I was at a climate-related event last week and I found myself somewhat disappointed. It wasn't because the turnout was small---it was actually quite large and included a great many community leaders. What saddened me was that it was so badly organized that I left early and I realized that this very worthy initiative would probably never, ever get such a good turnout again. (I know I'll never go to another of their events.) I asked around and found quite a few others that had the same reaction.
What the group was and which individuals were involved is irrelevant, so I won't mention them by name. What is important is the traps that they fell victim to are quite common. I've seen the same sort of thing happen over and over again in the past 40 odd years, and I thought that it might be useful to go over them in an Op Ed.
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The first thing I noticed was the drumming group. The first time I came across drumming was long ago at a Green Party conference. Some person thought that it was important to drum loudly and constantly at a convention where people were breaking off into little groups to do the networking and caucusing that is essential to doing the work of a large organization spread across an immense geographic area.
I don't know about you, dear reader, but I find it very hard indeed to think when someone is playing a very loud drum in an enclosed space. This is because drums are very loud. (This is why they have been used by tribal groups and the military to spread information over long distances---outside, where they belong.) Moreover, because they are rhythmic, they also catch the attention. That's why people play drums when dancing or marching---they take over our minds on a subconscious level and dominate our thinking. But that is also why they are enormously distracting in any sort of event where people are trying to talk about important issues.
It's important to understand that even before the event officially begins, there is still a lot of very important informal community building taking place. People join together in little knots, people talk together, and, get to know each other. Loud drumming---if not any type of music---keeps this from happening. That's why at the very least I would always ban drumming from any event where we are trying to build a political movement. (After the meeting is fine, but not during.)
I must not be the only person annoyed with drums if someone
actually went to the effort of creating this sign.
First rule of thumb: Don't allow drumming at any political event!
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During this event I bumped into a friend who reads this blog. He asked me how much money I'm making off this blog because he's thinking about subscribing. He was genuinely surprised that I'm making a grand total of about $70/month. He had assumed it was a lot more. Well, that is the way it is with local news bloggers in a world where everyone assumes that they should let "the other guy" pay for content on the Web. If you'd like to subscribe, even a buck a month is appreciated: you can use Patreon or PayPal. Also, further down the page you will see an advertisement for the showing of a documentary about the Robo Call scandal. Remember, if you want to advertise an event, group, or, business the prices are very reasonable and I'm open to barter. Email me at thecloudwalkingowl@gmail.com for more info.
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The second thing I noticed was the time when the event started: 6:00 pm. This wasn't an issue to me, as I am retired (well, sort of) and I live by myself (at least when my wife isn't visiting). I'm not someone with a child or parent that I have to provide meals for. Nor am I someone who has to come home from work exhausted and then start the "second shift"---like a lot of young parents. But when I have organized meetings I've learned that if you start anything before 7:00 pm, you are placing a lot of people onto the horns of a dilemma---do I "skimp" on the home life stuff, or, do I just forget about the meeting?
What made the decision to start so early even worse, was that the organizers didn't force the meeting to start at 6:00 sharp. For anyone who rushed around "moving heaven and earth" to get the meal done early, etc, the fact that they ended up twiddling their thumbs anyway is irritating, if not infuriating.
Oh gee hon, time to go to that environmental group meeting!
Image from Forbes magazine. Used under the "fair use" rule.
Second rule of thumb: Choose times that work for as many people as possible!
Things just got worse from here on in.
There were a number of speakers. In fact there were far too many speakers. In fact, one fellow attendee said the thought that there had been a series of boxes that the organizers felt that needed "checking off" before they felt that they had any legitimacy. There was a student speaker, there was someone from Extinction Rebellion, there was a gay speaker, there was a farmer speaking, there was a First Nation's speaker---. (I don't know if there were any others, as after two hours of this torture I had to leave Dodge before I had a brain aneurysm.)
What made this even worse was that even though the speakers were supposed to limited to a specific set time, the time keeper totally lost control of the event and people just went on and on and on long past the time that they were allotted to speak.
Even worse still was the fact that while I have no doubt that the people chosen to talk are wonderful people, most of them were absolutely terrible speakers. With maybe one exception, none of them seemed to have put any effort into writing a speech or working on their presentation. Instead, what we got was a bunch of rambling, disjointed, "stream of consciousness" talk---some of which was accompanied with some power point slides.
Third rule of thumb: Get good speakers, not too many, and, force them to be brief!
This fits into a fourth issue. People who are engaged with the world tend to be people who are generally time poor. I saw a lot of people in the audience who were city Council members, people running in the Federal Election, or people who are involved in a great many important projects in the city. These people are really, really, really busy trying to make the world a better place. And they believed in the concept that this meeting was based upon. But I suspect that they won't come back again to anything this group ever does. That's simply because they will work out a calculus in their heads that says "where is the best place to put my time"---and it won't be going to another one of these meetings.
Over-arching rule of thumb: NEVER, EVER WASTE THE TIME OF PEOPLE WHO ATTEND YOUR EVENT---IT IS THE MOST PRECIOUS THING THAT THEY GIVE TO YOU!!!! &&&&
Interested in the Guelph Robo-Call scandal? Come to a special "pre-release" screening of the documentary that uncovers the truth behind voter suppression in Canada. 2:00 pm Saturday Sept 28, at the Bookshelf Cinema. Tickets at EventBrite.com, or, $20 at the door (but it might well sell out---).
&&&& Finally, because of my long experience I think that I can identify the ultimate cause behind why all these mistakes were made at that meeting. The people organizing the event thought that they could make things easy by foisting the organization onto university students. This looks like an "easy out" because students can get spaces on campus for free and they "have time". (Actually, from my experience a lot of students are just as harried as anyone else because many have to balance heavy course loads with part time jobs.) There's also the idea that if students organize something on campus, that means a lot of students will show up. I'm a little annoyed about that---especially with regard to environmental issues. The fact of the matter is that students have precious little influence. They are young, don't have much money, and, aren't in control of much of anything. The people who are really screwing up the world around us are their parents and grand parents. And given the time frame of environmental issues the commonly held idea that "it's up to the young people to solve the problem" is simply a recipe for disaster. Indeed, it's always been not much more than just a prescription for "kicking the can down the road".
Ask Greta what she thinks about the idea that "it's up to the
young people" to save the planet.
From the Times of India, Fair Use copyright provision.
On a practical level, the problem with this idea is that students are young and, by definition, they don't have a lot of experience. Organizing is a skill set just like any other, and you don't do anyone any favour by just throwing them in the deep end of the pool and expecting them to learn how to swim. We have a lot of people in this community with a wealth of knowledge about how to organize good events. I'm not saying that they need do all the work organizing, but there should be some effort to pair these people up with enthusiastic young people who don't know much about what to do. The work load gets shared around, the job gets done well, and, young people learn how to do the job right. My final rule of thumb: Organizing is just as much a skill as any other---we need to teach young people how to do it well instead of just relying on them to figure it out through trial and error!
