Karen Farbridge, Part Two

I'm continuing my conversation with our previous Mayor, Karen Farbridge in this post. Whereas in the last one she talked mostly about what the job is like and how society has changed from her first time in office, in this part we talked about housing.

Former Mayor, Karen Farbridge.
Photo from a U. of G. website, cropped by Bill Hulet. 

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Hulet: I'd like to change the focus a bit, to talk about what I believe is a housing crisis in Guelph. I know that I'm tremendously unpopular with people when I say this, but it seems to me that we simply aren't building enough housing in this town. So I'm a big fan of just putting in the damn towers and build a lot of apartments to get some capacity out there. What do you think of that?

Farbridge: First off, I think that having the conversation at the municipal level is the wrong place to have it. During the elections everyone gets on the affordable housing band wagon, and says we are going to bring in more affordable housing---and they have zero policy or fiscal levers to move at a municipal level. What are you going to do? Increase property taxes, including people who are on the edge of being able to live in their own homes? Do you want to increase their taxes and make it unaffordable for them to keep their home? Push them out of their house?

You're unpopular with your point of view. I'm unpopular when I get candidates coming to me for some advice about how we can respond to the affordable housing issue. "What should I be saying?" My response is that you shouldn't be responding at all---because there's nothing you can do. 

[Karen offers a despairing chuckle.]

And you're just misleading people, and you're just continuing to let people think that there's something a municipality can do. 

Now there's little things that they can do---it's not like there's nothing---you can subsidize fees for Habitat for Humanity. I'm not dissing Habitat for Humanity, but they're not going to solve the problem, right? They do good work and help a few families---that's great---but they're not going to solve the affordable housing problem. 

To me the affordable housing problem is tied to income inequality. 

Hulet: That's certainly something I identified in my research. The top 30% is doing just fine, thank you. But the bottom 30% is in real trouble. And the bottom half has seen any income increase massively out-paced by the increase in housing costs.

Farbridge: The supply will be there, it's people can't afford it. It's an income issue, because of the widening gap. Even in my work with Meridian---all of these new rules that are coming in, tightening up the mortgage rules---right?---based on what happened in the U.S.. People are critical about these rules because they are making housing less affordable. But the mortgages weren't affordable before---they didn't have the incomes to support them. The rules are just acknowledging that the homes aren't affordable---which is a result of the income gap. 

So for me, the lever is "how do you address the income gap?" Not unemployment---the income gap, and, inequality.

Hulet:  I got this idea from a Parliamentary research paper on housing affordability where they mentioned the concept of "filtering" and housing supply. The idea is that if you have an adequate supply of housing, a certain amount of buildings will become priced less and less. I'm thinking of the sort of places I lived in as a student---which were run down houses and apartment buildings. If you don't have enough supply, filtering ceases, and the pool that already exists shrinks due to gentrification.

Farbridge: Trickle down housing? 

Hulet: Yeah.

[Karen laughs.]

I tend to quote from that article somewhat out of desperation. If the Feds and the provinces won't do anything, then that leaves it up to the municipalities---or nothing will get done.

Farbridge: Unfortunately the city doesn't have the legislative or financial tools to be able to do a lot. 

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I think it might be useful at this point to expand some of the points that Karen and I were discussing here so the reader doesn't get confused.

The first point to remember is that the phrase "affordable housing" can mean very different---but intimately related---things: social housing (ie: housing subsidized by the county) for people with significant economic disabilities and privately-owned, non-subsidized housing for the lower-income working class. These two groups tend to overlap somewhat, because there is always a certain number of people who are either working poor who temporarily have to access social service, and, others who use social services who manage to get work that draws them up into the ranks of the working poor.

I am pretty sure that Karen is mostly referring to "social housing" in her remarks about the need for federal and provincial funding being needed. It certainly is the case that it cannot be build exclusively through the use of locally-raised money. As she points out, above a very modest level it just becomes an exercise in "robbing Peter to pay Paul". But having said that, I also have the statement by Liz Sandals to the effect that there needs to be some local money put into social housing simply because federal and provincial money is almost invariably tied to the city putting in some of its own.

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.

So what we have here is a classic political disagreement between Sandals and Farbridge. Sandals seems to believe that there is some room to raise a little tax money to put into a social housing fund, but Farbridge is arguing that there isn't and I suspect at the back of her mind is the political cost that anyone would have to pay in order do so. Since both politicians were part of governments that fell victim to populist "tax fighters", it might be that Karen is right. But I would at least like to point out that whenever a politician tells you that he wants to "keep a lid on property taxes" while at the same time saying that he is committed to fighting homelessness that there are times that the two commitments are at odds with one another. 

What I'm talking about, in contrast, is "affordable housing" as being rental housing that lower income people, in general, can afford to rent. And that, I believe, is related to the issue of supply and demand with reference to the total stock of housing in a city. The idea is that if a city doesn't allow developers to build enough housing for everyone, intense competition will develop for the existing stock---which will drive up the prices to the point where lower incomes people not longer can afford housing. Another side effect is that what new construction is being built will tend to be aimed at the higher income market---simply because the returns are higher on it. (Think about it. In a world where everyone was clamoring for a watch, but where the government only allowed fifty watches built in a year, which ones would a business sell: Rolex? Or Timex?)

This isn't to say that any developer will build very inexpensive new construction. Instead, as economists explain it, there will cease to be competition by renters driving up prices and encouraging gentrification; and instead competition between landlords will drive rents down and encourage owners to defer upgrades on older, existing housing stock. This last process is called "filtering", and is the direct opposite of gentrification. It isn't a difficult concept to understand, but it rarely gets discussed in conversations about housing affordability. It's easy to understand why.

I can remember being invited to a provincial focus group about the Places To Grow Act where the intensification goals for the downtown were being discussed. I was the lone voice raising concerns about housing affordability and I used the example of the old downtown Diplomat Hotel. By all accounts it was a dreadful place to live. But it was affordable for very low income people. Now it has been totally renovated and all the people who used to live there have been dispossessed. I can understand that no one on city Council wants to stand up and defend decrepit, old, nasty, apartment buildings. But the fact of the matter is that those places are part of a continuum that allows low income people a place to live. And that continuum goes through the sorts of crummy houses, apartments, and, rooming houses that I lived in when I was a student and poorly paid janitor. Middle class people might turn their noses up at such places, but if we don't provide for their existence---and won't pony up the money to pay for social housing projects---where are the poor supposed to live?

