what you're seeing with Doug Ford is the personality of Doug Ford---who might be evil and stupid. As opposed to all conservatives. 

I believe what I am trying say is that I think there's still some of the old "Red Tory" conservatives around and then there's this new breed of God knows what they are. "Right wing populists", I guess is the best way to describe them. A lot of what they do are not even classic fiscal "conservative". 

But at any rate, it's like those that are the most negative have captured the leadership roles. Which is a bigger question than just climate change. What they've done with climate change in Ontario is just plain stupid.

The bigger point that Sandals was trying to make is that carbon pricing isn't something that traditional Conservatives would have a problem with---once they agreed on the need to deal with climate change. As she sees it, the real problem is that a new, more radical, anti-government attitude has taken hold of the leadership of the party.

I think he chose to go there because if there's two things that Doug Ford actually believes---I don't think that there's a lot that he actually believes in---the two things that I think he does believe, really strongly believes in, are "taxes are bad" and "government is bad". 

Because if you look at the things he's actually done---that aren't "undoing" (so we're just going to reverse this because the Liberals did it)---we're going to give you a tax break. I think if you were going to ask him why you are getting rid of cap-and-trade is because I think it looks like a tax, and taxes are bad. And if you look at what he did yesterday, and what he has chosen to do, is reduced income tax instead of raising the minimum wage---when all the evidence is that people would all be better off if you raise the minimum wage---and then they could pay a little bit of tax---which would be better for the people and for the government---(but government's bad.)  So you've got less tax and don't tell me what to pay my workers. It's all rolled up into that. 

At that point we slipped into a conversation about tactics. How was the Ford government selling their agenda to the public? I mentioned that I'd heard someone opine the night before that Ford had "thrown a shiny penny into the mix" and people were fixating on the shiny penny. I mentioned that I thought the "penny" in question was keeping liquor stores open later.

Hah! Yeah! Which is the same nonsense as the "buck a beer". What is something that he has seemed to slip by the public is that he's also reduced the surtax on the wealthy. Which nobody seems to have noticed.

What Ms. Sandals was referring to are two items of tax policy. First, the Conservatives substituted a tax cut for the increase in the minimum wage. Under the Liberals, the minimum wage was raised first to $14 in 2018, and was supposed to be increased to $15 early in 2019. Instead, Doug Ford's government decided to change the dollar an hour increase to only 25 cents per year which would only arrive at $15/hour in 2022. The tax cut for low income earners is called "the LIFT (Low-income Individuals and Families Tax) Credit". What this basically does is raise the gross income that an individual or family has to receive before it starts to pay taxes.

LIFT Credit, from Government of Ontario Web Site

Sandals is saying that someone on minimum wage is better off having the extra $1/year hour and continuing to pay the previous tax rate than if they are after the tax cut without the increase. Let's assume that someone works 40hrs/week at $14/hour. That would give them an annual income of $29,120. Previously, this person would have paid 5.05% income tax, or  $1470 in taxes. Now they pay nothing. But if they had had a $1/hour raise, they would have made $31,200 and paid $1,575 in taxes. So if you make $31,200 and subtract $1,575, you get $29,625. What this means is that the tax cut that the Conservatives brought in left minimum wage workers with about $500 less/year than if they'd just got the dollar an hour increase in pay. It had the added benefit of keeping the tax revenue that the government could then use to pay for the sorts of programs that lower income citizens tend to depend upon.

The second issue that Sandals is referring to is a proposed change to the tax rates in Ontario. This would have involved removing existing surtaxes on wealthy individuals and replacing them with two new tax brackets and slightly increasing their tax rates. According to a CBC story by Mike Crawley published at the time that this proposed budget was announced, 3/4s of Ontario citizens would not see any change in their income tax, while someone earning $95,000 would pay $168 more, similarly someone earning $130,000 would see an increase of $200. And according to this story from a tax advisory website, the top three tax brackets would have changed from 17.4096% to 17.5%, 18.9696% to 19%, and, 20.5296% to 20.53%.

This is the tax increase that Doug Ford described using the following language:

"Today's budget includes massive — I repeat, massive — tax hikes," Ford said. "I'm not going to go after 1.8 million people and increase their taxes, charge them $200 more when they're already struggling with the highest hydro rates in North America."

