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.
Donald Rumsfeld was famous for saying that there are
things we
know, things we know that we don't know, and, things that we don't
know that we don't know.
As a general principle this is quite
true. In his case, however, I think it's fair to say that he was
speaking in “bad faith” because he was an example of someone who
refuses to interact with, let alone listen to, anyone who tried
to expose him to something he “didn't know that he didn't know”.
In his case the “unknown unknowns” multiplied because of his
arrogance.
In contrast, Daoists try to remind themselves that there are “unknown
unknowns”. One of the ways they do this is by thinking about a
famous passage from the Zhuangzi.
In
the chapter identified as Autumn Floods, a character named
Kungsun Lung complains to a
prince
Mou that he has a hard time understanding master Chuang (Zhuangzi.)
Mou explains why this is by talking about a frog that lives in a
broken-down well and its conversation with a sea turtle.
---'I
really enjoy myself here!' it said to a turtle of the Eastern Sea.
'If I want to go out, I jump along the railing around the well, then
I come back and rest where the brick lining is missing from the wall.
I enter the water tilll it comes up to my armpits and supports my
chin. When I slop through the mud, it covers my feet and buries my
toes. Turning around, I see crayfish and tadpoles, but none of them
is a match for me. Furthermore, I have sole possession of all the
water in this hole and straddle all the joy in this broken-down well.
This is the ultimate! Why don't you drop in some time, sir, and see
for yourself?'
“But
before the turtle of the Eastern Sea could get his left foot in, his
right knee had already gotten stuck. After extricating himself, he
withdrew a little and told the frog about the sea, saying, 'A
distance of a thousand tricents is insufficient to span its breadth:
height of a thousand
fathoms is insufficient to plumb its depth. During YΓΌ's
time, there were floods nine years out of ten, but the water in it
did not appreciably increase; during T'ang's time, there were
droughts seven years out of eight, but the extent of its shores did
not appreciably decrease. Hence, not to shift or change with time,
not to advance or recede
regardless of amount---this
is the great joy of the Eastern Sea.' Upon hearing this, the frog in
the broken-down well was so utter startled that it lost itself in
bewilderment.
Zhuangzi,
(Wandering on the Way,
“Autumn Floods”), Mair translator.
The
frog simply cannot understand what it is like to live as a sea turtle
in the vastness of the ocean. Moreover, as someone who's lived his
whole life in a well, he can't even know that the ocean exists. The
only thing that he can possibly do is embrace some form of
intellectual humility and realize theoretically
that there are limits to his understanding and stay open to the
possibility that something will come totally “out of left field”
and surprise him. That's part of the Daoist response to life. How sad
that important leaders of great nations often have not learned the
same lesson!
&&&&
Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!
Several weeks ago I was called up for jury selection. If you've never been, it involved a lot of people (something like 100) from all over the county being called into the Ontario Superior Court of Justice on Woolwich Street. We were run through various processes, but one thing that struck my eye was the random selection system. A lot of people were forced to take a day off work and some travelled long distances. (Other than writing this blog, I am retired and only live a five minute walk away from the Courthouse---so I got off lucky.) Yet only a small fraction of the people called up were asked to go in front of judge for a short interview in order to be chosen to be involved. (In my case, I was the very last person called up, and was chosen only as an alternative who would get called in if someone else failed to show up---which didn't happen.)
The process of choosing the smaller number that actually got onto the jury involved paper slips put into a rotary cage and a court clerk cranking it over and then pulling out people's names one by one.
The clerk was dressed differently, but that's how it was done. Image by Ellin Beltz, c/o Wikimedia.
This struck me as bizarre. Why call in so many people and have them wait so long, only to have a small number of their names drawn? Why not select the people at random and only call in enough individuals to be sure to get the right number? It's true that the judge asked us a couple questions, but both of which could easily have been asked on line or over the phone.
I asked a Bailiff why the court used such an antiquated system when it would be a lot simpler to use a computer to sort out the people before they even bothered coming to the court house. His response was that "the lawyers always object---they want to see an actual piece of paper in the cage being taken out by a human being". At the time I wondered that if the money people lost by taking time off work was taken out of the lawyer's income how long they'd continue to object.This got me thinking about how much money the courts waste in other ways.
People and politicians routinely complain bitterly about how much money gets "wasted" on helping people through things like welfare, subsidized housing, etc. But I rarely hear any of them complain about how much money gets spent (or "wasted") on our criminal justice system. I thought it might be interesting to try to figure out just how much does get spent on it.
&&&&
As I see it, there are three places where money is spent by the Justice system: the police, courts, and, prisons. Let's start with the police.
The first thing to remember is that there are four types of police: federal, provincial, municipal, and, specialized. Federal police are easy to identify: they are the RCMP. I found a financial report for the Mounties on their website, and if I'm reading it right it appears that their allocated budget comes to $3.9 billion in 2021. Looking at the OPP, their financial report says that they cost $1.1 billion in 2020. And looking at the city website, it appears that the cost of the Guelph police will come to a little under $52 million in 2021. What I'm calling "specialized" police are entities like the University of Guelph campus police, the Metrolinx "transit police", and, military police---among others. For the purposes of this article, I'm going to ignore this last category.
Since this article is more about "back of an envelope" figures than the picky details, I'm going to just divide each of these categories by the relevant population to try to get an average cost per citizen for each entity.
The entire population of Canada in 2021 is a little over 38 million. So if you divide the RCMP budget of $3.9 billion by 38 million, you get a figure of $103 per citizen. And there are 14.7 million people in Ontario as of 2021. Divide that into the OPP budget of $1.1 billion, and you get a cost of $75/citizen. And the population of Guelph is now something like 132,000. Divide that into the Guelph Police Services budget of $52 million and you get $394/citizen. Add them all together and you get a total of $572/citizen/year for policing.
Of course, people with different incomes (and different accountants and lawyers), pay different tax rates. Don't assume that these numbers bear any reference to your particular tax bills. But they do allow us to create a comparable number that we can use to get a handle on how much different government programs cost relative to each other.
&&&&
Now, let's look at how much criminal courts cost. Figuring this out first requires an understanding of how criminal trials are administered. Here's a flow chart from a government website that explains the courts of Canada.
The thing to remember is that the federal government passes most of the laws, but the provincial government has the courts that try most of the criminal cases. There is a complication, however, in that courts don't just try criminal cases, they also handle things like child custody and disputes between businesses. I'm not going to try to separate out these functions from the criminal ones---and I'm not even sure that we need to do so, as this too is a cost that is born by society. Moreover, family and civil court decisions have results that are imposed upon individuals against their will and which if not complied with have criminal consequences. For example, if you don't pay child support or a lawsuit judgment you can have your income garnisheed or assets seized.
Sorry about the date, but this was published in 2011, which might give you an idea of how "tardy" these reports can be.
Since the report is so old and there is such a big increase from 2007 to 2009, I'm going to round up the number to $150 million. Divide that by the Ontario population of 14.7 million, and we get an average of about $10. That seems relatively small compared to the cost of policing. (This might explain the stories I often read about how under-funded the courts seem to be.)