Karen said "The supply will be there, it's people can't afford it". I'm not so sure about that. The Places to Grow Act and the city plan has put a cap on suburban sprawl---as it should for environmental and cost-of-servicing reasons. This means that the only way for the city is to grow "up"---to use her language. But there is a lot of push-back by the citizenry on that. Every time a developer seeks to build a tower or large apartment complex a mob shows up at Council to complain bitterly about things like parking, shade, build design, etc. Some of this is legitimate. (I can certainly see that on street parking has dramatically changed in my neighbourhood because of condo owners who were too cheap to buy enough parking spaces for their---often extremely expensive---vehicles.) But the "macro" effect on the housing stock is that all this "citizen engagement" dramatically slows down the rate at which developers build new housing, which means that no market pressure gets built up to push down rents and encourage filtering.

As an experienced politician, Karen has to think about what the electorate will allow her to do---not what the optimal policy would be. Voter turnout is relatively low in municipal elections, and the people who do vote tend to be disproportionately older people who already own their own homes and who are fixated on preserving their property value and making sure that their neighbourhood never changes. This means that it's likely that they will badly punish any Councilor or Mayor who was publicly associated with developers building large towers in order to preserve crummy old "welfare hotels" and rooming houses. So it's very easy for an armchair philosopher like me to suggest all sorts of theoretical solutions to public policy. (I've tried many times and only shown that I couldn't get elected dog catcher.) When you add in the political element it's easy to come to the conclusion that there really isn't anything that people on the local level can do to build more affordable housing. 

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I put a lot of effort into researching and writing these articles. For example, I started work on this series of articles in December. It's real work and just as tiring as any other job I've had. I hope that they help readers get a better understanding of the long-term issues facing the city. If you'd like to help me with this, why not subscribe on Patreon? Even as little as a dollar a month is helpful. (I'm now getting about 1500 "hits" a month. If all those people gave me a dollar, I'd be rich!) If you don't want to make a commitment, you can put something in the Tip Jar. If you are afraid of using money on the Internet, you can just mail "Bill Hulet" a cheque to "124-A Surrey Street East, Guelph, N1H 3P9". 

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Hulet: So there's very little you can do other than allow developers to run wild---which would cause lots of problems too. It just seems to me that we are a city now and we're going to have to accept a certain number of apartment buildings---and big ones at that. Try squeezing that past an electorate!

Farbridge: We've had some success. I don't know if you remember---it was during the 90's---there was quite a struggle, you were either pro-growth or you were against growth. The problem was that we weren't talking about "how". There was "Smart Guelph" and then after Kate's term [Kate Quarrie, 2003-2006] there was a lot of engagement around our growth strategy, and we had an interactive tool where we could see that if we didn't grow "up" [ie: taller buildings versus suburban sprawl] we'd see how much land would get taken up [ie: paved over]. Then people saw how many natural areas and how much farmland was being consumed by sprawl, so we were able to get a good community consensus about building "up", and that's what you've seen in the downtown, right?

But we're back at needing to do that. The Clair/Maltby development, it's pitted "for" and "against"---there's more than just Clair/Maltby---but there hasn't been this re-engagement of people to look at what the data tells you about how we're growing and to build that consensus again. So we're getting this opposition to growing "up" again.

Hulet: What do you think about Clair/Maltby? It seems that the city wants to intensify there, but I hear people talking about preserving water, and parks---but I'm wondering if it's just a back-handed way of being opposed to intensification.

Farbridge: The problem is the intensification they're doing---the community form is basically a suburban form---squeezed. As opposed to being a true urban form. A suburban form that is high density as opposed to an urban form that is high density.

Hulet: So it's not forming a downtown?

Farbridge: Yeah. It should be forming a downtown. It almost should be a village onto itself. That's what they're not doing; it's an expansion of the suburban model. That's one of the things going on. 

The other thing is that it's turned into a planning application. They're not doing policy planning and I had the sense that---you know I don't follow this closely, I just sort of watch from the distance, people talk to me about it, and I can connect the dots---my sense was that it sounds like they were going through a planning application as opposed to doing policy planning. That's when the planning applications come later---to respond to the policy. Right? 

Hulet: So is this a question of the old culture reasserting itself?

Farbridge: No, I think this is a question of administrative leadership---it's the individuals more than anything. I don't think it's a Council-driven thing. I don't think it's political---I think the governance is absent, so they're able to do this.

So I asked a Councillor about this, and I said "We had articulated a vision for the secondary plan---it was to be an urban village---that's not what you're proposing for this." The response back was "But that's not what the developers are planning to build". 

[Karen laughs.]

It's not about what the developers are planning to build---it's about what the policy that we are going to approve, and then they respond to that policy. And this Councillor had completely bought it---that we have to develop the policy to support what the developers want to build. We've seen subdivision plans for the areas that they own---and it's what they want to build.

So it's backward. 

Hulet: This is the traditional culture of developers proposing and Council disposing.

Farbridge: Yeah. We created a plan for the downtown and we've had some incredible developers step into the space to deliver on our vision. Right?

Hopefully with the Guelph Innovation District they've got a good secondary plan there, we'll be seeing developers like Windmill. There's more those emerging---their still a minority---but they will step into the space and deliver once they know what the rules are. 

But given their druthers---and particularly some of them in town like [name deleted]. ---Whoops! This is on the record, right?---some of the developers who have not made the switch to urban development would prefer to build in the suburban model because that's their business plan. Their whole supply chain serves that. Whereas Fusion---which I can say---

Hulet: The people at the old Woods site?

Farbridge: Yeah. They still do home building, started off as [single, detached houses] home builders---but they had to switch up their business model to do that. 

Hulet: I thought they got pushed by the local community---.

Farbridge: No, the did a great job on engagement, but they were also responding to the secondary plan. The secondary plan said that's what we want there.

There were some secondary things that the community engagement helped with---such as access and bridges and things like that. But the main elements were from the secondary plan. That's an example of a developer who stepped up and delivered the vision of the secondary plan. 

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This is the front of the Fusion Homes site on Arthur St, (the old Woods site.)
Photo by Bill Hulet

Here's a shot of the same property from the rear, facing the Speed River.
The old stone building at the end of the lane is the Spring Mill Distillery.
Photo by Bill Hulet

Hulet: So Council has to show the leadership and the business community will show up?

Farbridge: Yup. Not all of them.

[Karen laughs.]

Some of them with bitch and complain to the end of days. But there will always be the clever businessman that recognizes an opportunity and switches up their business model to deliver. 

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I think this post is already a bit longer than some people like to read---and this is a good place to stop---so I'll leave off here. Farbridge still has some interesting things to say, but I'll leave that for the next post. 