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Please note that the above is constructive criticism, it's not destructive. I'm not saying that I'm perfect or that anyone associated with this event is bad or even incompetent. Instead, I'm saying that it could have been done better. If anyone is at fault, it's the entire community that I suspect left people flailing who probably should have had more support. And I think we can all benefit from learning from the experience.
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Furthermore, I say onto you the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!
This morning I had the unpleasant experience of spending a half hour listening to a Guelph candidate in the federal election. I won't go into details, but I haven't heard such a dense avalanche of total nonsense for a very, very long time. It got me thinking about how tremendously fragile a democracy can be.
People naively assume that all you need for a functioning democracy are relatively fair elections. But if you've really thought about it, that's the end result of developing several foundational cultural norms such as freedom of speech, the rule of law, a vigorous free press, and such. When I was listening to this Niagara of idiocy I got increasingly agitated because it was obvious that this fellow's campaign seems to be based on the principle of undermining and destroying at least one of them: the commitment to anchor policy on facts by using logic.
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Most people don't think about the relationship between philosophy and science, and, democracy. But I believe that it wasn't just a coincidence that ancient Athenian participatory democracy flourished during the time of the great Greek philosophers, or, that modern liberal democracy came into being during the time of the European scientific enlightenment.
If you read Plato I think you get evidence of this relationship by considering the reoccurring theme of the disagreement between Socrates and the Sophists, or, between philosophy and rhetoric.
Philosophy is based on the premise that there are rules that one should follow in conversations that allow you to gain new information about the world. I think modern people often forget what a tremendously radical idea this really was. Just about every other society in the world at that time was based upon tradition, religious authority, and, brute force. People believed what they believed primarily because they had always believed it, because the priest told them, or, because if they said anything different---bad things would happen to them.
But something unprecedented happened in Greece---and Athens in particular. A space opened up in society that allowed people to ask the "unpleasant questions" that would usually result in getting the crap beaten out of you (or worse) anywhere else. As a result, the city state became a place where brilliant thinkers from all over the Mediterranean came to live. And they met and talked with each other, which allowed them to sharpen their insights.
I don't know much about ancient Athenian democracy, but it seems clear to me that there had to be a relationship between the philosophers and the assembly, because both are based on the idea that truth emerges from a conversation between people.
Plato. A Roman copy from a portrait made at the time of the philosopher's death. Made by the sculptor Silanion. From the Boehringer Collection. Image c/o the Wiki Commons
Unfortunately, at the same time that people like Heraclitus, Thales, Plato, Socrates, and, Aristotle were trying to work out the way to tell a good argument from a bad one, there was also a counter-current of people who were figuring out the best way to confuse the public in order to get what they wanted.
Probably the most infamous example was one of Socrates' students: Alcibiades. He sought to build his political career by promoting an unnecessary adventure that involved invading Sicily. The result was a catastrophic defeat that involved the annihilation of the cream of the Athenian military. It never recovered, and eventually Athens was conquered by Sparta. And the Athenian citizens lost their democracy.
Philosophy survived, primarily because it was excellent training for members of the elite who would then go on to study rhetoric. With democracy totally discredited---because it seemed to invariably result in demagogues like Alcibiades being put into power---the paragon of societies became Republics, like Rome. These were oligarchies: societies where power resided in a wealthy elite. Politics and voting still occurred---which meant that rhetoric was considered an essential part of an ambitious man's education. But never again would butchers, bakers, stone masons, and, the guys who pulled an oar in a war galley have a say in how their society was run---at least until modern times.
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I generally ask individuals to support the "Back-Grounder" through Patreon and PayPal. But this time I'd like to ask businesses and community groups to consider purchasing an advertisement. If you provide me a graphic that I can incorporate into the body of the article (like the one that follows), it will be something that isn't taken out by an ad-blocker because it is permanently incorporated into the article.
This is an important point. I keep track of the number of hits on an article, and old articles are repeatedly looked at by lots of people. Unlike the newspapers which end up lining bird cages, washing windows, and, starting wood stoves---the articles in the "Back-Grounder" continue to be read months and years after they are published. The other thing to consider is that the readership of the "Back-Grounder" is concentrated on a very specific demographic: local, progressively-minded, engaged individuals. If you have a business or organization that is based on this slice of the population, these people are "the sea" that your business swims in. My readership is tiny compared to national blogs---but it consists only of people who would be of interest to you!
My rates are also affordable. I'm only asking a few bucks for an ad---and I'm quite open to things like in-store credits and barter. So why not give the Back-Grounder a try? You can email me at: thecloudwalkingowl@gmail.com .
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Liberal democracy (the modern form) arose during a similar period of philosophical exuberance. Only the driver for this wasn't logic, but rather science. The European enlightenment was driven by the "new learning" that came from people like Galileo, Newton, and so on. The tremendous growth in human knowledge that grew out of the scientific method emboldened philosophers to look at their societies in much the same way that the experimental method had dramatically changed people's understanding of astronomy, physics, medicine, chemistry, and so on.
These people ceased to look towards some divine basis for government and were instead "empiricists". This was the idea that human society could be studied just like any other part of the world around us. And that we could use the insights that arise from that investigation could be used to improve how we make collective decisions.
John Locke. Line drawing by Crovonrosso. Image c/o the Wiki Commons.
One of the great fathers of Enlightenment political theory was John Locke who said
"whatever I write, as soon as I discover it not to be true, my hand shall be the forwardest to throw it into the fire."
This is totally at odds with rhetoric, which is used not to find the truth, but rather to "score points", convince people, and, amass power.
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This gets me back to the noxious individual I had to listen to this morning. I suspect that he genuinely believes what he said. But if he does, it's because he's expended very little effort in trying to find out if what he says is actually true. That is especially pathetic because we live currently live in an age when it is so incredibly easy for a person to find the facts about most contentious issues.
Just to give one tiny example. When asked about whether or not his party is in favour of the pipeline to the West coast, our stalwart candidate said "Alberta is the engine driving the Canadian economy". I'm not suggesting that he invented this idea, but he was certainly helping to spread it. And this is something that it is very easy to "truth-test". It took me about a minute to use Google to look up the Gross Domestic Product of Ontario ($728 billion), Quebec ($338 billion) and Alberta ($335 billion) in 2018. Indeed adding together all the numbers for all the provinces and territories, it turns out that the Alberta GDP only comes to about 17% of the total Canadian economy. So in actual fact Alberta isn't "the engine driving the Canadian economy" by any stretch of the imagination---. (Repeating this statement over and over and over and over again simply doesn't make it so.)
The problem with this guy isn't that he's wrong. It's that if you point out that he is wrong, he won't change what he says. He certainly won't be like John Locke and "be the forwardest to throw it into the fire". That's because he isn't interested in finding the truth, but rather in pushing his agenda.
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And that's tremendously dangerous in a democracy. If enough politicians, journalists, and, voters stop caring about whether something a politician says is actually true, then we start edging towards the bad old world where everything gets decided on the basis of money and brute force.