Since most trials are held on the provincial level, I won't bother trying to add in a federal cost. That would probably mostly involve things like the Supreme Court---which only handles a fraction of appeals.
&&&&
Let's now look at the price we pay for prisons. First off, let's be clear about my language. I am using the word "prison" to mean a place where the government locks you up against your will. It's the "crowbar hotel". That's an "ordinary English" term instead of a technical one. When you look at the website they instead talk about things like "Jails", "Treatment Centres", "Detention Centres", and, "Correctional Centres". I'm not going to get into the differences between them. Suffice it to say that each of these types of institutions may have slightly different goals, but at basis all are about dramatically limiting people's freedom to move out in the world.
According to the Parliamentary Budget Office's 2018 report, Update on Costs of Incarceration, the federal government spent about $1.6 billion on incarcerating something like 14,000 prisoners. This comes out to about $110,000 per inmate. Divide this by the population of Canada, 38 million, and we get about $42/citizen.
But that's just federal prisons. The majority of inmates are in provincial prisons.
On average during 2018/19, over 7,400 adults 18 years and older were in custody every day in the province’s adult correctional institutions and the Ministry spent $817 million in that fiscal year to run the institutions. In this report, we use the term “cor- rectional institutions” to encompass jails, detention centres, correctional centres and treatment centres.
As you can see above, she uses the term "correctional institution" where I would use "prison". I use my term because it is clear to me that the inmates are being imprisoned, but far from clear that their behaviour is being "corrected". Other than that "tom-eh-toes tom-ah-toes".
In addition, it's important to remember that lots of people spend considerably less than a year in jail either because they are sentenced to a period of time less than a year or because they are in jail for a short period of time while waiting for either bail or trial.
Having said that, it's easy to divide 7,400 into $817 million and get the cost of $110,000/inmate year. But let's divide that $817 million by the Ontario population, or, 14.7 million. The result is something like $56/citizen/year, on average.
Add the federal cost per person of $42/person to the provincial cost of $56/person, and we end up with a combined cost of $98/citizen/year.
&&&&
I put a lot of work into researching this stuff. It might not be obvious because a lot of effort includes wading through websites and reading government pdfs to only discover that there's nothing there I can use. I also have to spend a lot of time trying to assimilate complex policy issues before I can try to come up with a simple way of explaining them to readers.
Anyway, if you like the results and you can afford it, why not subscribe or throw something in the tip jar? Pay Pal and Patreon make it easy to do.
&&&&
Add together my "back of the envelope" estimates of policing ($572) plus courts ($10), and, Prisons ($98), and we get a total cost of $680 paid by the average citizen of Guelph for the criminal justice system.
It's a difficult thing to figure out what the average Canadian pays in taxes for a variety of reasons. First of all, there are different levels of government: federal, provincial, and, municipal. Secondly, there are different types of taxes such as income, sin, sales, etc. It's also important to realize that we live in a time of growing wealth stratification, which means that average numbers are less useful than median ones. (For example, in 2015 Statistics Canada estimates that the median household income was $70,336---which is an example of why we always have to double-check Fraser Institute numbers---see below---because they have a tendency to be "massaged" to push their particular message. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a median total tax per household number, so I was stuck using their number instead.)
This graphic clearly shows the difference between median and average. It comes from a website titled The Balance, and I'm using it under the "Fair Dealing" provision of our Copyright laws.
Another complexity comes from the way people record taxes. Because most couples both work, and there are significant tax issues around joint tax filing, financial reporting routinely talks about "household" incomes and taxes. A "household" is two or more people who live together (generally two adults and maybe one or more children)---but there are single parent households too. This raises problems because I've been dividing costs by the population instead of households.
It would require far too much digging to come up with a more accurate number, so for the sake of this article I'm just going to divide the per household number by two and suggest that that is the "average" taxes paid by Canadians. I'm interested in "orders of magnitude" here, so I think that these "short cuts" are legitimate. (You will make up your own mind about the validity of the results.)
According to the Fraser Institute, in 2018 "tax freedom day" arrived on June 10th. That's a "razzle dazzle" way of saying that:
In 2018, we estimate the average Canadian family (consisting of two or
more people) will earn $115,724 in income and pay $50,464 in taxes—or
43.6 per cent of its income.
With all the caveats I mentioned above, I will cut this in half and say that the average Canadian paid $25,232 in 2018. That would mean that the $680 I said the average Guelphite paid for the criminal justice system comes out to a little under 3% of his or her taxes.
&&&&
That's a starting point for a comparison, but now I want to pick up that old "bugaboo" from politics: welfare.
I want to talk about this because I can remember that one of the things that gets a small number of voters most "riled up" and angry is any suggestion that the government should spend more money on helping the poor. (When I ran for office it was the only subject that I could raise while going door-to-door that I thought could result in my being assaulted.) I don't think most people think about it much one way or the other, but I suspect that's more because politicians have learned to not mention the subject. It is, however, something that conservatives have used to whip their base into a frenzy at times. Premier Mike Harris, in particular, rode into office---at least partially---on the backs of the poor.
There are complications. In fact, there isn't any such thing as "welfare" anymore. Instead the Orwellian title "Ontario Works" has been substituted. (I say "Orwellian" because I suspect that the fraction of people who use this program are exactly the same fraction of the public who find it hardest to actually be employed.) There are other programs as well, such as rent geared to income housing, special programs like the Mayor's Task Force on Homelessness, the safe injection facilities, etc.
Advocates of a Guaranteed Annual Income would argue that it makes most sense for people to just get money themselves instead of creating bureaucracies. The idea is that people just need enough to afford a place to live rather than hiring a lot of people to build and administer affordable housing. Others suggest that a lot of lower income people need "minders" because their issues that keep them from finding good jobs would also result in the being soon parted from that guaranteed income provided by the government---if they were just given a bunch of cash. I suspect that there are good arguments on both sides and some individuals would benefit more one system than the other---and vice-versa. The main take-away for this article is that help for the poor isn't just the dole anymore. Instead, it encompasses a wide range of services too----which in Guelph's case is called "social services".
Yet another complexity is that while the majority of social services are consumed in Guelph and paid for by the province, they are administered by the County. To that end, I've pulled up a pie chart from the Wellington County budget of 2021.
As you can see, social services eats up 40% of the $231.7 million county budget, or $92.7 million dollars.
It needs to be said that this isn't how much the county raises in taxes, however. That figure is only $108.8 million. The difference is paid by city of Guelph and the Provincial and Federal governments. Luckily for the purposes of this article, the old saw that "there's only one tax-payer" works in my favour. All the money comes from people in the County---no matter whether it's property, sales, income, sin, or whatever tax you can think of.
There are 222,726 people who live in Wellington county, including the city of Guelph. If you divide $92.7 million by that number, you get $416/citizen/year. Compare that to the figure of $680 that I arrived at by estimating the combined police, court, and, prison costs and you could say that we only spend 60% as much on Social Services as we spend on criminal justice.