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Furthermore, I say to you---climate change must be dealt with!

Making Up Our Minds: The Importance of "Fiddles"

I was involved in various forms of activism for many years. Amongst other things, I've sat on the board of directors of OPIRG, was Communications Chair for the Green Party of Canada, had a lot of influence in the development of the constitutions of the Green Party of Ontario and Canada, had a hand in organizing the Grand River Watershed Congress and the Municipal Democracy Movement, ran an activist school titled the Public Interest College, helped organize and negotiate with MacDonald's Canada to get rid of extruded polystyrene clam shells, started and built the Guelph Green Party Constituency Association into one of the strongest ones in Canada, started and ran a local currency system that had 23 downtown stores accepting my "LETS Bucks", sued Walmart on behalf of a coalition of religious faiths to help preserve the Saint Ignatius property, and, probably other things I've forgotten about.

As a result of this ludicrous life I've been exposed to several different ways that organizations make collective decisions. I absolutely loathe most of them. Several groups used something called "formal consensus decision-making". Basically, this is a system where each member of the group is allowed to "block" a decision that they don't agree with. In effect, each person present gets a veto over the majority. The theory of consensus suggests that the way to stop this from becoming a complete exercise in frustration is to "build consensus" through meaningful, gentle, conversation.

The problem with this is that even if there were no totally intransigent individuals totally uninterested in listening to other people's opinion---these groups seemed to be filled with them---this "consensus building" ate up enormous amounts of time at meetings. And because every decision was such a labour of Heracles, there were two results that I---and it seemed almost no one else---noticed.

First, because so many issues ended-up "falling off the clock", the paid staff and directors of these groups ended up making most of the decisions---simply because the democratic processes never did it for them. Funny thing, but most of these folks weren't too upset about this.

And second, many people were functionally excluded from taking part in decision-making. If you are a busy person---with young children, your own business, or, a demanding job---you just don't have the time to waste hours and hours of it in discussions that end up coming to nothing anyway. This meant that organizations I was involved with often ended up being controlled by people who---for one reason or another---had lots of time on their hands and no responsibilities. (I'll let the reader "fill in the blanks" on that.) As a general rule, these are not people with a great deal of experience in the practical realities of the world or much of an ability to "put themselves in other people's shoes".

Jo Freeman, photo by Carolmooredc.
Public Domain, c/o Wiki Commons

I'm not the only person who has recognized these problems. There was a paper written in 1970 by a woman named Jo Freeman who called this thing The Tyranny of Structurelessness. Her basic thesis was that if a group doesn't create practical decision-making structures that deal with the limitations that people's lives put on democracy, it invariably creates a vacuum that will be filled by an unaccountable elite.

Freeman's point of view is really unpopular with the people who already benefit from the existing system. I saw this starkly in a group (which will remain nameless) that I cajoled into bringing in some facilitators to talk about class issues. The person who led the workshop raised the idea that a group that holds meetings over the late afternoon, and which has very long meetings, will practically exclude participation by anyone who has a nine-to-five job or a young family. That was it. At that point (only 15 minutes into the presentation) the young, "hip", activist-types who ran the organization (and had the time to attend the marathon meetings) started screaming, hooting and hollering, and, shut down the workshop. The consultant we'd brought in was blase about the reaction and seemed resigned to this sort of response to the concerns he raised.

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I'm not raising this issue because I want to slag activist organizations. Please remember that for all my carping, I spend decades of my life working with these groups. But they were useful to me because they allowed me to understand the absolutely huge importance that process has for democracy. The point I learned was that a flawed process can result in an organization being fundamentally incapable of representing the best intentions of the membership.

This is a lesson that I've taken and used to look at the world around me. For example, people routinely forget that the way we count the votes in elections has a huge impact on the results. But consider this. Doug Ford's Conservatives won 76 seats with 40.5% of the popular vote in 2018, whereas under Tim Hudak they only won 28 seats with 31.3% in 2014. That means that a 29% increase in the popular vote translated into a 270% increase in seats and a majority government. The same sort of math holds for all the parties----Kathleen Wynn's Liberals won 58 seats with only 38.7% of the vote in 2014.

This fact is well known, if difficult to find out. One of the things that's always intrigued me about the percentage of votes cast is how difficult it used to be to find this anywhere. It is difficult---perhaps impossible---to find on the Elections Ontario website (I tried to find it when writing this editorial, but gave up.) Journalists used to almost never report it, although I did find a reference in the CBC. Where you usually can find it is Wikipedia, which is "the exception that proves the rule". My unsupported hypothesis is that Elections Ontario doesn't want to high-light how undemocratic "first-past-the-post" is, and, the mainstream media doesn't want to detract from the "horse-race" coverage that dominates most coverage. "Small change in voter support leads to overwhelming majority" headlines just don't work in that frame. The Wikipedia is written by independent volunteers without any sort of hidden agenda---which is why it is usually the source to find percentages.

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Years ago I had my portrait taken by a local artist as part of a commission he'd got to paint downtown Guelph's "characters". It was fascinating to watch him create a full oil painting in one short hour. As he said "Yes, one hour of work---and a lifetime of practice". That's what writing these stories is like for me. I've put in more than 40 years at various projects. The result is what you get. If you think that they are worth reading, why not subscribe through Patreon or put something in the Tip Jar? (Thanks Oxanna and Warren for being so awesome!) If you can't afford that, why not share through social media? 

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I have a term for these subtle little games that people use to manipulate the process. I call them "fiddles". It's hard to blame any particular individual when it comes to the creation of our absurd "first-past-the-post" system, but I certainly can lay blame on anyone who continues to support it. They know damn well that it is undemocratic, but they simply like things the way they are and to Hell with the idea that everyone should be represented in Parliament. I came across a more obviously constructed fiddle when I was involved with the Green Party of Canada.

There was a law that said that there had to be a publicly-accessible record of everyone who'd made a donation to a political party. The idea was that you could look this up and see who gave what to your local MP. The problem was that these were paper records and the listings were random. They weren't alphabetical, they weren't by size of donation, they were just tossed together like a salad. As you might imagine, this meant that it was a LOT harder to figure out cui bono (Latin for "who benefits") from a piece of legislation. This was so outrageous that a Green Party member took Elections Canada to court and a judge forced it to issue a electronic version of this list, so people could use a search engine to find the specific information that the paper version hid. (Unfortunately, I am working from memory here as I couldn't find any reference to this obscure piece of history that happened before the emergence of the World Wide Web.)

