Here's the thing. A lot of important Guelph issues are really complex. And to understand them we need more than "sound bites" and knee-jerk ideology. The Guelph Back-Grounder is a place where people can read the background information that explains why things are the way they are, and, the complex issues that people have to negotiate if they want to make Guelph a better city. No anger, just the facts.
In the next two parts of my conversation with Councilor Gordon, I'm trying to tease out some of the more subtle issues that environmental leaders have to deal with. In the first one I'm asking about how we respond to the feedback we get from the general public---who are often totally indifferent to the problems that future generations may have. I've listened to James' response quite a few times and had some ideas pop into my head as a result.
It strikes me that James and I see the demands of activism and politics in different ways. I think that for him what's important is what the general public will allow him to get away with. He's working for the audience. In contrast, my concern is about what the science says. It's something of a dilemma that all environmentalists face. The science is getting increasingly shrill in it's dire warnings. But the general public doesn't want to change the way it lives it's life, and many people will just "shut down" if you try to tell them the truth. That's why a lot of people in leadership positions won't tell the voters what they really believe---they sugar coat it because they believe that the general public "can't handle the truth".
Maybe they are right. I ran for public office many times saying things that people didn't want to hear and as a result I never got anywhere near getting elected to anything. But I have a sneaking suspicion that every time a politician sucks up to what they believe are the voter's prejudices they end up reinforcing the idea that there really isn't an Climate Crisis and that they won't need to make any sort of substantive change in their lives to prevent a real catastrophe. Sometimes we need to stop making "baby steps" and really do big things if we are going to deal with real problems. Where would we be, for example, if this same sort of timid, tepid response was used to deal with the Covid-19 crisis? What sort of hole would we currently be in?
Another way to think of this problem is to compare it to the dilemma we face when we see someone in a store who adamantly refuses to wear a mask during the current pandemic. A large school of opinion states that a small but significant fraction of the population just "double down" and become more obstinate in their behaviour if you try to get them to do something that they don't want to do---so talking to the guy without a mask will be counter productive. (If you wonder what I'm talking about, check out the video below. It's from the Now This website.)
There's another issue that people should think about too. In work life I've seen diabetic people who are having issues with their blood sugar levels act just as loony as the woman in the above video. After they got their blood chemistry under control they were profoundly apologetic. In my first aid training the paramedic who taught us said that diabetics die in police drunk tanks every year because they look like out of control drunks who eventually "quiet down" to "sleep it off"---only the "sleeping it off" bit is going into a diabetic coma and dying. So I would advise caution in making assessments about individuals you see freaking out. You never really know what is going on until you've got a pretty good understanding of the specific details.
Another school of thought states that if you allow "free riders" to get away with their behaviour, it undermines the willingness of everyone else to continue to support the group effort. Personally, I see evidence that both points of view have merit, which would suggest that there must be a statistical "sweet spot" where you ignore a certain percentage of infractions to avoid helping people get a "martyr complex" over mask wearing, but call out and sanction another percentage so the people who routinely wear a mask don't end up feeling like they are "being played for suckers".
It's much the same thing about the climate crisis. Some folks refuse to accept any limits on their "right" to have the largest environmental footprint possible. If we point the finger at them and point out how selfish and greedy they are, a lot are going to go out and buy a Hummer or do something else equally idiotic---just to give the finger to whomever told them off. But at the same time, there has to be at least some effort to point out publicly how viciously they are acting towards other people or else the people who are careful about their footprint will just give up because "what's the point? every molecule of CO2 I save is just being emitted by the jerk who drives his Hummer to the airport so he can fly to where he starts his holiday cruise."
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In this second question we move on talk about the importance of "leading by example". I've had this conversation with a lot of people and there seems to be a real disconnect between most of the green leaders I know and many members of the general public. The leaders often don't understand why they should live less "large" lives than anyone else, and many voters say that these people don't really believe what they are saying---because if they did, they wouldn't be blasting around the planet spewing CO2 everywhere.
If you wonder what I'm talking about, take a look at this image from the Patriot Post website:
Used under the "fair dealing" copyright provision.
I think that there are two sides to this thing.
I suspect that James is onto something when says that people often come from a position of privilege and aren't conscious of what they are doing. I have a hard time understanding this because I'm old enough and come from they type of background that I remember a time when almost no one except the very wealthy ever traveled on vacation. For example, my parents went on one over-night vacation in their entire marriage---to beautiful Chatham Ontario. And it was only possible because their children were old enough to take care of the livestock (and dad won the trip as a bonus for selling seed corn). That's because, as they said, farmers are "chained to their animals". Having grown up this way, I can understand that long distance travel for pleasure is an aberration in human history whereas a majority of Canadians see it as their birthright.
I also wonder about the honesty of people who complain about the hypocrisy of greens who go on trips, live in big houses, etc. There certainly are some greens who actually do "walk the talk". Why do the complainers fixate on the ones that don't? I suspect that even if every single person who said that we need to get off our fossil fuel addiction actually did go off meat, never flew again, got rid of their car, etc, most of these folks wouldn't lift a finger to change their lifestyle. That's because they aren't honestly complaining about the other guy, instead they're just looking for an excuse to do nothing.
There are examples from history, however, where "leading by example" was a genuine thing and led to great results. Consider the "Swadeshi" movement that was part of Indian Independence (which I was mentioning to James.)
Personally, I think that there is a real need for environmental leaders to lead by example. I have great sympathy with the idea that if you really do think that we are facing a tremendous catastrophe we owe it to everyone else to actually look like we really believe it and live accordingly. Possibly that explains the "rock star status" of Greta Thunberg when she was in the middle of her "fifteen minutes of fame".
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Moreover, I say unto you we have to deal with the Climate Emergency!
My significant other says that I'm one of the most optimistic people she's ever met. I know that sometimes this annoys her. She accuses me of being unwilling to face up to the facts facing the human race because I'm too afraid of the TRUTH. Perhaps that's right. I do tend to keep looking for the shoots of new growth pushing their way through the asphalt. It might be confirmation bias, but I think that I can see some evidence of a better future even in the midst of our current mass attempt to commit suicide by destroying the planet.
What I'm talking about in this particular op-ed is the emergence of the "Maker Culture". But before I start talking about it, I need to give some background economics theory to make sense of it. Some of this might not be what you are used to hearing, but please bear with me for a while. The biggest impediment we have to building a better world is our inability to understand what it could look like and how we can get from here to there. And a huge part of our inability to see what's right in front of our eyes is a lack of the right language to explain it. I hope that what follows will help people understand what I'm talking about.