I don't want readers to put too much stock on the numbers I've manufactured above. I'm not an expert on any of these subjects, and I'm just trying to dig out the sort of context and background information on a subject that politicians rarely talk about. Moreover, if they do, from what I hear, the legacy media tends to not report it. (As one ex-Cabinet minister told me, "Once I start getting into details you can see all the reporters put down their pencils and stop listening".)
&&&&
Even if you believe that the machinations that I've gone through in the above has at least rough value to understand the emphasis we are putting on one part of the government's job over another, there are still other important complexities.
One issue that comes to my mind is just how many people are "benefiting" from each of these branches of the government. As I mentioned above, there seem to be 7,400 person/years each year in the entire Ontario prison system. This gives us some idea of the magnitude of what is happening in the criminal justice system. But it's important to remember that the police don't charge, arrest, or, investigate every crime that comes to their attention. Moreover, not every person they charge gets convicted. And not every person convicted ends up in prison---there are things like house arrest and probation. Finally, the police don't even spend all their time investigating crime. A lot of what they do involves things like public education, monitoring traffic, and, just being "visible" in order to keep a lid on unlawful activity.
Having said all of that, it might be useful to come up with a comparable number for social services. About three years ago I went to the trouble of finding how many units of social housing exist in Guelph. It involved a little digging, but the number I came up with was a little under 2,500---just for Guelph. That's 7,400 "clients" of the prison system versus 2,500 units (lots of these have more than one person living in them) in Guelph alone. Looking at this disparity of needs versus resources, I am tempted to suggest perhaps society should redirect some of the money it currently spends on the criminal justice system towards social services.
I'm not about to do that, however. My understanding of bureaucracies is that there is a hierarchy of programs within any institution, and if they have to cut programs they generally cut muscle and bone long before they get around to the fat. What I'm talking about, for example, is that if a police department was forced to cut it's budget it would probably cut de-escalation training instead of the SWAT team. (The plausible argument that could be made would be that the latter is more of the "core mandate" of policing than the former---but from what I've read SWAT teams tend to be expensive and rarely necessary.) Similarly with the courts---cut their funding and things like sentencing circles and special drug courts would be the first to go.
Moreover, I don't think the debate should be about forcing judges and police to fight with social workers and psychiatrists over scarce government money. Instead, I think it would be more productive to look at two other things: getting new revenue sources from somewhere else (ie: make the rich pay a bit more taxes) and developing new government policies that deal more with the core problems that the poor face. For example, many of the problems associated with addiction to opioids stem from their being illegal. If there was a legal, safe, and, cheap source it would dramatically reduce overdoses and dramatically cut the costs of addiction. This would get many addicts off the streets and into productive jobs and away from prostitution or petty theft. It would also help the police by ending their "whack-a-mole" job of combating narcotics trafficking.
&&&&
When I started this exercise I hoped I'd come up with a startling figure that showed the government "wastes" huge amounts of money on the court system, police, and, prisons that could be much better used for social services. Instead I found that while there are probably individual situations where money could be more wisely spent, I didn't see a huge disparity. I suspect that the criminal justice deals with a lot fewer individuals than social services---but my take-away is that looting its budget would hardly end poverty in Canada.
Having written the above, I do think that it is a useful procedure to walk citizens through the relative costs of different government programs. If voters don't have a "feel" for the relative price that they pay for different services, they really can't make an informed choice when they choose between different party platforms during an election.
That's enough for this week. Enjoy the relaxed rules around social life. I am! I went out to a restaurant with friends a couple weeks back---for the first time in over a year and a half! We aren't out of the woods yet, but with any luck that glimpse of light won't turn out to be a mirage.
&&&&
Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!
1. Heaven and earth are not humane (jen), They treat the ten thousand beings as straw dogs (ch'u kou). The sage is not humane (jen), He treats the hundred families as straw dogs (ch'u kou).
2. Between heaven and earth, How like a bellows (t'o yo) it is! Empty and yet inexhaustible, Moving and yet it pours out ever more.
3. By many words one's reckoning (shu) is exhausted. It is better to abide by the center (shou chung).
(Chapter
Five, Laozi,
Ellen Chen trans.)
“Jen” is a key Confucian virtue
that suggests that people have an innate desire or drive to help one
another. While not universally expressed, it is something that is
potentially in all human beings if they try. Usually this word is
translated as “sentimental” but Chen has translated it as
“humane”. This is an important point, because the chapter becomes
a lot easier to take if you think of it as a rejection of saccharine
sentimentality. It is much harsher than that, however, Laozi is
saying that the universe is totally indifferent to human suffering.
It might be that some, or
even all, people have jen,
but the world certainly doesn't.
He implies this by saying that every
creature (ie “the ten thousand beings”), every human being (“the
hundred families”) are just “straw dogs”. Straw dogs were cheap
representations of the animals that used to be used as sacrifices
during religious rituals. (They
were the same as the “Hell Money” that you can find in any
Chinese grocery and which is burned as a sacrifice during various
festivals.)Straw dogs are simply
worthless objects that are destroyed in the place of things that are
actually worth too much to be wasted.
Contrast this Daoist statement with the lyrics of this Christian hymn
I learned as a young boy.
God sees the little sparrow fall, It meets His tender view; If God so loves the little birds, I know He loves me, too.
Christianity is
sentimental. It believes that there is a great God in heaven that
cares deeply about what happens to each and every human being that
has ever lived. The Christian
universe is supposed
to be humane.
The question is, which point of view makes the most sense?
...........
Shortly after the terror attacks at
the World Trade Centre I was invited to take part in a panel
discussion at a private school. There were a lot of people
present---a Cabinet minister, a representative of the Israeli
government, a Roman Catholic priest, etc. I was appalled by the way
these “responsible”, “mainstream” people acted. To a one,
they expressed an extremely emotional, freaked-out response to the
9/11 massacre. There was no
attempt to try and put any of it into a context, to suggest that we
shouldn't stumble around like enraged bears---creating more violence
and evil in the world. I was the lone voice trying
to put the attacks into an objective perspective in order to calm
people's emotions. I said
that bad as the attack was, the casualties would have been considered
a quiet day in WWII---which went on for about six years! I also said
that we have to remember that each and everyone of us is going to die
and that we shouldn't be so emotionally freaked out by something like
this. I ended by reading out the above passage from the Laozi.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about that event as I watch the
horrors that have been inflicted on the world by the catastrophic
invasion of Iraq and the never-ending “war on terror”. Why was I
the only voice suggesting moderation? I would suggest that it is
because these other people were working through a false understanding
of life. They believed in the words of that child's hymn that I
learned at Sunday school. They literally believed that “Jesus loves
them”.1
Of course, none of them would parrot
that little song. Some of them weren't even nominal Christians. But I
suspect that if you pressed them, they would all have ultimately come
up with some expression that the universe is, or at least in some
metaphysical ways shouldbe, “fair”. The
emotional response that these “leaders” all manifested came from
the cognitive dissonance that stomped with
leaden feet into their lives
on 9/11. The world isn't “fair”---your day can start with a
proper breakfast, you can kiss your spouse, you can line up all your
career “ducks in a row”, and out of nowhere some lunatic will fly
an airplane into your building and incinerate you with jet fuel.