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These sorts of fiddles exist everywhere. A friend of mine once told me how the representatives of the unions representing autoworkers raised a lot of procedural quibbles in order to "wait out the clock" at an NDP convention when it looked like a resolution committing the party to moving towards an "car-free Ontario" might pass. (She was so disgusted by the experience that she tore up her membership and joined the Liberals.) I certainly saw lots in the Green Party. With a little research I'm sure I could find some for both the Liberals and Conservatives.

This sort of thing absolutely dominates our democracy, but most folks are totally oblivious to it. Indeed, if you rub many people's noses in this stuff, they will often say that they just don't understand what the fuss is all about. And yet I'm convinced that it is tremendously important in a wide variety of ways. In Ontario we currently have a party bent and determined to rip to pieces a wide variety of infrastructure to deal with a myriad of problems---most notably anything to deal with climate change. And yet, if you look at the polling numbers, a majority of the citizenry are really concerned about it.

Image from Abacus Data, used under "Fair Use" Copyright Provision

If it weren't for the first-past-the-post fiddle, we would probably have a NDP/Liberal coalition government that would never have ripped up the cap-and-trade agreement and wouldn't have cut funding for forest fires, flood prevention, and, Dao-only-knows-what other important infrastructure.

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It's not really all that surprising that people don't know about all this stuff. Almost no one who knows a lot about how political parties actually function bothers to try to explain it to them. It's a downer to learn this sort of thing, and you don't get people involved in your group by pointing out to them how they are getting manipulated by the folks "hidden behind the curtain". The people who do know have to decide whether or not they want to use these fiddles themselves, and thereby get ahead in the organization; or make a fuss about them and end up being vilified by the rank-and-file for "being negative" and the elites for exposing how they manage the democratic system to their ends. Most of this sort of thing just goes over the heads of the membership. That's a pity, as it is something that anyone who really wants to build a true democracy should spend some time thinking about. So as Jesus says in the Gospels: "He who has ears, let him hear".

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Furthermore, I say to you---climate change must be dealt with!

The Voice of the Unheard

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Image from
the Nobel Prize Committee, c/o Wiki Commons

People routinely use Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as an authority to suggest that there is never any justification for making waves. The idea is that he showed that it is possible to make great changes in society without using violence. And in some vague extrapolation, this has been expanded to suggest that there's ultimately no reason to create any disorder or even inconvenience in order to make the world a better place.  This does a profound disservice to the man, who was acutely aware of the necessity of rebellion in social progress. Moreover, while as a Christian he was generally opposed to violence, he was sensitive to why people become violent.

 “I think that we’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard. And, what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the economic plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years.”

I raise this point because there are a lot of people who believe that only "wack-a-doodles" ever become "activists". I realized this a long time ago during a boozy backyard get together with a person who has been a city Councilor in Guelph for many years. After several beers the conversation came around to the Residents for Responsible Development, the battle against Walmart, and, one of Guelph's past leading lights, Ben Bennett. I was completely taken aback when my host mentioned that he thought Ben was a nutcase because he was involved in a ten year battle to force Walmart to abide by the city's official plan.

This surprised me because the man who's beer I was drinking is someone I respect as an intelligent, thoughtful professional. And also because I know Ben really well (he was best man at my wedding) and I know that he is also a very thoughtful, intelligent person who had a career where he was a respected part of an important profession. (He retired as head of the Municipal Waste Association.)

I raise this point to illustrate a bit of a divide between people who are adamantly, absolutely, and, exclusively committed to electoral politics and others who see it as just part of an on-going and multi-faceted struggle between different elements of human society. The fact of the matter is that people forget that just about every worthwhile thing in our society came about not because rational elected officials decided that a certain thing would be in the public interest. Instead, what we consider human "rights" have come about only after hard struggle outside of the electoral process by people who were considered silly or dangerous "wack-a-doodles".

Another dangerous wack-a-doodle,
on a church's stained glass window, no less.
From a theology blog. 

People conveniently forget that Martin Luther King Jr. was absolutely vilified during his lifetime. He was a dangerous radical to a great many people. We forget that he was actually named after a much older, dangerous wack-a-doodle who had a death sentence hanging over his head most of his life and only survived because his monarch (Frederick the Wise) moved heaven-and-earth to keep him alive.  Sometimes it seems like we even forget that he was assassinated.

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I'm raising these points in this weekend editorial because I've been watching another movement that might become every bit as important---if not more---than the Southern civil rights movement in the 1960s. I'm talking about the group Extinction Rebellion. This is a group that is built around the idea that time is absolutely running out to deal with environmental issues, none of the political parties are giving them the priority that they deserve, and, we need to totally mobilize society in order to avoid total catastrophe. As a result, they are committed to pulling all the stops to raise the issue. This has included mass disruption of transportation in London England through blocking major bridges and the subway system. Another example was when protesters in the gallery of Parliament disrobed to show their absolute disgust with politicians who spend their time bickering over Brexit while ignoring the fact that the earth's life support systems are on the brink of failing catastrophically.

Image c/o Mother Board, original attribution to a Twitter Feed capture from Extinction Rebellion.
Used under the Fair Use provision of Copyright legislation.

I'm especially happy to see that Guelph has organized it's own chapter of Extinction Rebellion. It held it's first protest on April 15th. This helped local members "get their feet wet" and to help raise awareness for the proposal to have city Council declare a "climate emergency". No roads were closed and even though it was a sunny day, it was still far too cold for shaming nudity.

April 15th protest, next to the Church of Our Lady in Guelph, on it's way to City Hall. Photo by Bill Hulet

The underlying thesis of this group is absolutely bang on. Time is running out and we need to organize on the same sort of footing that we did in WWII to defeat Fascism. It's absolutely outrageous that in the face of frantic calls to action by the scientific community the Conservative party is building it's brand around sabotaging action to prevent climate change, and, the Prime Minister thinks he needs to build oil pipelines to get the "social license" to do his bit to stop the human race from committing suicide. This is just a tiny protest, but I hope that it will be a harbinger of greater things in the immediate future.

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After 31 years I've finally finished my day job. I hope that this means that I'll be able to spend more time working on stories and editorials. But it also means that my income has dropped considerably. And there are expenses associated with putting out the blog. For example, I just subscribed to another news source, the National Observer, which (with taxes) costs almost $150/year---but is an excellent source for provincial and Canadian news. That's part of the research that I have to do to keep the stories coming. So if you can afford it, why not think about helping out with my expenses by subscribing through Patreon or putting something in the Tip Jar? Every little bit helps. 

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Furthermore, I say to you---climate change must be dealt with!