That's the thing about democracy. All societies have to figure out how how to make decisions and divide up scarce resources. Throughout most of human history this has been done through tradition or brute force. What is unique about both ancient Athens and modern liberal democracies like Canada is that---at least in principle---they do it by having an honest and open debate between different points of view. The idea is that this conversation is the best way for truth to assert itself and that the general opinion of the mass of citizens usually comes to---if not the best, at least a "good enough" decision.
Unfortunately, this isn't always the case. Sometimes people temporarily lose their way and become overwhelmed by their emotions---both individually and collectively. When they do, fast-talking, "slick Willies" can use rhetoric to bamboozle them into voting against their best interests. That's how ancient Athens ended up sending their fleet off to it's destruction. It's also how the people of Germany pissed-away the Weimar Republic. It's also how Canada could sleep walk its way into a climate catastrophe.
It looks to me---from what I've seen in the last decade or so---that many politicians are trying transition from making the best logical, evidence-based argument to instead creating rhetorical appeals to people's emotions. That's why truth seems to be so much less important than "truthiness" today. It's also why the lies seem so much more brazen. People often aren't ashamed when you catch them fibbing---and many just ignore you if you point out an error. They just keep repeating the same bullshit over and over again, because telling bullshit is what they are all about.
The problem with emotions is that they are dangerous beasts. They need to be tamed and kept under control. We've seen where the politics of emotions can lead people---and it's a dark, dark place. That's what made the 20th century the time of enormous wars. Let's hope that we can collectively step back from this time of delusional politics and find some "new enlightenment" that can inform our political institutions.
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Furthermore, I say onto you the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!
I spent several decades involved in politics of one form or another and bring from that time a few ideas. One of them is something I call "political derangement syndrome". By that I mean the tendency of people to lose all perspective and common sense while pursuing political goals. I thought maybe a quick discussion of how this manifests itself might offer a useful perspective on the up-coming national election.
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You wouldn't know this from the way professional journalists tend to cover politics, but most of whether or not someone gets elected to office just boils down to luck. This manifests itself in a lot of different ways.
Doug Ford senior. Image
from the CBC, used under the
Fair Use copyright provision.
One aspect of this simply comes down to who your parents are. If you come from a political family, you will have a big "leg up" over people who don't. If you have any doubt, consider how well Doug Ford would have done if his father hadn't been having big political barbecues (ie: "Ford Fests") since Doug Ford Sr. was elected as a Conservative MPP 1995? Or if his brother hadn't been elected mayor? Or he hadn't inherited a lot of money?
Need I remind anyone that Justin Trudeau wouldn't be a Prime Minister if his father hadn't been one too?
Even if you don't come from a political dynasty, it is tremendously important to have parents who encourage you in "how to get along" with other people and the financial independence that is necessary to be willing to spend long periods of time working as a volunteer for political campaigns and organizations. That's where you get the expertise and connections necessary to be able to build the team you need to accomplish anything as a politician.
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Another aspect of "luck" boils down to being at the "right place in the right time". I have nothing but respect for Mike Schreiner, who I believe has done an excellent job as Guelph's new Green MPP. But he has benefited tremendously by a number of fortunate events.
First, he came to Guelph after decades of work by other people who built up the local Green Party riding association into one of---if not the very best---in the entire country. If he hadn't had that foundation to build upon, it's doubtful if he could ever have gotten elected.
Ray Ferraro, Ontario PC
candidate for Guelph, 2018.
From his Twitter account.
Fair Use provision.
Secondly, he benefited from a very strange election campaign where the conventional wisdom was that the Liberals were going to get trounced no matter what they did. At the same time the incumbent, Liz Sandals (again, a politician I hold in great respect), was retiring from office. Moreover, there was a "buzz" around that the Conservatives were going to win a majority. But for some not-entirely-clear reason, Doug Ford appointed Ray Ferraro as the candidate instead of going through a local nomination meeting. I suspect that this move created some ill-will among traditional Conservative supporters.
In addition, Ferraro seemed to not really have his heart in the election. He had a tendency to complain about the mess inside the Conservative party, even though it probably cost him votes.
Ferraro was asked if he had any regrets about Christine Elliott losing the PC leadership, after he praised a candidate retreat she led in London a few weeks ago. “Yes,” he said. “As a matter of fact, when they came to me to run I thought they were crazy, it looked like a comedy of errors,” Ferraro added describing the leadership convention.
Ferraro did his part blaming “Mr. Brown and his lieutenant” for changing PC bylaws, “parachuting” candidates into ridings, and misplacing funding, but the party has owned up to those mistakes. Having said that, “I was embarrassed to say the least,” Ferraro added.
(I heard much the same thing from Ferraro when he was at a local political breakfast meeting. Indeed, the guy next to me leaned over and asked "did I hear what I thought I just heard????")
The NDP and Liberals also elected nominated candidates who---although both very good people---simply didn't have the political experience that Schreiner did. He'd already run in Guelph a couple times, was the leader of his party, and, had been very involved with local issues for years. Indeed, several people told me that compared to all the other candidates they considered him "the incumbent".
This isn't to say that people didn't work hard or smart on Schreiner's campaign, just to suggest while hard work and preparation are necessary, they are far from sufficient to achieve success. It also helps to be lucky.
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It takes a lot of work to write this blog---even these more "opinion oriented" pieces. I know that my readers pay a lot of money for their Internet service, computers, cell phones, and, data plans. (Personally, I pay a lot less than most because I use second-hand equipment, split the cost of my ISP with my neighbour, and, have a bare-bones cell phone plan. But that's for another post.) But people need to also get into the habit for paying for content if they want to get any local news. So why don't you sign up for a buck-a-month through Patreon or PayPal? You will get a "warm glow" from "doing the right thing" and encourage some young person to follow in my footsteps when I get too old and decrepit to do this anymore.
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If you understand this point it takes some of the pressure off a campaign manager to be "perfect". Indeed, the wise campaigner understands when the odds are against her and uses this fact to build for the long haul. For example, they will use the campaign to "cross train" people so they can expand the local talent pool. Some positions such as campaign manager, sign boss, Chief Financial Officer, etc, require a significant skill set and it helps a Constituency Association a tremendous amount if you have several people who are experienced and confident in each of these positions. This means that even if no one who is experienced is willing to do the job again, they can "hold the hand" of the poor schmo who ends up getting stuck with it.
It also helps build the local political organization if you can use the campaign to build your fundraising base by bringing in new donors. As well, it helps to run candidates even if they don't win because they can gain valuable experience in things like giving speeches and door-knocking. Campaigns for a provincial or federal seat often raise the visibility of "up and comers" which then allows them to win a seat on Council later on. And, of course, people with a term or two on Council then turn out to be excellent future federal or provincial candidates.
The "derangement syndrome" arises when people start putting pressure on volunteers and supporters to give their last drop of blood in a campaign where the candidate has very little hope of winning. At that point you aren't training people in how it's done, instead you are burning them out so they won't volunteer to help ever again. And if you hit up donors too many times or ask too much from them, they will just refuse to give anything at all the next time around.
