Public Education: Baby Steps Versus Playing the "Long Game"

Several years ago I was volunteering for a Green Party election campaign and I got "schooled" by a "hip youngster" with a degree in marketing about why it is important to not be what I'd call "punk and plain" about environmental issues during an election campaign. (I have a tendency to go on about unlimited economic growth being the ideology of cancer, among other things.) She told me that she had been taught that the key to effective advertising is to change people's behaviour and that that comes from appealing to them "where they are" instead of "where you'd like them to be".

She used the example of a fairly famous advert from my childhood, one that she said studies had shown did absolutely nothing to actually change people's behaviour. Here it is (ah, the wonders of YouTube!):

(Before we get too far, let me first admit that this video is somewhat racist. It plays to the "magic Indian" trope. This says that the First Nations peoples have some sort of inherent, genetic propensity to being environmentally groovy. While I think a case can be made that at least some of the tribal cultures are more "in tune" with nature, I don't want to give credit to the idea that this is something inherent in their genetic make up---which is clearly as racist as saying that all Chinese Canadians are good at math, and, all Black Canadians "have rhythm". Moreover, there is the whole point that the actor playing the role was actually an Italian-American who had adopted the persona and name of "Iron Eyes Cody". Having said that, I don't think that this invalidates anything I'm going to write after this disclaimer.)

Here's the other advert that her professor compared it to, one that actually is supposed to have made a real difference in how people act.

At the time I hadn't heard about this second ad, I was old, she was young, and I didn't want to get into an argument with someone who had studied marketing. But something about what she had said just didn't "sit right" with me. That was over 10 years ago, but I think I've finally figured out what I didn't like about what she said.

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Every time an organization creates and promotes a message it is going to have to decide whether it wants to "play the long game" or "seek out the low-hanging fruit". I would argue that our discussion wasn't about whether or not we were going to change people's behaviour, but actually about whether we were playing the long game or seeking after low-hanging fruit. Moreover, I'd suggest that just chasing low-hanging fruit is ultimately self-defeating in politics.

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On one level, this involves the message you are projecting to the audience. In the case of the "don't mess with Texas" ad, it is simply that you should put the trash in the can, period. The "crying Indian" ad is much more ambitious. It's trying to suggest that there is something inherently wrong with modern industrial society. That's why we have shots of him paddling through harbours with cranes, factories, oil refineries etc in the background. It's also why we have a zero-in on the huge traffic-filled highways before we see a bag of fast-food dumped at his feet. In short, the "crying Indian" ad was a critique of modern, capitalist, industrial society whereas the "don't mess with Texas" one was simply focused on litter.

Also, think about the people who were chosen in each different ad to represent the public viewpoint. In "Don't Mess with Texas", the heroes were two extremely well-paid NFL players. In "the Crying Indian" it was (I've already offered my disclaimers above) a First Nations member---certainly not a person of privilege. So it is a case of putting in the viewpoint of people who have the system working for them, and another who has probably seen nothing but exploitation from it.

The point I'd like readers to meditate upon is that it is always easier to do well in the short term if you have no problem with ignoring the long haul. For example, a government can almost always gin up the economy for a few years with tax cuts---if you don't care about the size of the deficit or the resulting wealth stratification in society. Executives can always increase the dividends they pay stock holders for a few years if they cut their research and development departments, and, avoid investing in new machinery---at the price of having the competition "eat their lunch" ten years down the road. Similarly, a political party can always do better in the short run by pandering to voter's pre-conceived notions than in trying to educate them about important issues---if they don't care about the long-term consequences for society.

And what exactly has been the trajectory of Texas since the "don't mess with Texas" ad first aired? Well, a quick Google search resulted in the following statistic:  Texas is 48th worst out of 50 states in terms of health risks from pollution.  (US News and World Report) (Obviously someone is messing with Texas after all---.)

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I suspect that at least some of my readers keep meaning to subscribe but never quite get around to doing so. It's not that hard. If you have a credit card (and I know that almost all of you do), all you have to do is sign up on Patreon or PayPal. But here's something new---why not have your community group buy a subscription? Unions, service clubs, charitable institutions---you all benefit from having local news. Why not subscribe? Or even buy an advertisement, for that matter. All sorts of groups used to buy ads in the old paper newspapers---what's stopping you from doing the same thing in the Back-Grounder? 