People in the Know: Karen Farbridge, Part One

I find that the most interesting interviews seem to happen after someone has walked away from their careers rather than when they are in the middle of them.  I think that this is because when you are actually in office you are constrained by it to always think about how your words could affect your ability to function there. It's only when you've finally walked away from it that you have both the time to think clearly and objectively about what you've done, and, the freedom to say what you really think about things. To that end, I was happy to do an in-depth interview with Guelph's past mayor, Karen Farbridge.

I think it's important to mention in passing that Karen and I go way, way back. I first met her in 1978 and she is probably my oldest friend in the Royal City. But I hope that that doesn't mean that I can't do a fact-based, objective interview with her. Ultimately, that's for the readers to judge, though.

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Karen Farbridge, our 40th and 42nd Mayor in Guelph.
Original image from U. of Guelph website, used under
Fair Use provision, cropped by Bill Hulet

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Bill Hulet: I heard that there was a talk you gave in London shortly after you lost the 2014 election to Cam Guthrie. Could you tell me something about that?

Karen Farbridge: There is a woman [Ashley Good] who has a business---I think it's called "Fail Forward"---she does work with---I think Doctors Without Border, but it might be Engineers Without Borders---one of those. In addition to their standard annual report, they also do an annual "Failure Report" where they highlight the year's projects that didn't work and why. The point of her work is help institutions and individuals have conversations about failure without triggering a bunch of negativity. Or criticism. And how to do this without making people feel threatened.

She was brought in to facilitate a conversation at the 2015 Federation of Canadian Municipalities meeting about what I'd learned from what I hadn't been able to achieve as Mayor of Guelph.  

Bill Hulet: In business people often talk about the need to experiment, push the envelope, "break things", stuff like that. But in governance you aren't really supposed to take any risks at all.

Karen Farbridge: The problem with politics is that there's always somebody who will want to take advantage of somebody and sort of flog it. One example would be the SUBBOR [SUper Blue BOx Recycling] project. Remember that?

Bill Hulet: That was the idea that you grind up everything and ferment it and burn the gas to make electricity?

Karen Farbridge: Yeah. 

So the city had an opportunity and we took it. We provided some space for them to test their facility. And when they were not successful, and they were not able to demonstrate the effectiveness of their process---all of a sudden it became the city's failure. 

Right?

And it got caught up in the lawsuits and stuff like that. So they sued us. It turned out that that was pretty much how they made their money---through lawsuits. So it became somehow that the city had failed.

But we had taken a risk on an opportunity. At the end of the day we were whole. We didn't invest any of our own dollars into it. We didn't pay them to process our waste. It didn't work---but I'm sure we learned some things along the way. 

But we never were able to go back and learn from it---people just wanted to move on and forget about it.

Our administration did a really good job in the agreement of protecting the city, and we were left harm free. But it's an example of even when it wasn't a failure in any sort of measured way, it was used to be a negative story. And yet we'd taken advantage of an opportunity to see if it could have worked for the city. 

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The Saga of Eastern Power

SUBBOR is an interesting study all in it's own. It turns out that it was a project run by two brothers---Greg and Hubert Vogt---who are the owners of "Eastern Power Limited". And as Karen mentioned, this company has a history with governments and lawsuits---.

The earliest reference to Eastern Power Limited's legal issues is a throwaway reference in a story about Guelph's SUBBOR troubles in the magazine Solid Waste and Recycling:

(Interestingly, Eastern Power sued Italy’s largest municipal utility for $162 million in damages in the late 1990s over what Eastern called a breach of contract related to a deal to supply a plant to generate power from sewage in Rome. The Italian utility won and Eastern Power was ordered to pay $44,000 in costs.)

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find any other reference to this lawsuit or the project in general.

In addition, Eastern Power has built two facilities that recover methane gas from landfills which were used to create electricity. The first one was at Brock West in Pickering which was installed in 1991. A second facility was installed at the Keele Valley landfill in Maple in 1995. (This was the largest landfill in Canada and the third largest in North America when it was in use.) Both of these facilities seem to have functioned according to specifications.

The Brock West methane collection facility in Pickering.  Image from the Keneidan Construction website,
used under the Fair Use Copyright provision.

In 1998 Guelph signed a contract with Eastern Power Limited to provide a space plus a source of garbage so they could display their SUBBOR technology.  The federal government had already ponied up $7 million to fund the project, and, the company had a proven track record because of their success running the Brock West and Keele Valley methane collection plants---the second and third largest landfills in North America. The idea was that the Vogt brothers had three years to show that their technology worked and at a price that would save Guelph money over the existing Wet/Dry system. Unfortunately they were unable to do so in the time allotted and the city decided to sever the connection. At this point Eastern Power sued the city of Guelph for the sum of $32 million because of "breach of contract". Eventually the Ontario Superior Court ruled in Guelph's favour on all points and awarded Guelph $4.5 million in court costs.   

Where the saga of Eastern Power really hits "over-drive" is the next project it took on. As part of the Ontario Liberal government's program to phase out coal-powered electricity generation, it was decided that the province needed to build "Peaker power plants" that would be able to harmonize electricity production and demand on days when sustainable electricity production (ie:  wind, solar, hydro-electricity, etc) couldn't keep up to demand.

Eastern Power had a background in producing electricity from methane gas collected from landfills, so it could be argued that they had some expertise in natural gas electricity plant technology. But on the other hand, they weren't experienced at building peaker plants---so some eyebrows were raised when the Liberals awarded them a contract to build two plants in the Mississauga area in 2005 instead of the experienced Albertan company TransCanada Energy (yeah, these are the same people behind the Keystone Pipeline.) These two plants were to be called "Greenfield North" and "Greenfield South". The Northern project was soon scrapped because Eastern Power couldn't find investors willing to loan them enough money to build the project. (Remember this last sentence---it will be important later!)

An election was called, and the two proposed generation stations were immensely unpopular with voters in Mississauga, so the Liberals cancelled their contracts. (They also cancelled a similar generating station in Oakville, but the contract for that plant had been awarded to Trans Canada Energy, so it isn't relevant to this story.) When Ontario Power Authority lawyers started the process of working out a settlement with Eastern Power they found that because the company didn't have any experience building peaker plants, they had found it extremely hard to find the money they needed to build the project. The only investor they could find, EIG Management Company, asked them to put in some extremely cautious controls over the way they used the money. In 2011 EIG agreed to loan Eastern Power $260 million, but only under what an ordinary person would consider quite onerous terms.