Have a nice day!
..........
For Laozi it isn't just that you can
have everything going for you and if you are unlucky bad things
happen. No, it's worse than that, it is inevitable
that bad things happen. Look at the second stanza of Chapter Five:
“Between heaven and earth, How like a bellows (t'o yo) it is!”
Who exists between heaven and earth?
People do! And where is a bellows used? In the forge of a blacksmith.
Laozi is suggesting that people's lives are like the fuel in a
blacksmith's forge. We are one of the raw materials
of existence
that gets burned up and consumed in the Dao
process. This analogy fits
perfectly as straw dogs get burned in a fire during the ritual they
serve. And, as I told those school children, whether or not you get
crushed, incinerated, or, jump to your death during a terrorist
attack---you are still going to die no matter what. Indeed, while I
was saying this, my eyes focused on a bald little boy who I suspected
had cancer and was going through chemo therapy. How is dying of
terminal cancer better than being smashed by a bunch of
Islamo-Fascists?
We are all straw dogs.
And yet, there is a little bit of an answer to the bleakness of this
passage.
“Empty and yet
inexhaustible, Moving and yet it pours out
ever more.”
The Dao exists and maybe it has a
purpose even if it is indifferent to our personal desires. It is
possible to build a life where one actually puts an ideal ahead of
yourself---even if many people think that this is completely
impossible. Stoics used to
believe that Virtue is its
own reward. This
credo says that you don't “do the right thing” because you expect
a reward---even if it is just a good feeling about yourself---but
simply because it is thething to do.
In same way, I understand that pre-Christian Norsemen believed that
courage was an ultimate virtue. You weren't courageous because it
would make you a great warrior, but just because it was inherently
thething
to be.
Scientists also derive real meaning and purpose in their lives simply
based on the quest for knowledge---not so they can patent some
invention and make money or get a Nobel prize---but just because it
is thething
to do. In much the same way,
Daoists identify and appreciate the amazing process of existence that
constantly transforms everything---plants, animals, rocks, people,
energy, etc---into something else. Even strawdogs give off smoke and
ashes that feed the plants, and, heat to warm the hands. For
Daoists
that is enough.
__________
1My
one-time boss had a bumpersticker on his desk that read “Jesus
loves you. But I still think you're an asshole.”
&&&&
Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!
Last Friday I got this year's flu shot and pretty much lost half a week to extreme tiredness. I have gotten a start on something, but I'm still somewhat under the weather and there's no way I will be able to publish anything worthwhile this week. I'm begging off until I feel well enough to accomplish something that I won't be ashamed of posting.
Having said the above, I still recommend the vaccine. I just hope you have less awful a response to it than my significant other and I have.
Yup, that's pretty much me for the last few days.
&&&&
Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!
We live in a society that “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”---to quote Oscar Wilde. We only value something insofar as it has utility for someone else. Indeed, sometimes we only recognize a thing's existence if it can be reduced to a number and used by an accountant to manipulate the “bottom line”. Indeed, that phrase has become synonymous in everyday conversation and political discourse as meaning “the ultimate criteria” for making any decision. This is why we build “brutalist” buildings and suburban sprawl---they are cheap to build so we create a fake aesthetic to justify their form.
In fact, the modern “utilitarian” design of our cities is tremendously inefficient for the people who live in them. The “utility” only refers to the people who make money off building them. Giant, ugly skyscrapers and endless sprawl are very profitable to developers, but they force the people who live and work in them to spend far too much of their lives commuting huge distances to go from soul-less homogenity to ugly conformity. This is hardly efficient for the people who live these lives or for the environment that has to soak up the enormous ecological footprint.
Sir Motley of Southunc made an excursion to the Hillock of Shang. There he saw an unusual tree so big that a thousand four-horse chariots could be shaded by its leaves.
“Goodness! What tree is this?” asked Sir Motley. “It must have unusual timber.” Looking upward at the smaller branches, however, he saw that they were all twisted and unfit to be beams. Looking downward at the massive trunk, he saw that it was so gnarled as to be unfit for making coffins. If you lick on of its leaves, your mouth will develop ulcerous sores. If you smell its foliage, you fall into a drunken delirium that lasts for three days.
“This tree is truly worthless,” said Sir Motley, “and that is why it has grown so large. Ah! The spiritual man is also worthless like this.”
Zhuangzi, “The Human World”, part 5, Mair trans.
Many years ago I worked as a janitor in a major department store. Once a year, the major share holders would come through in an inspection tour. When this happened, our foreman asked us to “give it our all” to make the store as clean as possible. We really worked hard and after the tour the store manager came to us, shook our hands, and told us that the shareholders had informed him that his store was the cleanest one in the country. The next week we had our hours were cut. The store was obviously too clean, and our extra work resulted in a significant decrease in pay. I learned a very important lesson that day. When you work you do not work for your employer or your customer---you work for yourself.
Institutions, abstractions, ideologies, none of them have any value in and of themselves. These are merely means to an end. People, nature, beautiful works of art, these are what have intrinsic value. The truly valuable are never useful, because the concept of utility is always directed outwards and never inward. In your life always remember that you are more important than the profit that any employer or customer wishes to extract from you. And you are also more important than any institutional goal that the government, political party, or, religious body asks you to sacrifice towards. Being useless means that you will never be used. If you remember this, you stand a greater chance of not being personally abused.
Moreover, if you remember this fact you also stand a much greater chance of not finding yourself abusing others in pursuit of some external goal. Remembering that you have your own intrinsic value as a human being is the first step to remembering that everyone else has a similar value.
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Furthermore I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!
I have spent the last couple weeks looking a the alternative social media sites Gab and Bitchute---which are functionally copies of Facebook and Youtube, respectively. The only real difference is that they don't censor content if it's out-and-out lies or designed to foster hatred against groups of people. As such, they are where most of the people banned off the mainstream social media end up. It's been a bit of an eye-opener.
It's a bit of a fire hose, so I won't attempt to describe everything I saw. Instead, I'll try to focus on a couple posts that I think will give my readers a feel for what I saw. I'm going to be a bit sparing about what I post because I've had problems in the past with Google yanking images that they deemed "unacceptable". There's supposed to be an exception for educational purposes, but my experience is that the artificial intelligence cannot tell the difference and if you appeal the odds are that I will never be able to get in touch with a real human being that I can explain things to.
One of several odd posts I saw contained the following.
This purports to be a photo of a living, metallic wire that a "doctor" removed from a soldier who'd been injected with one of the COVID-19 vaccines.
Here's a diagnosis from the same doctor about the soldier.
And, a prescription
The thing to understand about the above is what "detox" means in the "alternative medicine" community. It generally isn't the orthodox medicine treatment known as "chelation therapy", which is a rarely used, potentially dangerous treatment for various types of metal poisoning. Instead, it's usually a vague, new-age regime that generally involves a patient spending a lot of money on expensive products that don't do much at all. Quackwatch identifies several common types of "detox" that range from "colonic irrigation" (what our grandparents called an "enema"), through treatments that promote sweating, to some form of pseudo-chelation therapy.