Drop me an email at thecloudwalkingowl@gmail.com if you want to find out more. 

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Both of these advertisements have become "icons" in the American psyche, so it might be useful to see how they have exerted their influence since they were first created.

Here's a clip from The Simpsons that plays on the "crying Indian" ad: 

And here's another advert from Texas that is an out-growth of the original "Don't Mess with Texas" ad: 

I've cherry picked somewhat, but I do think that there is some sort of rough generalization that can be discerned here. But the point I want to make is that almost all pieces of messaging can be divided into two different messages: the foreground and the background.

In the case of the clip from the Simpsons, the foreground message is clearly that there is something profoundly wrong with American society---hence the giant, rat-infested garbage dump. The background message is that native Americans have some deeper appreciation and respect for nature than the average citizen. In the case of the official Texas advert, the foreground message is "don't litter", but the background one is "have respect for the military" and even "we honour our Confederate traditions". (I suspect this last bit is unconscious and came about simply because an existing institution---the Texas Confederate Airforce---helped with the ad. Indeed, the organization realized this fact and in 2002 changed it's name to the "Commemorative Air Force".)

The original advert inspired a whole line of official ads aimed at the "don't mess with Texas" trope. Here is one that is more than a bit "loopy":

Here's one that is a bit more indicative of most of them:

And another official ad that plays on the usual tropes:

The real message of the "don't mess with Texas" ads is that "life is good, happy motoring is good, things are just fine in Texas---just don't toss your trash out the window of your car as you roar down the road on your way to destroying the planet!"

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In the recent election there were a lot of times that I thought the politicians were obviously pandering to public opinion polls without even attempting to make any sense. Two examples that immediately come to mind were the idiotic policies that the Conservatives and Liberals came up with to make housing more affordable. Scheer announced that he'd loosen the requirements that would allow more people to get a mortgage, and, he'd allow it to be paid off in a maximum 30 years instead of the current 25. Trudeau's offer was to expand the "First-Time Home Buyer Incentive".

Both of these suggestions are flat-out idiotic and would be immediately obvious as such to anyone who hadn't flunked first year economics. That's because they don't actually increase the number of houses being built, just make it easier for everyone to borrow money in order to buy one. If they were implemented, they'd just increase the cost of housing, and channel more money out of home-owner's pockets and into the banks.

Both the Conservatives and Liberals had to have known this fact. But the leaders looked at the polling numbers and decided that they had to say something that sounded like they were concerned about housing affordability. As such, both Scheer and Trudeau were deciding to "make baby steps" and "pander to people's preconceived notions" rather than try to educate voters about the real reasons why housing is so damned expensive. They were following the "don't mess with Texas" route instead of the "crying Indian" one.

They thought that they had to do this to win the election. But the problem is that by pandering to the ignorance of voters, they were making it that much harder to get them to accept a more reasonable policy later on down the road. If you keep telling people "there's no reason to make hard choices---it's all just peachy the way it is", it may be surprising, but it's true none-the-less, that a lot of them will actually believe it. And if you turn around and tell them something different at a later date---like "if you want affordable housing you are simply going to have to accept living in small homes in higher density neighbourhoods"---they are not going to be happy to hear it. In effect, every time parties do the "easy thing" and suggest that all people need to do is "make baby steps", they are dramatically limiting their ability to tell voters the hard truth at some time in the future.

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This problem has been identified a long time ago. Henry David Thoreau once opined

"There are a thousand people hacking at the branches of evil to one striking at the root."

Henry was no fool, he knew what was important.
Henry David Thoreau, Public Domain image by Geo. F. Parlow.
Public Domain Image c/o the Wiki Commons.

And that's the ultimate problem with taking "baby steps" in our messaging about important public policy issues: they only strike at the branch of problems while leaving their roots still strong and vigorous.

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Furthermore, I say onto you the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LIFT Credit, from Government of Ontario Web Site

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hulet: You mean federal or provincial money?

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

Hulet:  The thing about the medical centre funding?

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

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

And it's all administered by the county. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Both.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes. Yes. 

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

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

That's probably true. 

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

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

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

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

Propaganda in a Free Society

In my last post I took the time to work out an argument that supports the idea of "deplatforming" neo-Fascists. In this week's op-ed I'd like to build on that foundation to talk about some disturbing trends that I've recently noticed outside the loony bin and on the main stage of our political theatre. 