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The first thing I'm going to ask my readers to do is start looking at different parts of the economy in a different way. That is to say, I think we need to start making a distinction between economic activity as a means of making or doing useful things, and, economic activity as a means of distributing wealth from the rich to the poor. For the purposes of this article, I'm specifically excluding social programs that directly help the poor. Instead, I'd like to focus on that broad range of predominantly service industry businesses that are hurting the most during the current pandemic. These are, things like bars, restaurants, cruise ships, airlines, spas, etc.
The Canadian economy won't collapse because there are no spas, cruise ships, and, jet travel to vacation destinations. The real economic value that these industries add to society is to provide an excuse to give the people who work in these industries a (generally low) income and keep them off the dole. The only really objective crisis that could happen because of this pandemic is if the government sees these industries collapse and perversely chooses to do nothing to fill the void that they leave behind in many people's lives. That's why the governments in relatively well-run nations have decided to give out money to these people through programs like the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB).
At this point, I'd like people to think about now is why we have all those restaurants, bars, nail salons, tourist traps, airlines, etc in the first place. People of a certain bent would suggest that they came from "THE FREE MARKET", but I'd suggest that they came about because of specific government choices.
Consider the following examples. We take it totally for granted that governments do things like create student summer jobs in the tourism industry. For example, why not have them doing something to create affordable housing? The reason is that tourism is seasonal (which is great for employing students) and doesn't require either a huge capital or educational investment. It's easy to find students who will dress up in historically accurate clothes and hand out brochures, and stick them in an old building that has just been spruced up enough to be safe to walk through. But you aren't going to put most of them on a construction site and expect them frame, plumb, or, wire a new apartment building. (I know some people do spend their summers doing stuff like this. Indeed, I spent summers this way myself. But most young people didn't grow up on a farm and don't know how use tools and run potentially dangerous machines---let alone have the strength to work with stuff that's built around the "big galoot" standard.)
It's the same thing when a city sets up an "entertainment district" in a city. It's really not that expensive to convert an existing building into either a bar or restaurant---at least compared to setting up a factory or building an apartment tower. And there's no real skill set necessary to wait on tables and wash dishes. That means that a little bit of encouragement by a city Council can reap relatively large dividends in terms of employment---even if most of the jobs are minimum wage.
Please note that I'm not saying that tourism is a rational or best solution to the decline in jobs because of automation. Instead I'm saying that it is an easy fix that doesn't require a lot of effort to get politicians "with the program".
To a large extent most politicians are mental prisoners of the "neo-liberal consensus" which states that governments shouldn't even try to redistribute wealth from the top to the bottom. As a result, we've seen a situation where the top 20% has been doing very well for a quite a few years. In contrast, almost everyone else has seen their wages stagnate or even decline in terms of real income since the 1970s. Here's a graph from a US government publication that describes the situation in America, which is much the same as in Canada.
Many industries have seen this problem and adapted to it. For example, that's a key part of the reason why developers aren't terribly interested in building affordable housing. They know that they can make a lot more money building luxury condos and monster homes with granite counter tops for the well-off instead of "economy" flats for working class families. It's simply the case that it makes more sense to build for that one fifth of the population that actually has money to spend than for the four fifths that don't.
And this isn't just something that affects the housing market. The growth of tourism, bars, restaurants, spas, etc, has all been driven by a lot of people in the bottom 80% making a not-very-good living off of servicing the top 20%. Indeed, it's actually not that much different than what used to happen in days of yore. People without money but who weren't involved in primary production (eg: farming, industry, trades) used to get jobs working as live-in servants for the wealthy. Nowadays our servants usually don't get provided with a place to live. We don't have live-in cooks---but they do cook for us in restaurants. And we don't have footmen to serve us our meals, but we do have waiters and delivery drivers. We don't have chauffeurs, but we do have Uber drivers. We don't have live-in scullery maids either, but we do have "Molly Maids" (or, as they used to be called "charwomen"). There are very few old fashioned "servants" anymore, but we have a huge number of people "employed by the service economy"---which is very much the same thing. The only thing that's really lacking is noblesse oblige.
And this didn't "just happen". Governments actively chose to stop taxing the upper ranks of the population enough money to keep them from becoming "super rich". The also decided to "look the other way" when new technology---like Amazon---ripped the tax structure to pieces and took away the revenue they used to make from things like sales tax at "bricks and mortar" stores. And politicians refused to "get involved" with putting offshore tax havens out of business, even though they peeled away huge amounts of income tax that governments used to receive.
Because governments chose to avoid taxing the huge amounts of profits that have come into the top 20% of the population over the last 40 years or so, they have had very limited financial resources to deal with long-term job losses due to automation. So instead, they've followed the path of least resistance and helped the private sector cobble together a ramshackle service sector that has managed to keep the bread riots at bay. But Covid-19 came along, and it has shone a light on all the institutional failures plaguing human societies. Just as our Long Term Care, Senior's Homes, and, migrant farm worker system has been found wanting, so has pretty much the entire service sector.
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Just to let people understand how out-of-whack the economy has become, please consider the so-called "Walmart Effect". That term refers to a wide range of different effects that the world's largest retailer has had on local, national, and, international economies, but for this op ed I'm talking about what it does to wages. (I assume that since the term was coined it could be applied to other emergent monopolistic corporations too---like Amazon.)
Walmart is such a dominant force in the market that it has managed to exert a macro-economic effect on the wages of both it's own employees and the people who work for the companies that produce the products that it sells. The point is that it has created a functional near monopoly that forces suppliers to sell to Walmart at the prices it wants because there are no other retailers that can purchase similar quantities of goods. Similarly, in a community where the economy is not producing enough jobs---partially because Walmart put all the other retailers out of business---there is nowhere else for people to work. This creates a "vicious spiral" where people are paid so little money that they have to buy from the absolute cheapest stores, which forces stores and producers to pay their workers the least that they can get away with. (Or give up on every customer except the ones who are in the top 20%.)
The problem with this drive to the lowest labour costs possible is that there is an absolute minimum that you can pay people. That's because people have to eat, they have to have shelter, and, they have to have transportation to and from work. The answer that Walmart has come up with is to build their labour strategy around getting their workers to take advantage of government programs aimed at helping the working poor.