While it's important to understand that neither of these two tax policies are terribly important to the an economy and government the size of Ontario, they do both cut revenue at a time when we do have some pretty significant financial and infrastructure deficits that need attention. One cut about $500/year out of the income of the working poor, whereas the other handed back money to the wealthiest fraction of the population. They do seem to be ideologically driven instead of being based on the public interest. And, there does seem to have be an attempt to divert the attention of voters away from them by tossing out "shiny penny" programs like extended hours at LCBO stores out at the same time. 

No more Canadian pennies, so here's a shiny American one.
Public domain image from US Mint, c/o Wiki Commons

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In all of my other articles I've mentioned that people have to get used to paying for news if they want to get something that isn't tainted with "clickbait" or hidden agendas. This time I'd like to offer a slightly different suggestion. A lot of businesses, government services and NGOs used to buy subscriptions to the local newspaper and magazines of interest. These included things like consultants, the public library, elected official's constituency offices, and, public advocacy groups. I suspect that most of these folks haven't really thought about it much, but I'd like to suggest that they should consider purchasing a subscription to things like the "Guelph-Back-Grounder" (and Guelph Politico too) through Patreon. Just like individuals, if you want to support the community and keep a regular flow of local information going, you need to pay for the service.   

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At this point we moved on to social housing. I mentioned my five part series about housing and how it was one of those things where the more research I did, the more horrified I was about the situation.

If I was to say what was the thing that I found most frustrating as an MPP, it would be my inability to get any movement on housing in Guelph. What was particularly frustrating was that there was actually money coming in for housing and trying to get it to materialize in Guelph seemed well nigh impossible.

Hulet: You mean federal or provincial money?

Yeah! Yeah! Because when there's federal money then the province puts in so much, but there has to be a local share. And it comes because housing is managed by the "upper tier" and we do have this weird situation in Guelph where the county is the upper tier for housing and social services and child care, but it's a separated city so Guelph has no say. So you get weirdness there. My initial reaction---because that was in the day when the county and the city were suing each other---.

Hulet:  The thing about the medical centre funding?

Oh, well I think that there were about four different law suits going on about one thing or another at one time. Or if it never got to lawsuits, at least legal wrangling. If you've looked into housing, you will have figured it out that there's a horrendous wait list in the city---particular for bachelor and one bedroom---and if you were to move to the county, the wait list is a month or two. 

The only problem is that most of the people on the wait list need services, and the services are located in the city. So if you have a medical issue or a mental health issue, or a need for counselling, job training, or access to post-secondary education, re-entry into employment----go down the list. Most of what you need during the day is in Guelph. And the people who need social housing tend not to have transportation. And if you don't have transportation, you can't get to Guelph. Especially as there is no Greyhound going down the number six road anymore. (Most of the people who need social housing don't live on the number six corridor anyway.)  

And it's all administered by the county. 

Sandals went on to discuss how her thinking on the issue has changed over the years. At first, she

Conservative Premier Mike Harris
Image from the Manning Centre
c/o Wiki Commons

thought that this was a misallocation of resources, then she moved on to think that it was driven by people with "issues" migrating to Guelph---where the services they need are offered. Then she talked about the history and theory behind how social services are administered. The Conservative Mike Harris government decided to hand the responsibility for social services to the "upper tier" of government---in Guelph's case the county as opposed to the municipality. She also suggested that this makes sense if your municipality is the size of Fergus or Drayton. Where this breaks down, in her opinion, is where you have separated cities---like Guelph. Guelph isn't part of the county. Legally it's a "stand alone". So as a general rule, she thinks that Harris's structure is not a bad idea. But in the specific case where you have a separated city---like Guelph---in the middle of a larger county composed of rural areas and small villages and towns---like Wellington county---it doesn't work well.   

But the reason it breaks down here isn't because of misallocation, it turns out to be because of local share. Cause Guelph, when this stuff got uploaded sort of did this mental shift where they thought "we don't have to worry about social services anymore---cause they're doing it". 