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On April 18th Canadaland published a leaked internal memo from the Toronto Sun that outlined how management wanted their reporters and journalists to cover the upcoming Ontario election. It makes for interesting reading. Here's part of the introduction:

Editorial Perspective:

• The past 14 years of progressive Liberal policies have undermined Ontario’s economy, electricity system and core public services and introduced unprecedented social division.
• Successive Liberal governments have been fiscally reckless, plagued by scandal, self-serving and demonstratively harmed the quality of life for millions of Ontarions.
• Our focus will focus on exposing the Liberal record during the campaign and advocating for change that addresses the critical need to responsibly address chronic and growing problems in health, education and economy.
• We are not better off than we were 15 years ago.

It goes on to outline a list of stories that management wanted their staff to write about. Consider the following, which are only a few chosen from a long list:

Issue: Hydro 

Story: The $9.2 billion fire sale of Hydro One was just one of many blunders that undermined the province’s electricity sector and drove up energy rates. We revisit the government’s failed green energy plan, articular ongoing and future costs, look back at the gas plant scandal and costs and detail how soon after the election rates will rise, and what the 25% rate cut will cost. We look at the high salaries and bonuses paid to hydro execs and dig into the Hydro One purchase of a U.S. coal plant and toxic sludge farm. Does anyone have a realistic plan for hydro?

Issue: Carbon tax 

Story: We compare Liberal cap-and-trade with Conservative and NDP plans for carbon pricing. We look at the impact carbon taxes will have on Ontario’s economy, from jobs to grocery and gasoline prices. We review failure of carbon taxes elsewhere, and problematic nature of implementing if the U.S. does not.

Issue: Minimum Wage 

Story: Ontario’s Financial Accountability Office estimated as many as 50,000 people could lose their jobs this year because of the wage hike. In January, 59,300 part-time workers lost their jobs. Declines have flattened out since then. We look at stats as they’re published during the campaign. Meanwhile, a 22.5 per cent cut in Ontario’s business tax from 4.5 per cent to 3.5 per cent won’t offset increased staffing costs and other incentives such as paid sick days and three weeks paid vacation for workers with five years on the job.We’re also increasingly seeing unintentional consequences, including part-time work for people with disabilities.

Issue: Green Energy

Story: Ontario’s Liberals have wasted billions on unnecessary wind and solar energy. We look at links between those who benefited and party. We also look at carbon taxes and impact on consumers. Cost of green energy? Corporate welfare? Promised Green jobs?

Please note, this is a strange form of journalism in that the managers are telling their writers and researchers what their conclusions should be before they go out to look at the facts. This isn't how news is written, instead this is propaganda. (This certainly isn't how I go about writing stories for the Back-Grounder. While it is true that I often have some vague idea about how I want to write a story, this usually goes out the window when I start doing research and learn how little I knew going in. For example, last week I thought I'd focus on climate change denial before I started researching and I ended up going with the problem of media concentration. That's how journalism is supposed to work---.)

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Paul Godfrey,
Conservative Politician and Media Tycoon
Image by Vibhu c/o Wikicommons

The Toronto Sun is owned by "the Postmedia Network". This is a very large newspaper chain that was accumulated by and is currently managed by Paul Godfrey (even though it is now owned by an American asset management firm called "Golden Tree Asset Management".) Godfrey doesn't come from a background in journalism---or even ordinary business. Instead he has been involved with various things such as: Conservative municipal politics (Alderman in North York 1964-73, then appointed to various higher offices such as North York Board of Control, Metropolitan Toronto Council, ending up his career as Chairman of Metropolitan Toronto in 1984), public administration (chair of Ontario Lottery and Gaming corporation 2009-2013), and, professional sports (president and CEO of Toronto Bluejays 2000-2008.) (The Wikipedia article linked to his name is really worth reading. The man has had his thumb in a lot of pies over the years.)