In a Congressional report titled The Low-Wage Drag on Our Economy: Wal-Mart’s low wages and their effect on taxpayers and economic growtha report from the US Congressional Budget Office is cited that shows that a typical Walmart store that had 300 employees was subsidized by various government programs to between $900,000 to $1.7 million per year. (The range comes from the initial assumptions one brings to bear when the study was done. And all graphs should come with ranges like this built into them---beware of ones that don't have them!)
The US is a different country from Canada, and Walmart isn't the huge force here that it is there. But I do think that this is an interesting feature of the world we live in. That is, government programs that were designed to help working people by keeping them from falling into destitution have become "props" that support businesses that are actively driving all working people's wages to absolute rock bottom.
As an aside, I often hear politicians in Guelph say that you can't expect Council to deal with the problem of housing. Instead, they want the federal and provincial governments to pour money into social housing. But the current model is "rent geared to income" and I'd hate to see a situation where people work at poorly paid jobs and the government subsidizes the places where they work by "topping up" the poverty wages through subsidizing people's rent. That's part of why I have argued for some time that we need to create zoning that allows developers to build large enough apartment buildings to start pushing down the market price for housing.
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In order to deal with the Walmart effect and wealth stratification I suggest that the government should expand the Guaranteed Annual Income (GAI) programs that we currently have for both seniors (the Guaranteed Income Supplement) and children (the Canada Child Benefit) to include working age people too. The Canadian Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) is something like this, but it is funded through deficits which really isn't sustainable over the long run---no matter how low interest rates stay. That means that we need to consider added revenue to fund the difference.
The first thing to remember about this is that a Guaranteed Annual Income program wouldn't need the huge amounts of money that the CERB is currently burning through. That's because the Covid-19 pandemic is an emergency, like a war. Presumably any GAI program expansion would not have to deal with the huge numbers of people that the CERB is presently dealing with.
The second thing is that we currently already spend a lot of money on the social safety net. And a lot of proponents for GAI argue that at least some of the programs that we currently fund---like Employment Insurance, welfare, and, disability pensions---would not be needed if we had a properly funded GAI. That means that the money we currently spend on programs like this would simply be rolled into the GAI budget. This would have the added benefit of being a lot easier to manage, which would mean that a greater percentage of the money could go to the recipients and less towards bureaucrats shuffling paper.
The next thing to consider is how much more money could be raised if the government went after the people who have benefited mightily during the last forty years of wealth stratification. I'm not about to get into the details about how the feds could chase after the money that has accumulated into the hands of the top 20% (see the graph I posted above), but I will point out that there appears to be a great deal to be had if the politicians simply had the will to go after it.
One June 17th the Parliamentary Budget Office released an interesting document titled Estimating the top tail of the family wealth distribution in Canada that discusses the creation of a database by their economists to find out just how rich the richest people of Canada really are. It's a fairly technical document, but there are a few things from it that bear repeating.
First of all, it's important to understand how difficult it is to actually get data on rich people. The report states:
There are several plausible reasons national wealth surveys, like
Canada’s SFS, are limited in measuring and analyzing high-net-
worth families.
Surveys may be subject to sampling errors if the surveyed sample is
not representative of the population, including at the top of the
family wealth distribution.
Response errors, where families inaccurately report, willingly or not,
the value of their assets and liabilities, may bias estimates for high-
net-worth families.
Certain large asset and liabilities values in the SFS PUMF are also
subject to top-coding, where they are replaced with a maximum
value. While this procedure ensures the confidentiality of released
data, it also reduces top wealth shares (see Appendix A.3).
The most impactful limitation may be differential unit non-
response, the tendency of high-net-worth families to be less likely
to participate in surveys. If high-net-worth families are
undersampled and the survey weights of those that are sampled are
not adequately scaled upwards, top wealth shares will be
underestimated.
While Statistics Canada reports the overall response rate (70.3 per
cent for the 2016 SFS), little is publicly-known about the incidence of
differential unit non-response in the SFS. There is evidence from the
U.S. of a positive correlation between wealth and the rate of unit
non-response in its main wealth survey, the Survey of Consumer
Finances (Kennickell & Woodburn, 1997)
Statistics Canada attempts to address differential unit non-response
among high-net-worth families by oversampling geographic areas
known to have higher income and believed to have higher wealth
(Statistics Canada, 2018a). However, similar approaches to
oversample high-net-worth families using geographic or income-
stratified geographic information in several European countries have
been shown to be of limited effectiveness in accurately measuring
the wealth of high-net-worth families (Vermeulen, 2018).
The idea of the new database developed by the Parliamentary Budget Office is to get around the problems mentioned above---which mostly boil down to rich people being surveyed about their net worth: the surveys not actually asking the right questions, people fibbing on the surveys, and, not filling out the survey at all.
The old method of seeing how much the wealthy own of Canada is disturbing enough to contemplate. Take a look at the following graph they provide based on 2016 data:
There's a phrase that has become current during this pandemic that I think should be applied to the stratification of wealth as expressed in this graph: we need to "flatten the curve".
Now let's look at the table that they provide that shows the latest figures, using their new methods.
Take a moment to contemplate the above table. I may not know much about the tax code, but it seems pretty obvious to me that there is a lot of money accumulating in a small number of people's hands. If we want to have a democratic society and some measure of justice in society, government needs to build mechanisms that can drag significant amounts of this wealth away from the richest people in society and get it back into the hands of everyone else. I happen to think that the best way to distribute the money (no matter how it is raised) is through an expanded Guaranteed Annual Income program.
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There is a thing that people call "the dignity of labour". It's generally something that people who grew up with money tend to blather on about to excuse refusing to share their obscene wealth.
I believe in the dignity of labour, whether with head or hand; that the world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living.
John D. Rockefeller
In contrast, I tend to agree with Herman Melville, who had actually worked as a common seaman on both whaling and navy ships before becoming a famous author. He said
They talk about the dignity of work. The dignity is in leisure.
Herman Melville
I mention it here because this is one of the most common arguments against a Guaranteed Annual Income that I've heard. That is, that in some way it is very good for people to get up in the morning and go to work. If you don't force people to do this, for some reason I don't understand, people will descend into a pit of existential despair. The worst possible thing that society could do, according to this line of thinking, is to hand people some money that they didn't have to work for.
But the fact of the matter is that a lot of work is dangerous, demeaning, evil, or, totally devoid of any value for society. Moreover, even work which could be none of these things gets poisoned by managers who organize it in a way that makes it needlessly tedious, dangerous, and/or, demeaning.