I've tried to explain this problem to people in political campaigns and unfortunately the sufferers of derangement syndrome just get angry. They have invested the campaign with some sort of ultimate existential importance and see any attempt to present a more nuanced, long-term approach as being "defeatist" and "counter-productive". This reminds me of the character "Boxer" in Orwell's Animal Farm. He was a "true believer" in the revolution who always tried his idealistic best to achieve the impossible demands put upon him by his pig overlords. Unfortunately it was beyond his abilities and he ended up dying young---a worn-out shell of his former self.
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Political derangement syndrome also affects Premiers and Prime Ministers.
Former NDP Albertan Premier
Rachel Notley. Photo by DaveCournoyer c/o the Wiki Commons.
I think that you can see it at work with the example of Rachel Notley in Alberta. She won a surprise majority government in by "coming down the middle" of a classic vote split between the Wild Rose Party and the Conservatives. The Tories got 9 seats with 28% of the vote. The Wild Rose got 21 seats with 24%. And the NDP got 54 seats with 41%. (If ever there was an example of why we need proportional representation in this country, that election was it.)
I think anyone who knew even a little about the politics of Alberta realized that this was a total fluke and that the Conservative vote would coalesce around one party before the next election. A rational response would be to pass a bunch of progressive legislation and hope that some of it would survive the next government. Instead, Notley's government tried to build support among traditional Conservative voters by moving heaven and earth to support the tar sands.
Of course, the 2019 election resulted in the NDP getting 33% of the vote that translated into 24 seats. The Conservatives had merged with the Wild Rose, and they got 55% and 63 seats. But in the interim the rest of the country had witnessed the spectacle of a New Democrat government moving heaven-and-earth to build an oil pipeline in order to export tar sands oil to Asia. What did this say about the depth of commitment by the NDP to believing that the climate emergency is an unprecedented threat to human civilization? It certainly looked to me like the standard NDP maneuver of talking a "good game" about the environment but always trading it away for pocket-book issues when "push came to shove".
Is it any wonder that there have been mass defections from the NDP to the Green Party? Or that the popular vote between the NDP and Greens is effectively tied?
Of course, much the same thing can be said about Justin Trudeau and the Liberal party. No matter how much tap dancing they do, it is just fundamentally ridiculous to try to argue that building a pipeline to sell dirty oil is somehow compatible with moving off of a carbon economy.
Hey guys, I bought a pipeline
for you. Why won't you love
me? Photo by JCH_3020.
Image c/o Wiki Commons.
What's really ridiculous about this is the fact that there is absolutely nothing that Trudeau and the Liberals can do to convince the pro-tar sands people to ever vote for him. All he can really hope for is that the forest fires, floods, hurricanes, etc, will eventually change the minds of enough voters that he will be able to start winning elections in Alberta. Indeed, the latest EKOS poll shows that the federal Liberals are at 16%, whereas the national numbers are 37%. Obviously the rational thing to do is write-off Alberta instead of continuing to burn through support in the rest of the country by trying get votes in a province that will never, ever support the Liberals no matter what they do.
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Please note that I am not saying that voters should now damn both the NDP and Liberals to Hell because they aren't "pure". Another type of political derangement syndrome is the idea that any politician who makes some sort of compromise is beyond all redemption. All political parties are "tents" that hold a lot of different types of people. And they all have to repeatedly "hold their noses" and support policies that they do not agree with if they want to accomplish anything at all. The big mistakes happen not when people make compromises, but rather when they compromise too much. Knowing where to tell the difference---just like in the rest of life---comes from wisdom. And that, as we all know, is in pretty short supply.
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Furthermore, I say onto you the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!
The other day I was attempting to find a human being at Immigration Canada to ask a very specific question. I found out that this was pretty much impossible. All the email addresses that I could find were automated to ensure that no one's precious time was wasted answering my dumb question. I tried to call, but I got an automated answer that started off by saying that the computerized system wasn't working, then led me through a very complex series of questions where I was directed to punch in a series of numbers to access the aforementioned non-functional system. Towards the end of this process, I heard another recorded message said that unless someone had sent in the forms I was trying to understand in before October of last year, they were still waiting in the queu and wouldn't be part of the automated system (ie: the one that isn't working) yet. At the very end, another recorded message said that I could dial zero to get in contact with a physical person. When I did that, another message came on saying that there was an "unprecedented" number of people trying to get through the phone lines, but that they understood that what I was trying to figure out was a big deal in my life and I could always hang up and call later. At that point my phone call was disconnected. (I tried later, where I found out that you can't punch in the zero until after you've done all the other things first. Then I got the same reply and got hung up on again.)
In despair, I called the local MP's office and asked the woman who answered the phone if she had an idea about who to ask to find out what I was interested in knowing. It turns out that this knowledgeable lady was an expert on the subject in question and quickly answered all my concerns. I suspect that phone calls like mine are very common and many people contact their local MP's office to try to navigate various aspects of the civil service which has become pretty much impossible to talk to.
I'm not going to rag on about immigration services. I've had the same problem with other agencies. For example, a few years back the city zoning department wanted the fire department to inspect my home. I dutifully said "OK" and waited. It took the firemen six years to contact me to do the inspection. At that point I was told that I needed an electrical inspection.
Booking an electrical inspection involved having to wait an hour or two to get through the phone lines to talk to someone. (Contractors have their own, non-public number. They can also fax in requests.)
I also remember many, many years ago trying to get through to a human rights hotline for a complaint about a workplace issue. Same grotesque long wait on hold followed by a blank statement that a man can't complain about women being badly treated in his workplace. (Sorry for trying to be helpful---.) I've learned that if I want to contact a "help line" to use a computerized free phone line (like Google hangouts) so I don't burn through my limited number of monthly cell phone minutes all on one call. I put the laptop on "speaker phone", and do dishes, cook, can veggies, write a novel, whatever, until someone finally finds the time to answer me.
To be totally honest, I'm kinda in awe of the way Immigration Canada has managed to automate the process in order to free up employees for other tasks. If it all works fine, I'll probably forget about how freaked out I have been about not being able to get a human being to answer my inane, fear-driven questions. (A giant complicating factor affects me. I suffer from PTSD and this sort of Kafkaesque dependency on invisible, unapproachable, and, ambiguous authority pushes all the buttons of my underlying psychological problem. I doubt if anyone would be totally happy with what I had been going through---but I descend into a state of physiological terror whenever I have to deal with this stuff.) What I really want to talk about in this opinion piece is the reason why the department has had to do all this automation in the first place. (Trying to look totally objectively at a situation is one of my PTSD coping mechanisms.)
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I did some looking around on-line and found this interesting graph on a government of Canada website.