At this point Sandals emphasized her point by acting-out Council rubbing the responsibility off it's hands---.

Now we can get back to the municipal stuff---like hockey rinks, and potholes, zoning, whatever. We don't have to worry about this messy social service stuff, the county will. 

Hulet:  You mean in terms of financial resources or political attention?

Both.

So now we get housing money. How does it arrive? Well, if it's tagged for "new builds" it's usually a third---not always---but generally it's a third, a third, a third. Some federal, some provincial, some local.  

Money arrives for "X" number of new units. The county says to the city "How much money do you have to put up for your share?" And the city hums and haws and says "We don't have any money. Cause we don't have a housing reserve. We're not in the housing business anymore. Why would we have a housing reserve?" They actually used to have a housing reserve and got rid of it when it got uploaded to the county. But the county says "But we have a housing reserve and we'll put it into the county."

Hulet: I have talked to Councillors about this and they have told me that the federal government just needs to kick more money in. But there's such an enormous backlog---.

But there's nothing that says the local share has to be just local government. It could be a mix of government and private.  The one bit of housing we got in while I was involved was the senior's housing at Saint Joes. That was the Saint Joe's Foundation---with some tax forgiveness from the city---but it was really the Saint Joseph's Foundation that was the local share on that deal. 

The Saint Joseph's Health Centre, Guelph
Image from its web page, used under "fair use" copyright provision.

The other thing it could be is just a private developer. And then we've got into the whole NIMBY [Not In My Back Yard] thing that you've identified. So the flap over the housing that Tom Lammer would have built over at the Church of Our Lady. So when Council eventually turned that down---it was a couple weeks before the deadline---and the county said "No problem, we have a housing reserve" and those units that could have gone into Guelph went into Palmerston.

Hulet:  That's something I don't recall hearing from anybody.

No. You wouldn't. [Laughs out loud.] And I would say to people who come into the office and say "You have to support us. We can't have an apartment building on that corner. It would be horrible!"  [Laughs out loud again.] And I would say "If we don't get some affordable housing in there, it's not going to be built in Guelph." And the response would be "That won't happen. They can built it some place else." And I'd say "'Some place else' will be not Guelph."And I'd get this sort of "Oh no, you're wrong Liz" reaction. Anyway, it's in Palmerston.  (29:30) 

And we've done this over, and over, and over, and over, and over----. 

The other thing is that there's such a backlog that you're never going to build enough. So a lot of the money that comes from the province has been flex money so that the local municipality has had the option of either building new units or using it as rent subsidies. So when the county has chosen to use it as rent subsidy---which they've done a reasonably responsible job of doing---then that money would be distributed in an equitable way. 

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Hulet: Just to spin this off in a little different direction, you've talked about NIMBYism. I think that's pretty much at the core of housing problems in Guelph.

Yes. Yes. 

Leading by being just barely in front?
Trudeau the Elder, photo by Chiloa
public domain c/o Wiki Commons

Hulet: And it's very difficult as a politician to alienate voters. Someone once told me---it's probably apocryphal---that Trudeau the elder once said "The art of being a leader is staying exactly seven inches ahead of popular opinion."

That's probably true. 

One of the good things you could probably say about Kathleen [Wynne] is that she got farther ahead of the public than the public was willing to allow.  

The whole NIMBY thing was that we had to get rid of the bad, old OMB. Yeah, the OMB tended to be pro-developer, but the OMB has also tended to be the "logjam"---. One of the things you happened to see in Guelph---and other municipalities---but Guelph is pretty---. Has done it more than once, let's say. Is that when there's a decision that is going to be publicly unpopular, but is technically correct---and probably a social good point of view, reasonable---you will see Council dragging its heels on never quite getting all the information they need on making a decision. And then the timelines expire on how long you can have a development proposal sit without making a decision. So it automatically gets so the developer can appeal to the OMB---because the timeline has expired. They aren't appealing a decision, they're just going to the OMB saying that the timeline has expired, so the OMB can make the decision---because Council doesn't want to make the decision. Because they want to be able to say "we didn't make the decision---the OMB made the decision." When the real issue is that there is a decision to be made that isn't palatable to the local politicians. So we'll let the OMB be the fall guy. 