Of course, it's true that many people do like the work they do and would never be content to just live off a stipend. (I'm probably one of them.) But the issue with a GAI isn't that the government gives you money so you don't work---it's that the government gives you some money so you don't have to take the only job that comes along, no matter how awful, just to keep from starving. This would stop the Walmart Effect in its tracks because it would mean that businesses could no longer depend on being able to hire desperately poor people who are willing to work at anything. With a GAI people have something to fall back on if a job doesn't pay a decent amount or is in some other was too miserable to be worth doing.
No one advocating for a Guaranteed Annual Income is suggesting that the amount of money being paid out should be so high that it supports an upper class lifestyle. Instead, the idea is that it should be set low enough that the majority of people can live on it, but they would probably like to augment it through some sort of employment. Moreover, the money would be clawed-back once one reaches a specific income threshold.
The idea is that if people want, they would be able to use the GAI to work on building up a trade or small business. It might not ever be something that they could exclusively live off, but with the financial subsidy it might be enough to live a good life none-the-less. Remember, however, that the core reason we would be giving people the Guaranteed Annual Income (beyond keeping people from starving or rioting) is because the economy needs some mechanism to recycle money from the wealthy to other people so we can keep up consumer demand. That's why some very wealthy people (like Elon Musk) are in favour of a GAI. They can see that without some way of redistributing wealth the wheels will eventually fall off the economy. That would hurt everyone, rich or poor.
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So what would the economy look like if there really was a baseline salary that everyone could depend upon?
I think we can see the beginnings of it in the so-called "Maker" movement. For those of you have never heard of it, there are a lot of young people who are really interested in learning arts, crafts, and, technologies that allow them to truly develop mastery in a given field. I'm tremendously interested in it, at least partially because my spiritual path---Daoism---teaches that to become a "realized man" it is necessary to develop a "kung fu", or, "excellence developed by sustained, thoughtful work".
Kung fu is a type of meditation leading to spiritual growth that can be pursued by anyone who really tries to get very good at a particular discipline. (In my own case, I practice two kung fus: tajiquan and writing.) Here's an excerpt from the television show Marco Polo that explains kung fu fairly well. (The character narrating---100 eyes---is supposed to be a Daoshi, or, lineage initiate from a Daoist Temple.)
If you know what you are looking at, you can see the Makers all around us. The people at Diyode are Makers. As are many of the people at the Tool Library. The artisanal bakers, brewers, butchers, cheese makers, etc, that have popped up downtown and in the Farmer's Market over the last few decades are Makers. Artists and musicians are Makers too. One of the first Makers I ever met is a local guy who propagates wild plants and spreads the seeds around to help keep local biodiversity going. The hackers who developed the software that I use to create this blog are Makers too. Makers are everywhere already and they are becoming an increasingly important part of our economy.
The key points of the Maker movement that come to my mind are:
an emphasis on creating beautiful and elegant products
personal growth through development of real skill
prioritizing quality and beauty over mass production and profits
a commitment to preserving and passing on skills and wisdom to future generations
One of the key things that is fueling the Maker movement is the Web and You Tube in particular, which has allowed people to create thousands of channels where people can share their knowledge with others. Just to give you an idea of this, my significant other has spent our period of self-isolation teaching herself how to do woodworking according to both the Japanese and European traditions. She is far from being a cabinet maker, but I have been totally impressed as she has learned how make increasingly good dovetail joints and amassed a set of self-made tools including a frame saw, a shooting board, a fairly good work bench, etc.
My writing and her wood working has gone a long way towards keeping our sanity, and, give meaning and purpose to our lives. We can afford to follow these passions because of our savings and my pension. But I can imagine what a totally different society we could build if a GAI allowed more people to do these sorts of things with the same sort of commitment.
If you wonder about what I'm talking about, I'll leave you here with an example of an amazing skill that I saw a Maker talk about on the Web:
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Moreover I say unto you, we have to deal with the Climate Emergency!
With the massive June 6th Black Lives Matter demonstration in front of city hall, I think it might be useful to spend some time trying to talk about what the term "systemic racism" really means.
The biggest demo I've ever seen in Guelph---- in the middle of a pandemic! Photo by Bill Hulet
What follows is an extended meditation about what the phrase "systemic racism" means. I've spent a lot of time thinking and researching this topic, with a lot of blind alleys. Here are some of the things I've considered and rejected:
At one point I considered giving up because who cares what an old, white man thinks of "systemic racism"? But I've come across several black commentators who opined that they were sick of having white friends ask them for "lessons on being woke". They said that they thought it was up to white people to get their act together on their own and black people have no responsibility to keep explaining things to them.
I've tried to frame this issue in a lot of different ways and wrestled with whether or not to include some pieces of evidence. For example, I kept in a reference to things like "oreos", "apples", "bananas", and, "coconuts" because I see this as evidence that race is culturally constructed. I thought about putting in a clip from the show The Wire that illustrated the other side of this, (the whole "wh*gg*r" phenomenon), but decided that probably some readers would find it really offensive (as I do on at least some level), so I decided to not bother. If you honestly don't know what I'm talking about here, you can look at this clip---but don't say I didn't warn you about it!
I originally thought I'd build it around a video clip of the RCMP commissioner trying to wrestle with, and getting totally flummoxed by trying to figure out "systemic racism". But I dropped that frame, as I thought that I could do a better job just discussing the ideas on their own. Moreover, I was a bit concerned about copyright infringement because I don't have my own footage of an interview with the commissioner, and I'm not about to get any any time soon.
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A quick check of Wikipedia came up with the following quote from a British judge who led an inquiry into a police killing. William Macpherson wrote the following definition of "systemic racism":
The collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour that amount to discrimination through prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.
I find this definition particularly useful because it expands the terms of reference somewhat beyond a simple focus on race. Macpherson says that it's not just the colour of a person's skin, but but also their "culture, or ethnic origin" that can be used to identify a person for discrimination.
This first point deserves some emphasis. It is true that there are plenty of people who overtly and consciously discriminate against people specifically because of the colour of their skin. And these folks can do some catastrophically bad things. But I suspect that the majority of problems created under the banner of "systemic racism" are done unconsciously by people who would be mortally offended if you suggested that they were racist in any way, shape, or, form.
I think that this is an important consideration, because it brings into play the relationship between a person's skin tone and their culture as a defining characteristic of race. People often talk as if "race" is a very specific thing. But in actual fact, the consensus among scientists is that race is something that has to be constructed by a specific culture.