In case you can't make it out (click on the image for something easier to read), the graph is comparing the size of the public service workforce (scarlet) to the population (light blue), real Gross Domestic Product (green), and, cost of the programs that the civil service is administering (dark blue) over 17 years, (2000 to 2017). As you can see, fewer people have been administering more and more things for more and more people. Looking at this, it's pretty easy to understand why it is that I have a hard time finding someone to answer my questions and allay my quaking fears.
Usually these cut backs happen when we get a conservative government. Please note that the downward curve in the federal civil service manpower happened from 2009 to 2015. Stephen Harper was Prime Minister of a majority government from 2011 to 2015. Coincidence? I think not. It all comes down to an obsession with cutting taxes. They call it "finding efficiencies", "ending the gravy train", whatever tedious nonsense Doug Ford is currently peddling in Ontario, or, something else. But it always boils down to cutting back on front-line staff which increases wait times and forces management to introduce even more automation.
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It's not just a problem with cutbacks in staff, however. There's also a problem with the constantly expanding regulations that get imposed upon the civil service as more and more time-consuming and expensive regulations get piled upon each other over time.
I had this issue come to my attention with a thunderous crash when I recently listened to a conversation between two doctors on a CBC podcast. A young man was interviewing a baby-boomer who had come across the boarder to Canada from the USA during the Vietnam war. He was not only a draft-dodger, if memory serves, he was also technically a deserter because he had had his med school paid for by the army. He says he showed up at the border and twenty minutes later he was a landed immigrant. If this sounds insane, here's a CBC article that says that the government treated draft dodgers as legitimate refugees, but called them "immigrants" in order not to annoy the US government. (Scroll down to halfway through the piece to the point the heading that says "Welcome, Draft Dodgers".)
Contrast this "quick and dirty" entrance to the country with the huge amount of paperwork and scrutiny that I'm having to go through to get my wife of seven years to immigrate to Canada, and it's obvious that the workload has expanded by several orders of magnitude. So not only do we have fewer and fewer people doing the job, the job itself keeps getting bigger and more complex. No wonder management is desperate to automate the process as much as it can.
I suspect that part of this is simply legitimate. The world is more complex and that means that civil servants have more things that they have to take into consideration. But I also believe that part of the complexity has come about because people refuse to consider the "opportunity costs" that come from bitching about what are ultimately very trivial or nonexistent problems.
Opportunity costs are the resources you waste or potential things you could do that are no longer possible when you pursue a particular course of action. For example, consider an experience I once had while managing a local community economic development project. I had applied for a grant position where I would hire someone through a job experience program. The position was for a full-time salesman who was supposed to help the project get "buy-in" from the community. The position was set to be filled and then a story broke in a newspaper and a member of the opposition party stood up in Parliament and lambasted the government about "waste" (this was in the pre-"gravy train" era).
Instantly, the bureaucracy managing the program that administered the grant went into "risk avoidance mode" and things shut down totally while people ran around in circles to cover their collective asses. This meant my grant sat on a desk for about a year. I eventually got the money, but by then "the moment" had passed and the project went down the toilet.
I'm not going to blame the civil service for destroying that project. At that point hiring a staff member was a bit of a "hail Mary play" anyway. It did teach me never, ever to apply for a government grant again, however.
I'm not going even blame the civil service for going into "ass protection mode". They had far more important and useful projects that they needed to keep from being accused of being "pork" and destroyed.
I'm not even going to blame the government of the day for breaking the glass and telling the civil service to jam on the breaks brakes. They needed to protect their "brand".
The people I do blame, however, are the media who made a huge fuss about a scandal that really wasn't much of anything; and; the opposition parties that were more interested in tarring the government with a "scandal" than considering the effect that this fuss would have on the numerous people---like me---who were going to end up having to deal with an increasingly risk-averse civil service.
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People love to complain about "the bureaucracy". But the thing is that our modern society simply couldn't exist without one. It is what ensures that we have a single-payer medical system, that our children get educated, that the roads get cleared of snow, that our electrical appliances don't kill us, that we don't die of food poisoning, etc, etc, etc. The problem is that if we starve it of resources and pass regulations that tie it's hands so tightly that it cannot do it it's job, it no longer works efficiently. At that point we blame it when instead we should be blaming the people that are keeping it from doing its job well.
We are entering into an election soon. If you hear a politician complain about "fat cat" bureaucrats who need to be "cut down to size", try to remember the long, long wait times that have resulted from past attempts to "find efficiencies". If the government needs the money, then maybe we need to raise taxes on the hyper-wealthy people who have been making out like bandits instead of starving the civil servants who keep the wheels of society turning.
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Furthermore, I say onto you the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!
Mike doing the photogenic thing. Photo by Jason Hendriks c/o the Danforth Greens.
Used under the "Fair Use" copyright provision
Hulet: The next question is a bit philosophical, but that's how I roll. Let me set this up.
Years ago, after the 9/11 attacks I was asked to be part of a panel discussion and I was kinda horrified to hear one of the other panelists---a cabinet minister---go on and on about how totally freaked-out she was by the whole thing.
This gets me thinking about how you, as a politician---and Dao knows anything's possible nowadays---how do you balance showing your concern and sympathy while at the same time trying to be a force for stability and encouraging people not to give into their fears?
I'm asking this because after 9/11 almost all the politicians told us to panic as much as possible. Then our foreign policy turned our nations into wounded bears that proceeded to wreak havoc around the world. It seemed almost that you weren't patriotic or sympathetic to victims if you didn't act like the sky was falling. But that is exactly what the terrorists wanted governments to do.
I'd like to know if you wrestle with this question. If so, how do you handle it?
Schreiner: I've had to deal with this issue on something of a smaller scale.
Schreiner: Yeah, yeah. I think one of the first speeches I gave at Queen's Park was after the Danforth shooting. That happened right after we started sitting. What I try to do is balance empathy, condolences, grieving. Acknowledging the public trauma and the need to grieve with a call to unity, coming together and not using the event as an opportunity to divide or score political points. I think by taking that approach I've got a lot of positive feedback from people across the political spectrum---even from people who disagree with me on policy issues---even on the particular policies associated with the tragic event that happened. I think at some level we're motivated by either fear or hope. I tend to usually land on the side of hope because I think that those who follow fear tend to divide and conquer, or, to energize and mobilize things like the war machine. Those that land on the side of hope and resilience can overcome and develop solidarity.
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Hulet: How willing are you to tell people something that they don't want to hear?
Schreiner: I have no problem doing that. Sometimes it's led to some of my most meaningful moments with people. I'll give you two concrete examples. One of the very first events in the provincial campaign last spring was when the Guelph District Realtor's Association had all four candidates in to speak. I laid it on the line that I was adamantly opposed to opening up the Green Belt for development---period. I knew that one of OREA's (the Ontario Real Estate Association) top priorities was opening up the Green Belt for development. Their argument is that the housing affordability problem is a supply issue driven by not having enough access to green space for new housing. All the reports I've seen argue that that is categorically false. I stated the facts. I stated my position. And I said the other ways that I'd support their industry and the important role realtors play in our society. Because they do pay a critically important role.