Just to give you an idea of how important he is to Canadian journalism, here's a list of Postmedia Network properties:

Newspapers

• National Post
• Calgary Herald
• Cornwall Standard Freeholder
• Edmonton Journal
• London Free Press
• Montreal Gazette
• Ottawa Citizen
• Regina Leader-Post
• The Star Phoenix (Saskatoon)
• The Vancouver Sun 
• Windsor Star
• Calgary Sun
• Edmonton Sun
• Ottawa Sun
• The Province (Vancouver)
• Toronto Sun
• Winnipeg Sun
• 24 Hours (Toronto, Vancouver)
• Airdrie Echo (tabloid)
• Barrie Examiner (broadsheet) sold to Torstar and closed, 2017[17]
• Belleville Intelligencer (broadsheet)
• Bow Valley Crag & Canyon (tabloid)
• Brantford Expositor (broadsheet)
• Bradford Times (tabloid) sold to Torstar and closed, 2017[17]
• Brockville Recorder and Times (broadsheet)
• Camrose Canadian (tabloid), closing 2018
• Chatham This Week (tabloid)
• Clinton News-Record (tabloid)
• Cochrane Times (Alberta) (tabloid)
• Cochrane Times-Post (tabloid)
• Collingwood Enterprise Bulletin sold to Torstar and closed, 2017[17]
• Cornwall Standard Freeholder (broadsheet)
• Drayton Valley Western Review (tabloid)
• Edson Leader (tabloid)
• Elliot Lake Standard (tabloid)
• Fort McMurray Today (tabloid)
• Fort Saskatchewan Record (tabloid)
• Goderich Signal-Star (tabloid)
• Grande Prairie Daily Herald-Tribune (tabloid)
• Hanna Herald (tabloid)
• High River Times (tabloid)
• Hinton Parklander (tabloid)
• Kenora Daily Miner and News (broadsheet)
• Kincardine News (tabloid)
• Kingston Whig-Standard (broadsheet)
• Kingston This Week (tabloid)
• Lakeshore Advance (Grand Bend; tabloid)
• Lloydminster Meridian Booster (tabloid)
• Mid-North Monitor (Espanola; tabloid)
• Mayerthorpe Freelancer (tabloid)
• Nanton News (tabloid)
• Niagara Falls Review (broadsheet) sold to Torstar, 2017
• North Bay Nugget (broadsheet)
• Norwich Gazette, closing 2018
• Orillia Packet & Times (broadsheet) sold to Torstar and closed, 2017[17]
• Owen Sound Sun Times (broadsheet)
• Peace River Record-Gazette (broadsheet)
• Pembroke Daily Observer (broadsheet), ceasing print edition 2018
• Peterborough Examiner (broadsheet) sold to Torstar, 2017
• Pincher Creek Echo (tabloid)
• Sault Star (broadsheet)
• Simcoe Reformer (tabloid)
• St. Catharines Standard (broadsheet) sold to Torstar in 2017
• St. Thomas Times-Journal (tabloid)
• Strathmore Standard (tabloid), closing 2018
• Stratford Beacon Herald (broadsheet)
• Sudbury Star (broadsheet)
• Timmins Daily Press (broadsheet)
• Vulcan Advocate (tabloid)
• Whitecourt Star (tabloid)
• Woodstock Sentinel-Review (broadsheet)

Magazines:

• Financial Post Business
• Living Windsor
• Swerve
• TVtimes

Websites:

• Canada.com
• celebrating.com
• connecting.com
• driving.ca
• househunting.ca
• remembering.ca
• shoplocal.ca
• SwarmJam.com
• Infomart.com
• in addition, Postmedia Network owns all websites associated with all properties listed on this page either wholly or in partnership.

(All of the info above comes from a Wikipedia article. I thought it would be 

valuable for readers to get an idea of the scale of Postmedia Network holdings.)

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What's happening here is a wealthy business man with ties to the Conservative Party is creating a Canadian equivalent of Fox News---a private propaganda outlet that relentlessly pushes a partisan viewpoint under the guise of "journalism".

It's important to understand how propaganda was created in older authoritarian nations like the Soviet Union. It wasn't particularly the case that each editor and reporter had an assigned KGB officer that they answered to. Instead, what happened was people who were interested as working as journalists realized "what side of the bread was buttered" and wrote stories accordingly. People who did this well and didn't let things like facts get in the way of the "party line" tended to get promoted. The foolishly idealistic, on the other hand, were quickly identified and they lost their jobs and never got hired again. No need for thumbscrews and beatings---the vast majority of people will simply do what they need to do in order to pay the mortgage and feed the family. Reporters are especially vulnerable to this sort of thing now because newspapers are in "free fall" and jobs are scarce as hen's teeth with gold fillings.