According to a Globe and Mail article published on the 7th of November in 2012,

Eastern could only withdraw money monthly and only for approved construction expenditures. In return, Eastern had to pay 14-per-cent interest on borrowed funds and pledge control of the company and virtually all of its assets as collateral.

Because of these tight controls, by the time their peaker plant was cancelled, Eastern Power had actually received only $61 million dollars. But when this happened, EIG sued the Ontario Government for $300 million in damages---and eventually received $149 million (eg: $61 plus $88 million) in an out-of-court settlement.

To understand what happened, I'll have to explain something called a "yield maintenance" amount. Basically, this is the idea that when someone loans another person some money at a specific rate of interest over a specified length of time, they expect to not only get their money back but also with a predicted amount of interest. When the peaker deal "went South" because of politics, the investors expected to get some compensation for the interest they expected to receive when they loaned Easter Power all that money. This isn't an outrageous idea, but the amount seemed out of proportion to the money actually lent. Again, to quote from the Globe and Mail article,

That provision shocked Rocco Sebastiano, a lawyer at Osler Hoskin & Harcourt LLP retained by the Ontario Power Authority, a provincial agency in charge of the negotiations. "I fell off my chair when I saw the yield maintenance amount being claimed by EIG," Mr. Sebastiano said in an e-mail dated Nov. 24 to officials at the Power Authority. "This sounds like a usury charge to me frankly."

The reporters said they couldn't find anything in the documents they looked at to explain either why EIG thought that they were entitled to such an enormous amount of money for lost interest on its loan to Eastern Power, or, why the Ontario Power Authority ended up paying $88 million. The authors of the Globe article had their own conclusions:

The controversy over the cancelled power plant serves as a cautionary tale for governments as they increasingly shift services from bureaucrats to the private sector. The risks associated with these projects are supposed to be borne by the private sector. But when deals unravel, it is taxpayers who are left on the hook.

The story of Eastern Power doesn't end with big cash payouts, though. As part of its settlement with Ontario Power Authority, it requested a contract to build a peaker plant somewhere else. This meant that they were contracted to build the "Green Electron" facility near Sarnia. The plant was finished in April of 2017, but during it's construction there were numerous complaints by people working on the facility about unsafe working conditions. And when it was finally finished, there doesn't really seem to be much need for it. According to a Toronto Star article on the 25th of January in 2018, the plant was only needed for 33 days in the previous year.

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I've gone on something of a tangent here talking about SUBBOR, but it's important to remember why it is that I'm producing this news blog. As I see it, at least part of the point of news is to inform the worldview of the readership. And this means that sometimes it's useful to go off on wild tangents when one story leads to another. It's easy to fall prey to the idea that things can be easily explained by concise narratives. But life's not really like that. Pull on a string and you never really know what the result is going to be. And how we view the world around us can often be dramatically changed by the unexpected results of seemingly random inquiries.

What I find interesting in looking at the SUBBOR story is something that I've found in other stories I've researched:  the really pernicious and deceitful way business tries and often does take advantage of both government and the ordinary citizenry. This has made me a lot more skeptical about government/business partnerships. Anyway, if you like the "deep digs" that I do on local Guelph stories---no matter where I end up with them---please consider subscribing through Patreon or making a one time purchase through the Tip Jar. Even as little as $1/month is appreciated. 

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Digital manipulation of images by GIMP

Hulet: Is part of the reason why politicians get blamed for taking risks because the media likes to do "gotcha" stories and reporters don't have time to do any meaningful research?

Farbridge: I think that's more of it. I was looking through paper clippings from all through the 90's about the various things we did. 

The paper then---because they had more resources, more reporters, who had more time. They were a huge contributor to helping see projects move forward---like the Wet/Dry, water conservation and efficiency.

We didn't have social media at that time. So I wonder what it would have been like trying to do those projects with social media. But the papers played this really important role of being a place where there was good reporting on the facts, there was good presenting of debates---criticisms but also the positives. There was a balance of that in the community conversation. 

But then when you get into the mid 2,000s with the rise of social media the paper's stories just continued to decline. At that point they only had time to go after the "gotchas"---at a very superficial level. And that would feed the social media stuff, and all of a sudden the negative stories had this platform and there was nothing counter-balance them. 

Put a positive story on FaceBook and it goes nowhere. Put a negative story on and it's shared---people put little crying icons, stuff like that. It's hysterical. There's lots of research on it---I've tested it myself. 

Hulet: And then there're examples like "Ontario Proud" that are specifically feeding that. If you have the analytics in front of you, can can tell what works and what doesn't.

Farbridge:  That's one of the reasons why I think it's gotten worse. Rob Fords and Doug Fords have always been on our councils---but there's always been a whole lot of other voices to put what they said into a context or perspective. Now it seems that those voices are amplified in a system that is driven digitally through social media and those analytics. Those voices are getting amplified out of proportion to what the larger population might believe. 

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Hulet: What have you learned about the difference between governing a city, and, being a politician and getting elected---so you have the opportunity to govern the city. I've always thought that these were two things that are very different, and are sort of at loggerheads with one another.

Farbridge: Yeah. No they are totally different. I'm much more comfortable in the governing role. I don't like the election role. I never did. How I managed that was to put together a good team who were able to work in that world and have them lead it. And where I haven't done well was when I haven't had that team. 

My second observation is it used to be that campaigns used to be six or eight weeks. Maybe a little bit of runway coming up. But not much because that would always be in the summer time. So things really just hit in September and October, you had the elections. They were over and you got to governing. 

Now the elections go everyday, the entire year, every year of the term. They just go constantly. It's not just at a municiipal level, it's at the federal level and the provincial level. The campaign is going all the time. 

Hulet: So you felt even in the middle of a term you had to be very careful about what you said, or, think about the election?

Farbridge: It's about time. There's only so much time. 

A woman who's doing her Master's---. I met her about a year ago now---. She asked the question "How do mayors in Canada express their influence and power?" We don't have a "weak mayor" system---that's a wrong use of the term. (That's where the mayor only has one vote on Council---as you know.) 

Anyway, this woman interviewed mayors across the country, and she defined things into three areas. And how she said it made a lot of sense to me. 

One is sort of bucket is executive execution, another bucket is community, and, the other bucket was politics. Her thesis is that with the resources that mayors are given in Canada that they can only operate in one effectively. Maybe a little bit in one of the others. And it depends on the context of the municipality. 

So, for example, John Tory [Mayor of Toronto] has to spend a lot of time in the political bucket because he has forty odd councilors. So he has to know who he has "lined up" on his votes before going into a Council meeting. 