If you think about it, some of the people who support the most community events are realtors because they have a vested interest in the vitality, vibrancy and live-ability of a community. So I wanted to recognize all of that but I wanted to be really clear and honest. After that one of the board members of OREA---who wasn't from Guelph---came up to me afterwards and said "You know what. I was blown away by your speech and I was particularly impressed by your honesty, lack of bullshit, total transparency. When you disagreed, you stated your case very effectively. I'm going back to OREA and say that maybe we should rethink our position on opening the Green Belt for development." At the very least I think it impressed one person because OREA never changed it's position. Which is okay because later when I was our MPP when I spoke to OREA I made the exact same case to the entire organization---over a thousand people were in the room.
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I looked into OREA's website and I couldn't see per se anything that boldly said that the organization was interested in opening up the Green Belt for development. But that doesn't mean that it wasn't pushing that agenda, just that they were being careful about what they said in public. I did look through their submission to the 2019 "Housing Supply Action Plan", which was sub-titled A BOLD PLAN TO SAVE THE DREAM OF HOME OWNERSHIP IN ONTARIO. On page 24 it suggests that Ontario should "remove the straight-jacket of the 'one size fits all' growth plan".
This section goes on to add gems like the following:
Right now, that growth plan says that almost the entire GTA has got to look like Younge and Eglinton, the (previous government) has really put municipalities in a planning straightjacket.
OREA CEO Tim Hudak, March 2017
All of the GTA is supposed to look like this? Younge and Engliton in Toronto.
Photo by BradBeattie, c/o Wiki Commons.
It's hard to understand what OREA really wants, however, because while the above would seem to imply that they are opposed to high-intensity housing, it also has a policy of supporting what they call "as-of-right zoning". What this means is that they want the zoning around transit nodes (subway stops in Toronto, bus express lanes---like Gordon Street in Guelph) to be changed to allow intensification.
Over 30% of the space surrounding Ontario’s major transit hubs are predominately single-family homes with the capacity for up to 4 million new housing units, which, if developed, could support the expected population growth of the Province for the next 24 years (Ryerson CUR, 2019).
A bold decision to mandate as-of-right zoning along provincial transit hubs will not only build enough homes to satisfy Ontario’s needs for a generation, it will keep thousands of cars off our road and support our low-carbon transit systems.
A Bold Plan, p-10
So they don't want to have places in the GTA looking like the corner of Younge and Eglinton, but on the other hand they want to change the zoning on areas where single family homes currently exist so developers can build housing for up to 4 million new units? I suspect that like any large organization, different members of OREA believe different things. Also, call me a cynic, but I suspect that what developers---and possibly at least some of the members of OREA---say in private to politicians is different from what they say in public.
One thing I have found, however, is a quote from the CEO of OREA---Tim Hudak (yeah, that Tim Hudak, past leader of the Ontario Conservatives)---talking about the "damage" the Green Belt has done to housing affordability.
“But in the Toronto area, the government’s created its own artificial barriers that are spiking prices,” he said. “So if we don’t address that, then I do worry that young people won’t be able to find a home of their own, and secondly, it will slow down economic activity.”
And, of course, there was Doug Ford's infamous statement to a select group of home builders during the last election. One can only suspect that if there hadn't been such a storm of outrage leveled against him at the time, OREA's website might have posted something a little less diplomatic on the issue.
I'm on the record as being in favour of loosening some municipal zoning regulations to allow more high intensity housing, so I am receptive to some of the OREA argument. But I don't think that more green field development is what's needed. So kudos to Mike Schreiner for standing up for the Green Belt at meetings where the public might not have been able to listen in.
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More recently I spoke to the Ontario Police Association and explained to them why I don't support carding. You could hear a pin drop in the room when I said that. Afterwards I had a lot of police officers come up and say that they totally disagree with me but they had more consideration for me as a politician than any other they'd met because no one had ever come into that room and just so straight-forwardly tell them something that they knew they disagreed with. I stated my case and that's led to some really productive conversations. I have to give the Police Association of Ontario---and their President Bruce Chapman in
Bruce Chapman, Twitter photo.
Fair Use copyright provision.
particular---tons and tons of credit because that led to lots of productive conversations about how we can improve policing and how we can particularly improve the community relationship. You know: issues around race, discrimination, profiling and things like that. And I realize that those are bigger issues in places like Toronto. But these issues are important in Guelph too. By having an honest conversation about it, this has led to additional conversations about other issues---which has led to mutual respect and more and better and deeper understanding of the challenges that police face, that I face as a politician, that members of the community face, that people who feel that they are being targeted face. Sometimes I think as a society we're afraid to have those conversations but I think it's essential we have those sorts of conversations and I think that is part of what leadership is all about.
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First off, let's see what a police "card" looks like. I couldn't find an example of what's called a "Toronto Police Services 306 Form", but I did manage to get an image of a Hamilton Police card. From what I've read, it is almost a exact copy---and it does have those onerous questions that people who've been "carded" complain about.
If you are having a hard time seeing it (click on the image for a bigger version), the two questions that people find most annoying are "Gang/Club Description", and, "Parents: Divorced/Separated". The reasons why these are annoying: if an officer decides that someone is a member of a specific gang it could only be based on his own personal judgement/bias because street gangs don't wear uniforms and don't issue identity cards. And the second question seems to imply that anyone raised by a single parent is "damaged goods" and needs extra careful scrutiny.
This information is tremendously important because the people who design and manage security databases often don't put enough info in the database to let front line staff know enough to make a good "judgement call" of the relative danger that the particular person in front of them offers to society at large. As a Global News story by Patrick Cain about the complexity of erasing simple possession cannabis convictions pointed out,
The problem is that while police forces can enter the type of drug someone is charged with possessing into data which is sent to the RCMP, they don’t have to and often don’t, the force told Global News last May. So a record can show whether someone has a record for possessing an illegal drug, but not necessarily which one.
As well, someone found with a small amount of pot could be charged under one of two sections of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, one of which relates to marijuana specifically, and one of which is more generic.
What this could mean to a customs officer is that someone who is in front of them and that red flag for "possession" could mean heroin, crystal meth, fentanyl, or whatever. In addition, add a little paranoia about "maybe this minor charge was the result of a plea deal", and crossing the boarder becomes a royal pain in the butt for the rest of a person's life.
Moreover, as another story by Cain on the same subject points out,
Once data crosses the border, Canada permanently loses control over it, says immigration lawyer Guidy Mamann.
“Once the Americans have that information, they have that information. How is it going to be erased on the American side? You can erase it on the Canadian side, but that data has already been sent over.”
I also often seems that the people who design the databases simply haven't really thought about how to remove someone who has been put on it by mistake. For example, consider the case of a six year old Toronto resident who ended up on a no-fly list.