I've seen this happen with a number of proposals. And that's usually a case where I have nothing to do with it. It's totally private. I just sat back as the observer. I just said "Ah. Here they go again!" 

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This is getting to be a quite long post, even though I'm still less than half through my interview. I think what I'll do, therefore, is split it up into two parts.

Imagine There's No Heaven---

During my three weeks off over Yule (unfortunately spent mostly being sick and dealing with family crises) I spent some time indulging a new addiction, the BBC television series History Cold Case. (I watch it on YouTube through the "Timeline" channel.) It's a simple concept, assemble professional forensic anthropologists and use the latest scientific technology to learn all they can about the bodies (skeletons) that archaeologists have found while excavating British historical sites.

There are several things about the show that attracted me. First of all, everyone in the show is a real person. Mostly women, mostly middle-aged or older, no one wears make up, and, none of them would be confused with being a fashion model. But they are all sharp as tacks. Moreover, there's none of the fake conflict or tension, or, repetition that a lot of "documentary-style" directors feel the need to insert into other shows. The science and the subject themselves are more than enough to provide a gripping program.

What really got me thinking was the episode titled Crossbones Girl. 

It involved a random skeleton removed from an early Victorian graveyard that had been dug up to put in the foundations of a transformer station for the London transit system.

As the experts started their "deep dig" into her case they kept finding out more and more awful things about the world that this woman lived in. At first they thought she was a young woman in her early 20s who had a severe case of syphilis. Then they looked a little closer, and found out that she had rickets too. Then they did a CAT scan of the bones and decided that she was actually a bit younger---between 15 and 19. They checked her teeth for growth deformities and decided that she didn't contract syphilis from her mother---so she was probably a prostitute. And since she had a very well-developed case of the disease already, it probably meant that she had contracted it when very young---perhaps as a preteen.

When they brought in a historian she explained that unless a poor woman was able to connect with a man who would support them, there simply was no "decent" work available that would pay her enough to live. She showed them a then current book from a work house (the Victorian equivalent of welfare) that gave brief descriptions of the people who had arrived there. Most of the women were prostitutes who had fallen on hard times in one way or another. One had been a young girl lured to the city with a promise of work only to end up in a brothel. One had had employment as a servant to a wealthy woman who abandoned her when she decided to go to Europe for a while. Another had had "an argument" (one can only guess what that means) with her father that led to her leaving home---and eventually becoming a prostitute. 

Prostitution was so common and women were so desperate that many would simply trade sex for a decent meal.

I couldn't help thinking about the contrast between the strong, intelligent, professional women gathered around that table and the women of Victorian London who literally had no other option than prostitution. What a horrible waste of lives. Not only horrible to the individual, but also to the society. My doctor, my dentist, my accountant, my banker, etc, are all women. Deny them an opportunity to participate in society and all of us will miss their intelligence, skill and creativity.

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But the horror that was this young woman's life didn't get left there. At this point the show goes on to discuss what Victorian Britain knew about syphilis and how they treated it. The only treatment that they thought had any success was by using a very poisonous compound containing mercury. As it gets explained, it was very well understood that this treatment had awful side effects. Indeed, as described the experts say that it sounds like the worst type of chemo-therapy that is used today on cancer patients. Oddly enough, it is still an open question about whether or not the mercury treatment actually helped patients. There is some evidence that it poisoned the syphilis germ along with the patient. But since modern antibiotics can usually cure the disease. It would be profoundly unethical to do any experiments with mercury to test it's efficacy.

Mercury treatment was very expensive, so the cold case experts just assumed that there is no way that this young woman would have been able to access it. But just to be sure they tested her bones for mercury. Low-and-behold, they tested high. It appears that she had had some treatment by the latest and most expensive that the medical system could offer. Historical research turned up evidence that there were charity hospitals that specifically offered mercury treatment to poor prostitutes. They were chronically under-funded, but they existed and this woman seems to have been helped by them. 

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They bring in an archivist who spends weeks going through the old records that exist in the city archives. Through a process of deduction, he suggests an actual name for the woman:  Elizabeth Mitchell. She was recorded in the burial records, and also in the records of a charity hospital where she was in a syphilis ward when she died of pneumonia (a common secondary illness for someone already ill from another disease.) 