The other thing that we need to remember is that recent events have shown that even in a modern liberal society propaganda is tremendously successful. All through the scandals rocking the USA right, for example, popular support for Donald Trump has sat at a rock-solid 42% of the body politic. That's what happens when you have a significant fraction of the public who get all their news and information from corporate propaganda outlets like Fox News and Sinclair Broadcasting.

The important takeaway from the above is that there is a problem with letting a small number of extremely wealthy and well-connected individuals control the media. Freedom of speech laws don't mean much if one side has a huge, enormously-amplified megaphone and the other side has nothing but the quiet voice of reason. That's why we need to build our own megaphones, and, lessen the ability of "big money" to say whatever they want---no matter how divorced from truth or objectivity.

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The pitch for support shouldn't actually be necessary in this week's op-ed. Do you want to let propaganda machines like Postmedia control what you learn about our society? Or do you want some sort of in-depth coverage that gives an objective, much more complete picture? The choice is up to you---you can support independent, responsible journalism, or, you can passively watch a small number of wealthy individuals amass a "free market" propaganda machine designed to control a large slug of voters. But that choice is easier than it has ever been. Just subscribe to the Guelph Back-Grounder through Patreon or put something in the Tip Jar. Other people have already done it---(thanks Charles for being so awesome!) What's stopping you?

You can also share the Guelph Back-Grounder through social media. Word of mouth is the only advertising I can afford.

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Another issue that is compounding the importance of this debate is the fact that the federal government is aware of the problems that newspapers are currently facing, which is why the Trudeau government has pledged money to help the news media. But the question is, who gets what and how is the money going to be allocated? Certainly, it sounds like Paul Godfrey thinks that he is going to be getting some of it. 

Paul Godfrey, the CEO of Postmedia, which publishes the National Post and daily broadsheets in many of Canada’s largest cities, said that tax credit “could be looked upon as a turning point in the plight of newspapers in Canada.”
“I tip my hat to the prime minister and the finance minister. They deserve a lot of credit,” said Godfrey. “Everyone in journalism should be doing a victory lap around their building right now.”

"$600M in federal funding for media 'a turning point in
the plight of newspapers in Canada’ "
Stuart Thomson, Nov 21st, 2018, The National Post

Of course, it wouldn't be a good idea if journalism actually disappeared. But equally, we don't want the government-of-the-day deciding on a case-by-case basis how this money is going to be divided up. If we don't do that, we will probably end up with an independent board deciding how to divide up the largess. But there will be a temptation to get a group of "establishment media types" together who will give most of the money to the existing media companies---like Postmedia. And if we do that, we run the risk of propping up some really horrible media practices, like managers deciding the editorial policy is to support the party of the guy who manages the paper.

Is this the only way we can deal with news in Canada? Maybe it would make more sense to decide the money needs to be divided up on the basis of how actually independent, objective, and, perhaps even local, the news media really is. I think that voters should make sure that Paul Godfreys and Postmedia don't end up using our tax money to tell us how to vote. What do you think?  

Quick and Dirty RSS Tutorial!

I recently used social media to ask a bunch of my friends whether or not they use RSS feeds to follow sources on the Web. I was kinda shocked to see how many people didn't know what RSS is, or, how to subscribe to a site with it. I'm writing this blog post because I think that this shows a dangerous lack of media literacy among people of good will. This will be the last "quick and dirty" post before a real news item. 

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Walled Gardens and Confirmation Bias

Modern people live in a news-saturated environment. Learning about the world around us is like trying to drink from a fire-hose. Not only is it impossible to read, hear, or, watch everything on the Web---it's impossible to scan everything that the Web publishes everyday and decide what tiny fraction of it we want to read, hear, or, watch. This means that people not only have to be discriminating about what they spend their time consuming, they have to pay attention to what technology they put into place to decide what they are exposed to every day.

Take a look at this screenshots from Google Play News Stand (you can always click on an image to see a larger version):

This is a screenshot of Google Play News Stand,
reproduced under the "Fair Use" copyright provision.

This is an example of an "aggregator websites".  These are websites that are designed to bring together individual stories from a wide variety of websites for you to look at so you don't have to manually search around for them. These sites have the same "drinking from a fire hose" problem as individuals do, so they use computer programs to do the actual search. They use instructions that programmers have included in the coding, preferences from the viewers, and, access to personal information of viewers that has been "scraped" from their use of other Web products (eg:  the Google search engine.)