Once you are on a list, you can get stigmatized for life. And this has been going on for a very long time. I once met a guy on a train in the US who said that he'd given up on travelling to Canada because he'd been arrested while taking part in a protest against the Vietnam war---ie: 50 years ago---and gotten charged with something that put him on a list that was shared with Canada Customs. As a result, he said that every time he crossed the border he ended-up being hassled for hours. Another fellow I know made the mistake as a teenager of trying to cross the boarder into Canada for an afternoon with less money in his pocket than the Boarder Guards deemed sufficient---he gets such a hassle now as a middle-aged man that he's also given up coming to the "True North strong and free".
And don't think that this is just a question of inconvenience. Consider the case of Maher Arar who got onto a list because he talked to someone that the RCMP were watching and an FBI agent said that Arar had been identified by Omar Khadr while in Afghanistan. (Arar was actually in North America and under surveillance by the RCMP at that time.) The result was him being kidnapped by American security officials and dragged off to Syria to be tortured. (Totally illegal and unconstitutional---buy hey, that's how America rolled in those days. This is why politicians shouldn't scream that the sky is falling whenever there's a terrorist attack.)
If you really want to get all "sci-fi" about this, consider something called "predictive policing". What this is is a high tech version of the old movie trope of a detective making up a map where he identifies crimes with pins and then uses it to predict where the malefactor will "strike next". In effect, data is put into an artificial intelligence program and it spits out suggestions about where police should be concentrated. In and of itself, this is a pretty good idea. But, of course, a problem arises if the data that it works with comes from the same people who put a 6 year old on a no-fly list and don't seem to have developed a way to take him off it. Here's a rather long YouTube video (13 minutes) from Wired that discusses the key issues in some detail.
None of this is to say that our police and intelligence agencies shouldn't be collecting information and sharing it. We live in a world where a lot of crazy dangerous technology is floating around and we do have a very small, but unfortunately significant percentage of the population want to do serious harm to their fellow citizens. But the people managing the databases have to seriously "up their game" if they want to have the confidence of ordinary people. It's simply ridiculous in this day-and-age to have extremely vague charges put on databases where information that's found to be wrong cannot be purged. And the information has to be better sourced that a beat cop's assumptions about someone else he really knows absolutely nothing about.
So again, kudos to Schreiner for taking a hard stance about carding even in venues where the audience thinks that it is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
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Hulet: This is kind of an "inside baseball" question. What does the election Doug Ford to lead the Conservative party say? Are there any lessons from this for the other parties---in the way that they choose their leaders?
Schreiner: [Schreiner laughs]
Yeah. Maybe not have such a complicated voting system. One that allows somebody who doesn't get the most votes elected leader. That would be one thing.
Hulet: They have a transferable vote system---.
Schreiner: Yeah, but it is also weighted by riding too.
Hulet: Oh, okay!
Schreiner: It was even more complicated than STV (Single Transferable Vote)---way more complicated than STV. What delivered him [Ford] the leadership wasn't STV, it was the way in
Christine Elliot should have been
Conservative leader?
Photo by Jwiki2014, c/o Wiki Commons
which the ridings distribution worked. STV actually led to Christine Elliott getting the most votes. But because of the way they do the weighting of the ridings---the distribution of the votes per riding---it's more of an Electoral College situation. Kind of like what happened in the US with Clinton getting more votes than Trump yet still losing.
Hulet: So in some Conservative Riding Associations an individual's vote is worth more than one in another?
Schreiner: Yeah. It comes down to how they do the weighting. I don't know how the formula works. Every time I've tried to read about it, it seems incredibly complicated. So one lesson to be learned is to have a fair voting system!
Patrick Brown, past Tory leader.
Photo by Laurel L. Russwurm,
c/o Wiki Commons.
Number two is---I don't have a solution for this one yet---I haven't thought about it as hard because it doesn't affect the Green party yet. And this also goes back to how Patrick Brown was elected to lead the Conservatives---. We elect a leader by who can sell the most party memberships. Not by who has the best policies, or who has the most charisma, or who is the best campaigner, etc.
Hulet: Or even who has worked the hardest---.
Schreiner: [Schreiner laughs]
Or even who has worked the hardest for the party! It's just who sells the most memberships. That is a horrible way of electing a leader. I don't care which party it is. So it's something that I should probably think about for my own party. Somehow we have to change the way we elect party leaders in this country. Doing it through selling memberships leads to all sorts of problems. The Conservatives are still trying to deal with all sorts of problems---bogus memberships, phantom memberships---around Patrick Brown winning the leadership---let alone Doug Ford!
On a broader level the takedown of Patrick Brown and the election of Doug For has shifted the debate we had on climate action in such a substantive way that it makes me wonder what else is at play, because I know there was a huge "axe the tax", anti-carbon tax, anti-climate agenda that led to getting rid of Patrick Brown and replacing him with Doug Ford. That's completely changed the national conversation on climate action, and potentially set Canada back another decade. Which at this point would be too late to prevent serious climate damage. So the leadership race has had significant implications not only for politics in Canada but public policy and particularly climate policy.
Hulet: Sometimes it's like you are watching a still pond and then you notice that there are these big ripples and you wonder what is happening under the surface.
Schreiner: Yeah.
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The first issue that Schreiner is identifying is that the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario does indeed elect it's leaders with something like the American Electoral College. By that I mean that there is a trade off between "representation by population" and "representation by geography" baked into their selection process.
The key issues come in Article 26 of the PC constitution. One part says
26.5 For the purpose of apportioning ballot results among the candidates, each Electoral District shall be assigned up to 100 Electoral Votes.
and another
26.6 Upon the completion of a ballot, the votes cast in each Electoral District shall be counted. If 100 or fewer votes have been cast, each candidate shall receive Electoral Votes equal to the number of votes cast for the candidate. Otherwise,each candidate shall receive Electoral Votes equivalent to the percentage of votes cast for the candidate.
What this means is that if you have 4 ridings and the vote count breaks down like this:
88 votes for Ford and 12 for Elliot out of 100
76 votes for Ford and 24 for Elliot out of 100
92 votes for Ford and 8 for Elliot out of 100
929 votes for Elliott and 71 for Ford out of 1000
This means that Ford gets 263 electoral votesand wins the leadership whereas Elliott only gets 137---even though Ford only got 327 popular votes and Elliott got 973. (This is the same way that Trump beat Clinton.)
Shortly after the leadership race the leadership candidate that came in a close second to Ford---Christine Elliott---refused to concede defeat. As Ipolitics reported on March 11 of 2018, her campaign argued that
“Thousands of members have been assigned to incorrect ridings” her statement read. “For example, Mount Hope, inside of Hamilton, had its members assigned to Chatham-Kent, several hundred kilometres away. Our scrutineers identified entire towns voting in the wrong riding. In a race this close, largely determined by geography, someone needs to stand up for these members. I will stand up for these members and plan to investigate the extent of this discrepancy.”
Elliot is making a very serious charge here. She is saying that votes in one riding were switched to another. Potentially it could have had tremendously important effect on the final electoral vote tally. But this is a place where the trail goes cold---I couldn't get any detailed info about the individual Constituency Association vote count and there was a declaration that an internal audit didn't show any problems that would have been enough to influence the final result.