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There are a lot of people who publish opinion pieces on the Web and in legacy media. Unfortunately, a lot of them just pull nonsense out of their butts and rant. I like to think that I'm different in that I put a lot of time and effort into researching everything I write. But that takes a lot of time and effort. If you like what I write---and you can afford it---why not buy a subscription or toss something in the tip jar? (Thanks Anthony for being so awesome!) Paypal and Patreon make it easy to do.
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There's a second video from Stew Peters that builds on this theme and takes it into X Files territory. I tried to put up an excerpt that showed the insanity, but Youtube's artificial intelligence is incapable of making a distinction between someone who is putting something up to trick people versus using it educate people so they are less likely to get tricked. As a result, you are just going to have to believe me when I describe what they are talking about. (I know, but we live in an imperfect world---get used to it. I have.)
Peters is interviewing a woman by the name of Carrie Madej. (She says she's a doctor, but I'm reticent to call her that given what says in this interview.) In the video he shows some black and white, slightly out-of-focus pictures that look remarkably just like the sort of fuzzy images that I used to see with a cheap compound microscope when I was a kid.
Just for comparison's sake, here's an image I found from an American Public Broadcasting System article on microfiber plastic pollution that looks remarkably similar.
The next image is something that Ms Madej became very concerned about. That's because she said it had tentacles, was lifting itself off the slide----"it appeared to be self-aware" and "it knows we were watching it". (How she could infer any of this from a blurred image on a compound microscope is beyond me.)
Here's an example of the sort of weird stuff you can find in just a drop of pond water and see under a microscope. It's a water hydra, recorded from a much better microscope than the one that was used to take the pictures on this dumb show. It's something that elementary school teachers routinely show children to get them to realize how complex the world is and how little our "common sense" prepares us to understand it.
Using the above two pictures plus some others of equally dubious value, she describes them as being evidence of:
"an injectable computing system"
"super conducting material"
"self-assembly, things were growing"
"metallic fragments"
"tentacles"
"graphene-like structures"
"sticky glue-like substance that would be considered a hydro-gel"
"nano-lipids"
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Of course this is all nonsense. But it raises the important question "what are these people thinking?" The first thing to remember is that "Dr." Madej is using "technobabble" to confound the viewer. The term comes from Star Trek where writers would inject some sort of baffle-gab into the conversation between characters that would suggest some sort of pseudo-scientific reason for the magic that the plot needs to explain the crisis or save the day.
In the case of The Stew Peters Show, the guest---Carrie Madej---is using the con-man's version of the "Gish gallop" to dump a load of bullshit on the viewer so it will over-load whatever doubts she might have about any one particular part of it. (That's the same sort of maneuvor that a confidence trickster used separate me from $60 a couple weeks ago.)
Is she a "wiseguy" doing this on purpose to separate "suckers" from their money? Perhaps. (Quacks charge good money for all those detox treatments.) But that doesn't necessarily mean that she is aware of what she is doing. As I explained in my article a while back titled Human Parasites, natural selection can create different types of populations within a given species. It might be that evolution has created a specific type of human personality---should we call them "homo flakyensus"?---that instinctively spew this sort of nonsense. In that case Carrie Madej really does believe in this stuff and makes a living off it in just the same way a real doctor makes a living off what he does.
Whatever is going on the heads of people who create this stuff, we also have to account for those who eat it up. I think that this is where the Trekkie idea of "techno-babble" may offer a suggestion. Writers insert this stuff into scripts not to annoy scientists, but rather to create a simulation of reality in a situation that is totally unreal. It's part of telling a convincing story.
And link together enough convincing stories and you end up with what writers call a "mythos". Star Trek has an extremely well-developed mythos that includes heroes (Zephran Cochran), villains (the Borg), political organizations (the Federation), an economic system (as near as I can tell, utopian Communism), and so forth. The Star Trek mythos is so appealing to people that television studios have repeatedly created new shows about it and fans have devoted a great deal of energy into making it a "hobby" through cosplay.
People organize their lives around different mythical systems. In my case, I've constructed a rationalist system that merges parts of Daoism with the scientific Enlightenment of Europe. Many others live in a world that brings together Christianity and Laissez-Faire Capitalism. There are a lot of others. In the case of anti-vaxxers, I think that they have created a mythos that draws from a great many different sources.
One of them is a profound fear of modern technology fueled by a profound ignorance about how things actually work. You can see this in Madej's belief that scientists are able to inject something into a person's arm that would be able to create metallic filaments and a microscopic yet somehow sentient creature. This doesn't require an evil government conspiracy, but rather an X-Files alien alliance. Only someone who has no understanding of what modern technology can and cannot do would come up with this fantasy.
Another part of this worldview is fear that the government will take away people's "freedom". Again and again Stew Peters ranted about the government "forcing vaccines into people's arms".
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Why are these mythos I'm talking about so important? I recently watched a video by Rebecca Watson where the issue of motivated reasoning came up. This is the idea that a large part of what people call "rational decision-making" is actually human consciousness creating excuses for decisions that have already been made emotionally. As she explained it, she used the metaphor of a monkey riding a tiger.
I found this image being used by a Thai Restaurant, so I assumed they wouldn't mind if I copied it.
The main point is that the tiger goes where the tiger wants to go. (It is a cat, after all.) The monkey is not about to argue with it, but she has a certain pride---so she makes up a story about why she wanted to go to wherever they both end up. The tiger represents the older parts of the brain that often make decisions for us and the monkey represents the more modern bits that govern things like conscious decision-making.
So far I'm well within the realm of orthodox psychology. But I'm going to take it one step further---simply because I think that this point seems obvious to me from self-reflection. (Philosophers are allowed to do this sort of thing as long as they freely admit that it is just speculation and are willing to be disabused of their idea if a good experiment proves it wrong.) I think that the tigers we ride aren't just artifacts of brain evolution. I also think that they are probably influenced by culture too. And what I call a person's "mythos" would be a key part of building a person's individual "tiger".
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If we accept that a person uses motivated reasoning based upon their own inherited or personally-constructed mythological understanding of the world, then trying to reason them out of their crackpot behaviour is a waste of time. Instead, we need to stop the adoption of their nutty mythos in the first place. The problem with this idea is that it flies in the face of one of modern democracy's most cherished ideals: that everyone is entitled to their own personal belief system.
I'm not suggesting that the state step in and force all people to accept the same worldview. That would be a totalitarian solution. But it might be possible to educate children so they understand the implications for life of the worldview they begin to see everything through. This would perhaps allow them the chance that they might "choose wisely" instead of just stumbling into something without understanding any of the implications.
I don't know much about Grey Owl, other than he was an Englishman who became so enamoured with an idealized myth about the First Nations of Canada that he moved to Northern Ontario and tried to totally adopt their lifestyle. I don't even know if it's true that he was accepted by members of the real First Nations, as the above video implies. But I do think that trying to live in harmony with nature was a damn sight better mythos than the British Imperialism and white superiority which a great many of his fellow citizens would have believed.
In short---true or not---as the line from the "Heritage Minute" above says, people become what they dream. And it's important that we dream well. I would suggest that the people who refuse to wear masks and won't get vaccinated are people who have "dreamed poorly".