To understand this point, consider the following situation. I know a guy who's mother was a Mohawk woman who "looked white" but was so afraid of having her children taken away from her during the "sixties scoop" that she decided to tell everyone that she was actually was "white". Moreover, she moved heaven-and-earth to live as "white" as she possibly could in order to remove any chance that she might be found out. As he tells it, she went to the point of joining and eventually becoming the president of a local horticultural group that bred a specific type of ornamental flower---because that was the most "white" thing she could think of doing. Indeed, she went to such lengths to hide her identity as a member of a First Nation that my acquaintance didn't even know about his heritage until he was in his 60s and she was near the end of her life. At that point he found that he had an entire extended family that lived on a reserve near where he grew up---but knew nothing about!
Of course, what I'm talking about is the phenomenon of "passing" that has always been part of every race group. If you doubt this as a possibility, consider the following photos. Ask yourself, what would you think if you met one of these people on the street and had to decide which particular race they belonged to? (I got these photos from this Huffpost article. I'm using them under the "Fair Dealing" copyright provision.)
This woman is of German/Ethiopian extraction.
Asian/Black
Mixed extraction from Cape Verde.
African American with vitiligo.
Looking at these photos you should be able to see why the consensus among modern scientists is that "race" is something of an artificial construct. The reason why they say this is because there are no "hard and fast" boundaries between different races---they blend into each other at the edges.
We should be able to all understand this point if we could look at the people we meet without labouring under preconceived notions. In my own case, while at university I shared a house with a guy who's skin was so white that he looked like something from a vampire movie. But he had a fuzzy blonde afro. Eventually it came up in a conversation that he was part black, which was what explained the hair thing. I also had a "significant other" for a time who came from Bombay and was of Goan extraction. She had very dark skin like a lot of Southern Indians, but also very frizzy hair---which meant that lots of people thought she was of African background. Moreover, she had vitiligo, which upset her a bit, but she used to kid me about by saying "see---I'm turning white, just like you!"
Having made the above point, it is important to understand that saying "race is an artificial construct" doesn't exactly mean that there is no such thing as race, or, that people can pick and choose whether they identify with one race or another. Indeed, there was a lot of idiotic talk after Barack Obama got elected US president to the effect that he could pick and choose to identify as black or white because he had a parent of each race. The point of race in a racist society isn't what the person in question calls themselves, it's what the racist dicks call them. In the US the ultimate decider are jerks like the Klueless Klucks Klan. No matter what Obama might have thought or said about himself---to these guys he was black.
Indeed, a legal definition of "black" was developed in several American states as used in various laws, such as denying marriage between whites and blacks, who sat at the back of the bus, which school you went to, etc. (This list is illustrative, not definitive, as things changed in the legal codes, and, various definitions applied differently to different laws):
in Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, and, Oklahoma, it was whether any single person in one's ancestry was black
Florida said it was 1/16th or more of one's ancestry
Indiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Tennessee, and, Texas it was 1/8th
These definitions meant that someone could look as white as me, and still be legally defined as being "black" and therefore subject to various regulations denying her a whole range of civil liberties.
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Beyond the issue of "passing" and the ambiguity that exists at the edges of racial stereotypes, there's another piece of evidence that would suggest that race is a social construct. That's the issue of someone looking like they are a member of one race yet acting like they are a member of another.
Every racialized group in our society has some label that they use to describe someone who looks like they are members of a specific racial minority, but who actually acts like they are white. Blacks identify some people as being "oreos" (ie: black on the outside, white on the inside), First Nations have "apples", East Asians have "bananas", and, South Asians have "coconuts".
Nora Loreto, image from her website. Used under the "Fair Dealing" provision of the Copyright Act.
I got thinking about this because of an exchange I recently heard on a Canadaland Shortcuts podcast where Jesse Brown's guest Nora Loreto came up with an insight based on a conversation about Corey Hurren, the guy who drove his vehicle into Rideau Hall presumably so he could hunt down Justin Trudeau and shoot him with one of the many guns he brought along. As she puts it, the problem with mainstream media coverage of this incident is that it focuses on what a "nice guy" Hurren is, how surprising it is that he would do anything bad. But as she points out, here's a guy who took hours and hours to drive across the country---which means that he had ample opportunity to change his mind and not follow through with his deranged notions. "Nice guys" sometimes get dumb ideas into their heads---but they don't follow through once they've had some time to cool off and think things through.
Moreover, from what I've read it seems to be clear that Corey Hurren is a member of that deranged group of people who see the whole Covid-19 shutdown as being an attempt by the elite to take away people's freedoms. The reason why regular reporters find it impossible to see this guy as a dangerous terrorist instead of being a nice guy (who, moreover, makes tasty sausages!) is because the reporter's first instincts is to identify with him instead of seeing him as "the Other". And that's the thing about systemic racism. People tend to separate the people around them into two groups: people just like them, and, "the Other".
Beyond skin colour, the "Other" is easily recognized by other cues: immigrant, urban, non-Christian, left wing, non-average sexual orientation, etc. If reporters had been able to check off these background items about Corey Hurren, you can bet that they wouldn't be writing about what a "nice guy" he is, how tasty his sausages are, and, how much people in the community liked him. And if the media constantly frames stories in such a way that it adamantly refuses to call someone a "terrorist" if he is too easily identified as being "just like" the white, middle-class, mainstream guys who work in the newsroom, that is an example of "systemic racism".
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I put a lot of work into this article. I'm pretty happy with the result, but it was still a real slog. I've spent most of my life doing physical labour of one type or another, and I can honestly say I get just as tired writing these articles as I used to get pounding a beat, mixing concrete, banging nails, moving furniture, shoveling manure, picking fruit, etc. So if you can afford it, why not subscribe so you can help keep this sort of thing available for anyone via the Web? (Thanks Stan for being so awesome!) It's not hard to do using either Patreon or Pay Pal.
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Next, take a look at this short excerpt from a You Tube clip. (Generally, when I put in a video clip, I add a link to the original. But there are so many half-truths, misleading statements, lies, etc, being spouted in that one that I don't want to help propagate the nonsense.)