I also tried to find some numbers for the relative number of paid-up Ontario Progressive Conservative members broken down by Constituency Association, but didn't find anything. It might be that this exists somewhere, but I suspect that it is info that the party wants to keep secret. There are practical reasons for this in that it would help other parties decide where to put their scarce resources when an election comes.
Having said that, the CBC's Eric Grenier was able to get some internal vote tallies unofficially from the leadership race and he used them to write a story. According to him
Ford won not because more members supported him or because he could win in more parts of the province. He won because he was more popular in his best regions of Ontario than Elliott was in hers.
In addition, the transferable voting system that the Tories use also meant that after the first round of voting, the votes for Tanya Granic Allen---a strong social conservative---went mostly to Ford. Her votes were also very strongly clustered geographically in the Windsor area, which meant that they provided a lot of electoral votes to Ford.
(Incidentally, mixing an electoral voting system with a transferable vote ballot would add in the complexity that boggles Schreiner's mind. Every time lower-tier candidates would get dropped off the ballots and their votes were transferred to the voter's second choice, the percentage of electoral votes would have to be re-calculated, which would change the total vote tallies for the front-runners still on the ballot. This would make counting ballots at the same time both a tedious and surprising thing to watch---especially in a tight race.)
It seems to me that geography-biased voting system in the Conservative constitution "put the thumb on the scales" in favour of Ford. If so, this is yet another example of Stalin's dictum that it is often more important how votes are counted than whether or not you have a vote at all.
But having said that, to be fair to the Conservative party, politics isn't just a matter of people---but also geography. Canada, in particular, has lots of different subcultures spread over a huge geographic area. That's why, for example, in the 2000 federal election the Bloc Quebecois won 38 seats even though it didn't even run a single candidate outside of Quebec. Conservative parties all over the world have a hard time winning seats in urban settings. For a very long time the Ontario Conservatives have had the same problem here---their rural Constituency Associations are strong and their urban ones weak.
The obvious way to fix this problem is to bring in urban voters and listen to their problems so the party can create policies that appeal to them. That is probably why the "Electoral Vote" system was written into the Conservative constitution. If voting was simply a question of one person one vote, the people in weak ridings would be drowned out by the people in strong ones. This would mean that a party with a strong rural membership would never seriously consider urban issues---which would stop it from growing in urban areas. But, as Schreiner and Elliott point out, this means that the system is vulnerable to "gaming" by a smart campaign that can mobilize votes to take over these weak Constituency Associations. I suspect that the Electoral Vote system makes the Conservative party uniquely vulnerable because it magnifies the inherent problems that come from the second issue that Schreiner identifies: electing leaders based on how many memberships they sell.
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Yeah, it's blue type time again. I'll be brief. I think that most people who read this blog can afford to give me a buck a month. And if I could get that, it would prove that local indie news can be a "thing". You can pay through Patreon or Paypal.
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There is a second element to this, namely allowing leadership candidates to sign up new members so they can vote for them.
The basic problem that Schreiner identifies is that people who get signed up in a leadership campaign are often people who have very little knowledge of or loyalty to the party. This can be extremely damaging to the ability of a political party to "stick to it's ideals".
The Conservatives have a especially interesting history with regard to party membership. There's an article by Tom Blackwell in the National Post website that raises some interesting points. It relates that just before Patrick Brown's career as party leader struck an iceberg and sank with all hands, he bragged about the party having 200,000 members. That's a pretty impressive number when you compare it to the 20,000 odd members that the Liberals say that they have. (Please note that the Liberal Party of Ontario doesn't elect it's leaders through a direct vote by party members---they still use delegates from Constituency Associations at a provincial convention. That means that there isn't anywhere near the same pressure to sell memberships during leadership races.)
But when Vic Fedeli---the interim leader who replaced Brown---took over he said that that was an exaggerated number and the correct figure was really only a paltry 130,000. But Blackwell got another quote that made things look even more complicated:
In an email sent Sunday, Thomas DeGroot, the party executive’s chair of IT, tells Jag Badwal, party president, and Marc Marzotto, the membership chair, that, “as requested,” he had reviewed the memberships.
“I can confirm to you that during Patrick Brown’s tenure, the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario’s membership has grown to over 200,000, to be exact it has grown to 234,066 members,” he says in the missive, obtained by the National Post.
This confusion over how many members the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario actually has is troubling. Membership is very easy to define---it is the people who have their dues currently paid up and who are in the central database. It should be very easy to give a reporter a precise number. It's not as if people have to go into a room filled with filing cabinets and pour over paper membership forms anymore. If a party doesn't have a good grasp of who is or is not a member, for example, then it just stands to reason that there are opportunities to "game" the voting system---especially if you are doing it on-line.
Once the leadership race was over and it was time for the general election, another membership issue raised it's head. This YouTube clip from the CBC was released by a source within the Conservative party to the Liberals. It seems to show Ford himself directly breaking an internal Conservative party rule governing nomination races.
The issue is that Ford and his team were pushing his favoured candidate in a specific riding by paying for their memberships.
Tom Blackwell, from the National Post, had another story about this and got a Conservative former MP to speak on the record about this nomination race:
Bernard Trottier, who served as the federal Conservative MP in the neighbouring Etobicoke-Lakeshore riding from 2011 to 2015, told the Post he came to the nomination meeting to support Surma but was dismayed by the flood of new members he saw. He confirmed that a number of buses were used, but said he had no direct knowledge that Ford paid for any of their memberships.
“It really bugs me when people go out and recruit what they call insta-members. You just know you’ll never see these people again,” he said. “I don’t know if there were cash payments for memberships. It was just my observation that at this nomination meeting there were a lot of people you knew were not dyed-in-the-wool members. They were insta-members and they were trucked in from various buildings and so on.”
Trottier said such problems are endemic in the nomination process and argued the provincial party should follow the example of the federal Conservatives and ban cash payments for membership. By requiring a credit card, the payment can be matched with the actual member.
“Somebody with a big roll of $10 bills can buy memberships. The best way to inoculate against that is … no cash for memberships.”
Of course, the "insta-members" that Trottier is talking about are with regards to a nomination race for a specific candidate for Queen's Park. But it is obviously also the sort of thing that can make a big difference in the race for party leadership. And that's exactly the point that Schreiner is making---and admits could be a problem for any political party, even the Greens.
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Even if you don't sell memberships and bus in "insta-members" you can still get an uneasy feeling about the way leadership races get made by selling memberships. Should the leadership of a party go to an outsider who is famous? Or should a leader be famous because of the work he's done for the party? Doug Ford seems to have built his "brand" through his relationship with his brother, the "Ford Fest" barbecues, and, his outrageous persona. I suspect that a great many old time Conservative members are wondering right now about how they could go back to the days of Bill Davis, who's motto was "bland works".
Bill Davis, from Ontario Archives.
Reference code: G 17-43, #3-27.
Photographer unknown.
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Furthermore, I say onto you the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!