Nenshi [Naheed Nenshi, Mayor of Calgary] is completely in the community bucket and has an abysmal political record in Council in terms of getting his stuff supported---because he spends his time connecting people with his lost cats over social media.

Hulet: So he's what they call "a retail politician"?

Farbridge: Yes

So when I reflected on that for my own various terms---.

My first term---because it was such a split Council---I spent a lot of time on the political side of it. A lot of time engaging Councilors. Making sure they had what they needed, making sure they were comfortable with the vote---to ensure we could move forward with decisions. 

In my second term as mayor I was able to put a lot of time and effort into execution---more fundamental governance stuff. So once Council had made a decision I put my focus on making sure Council's decision got implemented. Cause there's "no connect" between Council making policy and those policies actually getting implemented, right?  Unless you put attention to it. 

I was able to put a lot of time into the execution and I had a CAO [the Chief Administrative Officer---the person who runs the city and manages all the non-elected staff] at the time---Hans Loewig---who was very much into getting things done. So we were a great balance in terms of getting the Council's direction, and giving him the mandate, and getting things done. 

And then the third term. I should have switched to community, but I didn't. I stayed in execution and was up against an opponent who lives entirely in community: not very good politically, hasn't had a good political record, and doesn't govern. And so I lost for lots of reasons---but that was one of the contributing things. And I felt that pressure---and I was absolutely doing more in that space. But there's only so much time in the day. 

Campaigning takes a lot of time and energy. You know. Going to every event and tweeting it out and putting it on FaceBook, taking a picture wherever you go. If you watched Frank Valeriote and Lloyd Longfield now---Liz Sandals [past Guelph MPP] never did this---they are never present. They are never in the moment governing. They are running their election. 

[Karen breaks out laughing.]

They are constantly on their phones tweeting and just doing the social media stuff. So it's all about the attention span and band width. You can't be running an election and governing at the same time---and do them both well. 

Hulet: That's certainly what Mike Schreiner is doing. He's like the Ever-Ready Bunny---he's everywhere.

Farbridge: And I think that social media has raised this level of expectation---that somehow this is the job of the elected official. But they're actually supposed to do a job, and elected to govern, and sure there are community pieces to that, but the demands today on a Mayor to go to events compared to in the 2,000s---there is a night-and-day difference. And it's been exponential, its not about the growth of the city, it's about people have this expectation of accessibility that social media provides. 

So if you're not being seen to be doing it, somehow you're not doing your job. 

And Liz never got onto social media, she got criticised for not doing it. But she really made a decision---I don't know if she did it consciously or unconsciously---but she kept elections to elections, and once she was elected, she governed. 

She went to a lot of community events. But even there---I admired her---she wouldn't go to every event, every year. Take for example some fundraiser that happens every year, she'd go every other year. This set the precedent that she would not be at everything every year, every time. But the pressure was absolutely the other way. 

Hulet: It's not just politicians. I'm on five different social media accounts---flogging the blog, flogging the books. And the sad thing is that all this effort actually works. It's just part of being a writer now.

Farbridge: And artists, and musicians---same kind of thing. Right?

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I think that this is a good place to pause for now. I'll do some more work and get the next part out ASAP.

Furthermore, I say to you---climate change must be dealt with!

The Tyranny of Numbers

There are certain key concepts that are essential to understanding the world we inhabit. Once you understand them, you can see their influence in everything around you---but until you do, much remains mysterious. One of them is the increasing influence of numbers on every aspect of life.

Let me give you a specific example. I once had a conversation with a carpenter where he talked about the nature of the trade in this day and age. He mentioned to me that a local home builder (I won't name names) expected his framers to work so fast that they were forbidden to "crown" the floor joists in the houses they were banging together. The following YouTube video explains what this means, but basically is a very easy-to-do step in building a home that objectively makes the final finished home better to live in. 

Why would a home builder do such a thing? It isn't just greed, although that probably has something to do with it. There are other considerations. The more man-hours it takes to build a house, the more it costs. And people buying homes often don't really know much about construction so they rely upon the square footage of floor space to define how "good" a house is.

I realized this fact when I worked as a chimney sweep, many years ago. A lot of that job entailed doing jobs for people with money---lots of money. I climbed onto the roofs of many a "McMansion" and quite a few real ones too. They were huge, but they were often very shoddily built. You notice this when you go into the basement to check on the base of the flue or walk around the building to place your ladders. 

They also often had the most ridiculous furnishings. Beautiful, custom-made bookshelves filled with Reader's Digest condensed books (the book spines all look nice); Bang &  Olufsen stereos with albums by Slim Whitman on the turntable. (I learned that money doesn't buy taste.)

If you don't know anything about home construction and you have never developed any sort of aesthetic sense, then the only thing you can really do is buy the biggest house and fill it with the most expensive furnishings that you can afford. A developer is just like any other business person, he has to create product that customers want, not what he thinks that they should. Hence the McMansion.

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If you think that the posts I put out are useful, why not share them with your friends over social media? If you can afford it, why not subscribe through Patreon or put something in the Tip Jar? Even a couple dollars a month helps. 

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I'm not writing this post to talk about housing. (I've certainly flogged that horse long enough!) I'm just using it as a concrete example of something that's happening all through our society. On one level, it's the triumph of quantity over quality, or, of number over just about everything else.

Most of this is invisible to ordinary people, but you often hear rumblings about what's going on. Recently, for example, I heard a podcast on the CBC where someone explained why Google offers us gmail for free. It turns out that they have developed software that reads our email and that allows it to develop a personal profile of each of us. And this is what has allowed Google to personalize advertising to our particular personal interests and preferences. Indeed, most of the "Google Suite" (ie: Google Calendar, Maps, News, etc) harvests information from our daily life. This isn't to say that there are actual human beings doing any of this, but rather that an Artificial Intelligence (AI) program is creating increasingly detailed files on each of us. In practice this means that when we send an email to Aunt Martha saying that the wife had a baby Google can read the email and send us an ad for a diaper service.

A lot of people get "the creeps" over this, but I'm more sanguine about it than most. That's because I grew up in a very old-fashioned part of the country, and privacy there was almost non-existent. Everyone knew what everyone else was doing almost instantly. Most folks don't realize this, but privacy has pretty much only existed in the city---and there it was generally only a part of a very few people's life. The poor lived cheek bye jowl with lots of others and the wealthy were always on display to their servants. The results could be awful for people with something to hide (religious dissenters, gays, people at odds with authoritarian governments, etc), but that's simply been the way it was for most of human history. If you are afraid of the neighbours (or Google, FaceBook, et al) ratting you out to the Inquisition or the Secret Police, you have to "take measures" to protect yourself. 