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That's enough for this week. Be nice to each other and don't get ahead of the health authorities as we slowly wake up out of this pandemic fever dream.
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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!
Another core Daoist idea is that of “unhewn log” or pu. This is the idea that all things, even human beings, have an innate nature that is perverted when it is forced to conform to external control. Civilization---especially in the form of Confucian ceremonies, rules, and, rituals---twists and perverts people's essential nature. Although the ancient Daoists had no theory of “socio-biology”, I suspect that they would agree that there is a basic, ideal sort of life built into our human genes that civilization often distorts. Daoist literature not only complains about how society twists our lives, it also paints visions of a sort of ancient utopia where people can live their lives in harmony with their essential nature.
In a world of ultimate integrity, men would dwell together with the birds and the beasts. They would come together in tribes with the myriad things. What would they know of superior men and petty men? Equally without knowledge, they would not stray from their integrity. Equally without desire, this is called “the simplicity of the unhewn log”. With the simplicity of the unhewn log, the people would attain their nature. Then along comes the sage, assiduous in his exercise of humaneness, plodding in his exercise of righteousness, and all under heaven begin to doubt. Music begins to multiply, rites begin to proliferate, and all under heaven begin to divide. Therefore, if the simple, unhewn log remained intact, who would carve a sacrificial vessel from it? If the white jade remained unimpaired, who would make scepters and tallies from it? If the Way and integrity were not discarded, who would choose humaneness and righteousness? If the attributes of our individual natures were not set aside, what use would there be for rites and music? If the colours were not confused, who would make colourful patterns? If the five sounds were not confused, who would conform to the six pitch-pipes? The carving of the unhewn log into instruments is the fault of the craftsman: the impairment of the Way and integrity with humaneness and righteousness is the error of the sage.
Zhuangzi, Horses Hooves, Mair, trans.
Modern people do not live lives governed by the strict rules of filial piety and decorum of Confucianism, but we are hemmed-in by other regulations that are in many ways even worse. We live our lives based on clock time, which means that for many people arriving at work as little as five minutes late can result in a gut-wrenching inter-personal conflict with their boss. We not only don't live in harmony with the “birds and the beasts”, our society is engaged in a genocidal war against them. In many ways, our competitive “growth at all costs”, capitalist lifestyle is every bit as constrained as the one lived in a Confucianist house-hold. We have merely traded a domineering mother-in-law and over-bearing father for a boss and the gnawing fear of unemployment. The need to kowtow before an altar of the ancestors has been replaced by the need to feign enthusiasm for the company vision statement. Henry David Thoreau's belief that "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with the song still in them" is just as true today as it was in his time---and even when Zhuangzi put pen to paper.
I personally do not believe that human beings are as defined by our “essential nature” as the idea of the unhewn log would suggest, but I do agree with Zhuangzi that there are some ways of living that work better for people than others. It is a bald truth that our civilization has painted itself into a corner and cannot go back to the utopian vision of small village life that the Daoists painted. (I suspect that this was no longer possible even in Zhuangzi's time.) But through social and political activism it is possible to change our current civilization to one that is in harmony with the best qualities of human beings. We can incrementally move towards a society more in harmony with nature, less competitive, and, more free. By holding onto the ideal of the unhewn log, we will have a star to guide us on that journey.
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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!
Former Green Party of Canada leader, Annamie Paul. Image c/o Wikimedia.
Last week the leader of the Green Party of Canada resigned after a disastrously short time at the helm. There have been allegations of racism and antisemitism, but I think that just about all the mainstream media have totally misunderstood what happened to Annamie Paul. I think my readers might benefit from my analysis. But to understand that, I'm going to have to do a bit of a "deep dive" and explain some political concepts that I don't think the vast majority of people think about much.
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In the interests of full disclosure, I founded the Green Party of Canada EDA in Guelph. I also sat for a while on the Green Party of Canada Federal Council as the Communications Chair. I also spear-headed a not very successful campaign to reform the constitution of the GPC. My involvement dramatically declined once Elizabeth May became leader. I don't know much more about the personalities involved in the recent dispute. But for reasons I hope will become obvious in the body of this Op Ed, I think that that's irrelevant. And I have double-checked the points I want to make with regard to the constitution, so I think I'm on pretty firm ground.
Having said that, as a general case, I see all my statements as being provisional. If new information comes along that would cause me to modify them, so be it. If some reader takes issue with the facts as I describe them below, I'm always interested in listening to constructive criticism. (That's why this blog has a Comments section.)
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The first thing that people have to understand is that there are different layers to causes. An old nursery rhyme points a finger toward this issue.
For want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe the horse was lost, for want of a horse the knight was lost, for want of a knight the battle was lost, for want of a battle the kingdom was lost. So a kingdom was lost—all for want of a nail.
The point is that issues that seem insignificant to people can cascade into bigger and bigger problems---to the point of having catastrophic consequences.
President Harry Truman was famous for putting a sign on his desk to the effect that "the buck stopped" with him for any decision that the US government made.
Harry Truman. Public domain image.
The sentiment sounds good, but unfortunately it doesn't really make any sense. Institutions follow their own internal logic based on the way they were set up. President Truman was at the mercy of the structure of both the Democratic Party and the United States of America. Similarly, I think Annamie Paul was at the mercy of the constitution of the GPC.
I generally believe in what people call "systems analysis" instead of individual responsibility. Our cultural/religious tradition predisposes us to blame individuals for the decisions they make instead of their past history or the institutions they serve. (There's that whole silly story about a talking snake and eating some fruit---.) I would argue that blaming the individual helps people channel their strong emotions, but in most cases if you look beneath the surface you can find a failed system that caused or at least made the problem worse.
Take the example of Catholic priests raping children. Who was responsible?
Of course, the priests bear some guilt, but I would argue not most of it. How about the Bishops who kept hushing things up and transferring the offenders to new (dare I say "virgin") parishes? How about the teachings of the church---that say that every single person has total and absolute control over their instincts (like the sex drive) and thereby ill-prepare people to channel them into healthy outlets? And how about teaching that the sex instinct isn't normal and natural, but rather the promptings of Satan---doesn't that bear some of the blame too?
Beyond these issues, how about the way the church chooses people for the priesthood? Why did they select so many young men who had such complex issues over sexuality? Could it possibly be that they had a bias towards repressed, up-tight, conformists because the higher-ups didn't want the sort of independent, confident, thoughtful men who might "rock the institutional boat"?
Looking at problems from the perspective of systems is hard to do. I too get the momentary "rage rush" that comes from wanting to beat some offender to a bloody pulp. But when I am able to put some distance between myself and the situation, I generally can see some sort of institutional mechanism that has fostered the problem before us. At that point my reason steps in and I tell myself "if we really want to fix the problem, reform the system---don't brutalize the individual".
With regard to the Green Party of Canada, I would argue that the
constitutional structure of the party makes it almost impossible to
govern. Elizabeth May is such a famous and charismatic leader that she was able to
keep it a lid on it for her term of office. But leaders like May are few and far between, and I think that someone like Paul didn't have much of a chance to calm down the Brahma bull that is the GPC.