In the case of the Google News Stand screenshot, pay attention to the first story: "Patrick Brown seeks $8 M in damages from CTV News---", it's important to realize that this story has been selected for me personally. That's because the Google analytics software knows who I am and it has a long data file about me---it knows where I live, what political party I support, what news sources I routinely read, how old I am, where I work, etc. The computer program that is "aggregating" the websites that it puts on the April 23 News Stand page knows that I live in Ontario, am interested in politics, and, often read the Toronto Star on line. That's why the first story I see is the one on Patrick Brown.

There is a big problem that people need to understand about this site. Google News Stand is what is known as a "walled garden". By this, I mean that Google gets to choose what does or doesn't get onto this website. In the Google example, this probably only means that you will only see fairly "middle-of-the-road", general consensus stories. In other words, you probably never see anything on it that you couldn't expect to see on the CBC or read in the Toronto Star or Globe and Mail. So forget about any sort of thought-provoking analysis, investigative articles that use detailed research to oppose "conventional wisdom", or, stories that deal with local issues.

Another way of thinking about this is to say that News Stand is a "filter bubble". When an algorithm sets out to select what stories it thinks you might be interested in, it also creates a situation where you no longer get "surprised" or see stories that you violently disagree with. This means that the opportunities for learning something that might lead to changing your mind about an issue are fewer than if someone else---like an idiosyncratic newspaper editor---was deciding what stories to put in front of you. This is a really dangerous thing for society because most---if not all---people are predisposed to look specifically for evidence the supports their pre-existing assumptions and discount that which undermines them. Psychologists call this "confirmation bias".

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Confirmation Bias

To understand this phenomenon, it is important to realize that there two ways to reason: like a philosopher or a lawyer. A philosopher looks at the evidence and arguments and tries to figure out what is the most likely to be true. She may come up with a hypothesis about what is actually the fact, but this is always provisional---if a new piece of evidence comes forth that invalidates that hypothesis, she will discard the hypothesis and create a new one to explain what is going on. In contrast, a lawyer is not trying to find the truth, he is setting out to win. If he sees a piece of evidence that would lose him the case, he will totally ignore it or try to find some way of discrediting that evidence---such as actively seeking out an "expert" who the lawyer thinks will say that the evidence isn't actually harmful to his client. That's because he doesn't really care about truth, but winning. And a lawyer who don't fight for his clients even when he thinks they are guilty can never expect to get ahead in his profession.

(To be fair to lawyers, our system of justice is based on adversarial battle between prosecution and defense. And this, in turn, is based on the idea that people with limited abilities and insight often have to deal with ambiguous situations where no one really does know who is being honest or not. In such cases, it's better for a lawyer to be forced to do all he can to win rather than make him the judge and jury of his client. But for the purposes of this discussion, the two ways of thinking are relevant. Consider, if you will, if a lawyer in a case ever says "Well you've got me there. I've never thought about it that way. I suppose I'm going to have to rethink what I believe about this." Philosophers actually do say such things in scholarly debate.)

Psychologists have found that the natural tendency of people is to think like lawyers instead of philosophers. That's why people who work in the oil industry discount the evidence of climate change. It's also why it is so hard to get many white people to see the privileges that give them advantages over people of colour. It's also why many men are incapable of understanding the effects of their sexist behaviour on women. Human society is absolutely rife with confirmation bias.

Because confirmation bias is so common, our society has developed mechanisms to limit the number of problems that can come from it. The scientific method is one. Several other examples come from the legal system. For example, when a judge rules that "hearsay evidence" is inadmissible, he is specifically using a rule of discourse to overcome a natural tendency for juries to believe what they want to believe. (Hearsay evidence is evidence that is based on second-hand accounts---eg: "I heard so-and-so say that he did it"---where the person who is supposed to have made the original claim is unavailable for cross-examination.) The key problem with hearsay is that the other lawyer and the judge are not able to bring the original person who is supposed to have said something to the stand and ask them whether a: they actually said what they are reported to have said, and, b: any questions that might show that they were mistaken or lying when they said it. If we allow hearsay into a court of law people can be convicted on the basis of gossip and rumour.