What I'm concerned about in this editorial is the situation I raised in the example of naive people buying very large and expensive---yet none-the-less shoddily built---houses. That is to say, we can do all sorts of useful things with numbers, but it is tremendously important that we collect and use the right ones instead of the wrong ones.

And it's important to understand that the numbers that are being created by the AIs that businesses like Google, FaceBook, Amazon, etc, use have been created in secret and are not being disclosed to the citizenry. That means that our society is increasingly being built around decisions that are not only not obvious in their implication, but that ordinary citizens---or even appointed officials---aren't being allowed to access. Increasingly, some of the key elements of our society are being built in proprietary "black boxes".

If you wonder what I'm talking about, I heard a podcast recently where the host asked a simple question. "If FaceBook's AI can't effectively keep fake news and white nationalists off FaceBook, how come I've never seen any pornography or appeals to join ISIS on it? What's the difference?" The implication is that there is something about the hidden, internal decision-making culture of the business that has been "baked into" the software; and it's never been a big enough priority for the executives to get this problem fixed.

I would suggest that it's about time that our government got interested in fixing the problems that come from bad data analysis. We have regulations to stop butchers from selling tainted meat. We have regulations to stop selling appliances that can electrocute you too. Why can't we have regulations to stop on-line businesses from creating shoddily-built algorithms that spread fake news and hate?

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Furthermore, I say to you---climate change must be dealt with!

A Short History Lesson

When I was still involved in politics one of the things that I usually found myself arguing with people over were constitutions. People love the idea that it's possible to come up with a set of rules that can deal with any and all situations, and that if you just set them up so it's almost impossible to change them, you've eliminated all opportunities for wrong-doing. The problem with this idea---and which it was decidedly hard to convince many people about---is that it is pretty much impossible to predict all the different problems that any institution is going to face in the future. And in those situations all a constitution does is give people of ill-will the ability to stymie the ability of the majority to deal with those problems.

I've been thinking about this issue lately because I've heard a lot of constitutional fundamentalists in the media and in one-on-one conversations. To hear them speak, there should never be, is absolutely none, and, it is horribly wrong to even suggest that there should be any "wiggle room" with regard to any constitutional issue. Some of this has been raised vis-a-vis the Lavalin affair, some of it about the carbon tax lawsuit. There is some push-back, but I have yet to hear anyone defend the idea that this fundamentalism is an intrinsically bad idea. To that end, let me describe a couple incidents from history.

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Sir Arthur Currie, Painting by Sir William Orpen.
Public Domain Image c/o Wiki Commons

The guy in the painting about was Sir Arthur Currie, also known as "Old Guts and Gaiters", was acknowledged by almost everyone as one of the best Generals in WWI. He rose in rank during the war from being a "Gunner" (what most people know as a "private") in the militia before the war to being a full General after it---which would now be a "Four Star General" in popular understanding. He owed his meteoric rise in rank because he had the ability to figure out how to win battles without slaughtering his men---something all the armies involved had a hard time doing. (Here is a popular history video that explains some of the issues.

The important point I want to raise is that this guy was an embezzler who stole money from his militia unit. There is absolutely no doubt about it---he was guilty as Hell. Moreover, the government of Canada was absolutely sure about it. They discussed whether or not they wanted to keep him on as their top general. (I once read that the British Prime Minister actually said that if the war had lasted another year, he would have put Currie in charge of all the British, Commonwealth, and, Imperial armies---he was that well regarded.) But the cabinet decided that they didn't care about the "independence of the criminal justice system" or "the rule of law", they needed this guy in charge of the army to save the lives of Canadian soldiers and shorten the war. The scandal was hushed up. 

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt, official Presidential Portrait
Public Domain Image, c/o Wiki Commons

I hope that this portrait is a little more well-known than Arthur Currie's. It's FDR, the author of the "New Deal" that made the lives of so many people easier to bear during the horrors of the Great Depression and WWII. He wasn't caught committing any crimes---like Currie---but he did do something that would and did make most constitutional fundamentalists head's spin. When the Supreme Court of the United States kept declaring key provisions of the New Deal "unconstitutional"---effectively vetoing them---Roosevelt successfully threatened the judges and forced them to back down. 

The way he did this was by having the Democrats in Congress introduce something called the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937.  The idea behind this was to "pack" the Supreme Court with judges who would support New Deal legislation and undue undo the veto power of the existing conservative judges. There were fundamentalists who were opposed to this legislation, and it eventually failed to pass through procedural delay. But the mere threat of this legislation, plus the enormous support that Roosevelt received from voters, was enough to get the judges to stop obstructing important legislation and allow Roosevelt to built the foundations of a welfare state in the USA.

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One of the reasons I decided to write this blog was because mainstream journalists have---by and large---lost the ability to put any story into a context. That is to say, they just repeat statements by leaders without any attempt to understand how well what is being said actually "jives" with reality. Part of this is probably because they are constantly rushing from pillar to post in order to keep their jobs. Part of it is also because they are taught that doing research and developing context are not "objective reporting", and that it is better to just write down what an important person says without trying to figure out if it actually makes any sense. 

Well we can all see how well that's served the general public---. 

Anyway, I am trying to do things differently. And if you have some disposable income, why not send some of it my way through Patreon or the Tip Jar? It sends a message to all and sundry that this is the news you like to read. (Thanks Sara for being so awesome!) 

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Constitutions do safeguard the rights of people. But it is profoundly naive to think that they are able to do this through some sort of magical legalism. There have been lots wonderful protections enshrined in the law that give people all sorts of great rights---that were totally ignored in practice. Blacks were supposed to be protected from lynching all through the Jim Crow era---but that didn't stop people from erecting scaffolds in town squares to kill them. Constitutions and laws are only as good as the general will of officials and ordinary people to live up to them. Moreover, they are only useful insofar as they benefit ordinary people. Far too often they are used as excuses to prevent long overdue reforms. And there are times when this is obvious to most people---like when a decision had to be made to promote or imprison Sir Arthur Currie, or, to abide by the Supreme Court or threaten it. But there are also times when the decision hangs in the balance and time is of the utmost importance. With the current court case over the legality of a federal carbon tax one of those situations faces us. If the judiciary decides in favour of the people seeking to sabotage any move towards avoiding a climate change catastrophe, this is one of those cases. If so, the government needs to punish any judges who stand in the way of preventing human suicide through ecological catastrophe. 

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Furthermore, I say to you---climate change must be dealt with!