An apt metaphor for Annamie Paul and the GPC? Public Domain image c/o Wikimedia Commons.
When Annamie Paul got elected, I suspect she didn't really understand the situation and assumed
that she would be able to take over where May left off. But she lacked
the fame and charisma that her predecessor had, which meant that she was
never able to get the system to work for her. The result would probably
seem to her to be a baffling refusal to comply with the leader's direction. And, I suspect it seemed to her like
there was some sort of institutional prejudice. Moreover, with the
right (ie: "wrong") mix of personalities, I can see how this would have led to a nasty
feedback loop of bruised egos that lead to the very public melt-down we all saw.
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But before I get to that, I want to discuss another issue that I think most folks really haven't thought much about. Just what exactly is "politics"? I would argue that the basic, molecular building block of politics are personal relationships between individuals.
Consider where politics comes from. In the pre-modern era, politics was all about networks of personal relationships. The Queen exerted her control over the state through appointing a group of courtiers, or, a retinue. Here's a painting of Queen Elizabeth the First and her retinue, painted by Robert Peake in 1601.
Public domain image, photo c/o Wikigallery
Each of these courtiers would in turn have their own retinue, who would help him or her undertake the tasks that the monarch had entrusted to them. If it was needed, some of this "staff" would also have a retinue that they would assemble to help with their responsibilities. This entire system was called "patronage". Patronage is how authoritarian states are able to operate. It's also why they tend to be both very decentralized and prone to corruption. That's because loyalty only comes from being purchased (hence corruption), and, people tend to only be loyal to their patron (hence decentralization).
Power flows from the top down in an authoritarian state, but in a democracy it is supposed to come from the bottom up. People who wish to amass power and influence in a democracy have to be elected by a group of supporters, not appoint a retinue of followers.
But there is more than one of way to build supporters in a political party. The problem is that some methods are more inherently democratic and make the party more resilient while others are more top-down and make the party more fragile. My concern with the Green Party is that early on it sleep-walked into a system that is not very democratic and quite unstable.
Under Canadian election law the basic building block of any political party is supposed to be the Electoral District Association (EDA). These aren't national organizations but instead are rooted in a specific geographic community, such as Guelph.
The idea is that a group of people want to support some political ideal so they reach out to find similarly-minded individuals, sell party memberships to them, form an executive, raise money, bring in speakers, hold rallies, etc. They build a war chest, train volunteers how you run an election campaign, and, seek out people with a local profile to run as a candidate. Do this in communities across the country and you end up with a strong political party.
The key point to understand about this system is that it "roots" the member in a specific community. This carries with it two intangible, but extremely important virtues.
First of all, in an EDA people have a much better chance to get to know the personalities and past history that each of us "carry around on our shoulders" (to use a phrase from Wendell Berry). For example, you can learn if someone can or can't be trusted to complete a task they've taken on, whether they can get along with different types of people, if they have a real commitment to the project or are just trying to build their own "brand", etc.
Secondly, in a local EDA you have to work with other people who often don't see the world the way you do. This means that to accomplish anything you have to learn how to explain yourself, negotiate compromises with different points of view, and, prove to the other members that you will honour whatever collective decisions made---whether you agree with them or not.
Under this old way of amassing political power, a pyramid is created where a small number of individuals build a "power base" of supporters in their local EDAs. This is then used to build connections with other local leaders within the party. Eventually a small number of people build followings of other local leaders, which gives them influence in the party-as-a-whole. They jostle with each other until some individual gets enough supporters among this group to end up in a leadership position.
In contrast, there is another road to political power that recently emerged from modern media. I suppose you can trace it all the way back to Pierre Eliot Trudeau and "Trudeaumania". That is, the leader of a party can become so famous that they end up being able get followers all across the country whom have never met and know almost nothing about him or her. This allows leaders to totally by-pass the local EDAs, which then becomes much less important to the internal political structure than things like social media and television news.
This new way of building support involves creating a "brand" through manipulating the media. I suggest Trudeau the elder as the beginning of this in Canada because he was really good at pulling "stunts" that endeared him to his supporters. To understand what I'm talking about, take a look at the following short video.
I don't know if this pirouette was on purpose or just a quirk of Trudeau's personality, but it was certainly part of his "brand" to make fun of the monarchy, hang out with rock stars, and generally "ham it up" for the cameras. This wasn't a liability, but key to his enduring popularity as a politician. That's because the average Canadian really didn't know much about him as a human being---they just responded to a two-dimensional persona that had been crafted by the mass-media.
This really came home to me when he died. I---probably like the vast majority of other citizens---had no idea that Pierre Trudeau was a devout Catholic. Which just goes to show that it's tremendously important to keep reminding yourself that no matter how much you think you know something about a person in the "public eye", you really only know what little manages to get through the keyhole that is the media. Another example that should make you think is Bill Cosby. How many folks who thought of him as "America's Dad" would have believed he was a serial rapist?
The thing is that Trudeau used his personal popularity to cement a close tie to the Liberal party---which was (and still is) firmly embedded in community EDAs. But now it is possible to build your brand to the point where you can thumb your nose at the local branches of your party and still end up being the head of a political party---hence Donald Trump.
The progression of this new way of building power in a political party manifests itself in things like directly electing the leader through a one-person, one ballot system. In contrast, under a community-based system each EDA elects delegates (based on the number of dues-paying members in that riding) who then go to a convention and negotiate among themselves to elect a leader. In addition, parties that go for this direct vote system usually allow leadership candidates to sell memberships and allow these new members---many of which have zero history or loyalty to the EDA where they live, or even the party itself---to vote for "their guy".
The GPC chooses its leaders through a direct member voting system, just like most of the others. (I understand the Ontario provincial Liberals still use a delegate/convention system---I don't know about the NDP.) But it has gone one step further than the other parties and doesn't even have EDA delegates at their conventions (which they call "General Meetings")---which I think all the other parties still do.
If you look at the constitution of the GPC you will see the following clause:
Article 8 General Meetings of the Entire Membership of the Party 8.1 General Meetings shall consist of: 8.1.1 individual Members in good standing who have one vote, and 8.1.2 delegates or Members carrying proxies, who are in good standing, and who have voting rights under one or more Bylaws that provide for voting by proxy. (Proviso: This clause shall not come into effect until the Members adopt such a Bylaw or Bylaws.) 8.2 A quorum shall be fifty (50) Members present at a General Meeting who are in good standing, representing at least two regions, as defined in the Bylaws. 8.3 General Meetings shall be held at least once every two years. 8.4 Sixty (60) days notice to Members is required to call a General Meeting. 8.5 General Meetings of Members shall be called in accordance with the Bylaws. 8.6 Special General Meetings of Members shall be called in accordance with the Bylaws.
Yes, you read that right. Some of the Green Party of Canada's most important decisions aren't made through consulting duly elected delegates from local EDAs across the country (like every other party I've ever heard of), instead they are made by whomever can afford and wants to show up at the convention.All you need to get things passed at a GPC General Meeting is for 49 random members from the area where the meeting is being held plus one more from somewhere else.