So for all the horror of this young woman's life, she did receive some of the best treatment her society had to offer. She did have a name. And at least some people cared enough to let her die in a bed with a doctor's care. Moreover, she was also put in a casket and buried. Her name was recorded and we remember her life to this day. 

One of the things that I like about the show is the fact that there are no actors, the people we see are real experts. Some of them have seen horrific things (think digging up mass graves in the Balkans to document war crimes.) Others are academics who've probably spent most of their lives in the Ivory Tower as students and teachers. When they had to reassess the age of the woman---and therefore the age that she was infected---the scientist who studies isotopes in the bones audibly gasped. It's a very British show, so not a lot of emotion gets expressed. But what does seems to me to be very real.

At the end there is a sidebar about the Crossbones cemetery. It wasn't completely obliterated when the power station was built. That only covered a corner. Most of it still exists in a back corner of London. But a funny and very nice thing has happened in the past few decades. It has become something of a shrine for people concerned about the plight of the poor. The last image we have is of an annual ceremony where people get together to light candles and remember the people buried there---the abused prostitutes and paupers. One of the Cold Case people joins in and lights a candle for Elizabeth Mitchell and all the others. It's touching and it's real.

The front gate shrine at crossbones cemetery, London.
Public Domain photo by Matt Brown, c/o Wiki Commons

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Consider the above something of an introduction to the point I really want to make in this post.

I'm not a Christian. I don't believe that there is a great Father in the sky who is going to right all wrongs and pay off all debts to the poor and down trodden. If I'm anything, I'm a Daoist. And one of the key texts in that tradition has a very blunt and apropos statement about the plight of the poor and oppressed.

Heaven and earth are not humane,
They treat the ten thousand beings as straw dogs (From Dao De Jing, chapt 5)

"Straw dogs" were ritual offerings that people burned at altars in place of something valuable. They are symbols in this poem of valueless objects that get used and discarded like Kleenexes. The authors (the "Old Ones" of Daoism) are saying that the universe is totally and utterly indifferent to the suffering of any particular individual. 
   
A lot of people will probably find this a bit of a "bummer". But I don't. And the reason why was crystallized for me by this show. We don't need to posit a God in the sky who commands us to do right by each other. And we also don't need "pie in the sky" to encourage us to do the right thing. We can do the right thing just because it is the right thing. We can struggle together to do things like set up charity hospitals where doctors do their best to help poor prostitutes like Elizabeth Mitchell. We can battle with the authorities like the suffragettes to get women the vote and eventually the right to be equal participants in society. We can form unions to get better wages. Form political organizations to fight for government programs to help the poor and oppressed. (We can even put out "indie media" that tries to explain the deeper issues that just get glossed over by corporate news. Support me on Patreon or use the tip jar.) 

Most of my life has been a steady progress of the world getting to be a better and better place. When I was young "Jim Crow" still ruled the Southern USA, women were forbidden admittance to various schools (my sister became a RN because she was barred from a horticultural college because of her gender), the police still raided gay bars, constables still gave talks at schools aimed at scaring the bejesus out of parents about cannabis, I could go on and on. But humanity really has struggled long and hard to become better. It still has a long way to go, but it has made real progress.

Sometimes it's hard to remember this. Especially when we find ourselves with coarse blowhards in positions of authority. But there has always been a certain "ebb and flow" as each step forward into a more just and equitable world mobilizes the scared, the stupid, and, the greedy to fight back against perceived attacks on their world. This is a time when a desperate rear-guard action is being fought by reactionary dorks. But their days are numbered and progress will continue. You don't have to believe in the supernatural---just the common decency of the women of the History Cold Case program and the folks who light candles at Crossbones Cemetery. 

Cutting the Knot

Looking at human society over my short 60 odd years of life one thing becomes increasingly clear to me. In many different ways we seem to have painted ourselves into a corner and find it impossible to get out.

Keith Haring's performance art piece:

Painting Myself into a Corner

I offer in evidence the fact that there are several different problems presenting themselves which objectively should be relatively easy to deal with---but which humanity seems totally incapable of fixing. Let's look at some of them.