The fast-talking, weasly young white man in this clip---Ben Shapiro---is using a high-school debating team tactic to beat the other panelists into submission. What he's doing is very quickly asking "Explain to me" questions about very complex issues that no one else can answer in the very short amount of time that the moderator allots to each person on the panel. These are:
why black children aren't graduating from high school
why black youth are shooting each other in higher rates
why 13% of people (presumably black people) do 50% of the murders
why the percentage of black people in prison is so high
why the black single mother rate jumped from 20% to 70% after civil rights reforms were enacted
There are several potential responses to these questions. For example, you could say that the behaviours he is referencing are the results of poverty caused by racism, not the causes of it. You could also argue that during the period of time he references wealth stratification has dramatically diminished upward mobility in American society---freezing different parts of society at the economic place where they were in the early 1970s. But both of these arguments are pretty much impossible to give in the short, snappy soundbites that the rules of the discussion require. Moreover, Shapiro has taken the initiative by demanding that people respond to his questions, which are probably very well-rehearsed because debating is what he does for a living. It is pretty much impossible for most people to immediately come up with the sort of response that would be required to shut him down. (I've spent a lot of hours thinking about this little clip of video before writing this commentary.)
And that's the point of these sorts of debates. At a university scholars have discussions that are based on the assumption that everyone involved is honestly looking for the objective truth. But people like Shapiro are only interested in "winning", and tailor their statements accordingly. Is it any wonder that someone who comes to a knife fight seeking to build a consensus with the other person ends up in the dust bleeding out?
But beyond that, it's questionable that some or even all of the claims on which Shapiro is basing his "tell me why questions" are actually true. For example, let's look at the first---the one about Black teens not graduating from high school. Here's a graph that compares recent American high school graduation rates by race from the National Centre for Education Statistics. As you can see, 79% of Black students do graduate as opposed to 89% of white. Since most public schools in the US are funded locally, which means that poor neighbourhoods tend to have poor schools and vice versa, it wouldn't be hard to understand that poverty might explain that 10 point difference.
Moreover, according to a study done by the PEW research centre, 20% of black dropouts go on to get a "General Educational Development" certificate (GED), which is considered the same as a high school diploma. They do this by going to night school, though. That means that they still get called "high school drop outs". (Strictly speaking, I'm a high school dropout too---even though I have a Master's degree.)
I could go on, but I don't want to make this story about rebutting Ben Shapiro. I'd just like readers to remember that even though he speaks with such absolute confidence about the validity of his arguments, I'd suggest that there is a lot less than meets the eye in this clip.
But having said that, I'd like people to really think about what is going on here. Even though I suspect Shapiro would honestly bristle at this characterization, I would say that he is a racist and what this video boils down to is a less-than-subtle form of systemic racism. That's because---among other things---he's built his brand around refusing to argue in good faith. Instead, he uses his undeniable intelligence and education as a weapon to---among other things---make money off abusing other people based on their race. And this isn't just a question of one "lone wolf" using the Web. Shapiro is part of an entire right-wing media sector that is built around spreading the sort of ridiculous nonsense that is his stock-in-trade.
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There's another side to this thing. Consider the following Venn diagram.
Depending on the group and the context, it's probably true that most racialized people are also lower class, even though most lower class people are non-racialized. Indeed, the fact that a higher percentage of racialized people are lower class than the non-racialized population is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that suggests that we live in a racist society.
But we not only have a racist society, we also have a society that discriminates on the basis of class. I have had people opine to me that Canada is a classless society, so I'll toss out a couple personal anecdotes to illustrate my point.
Years ago I had a conversation with a police officer who was saying how for years someone had parked a very expensive care illegally in a particular spot. He said he'd wanted to ticket it, but it was such a nice car that he thought it belonged to a big shot and he was afraid of the repercussions if he did. Imagine his chagrin, therefore, when he found out that it just belonged to a "nobody"---the owner of a hair salon.
How many times have you heard about a person who is very high up in an institution or business being transferred from one department to another or asked to resign because he was caught in something like sexual harassment? In contrast, how often have you heard about this happening to someone much lower in the food chain? They usually just get fired.
I remember when Elizabeth May stepped into the leadership race for the Green Party and sucked all the air out of the room for everyone else. Indeed, among the gaggle of reporters at the convention there was actually one from the New York Times. They never bother talking to any other potential leader, nor did they ask about anyone else but "Ellie May". It was obvious why this happened because whenever I heard her talk either in public or privately she never ever missed an opportunity to talk about "her buddies" like Mikhail Gorbachev, Bill Clinton, etc. What could the silly rubes who built the party possibly say that was worth listening to? Not much, it would appear.
For years people complained about what terrible neighbours university students can be in this city. I was one of them. I can remember talking to one of the relevant people on campus about this and they gave me their legal opinion that there was absolutely nothing that the University could do to curb bad behaviour off campus---I was told it would be "double jepardy". But low-and-behold, a very loud party several years later seems to have pissed off a person very important to the university, and it appears that it could do something after all.
(This is where the complaints against the idea of "white privilege" kick in. If you are are a low-class white person in Canada, you've probably had your fair share of humiliations where it was made abundantly clear to you that you really don't count for much in the grand scheme of things. [This kicks into "over-drive" when you have to interface with the bureaucracy, which I talked about in this story.] The problem is that while this sort of thing is very real to the people who experience it, there's a whole other level of humiliation for racialized people beyond this sort of "background" class discrimination---which many poor white people don't understand because they have no direct experience of it.)
I raise this point because there arises the question about systemic racism and class discrimination. If you are low-class because of discrimination due to racism, and then you get treated badly because you are low-class, is this discrimination "racist" or "classist"? The way to think about this is to bring in the term "systemic racism".
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At this point I can almost hear people complaining "What!!! It sounds like you are saying that you can't end systemic racism with stopping everyone in society from treating some other people like dirt!!!" To that I say, "Well, yeah".
It might be theoretically possible to treat poor people, immigrants, the mentally ill, the elderly, people from abusive backgrounds, the disabled, etc, all like crap without discriminating against people for racist reasons. But the fact of the matter is that this "background abuse" forms a tremendously good camouflage that racism can hide in. Moreover, a lot of devious politicians have found out that if they can pit some of the poor white folks against the poor people of colour society can divert attention from the fact that both groups are being jerked around. Simple abuse hides and protects racism, and, racism hides and protects simple abuse. They are bound together like conjoined twins.
If we want to build a better world for white poor people, we can't do it without making the world a better place for everyone else at the same time.
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Furthermore I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!
In the third part of my conversation with Councilor James Gordon we talked a bit more about the "nuts and bolts" of local politics. The first part deals with on-going issues where it appears that Council had made a decision---and yet, nothing substantive ever seems to change.