Think about the above state of affairs. Someone can show up at a Green Party of Canada convention who has amassed a great deal of credibility in his community, has inspired hundreds of members to join the party, and, built up the EDA into a major force---but his vote is no more important or weighty than someone who is considered a "flake" by the members of his community and hasn't lifted a finger to build the party.
There are attempts to deal with this imbalance by having on-line referendums, but even if there were no problems with that system (I think that there are, but that's not the point I'm trying to make in this article) it still dramatically weakens the authority of the EDA in the structure of the party. What this means is that if you want to become a real influence in the GPC, there's no real sense in trying to build up a strong membership base and local organization. In fact, it's just a waste of your time and effort.
To consider where real power lies within the GPC, consider the following two clauses in its constitution:
Article 6 Accountability 6.1 All Units and individuals within the Party are accountable to: 6.1.1 the membership in General Meeting, 6.1.2 the Federal Council when the membership is not in General Meeting. 6.2 Decisions of the Members in General Meeting shall have precedence over decisions of Federal Council, and any Federal Council decision that is inconsistent with a decision of the Members in General Meeting shall be null and void to the extent of the inconsistency. 6.3 Filings, and appointments, of the Party required by the Canada Elections Act, or other statute or regulation, including the endorsement of a candidate during an election, are under the direction of the membership in General Meeting or Federal Council as per Articles 6.1 and 6.2. 6.4 Unless otherwise specified by this Constitution, the Bylaws, or by the membership as the case may be, Federal Council, on behalf of the membership, is responsible for the overall implementation of actions as called for in this Constitution, the Bylaws, or in other decisions of the membership in General Meeting.
Article 9 Federal Council 9.1Composition of Federal Council The Federal Council shall be composed of: 9.1.1 A President. 9.1.2 The Leader. 9.1.3 One (1) representative from each Province of Canada. 9.1.4 One (1) representative representing the Territories of Canada. 9.1.5 A Fund Representative. 9.1.6 The Executive Director. 9.1.7 Two (2) Youth Representatives. 9.1.8 A Vice President English. 9.1.9 A Vice President French.
Real structural power resides with the Federal Council---who are elected on-line through the general membership, just like the Leader. And these people aren't beholding to their local EDA, which means that if you want power
within the party, it makes a lot more sense to become nationally famous for
one reason or another. This is hard to do, though, so another route is to become associated with someone else who is. If someone is really famous, their endorsement will go a long way towards getting you the votes you need to get your seat. At this point, the party begins to look like an old-fashioned patronage system with the party leader being able to rule through creating a retinue that rules the party. Does this remind you of anything?
Donald Trump and his cabinet. Public domain government image c/o Wikimedia.
Once Elizabeth May's mandate ended and she became a "lame duck" leader, Paul tried to fill her shoes. But she lacks the extreme public profile of May, which means that she'd never had the ability to get the Federal Council to abide by what she told them to do---because they aren't part of her retinue.
Indicative of the point I'm trying to make is the actual policy where all of this blew apart. One of Paul's staff members made an outrageous threat against a sitting Green MP, namely that he would organize a campaign against her re-election if she didn't stop criticizing the government of Israel. Paul refused to fire him, and she crossed the floor to join the Liberals. (Here's an interesting article by Yves Engler that describes his take on the conflict.) I won't get into the specifics, but I would like to point out that the Greens are supposed to be focused primarily around an environmental understanding of politics and the Palestinian/Israeli conflict is pretty far removed from that. A party that is firmly rooted in local Canadian communities wouldn't be stripping its gears over something so peripheral to the group's core mandate. Instead, this is exactly the sort of argument that one can expect from atomized individuals who's political engagement begins and ends with what they see on the Web. (Which isn't to deny that this is a big issue---but it just doesn't directly affect the vast majority of Canadians or environmentalists in particular. Instead, it's just one more generic issue that people have flame wars over on discussion boards.)
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Parties need the ability to survive ups and downs. This isn't going to happen if you build yours around something as volatile as celebrity leaders and web-based outrage. I contacted several party members for this article and the phrase I heard repeatedly was "dumpster fire". As the Biblical adage suggests, "a house built on sand cannot stand".
Unfortunately, the structural tendencies that I identified above are at work with all the other parties right now. I suspect that they are just more well-developed with the Greens because they don't have the long historical baggage of the others---including the retention of a delegate system for conventions. But I think that these parties have also been weakened by the same processes that I believe plague the Greens.
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How can the Greens---and by extension all the other parties---overcome the problem of centralizing power through rule by popularity contest and social media flash mob?
In Marxism there is this idea called Parliamentary Cretinism. This is the idea that politics begins and ends with elections. I meet people over and over again who believe that there is this sort of iron curtain between activism and politics---you simply cannot be involved with both. This is complete and utter nonsense! This is a ridiculous idea---on par with reducing farming to just picking the crop without taking into account preparing the field, planting, weeding, fertilizing, etc.
For example, the NDP and public healthcare didn't spring fully-formed onto Parliament, they developed because of a long, intensive program that involved local EDAs---first in Saskatchewan and then across the country---organizing public meetings where people like Tommy Douglas explained what a single-payer healthcare could look like. And the Quiet Revolution that changed Quebec from a priest-ridden backwater into a powerful modern economy didn't just happen because of a vote in the Legislative Assembly. There was an entire generation of activists who fought against the status quo through things like the Asbestos Strike of 1949. That dispute involved activists who later became prominent leaders of the Liberal party---including a young Pierre Elliot Trudeau.
The Green Party of Canada could build for the long-term by getting back to it's roots. The Greens started out trying to be a party of activists who tried to be on the fore-front of big issues. When I was building the Greens in Guelph the operating principle was that we would only become successful if we served the people of Guelph---and we didn't need to wait to get people elected to do that. To that end, we "spark-plugged" a lot of different events in the community---from hosting "slow food" dinners, through organizing a slate of reform-minded candidates for municipal council, launching province-wide protests against solid waste, to bringing together representatives from all the environmental groups we could find along the Grand River for Watershed conferences.
The EDAs of political parties have potential resources that other activists can only dream of. They can fundraise by issuing tax receipts worth up to 75% of the donation. And they can use connections to other EDAs across the country and other similar parties around the world. (When I was with the Guelph Greens we helped the Irish Green Party with recycling information, Russian Greens concerned about solid waste from fast food restaurants, and, the Romanian Greens researching a Canadian-designed nuclear reactor that had been built in their country with slave labour.)
Politics is an integral part of democratic citizenship---it doesn't just happen during elections. And the Green Party needs to make building strong EDAs dedicated to helping raise the political literacy of local citizens key to success within the party---instead of trying to find already famous people to join and fill its key slots. The way to build strong EDAs is to serve the people, and this should be the only way to become a leader of the party. If the GPC doesn't take this route, IMHO, it doesn't deserve to survive as a political force. And the way to do this is to reform the constitution so it becomes a genuinely community-based party.
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That's as good a place as any to end this. Remember to keep a positive attitude and work for good any way you can.
Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!