Rules like the ones against hearsay evidence are mechanical in nature and not dependent on any individual person being wise enough to understand their importance and remember to apply them in any specific situations. Lawyers and judges have it pounded into their heads at law school that they cannot use hearsay evidence, and, if a judge makes a decision that was based on hearsay evidence, an appeal judge will have to overturn the decision on appeal. This sort of mechanical, culturally-based rule has been created through trial-and-error because of grotesque miscarriages of justice in the past. If you know what to look for, these sorts of fixes exist throughout our society. Examples include the peer-review process for scientific discovery, police officers reading people their rights when being arrested, the rules governing voting procedures, the requirement that all publicly-traded companies have to have regular audits by chartered accountants, and so on. Unfortunately, it is very rare for human society to predict potential problems when a new situation arises and at that time create the cultural "fix" that protects society from confirmation bias. So instead what usually happens is that some ridiculous or catastrophic situation emerges because of confirmation bias, and then---through trial and error---society eventually creates a cultural "workaround" to deal with it. We are currently facing one of those situation with the creation of aggregator services like Google News Stand. The problem with the algorithms that companies like Google use in their web-based news aggregators is that they have created an invisible, mechanical system that encourages confirmation bias among the people who read them. 

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Lest people think I am making a mountain out of a molehill, take a look at the following screenshot from a web-based aggregator that is a little less "savoury" than Google News Stand.

Yup. Read that caption! This is "The Drudge Report".
Image used under "Fair Use" Copy rite provision. 

This is today's headline from The Drudge Report. This is one of the most influential "conservative" news aggregators in America. (Here is the actual website URL. But be careful, it has a lot of "snaky malware" in the advertisements. I have "Privacy Badger" on my browser to identify and delete  "sketchy" advertisements, and I've never seen so much blank space on a webpage before! Clicking on the screenshot above is perfectly safe. As is looking at the Wikipedia article.)

This too is a walled garden. But unlike Google, the fellow who created and runs this aggregator---Matt Drudge---hasn't got huge data files on everyone

Matt Drudge, from his FaceBook page.
 "Fair Use" copyright provision.

who uses the Web. Nor does he have access to Bond-villain-sized mega computers and armies of genius coders. Instead, he just looks at other websites and finds the most salacious stories that fit his own political agenda. And yet, it appears that his website gets about 3 million "hits" a day. (That number sounds impressive---I'd be happy if The Back-Grounder was getting over 100---but remember that the USA is a nation of 300 million. More to the point, it's important to understand that a large number of most website "hits" are generally done by robots doing Dao-only-knows-what.) That's certainly enough to have a significant influence on society. And there is a body of opinion that Drudge has had a huge effect on more "mainstream" media coverage, if only that of dragging down public discourse. As evidence, it appears that The Drudge Report has been important in spreading "important" news stories" such as the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

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One of the ways to "work around" confirmation bias is to expand the pool of people to talk to about things. Presumably, that way you get exposed to different points of view and that broadens your worldview. That was one of the promises of social media. The theory is that we would pontificate about some sort of issue and one of our FaceBook friends would point out the flaw in the argument and then we'd back down. For example, I recently I got all in a tizzy about a tweet that said that the federal government was attempting to remove some provision in the CRTC mandate that forbids the news media from knowingly spreading false news---but a FaceBook "friend" pointed out that the item was dated in 2011---oops! So this does happen. But unfortunately a lot of people use social media to create their own, special "walled gardens" where they allow only people of like mind. The result is what is known as an "echo chamber".  People in these groups take turns whipping each other into a frenzy about various things. Unfortunately, the result is sometimes someone taking all the rhetoric too seriously and then we have situations like like the guy who took an AR-15 into a Washington pizzeria looking for the children enslaved by the pedaphile sex ring operated by Hillary Clinton.  (This also appears to be what happened with the awful van attack in Toronto, which seems to have been inspired by the on-line "involuntary celibate (incel)" culture that exists on groups like 4chan and Reddit.)

Even if people don't end up drowning in the social media version of a cesspit, there are other issues to consider. Increasing numbers of people get most of their ideas from social media like FaceBook, Twitter, etc. There are several problems with these sources. First of all, these systems have a technological bias against long-form communication. Twitter restricts posts to 280 characters. FaceBook has a very limited editing suite. YouTube's advertising policy discourages posts of more than 15 minutes. The companies do this because their primary goal is to maximize the number of clicks, not the quality of discourse. They get paid by advertisers for the number of times someone logs onto the site, both to maximize the number of ads they see and the amount of information that the company gathers about each view. FaceBook makes a lot more money off people zipping from post to post than they do if someone settles into their chair with a cup of tea and spends a good long time reading something like the Back-Grounder.