In the first part I mention Hugh Whiteley, who was a professor (I assume retired) in the
Hugh Whiteley, from Face Book.
Engineering department at the U of Guelph. He used to spend a lot of time going in front of Council raising issues---so much so that I can remember some people saying that he was an "honorary member of Council" himself. One of the points that he repeatedly raised was that the city had made a decision that whenever a piece of land along the Speed or Eramosa rivers came onto the market that the city should purchase it and make it into a publicly-accessible park. Unfortunately, whenever some of it did become available, there always seemed to be a reason why the city never did buy it.
I got in touch with Whiteley and he sent me a power point presentation that he'd created for when he gave a talk on this issue. According to it, in 1993 the city Council created a "River System Management Master Plan". In fact, he says that "the City of Guelph became the first city in Ontario to adopt a management master plan for its river and stream corridors". The idea was that the Speed and Eramosa rivers have an undeniable value to the community, and as such should be integrated into a combination wildlife corridor and recreation area. Formally, the city called this the "1997 Greenway Vision and Plan". This was adopted as part of the official plan of Guelph in 2001.
According to Whiteley's slides
The Phase 3 Official Plan Update (OPA 48) adopted by City Council in 2012 and approved by the Ontario Municipal Board in 2017 replaces the OP policies implementing the Greenway Vision and Plan and its integration of all types of open space with an OP open-space policy framework restricted to City of Guelph parks
But according to Whiteley, this change only came from staff recommendations and shouldn't have superseded the Council decision. Instead, Council should have passed a new Recreation Parks & Culture Master Plan, which it hasn't since 1993. (The city is currently in the process of creating a new one, but the first public consultation was supposed to happen last winter, with a final draft being created by this fall. The pandemic has probably significantly delayed the process---which the website itself warns.)
It appears that the brave new world of Guelph riversides being linked together into an integrated wildlife corridor and park system just dissolved into bureaucratic goo once it left Council. That left Prof. Whiteley to become the conscience of Council---reminding them of that one meeting where they had a bold vision for the future.
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It might get people to loosen up their purse strings a bit if they realized that the above little section required about a half dozen hours seeking-out Hugh to find out how to contact him, reading various "false leads" (the official master plan of Guelph comes to about 400 pages), and, then working through what Whiteley sent me---besides just writing. This is just to explain that gathering news for the community is "an actual job that requires actual work" (to quote Adam Donaldson from an interview that went nowhere because my sound recorder wiped out most of the conversation).
I'm going to go on a bit of a rant here because I think it should be said. Years ago I wrote a story about the Guelph Carnegie Library and I spent many hours working through microfilm copies of the old "Mercury" newspaper. In the process, I gained a new respect for reporters. Beyond their daily missives, there really isn't any record at all of many different key events in this city. Recently I realized that the same thing could be said about "The Guelph-Back-Grounder". I carefully save each new story in the Internet Archive "Wayback Machine" so even if Blogger goes under, academics, students, and, interested citizens from the future will have the same opportunity I had when I looked at the stories around how the Carnegie library was built and torn down.
If you think that this work is important and needs to continue, pay for it! It's easy to do using Pay Pal or Patreon. As much as a dollar a month would make a lot of difference! I'm not proud, though. If you want to slip me some money or payment in kind---that's OK too. Indeed, if someone wants to be a "patron" and make a significant on-going financial support that would help too.
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I also mentioned Susan Watson, who's been battling with Council to provide as much
Susan Watson, photo by Bill Hulet
parkland as the official plan mandates for quite a while. As near as I can tell, the current official plan mandates that there should be four different types of parks with different rules governing each:
"Urban Squares" (I assume, like St. George's square downtown)
"Neighbourhood Parks": 0.7 HA/1,000 residents
"Community Parks": 1.3 HA/1,000 residents
"Regional Parks": 1.3 HA/1,000
Add these together and you get the number of 3.3 HA/1,000 people in residential communities.
Adding to the complexity, the city approved a new parkland dedication By-law in 2019. Just to give people an idea of the complexity of trying to figure out these rules, consider the following quote from page four:
(d) Where land is located outside of Downtown and is to be Developed or Redeveloped for residential purposes with a total proposed density equal to or greater than one-hundred (100) Dwelling Units per one hectare (1ha), the greater of:
i. a portion of the Land not exceeding 1 hectare (1ha) per three-hundred (300) Dwelling Units, but in no case to exceed thirty-percent (30%) of the total area of the Land, or; ii. five-percent (5%) of the total area of the Land; shall be conveyed to the City for Parkland.
After hours of trying to make sense of these planning documents I've come to the conclusion that it's almost impossible to figure out exactly how much land any given new subdivision should be contributing to any particular park. That's because there are different classifications of what a "park" is and the total amount of parkland added together across the entire city. This makes sense to me simply because each new development project can't be expected to build it's own parks---if it did, every small one would have a tiny park attached to it. It makes a lot more sense to consolidate the portion each development brings to the table into an organic whole that services the entire city. That's why businesses are allowed to offer a cash payment in lieu of land sometimes.
If this wasn't bad enough, the provincial government under Doug Ford brought in a proposed omnibus bill titled "More Homes, More Choices" that among other things (including cannabis regulation, endangered species, conservation authorities, etc) that changed the rules around parkland acquisition. This passed on June 6th of 2019 and it complicated things even more for the city. According to a legal website that I found discussing this subject, parkland is associated with "section 42" of the Ontario Planning Act.
In a nutshell, this analysis suggests that municipalities can now levy a "Community Benefit Charge" (CBC) that will be used to fund a variety of different services:
Libraries
Long-term care
Park development (eg. playgrounds)
Public Health, and
Recreation
The amount that a city can charge through the CBC is capped at 15% of the market value of the land for single-tier municipalities (Guelph is one), which means that when the money comes into City Hall, parks will be just one of several "soft services" that will be lined up, cap-in-hand, for their payment. Municipalities that already have regulations mandating park acquisition may still keep doing this, but only if they don't start charging a Community Benefit Charge. As you might imagine, this might put Guelph in the position of having to balance off parks against the proposed new library.