Politics

There are systemic flaws in our electoral systems that any first year political science student could easily fix if they had the power to do so---yet seem totally beyond the abilities of our political "elite" to fix. Why does it only take a little over 40% of the popular vote in an election to form a parliamentary majority? It's not quantum mechanics to understand---yet if you ask the leaders of the political parties you'd think that making elections proportionally represent the will of the voters was as difficult as creating a stable, cost-effective nuclear fusion reactor. Trudeau let the cat out of the bag in the last election when he said that he'd just change the system before the next election without a constitutional convention or referendum (which he could easily do under the law.) But it never happened. Why? 

There are other problems. We currently have a significant problem with social media influencing elections. Primarily, the wall that used to separate news from political advertising from third party advertising turns out to be quite porous when it comes to things like FaceBook. We are supposed to have some sort of mechanism to tell us whether or not something is news or paid political advertising but not anymore because of---. Why exactly? We are also supposed to have laws that prevent people who support political parties from buying adverts without reporting this as "paid for by the campaign to elect Joe Blow" but not anymore because of---. Why exactly? It's as if society has created a new class of internet business people who are above the law. Why can't the political class do anything about this?

Even when we catch someone dead to rights trying to subvert the election law---as in the RoboCall scandal---there doesn't seem to be any penalty accrued beyond the ritual throwing of the minor player under the bus. Not much happened, even though the judge opined that something obviously much bigger was going on and certain individuals had fled the country to avoid being dragged into court. Why didn't the Crown go after these people for extradition? Why didn't the Conservative party of Canada---or at least the local riding association---suffer any formal consequences? Isn't democracy a thing that should be protected? Why exactly doesn't the Chief Elections officer have the power to punish political parties that attempt voter suppression?  (I know, compared to the US we live in a paradise. But this leads to the obvious question. Why can't the US deal with any problem at all in their electoral system?) 

The Legal System

It's become something of a regular event in Canada. A very high-ranking judge retires and gives a speech where he complains how insanely expensive and time-consuming the legal system has become. He mentions that record numbers of people are trying to represent themselves in court because they don't believe that they can afford to hire a lawyer. At the same time, there just doesn't seem to be any money to pay lawyers to represent the poor. It's a funny thing. Judges and lawyers are very well educated and well-connected people. Supreme Court judges even have the ability to set precedents in the law and give orders to Parliament. You would think that they could work together to come up with solutions and work collectively to actually fix this mess. But all they seem to be able to do is wring their hands in public once their careers have ended and they no longer have any power to actually change anything. 

The recent decision to legalize cannabis sets out an especially bizarre situation where police departments all over the country complained that they needed more money and time to deal with the enormous complexity and cost involved in not investigating, not arresting, not trying, and, not incarcerating people for possession of cannabis. Presumably the new regulations are so insanely complex that they require extensive training to get the police "up to snuff". If this is the case, then surely there should also have been a lot of money similarly spent on educating the public about this arcane and complex new set of regulations. (Will I get a cheque in the mail?) 

One last thing. We have regulations in Guelph that control the taxi industry. They exist to ensure that when you get a ride in a cab you are not going to be overcharged, that the cab will be properly insured, that car will be maintained, and, the driver is not an obvious psycho. The number of cabs is limited to a set number, to ensure that we don't have so many cars chasing a limited number of fares that no one can make a decent living off the job. It also ensures that there will be a dispatcher on the phone and a cab to pick me up no matter what ungodly hour I get off work. (Many nights it's 3:00 am.) Into this legal system Uber arrived. Their brilliant business model? Break the law and dare the police to do something about it. It seems to be working. Yet another way in which the legal system seems totally incapable of adapting to novelty. 