I hope that the above discussion shows the sort of wild complexity that makes it very hard for the average citizen or even City Councilor to understand what is happening with regard to setting aside land for new parks. And that pretty much leaves developers and staff in the driver's seat. Just like the discussion I had with James about the proliferation of red tape one needs to wade through to receive social assistance (see The Administrative Burden of Social Programs), it appears that managing development has become so complex that it is pretty much impossible for a non-professional to understand what is going on. Two questions arise from this insight: "how effective is democratic oversight when things are so hard to understand?", and, "is the complexity that ties both politicians and the public into knots a bug in the system---or a feature?".
It's generally a bad idea to try to parse out intent, so I won't do anything more than raise this question. But having said that, if we do want to continue to have some semblance of public oversight with regard to a great many things---including park acquisition---I suspect that citizens and elected officials are going to have to demand that more of our official documents be written in plain English instead of legal gobble-de-gook.
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Image from the David Suzuki foundation website. Photo by Jennifer Roessler
Councillor Gordon mentions that he personally shepherded the Blue Dot affirmation through Council as one of his first acts after being elected, but that not much seems to have come out of it. Contrary to what James assumes during the interview, I actually hadn't heard of the Blue Dot municipal program until he mentioned it. It turns out that it is an outgrowth of the David Suzuki foundation and in a nutshell it suggests that municipalities adopt a resolution saying that they consider environmental rights on par with other rights that our society affirms and supports to a greater or lesser degree. As they say on their website:
A municipal declaration of environmental rights is a commitment to decision-making principles that protect, fulfill and promote the right to a healthy environment. A community’s specific declaration might include a commitment to use the best and latest available science to ensure that the right to a healthy environment is always considered when decisions are made. A declaration can also include a commitment to set clear environmental objectives and targets for air pollution or other issues of relevance to the community. Finally, a declaration can ensure municipalities remain accountable through regular assessment and public reporting.
(Page 7 of Today We Decide: the Blue Dot Organizer Toolkit)
I checked on the website and it lists Guelph as having passed a resolution in December of 2015. There are now 174 municipalities that have passed this resolution, and the city has letters from then Premier Kathleen Wynne and then Environment Minister Glenn Murray acknowledging that they received letters from Cam Guthrie and pointing out that the province of Ontario already has had an Environmental Bill of Rights since 1993. Other than that, I suspect that the resolution is not much more than an empty gesture.
I mentioned earlier that I hadn't heard about the Blue Dot project. That's probably because over the years I've developed the ability to "tune out" symbolic programs. My belief is that the easier it is to show your support for something, the less real influence that it will have on the world around you. Indeed, I stopped going to a local spiritual community after a guest speaker told the congregation that "anyone who signs a petition is an activist" and everyone present murmured their assent to this proposition. In contrast, I'm of the opinion that the only real way you can tell if you are getting somewhere is if you start being watched by investigators and get threats. (I've had both things happen over the years. Among other things, I once caught a private eye who'd been hired by a political party in Queen's Park snooping into my background. Another time I had a judge threaten to take away my house and life savings through legal costs when I was involved in a lawsuit against a multinational corporation.)
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The next part of our conversation centred on programs that governments have passed, which have been embraced by the staff, and, which have done a great deal of good---but which the majority of citizens I meet don't know anything about.
According to this chart, the poorest 11.4% of all Canadian families with children received over $1,000/month, this is real money going to the poorest children in this country. Of course, this doesn't help all poor folk. But after decades of political parties mouthing platitudes about ending child poverty, the Trudeau Liberals have actually done something real about it. Personally, I think that this is something people should be shouting from the rooftops. But outside of one tradesman who told me it allowed him to support his family during hard times, I've never heard anyone but social workers praise it.
We also talked about the Elliot, which is a Guelph retirement home that was originally started in 1903 as a private charity called the "Guelph Home for the Friendless". It continues to this day as a non-profit charity, but which the city has put a significant amount of money into and the province has recognized through the a petition in 1963. As Gordon pointed out during the first part of our talk, the Elliot Community (as it is now called) has been something of an "oasis" in the present pandemic. This is a pleasant contrast to the dismal way that some for-profit homes have fared during the pandemic.
An overhead picture of the main Elliot Community complex on Metcalfe. From their website. Used under the "Fair Dealing" copyright provision.
The other very Guelph facility is the Guelph Junction Railway. It has the distinction of being the very first railway in the entire Commonwealth to be owned by a municipality---and is still one of only two in Canada. It came about in 1886 by way of a special act of the federal Parliament because local merchants believed that the Grand Trunk Railway wasn't providing good enough service at a reasonable price. Since it is municipally owned, it's management doesn't have to make a profit. This means that they can plough back a it's operating surplus into maintenance and keep it's freight fees low to encourage local businesses. And, as you can see from the map below, it allows Guelph industries to connect with three different railway lines. (Click on the image to see something bigger. Unfortunately, this map is the only thing I could find to show you.)
The purple line is the Guelph Junction Railway. From the GJR website.
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Councillor Gordon mentioned that he thinks it's the job of a politician to let the public know about the good that the government has been doing. But in my conversations with other elected officials I've found that many of them have a hard time blowing their own horns. Instead, they complain that reporters tend not report the good stuff that they do---presumably because it isn't "newsworthy". The way they have explained things to me, all they think that they can do is put out a press release and hold a media event. Beyond this, they talk as if there is absolutely nothing at all that they can do. This sort of passive attitude towards letting people know about the good they do has always been counter-productive, but it's somewhat suicidal in this time when local news production is in free-fall. We can't expect the free market to provide adequate news coverage anymore. And if we allow people to forget about all the good that government has done, we run the risk of letting demagogues promote the idea that "government is the problem---not the solution". And that wouldn't serve the public good at all.
To that end, I would suggest that it is tremendously important that governments put more energy into creating useful, easy to navigate, and, understandable public websites. And in doing so, they have to create an internal culture in the bureaucracy that fosters the ability to communicate in clear and precise language. This would probably involve a huge internal battle because it would involve fighting against the tendency towards risk aversion and the general "covering of the ass" culture of career civil servants. (When I worked at the University I often thought that the coat of arms for the place should consist of a roll of toilet paper rampant with the Latin motto of Tegimus asinum!) Another way of understanding this is to suggest that it would need to follow the "BBC model" instead of the "Joseph Goebbels" one. That is, to emphasize building long-term public trust through honesty instead of short-term influence through cover-ups and half-truths.
If governments did a better job of this, it might be a lot easier for both the public (and what journalists still exist) to find out the good that politicians are doing---and where they've failed to follow-through with the decisions already made.
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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Crisis needs to be dealt with!