The Environment

Here's a file near and dear to my heart. Our scientific community keeps putting out more and more frantic communiques about climate change. Politicians go to conferences and sign onto agreements. And yet, we still elect deniers to high office (with only a little over 40% of the popular vote---a strong majority wants something done, which is part of why proportionality is so damned important.) Doug Ford's Conservatives rip up a complex cap-and-trade agreement seemingly on a whim. Some voters and business people complain bitterly when reasonable people suggest that perhaps---if we are really serious about getting off the carbon economy---we shouldn't be building more capacity to ship off tar sands oil and maybe it might be a good idea to divest from fossil fuel stocks altogether. It's as if there is a big chunk of the voting public and the leaders who pander to them simply cannot adapt to this new information about what is and isn't feasible. Instead, they have responded by shoving their fingers in their ears and yelling at the top of their lungs. Can the human race survive if so many people's reaction to an existential threat is not much more than to throw a temper tantrum? 

I really had this brought home to me when I did my three-part "deep dig" on solid waste issues. Looking at the various elements of the system---including "eco-fees", coffee pods, and, Stewardship Ontario---it became abundantly obvious that all the various players in industry had zero interest in actually ending the avalanche of garbage that they were creating. Indeed, by fair means and foul, they repeatedly sabotaged every attempt by the government (Conservative or Liberal---it didn't really matter who was in power) to make businesses pay the full cost of disposing their waste. Indeed, much as they often whine about wanting to let "the market decide", any attempt to put a cost on garbage made them turn into raving Marxists seeking government subsidies to prop up their way of making money. Why does our government allow these goons to get away with this behaviour?

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Here we are in a new year and I'm doing the same old, same old. It takes a lot of work to create this blog and even if the last few posts have been opinion versus investigative journalism, this doesn't mean that I haven't been busy behind the scenes doing research. The new stories will be coming out this year. And to be fair, I think that I was really productive in 2018. Anyway, if you want to keep getting opinion, and, investigative reporting both, people need to be willing to support it financially. That means putting a little aside in Patreon or the Tip Jar (don't worry about the "Daoism blog" bit---that's how I set the account up for my other blog.) If you don't want to use your credit card on line, you can also send me a cheque c/o 124-A Surrey Street East, Guelph, N1H 3P9.   

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Growing Up

I am usually the first person in any group to suggest that there are few simple solutions. The whole "raison d'etre" of this news blog is to point out that there are a lot of very important details that need to be considered when we talk about public policy. Indeed, for years my email signature was a paraphrase of H. L. Mencken's dictum: 

Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong. The ancients, in the case at bar, laid the blame upon the gods: sometimes they were remote and surly, and sometimes they were kind. In the Middle Ages lesser powers took a hand in the matter, and so one reads of works of art inspired by Our Lady, by the Blessed Saints, by the souls of the departed, and even by the devil.

   (From Quote Investigator)

But having said all of that, there is something deeply important in the story of Alexander and the Gordian knot. That is to say, sometimes leaders just have to lead. This is different from trying to "finesse", or "take baby steps", or "find market solutions", or "build a consensus", or "do work a-rounds", or "check your poll numbers", or "defer to staff", or the myriad of other ways politicians refuse to stick their necks out on important issues. It might be that in doing so a politician may destroy her career---but if in doing so they end up making a long-lasting positive impact on society, why should they care? Politics, like life, always ends badly. All anyone can hope to do is add to the small store of positive improvements in the human condition.

And for all that, sometimes the bold move is the only move that will bring you success anyway. Remember the last federal election where the NDP played the "safe" move over and over again---as when they suggested that the government should decriminalize cannabis? Trudeau---to his credit---cut the knot and said "No. Make me Prime Minister and I'll end the debate once and for all by legalizing it!" It worked, he got elected, and, I suspect that in doing so he has gained the support of many people who will vote for him in the next go around. And if he'd done the "usual", "normal" thing we'd have one of the usual dodges: a referendum, a blue-ribbon committee, or a very long time frame. Instead he just said "here's the time line and that's when it's going to happen. If things aren't all in place by then, then it's your fault, not mine. And if there are problems, we can fix them as we go along." Yes, there are problems, but they will get resolved. But on the whole a stupid problem that no politician seemed capable of fixing got fixed. And it seemed to take a lot less fuss than we had repeatedly been told it would. If a politician can do this with one issue, they can do it with the others.

Alexander Cutting the Gordian Knot, by Jean-François Godefroy, 1767
Public Domain Image c/o Wiki Commons