What this means in term of content is that the social media business model is based on whatever it takes to get people's momentary attention instead of sustained concentration. This is why FaceBook spends so much of it's time trying to get you to gush over cute cat videos or be outraged about some politician. If they could get away with it, they'd probably be showing short snuff videos too.  (That sounds like an outrageous suggestion, but consider the fact that a few years ago a kid at the local university live-streamed a suicide attempt.) That's because what does best on social media are things that appeal to the more instinctual elements of human consciousness and by-pass higher order reasoning. Mainstream news media has understood this for a long time, hence the adage "if it bleeds, it leads".  (If I remember correctly, one of my first letters to an editor was a complaint about The Mercury printing a salacious photo of a woman in a bikini with a knife at her throat.)

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Introducing RSS Feeds

Knowing that social media is playing games with our access to public information doesn't totally

Nope, not going to happen.
Leonard Nimoy, Fair Use

remove the problem. After all, all human beings still have the lower brain functions and they are still important to our survival. Knowing we are fallible creatures doesn't make us into purely logical beings devoid of emotion. We will still find ourselves being fooled into having an emotional reaction that gets us doing stuff that we wouldn't if we'd had a bit more time to think things through. (After all, how many of us are totally immune to the siren call of advertising?) The only thing we can hope to do is find one of those "workarounds" like the one I discussed dealing with hearsay evidence in courtrooms.

Luckily people far smarter than me have been thinking about

This is the RSS Icon,
look for it on the website.

these issues for a long time. One result of this thinking was the creation of what is known as "Really Simple Syndication software or "RSS".  What this allows people to do is to subscribe (what's what "syndication" means) to those particular blogs that you really want to read. The way to understand this is to think that what you are doing is creating your own, personal newspaper---instead of letting Google analytics or Matt Drudge do it for you. What you do is find the icon on the left on one of the websites you want to follow, copy the relevant info, and then add it to the feeder you have decided to use. (Here are some good instructions about how to use it.) In my own case, I now use a Feeder add-on to my Chrome web-browser. What this does is create a list of websites that shows whether new content has been uploaded to them. When I read these new posts (or listen to new podcasts), they are then marked as "read" and removed from the "new category". If I look at the list of posts and see stuff I don't want to read, I can just click next to it and it becomes "read". And if I see a long list and I don't think I want to see any of them, I can click next to the title of the list, and they are all marked "read". When something new comes along, I see it added to the number under the icon on the top of my browser.

My own personal RSS feed. 

This has several advantages over other options. It is possible to set up a link on a web page that will email new posts to readers. But this clutters up your email and it causes formatting problems so you don't really see exactly what the author really wanted you to see. Secondly, it isn't as easy to glance at a list of website notices in order to decide what you do or do not want to read when they are mixed in with other traffic. In a way, an RSS feed is like when we read an old paper edition of a newspaper---I routinely discarded the "Real Estate" and "Sports" sections and mainly read the first one. You don't want to have to open each individual email from all your web sites to see what's inside. With an RSS feeder I can tell at a glance what I want to read and what I want to discard---just like with the Toronto Star.

People often say "well, I just go back once in a while to look at the pages I like---I don't need to subscribe". That doesn't really happen with most people, though. Instead, they log onto social media,

Aaron Swartz,
one of the "good guys"
image c/o Wiki-Commons

look at cute cat pictures, get angry about that awful politician that they are being told to hate, etc, look at the time, are horrified about how much they've wasted, and, run off to do something else. That's not an accident---very clever, very well-paid people who studied human psychology at university have set up social media sites to get you to do that. In contrast, very idealistic people (if you have the time, read this article about Aaron Swartz, one of the RSS inventors---warning, it has a sad ending) have been trying to push back against this avalanche of corporate greed through things like RSS feeds.

A reader might at this point ask "What's the difference in subscribing to a bunch of RSS feeds and using an aggregator like Google News Stand or The Drudge Report? Aren't they all "walled gardens"?" Yes, they are---but the significant difference is that YOU get to create the walled garden, not some algorithm or an individual with an axe to grind. Moreover, the decision to choose whether or not to subscribe to a site using and RSS feed is both conscious and rational. It requires a moment's reflection, and, uses the cerebral cortex instead of the "reptile brain".  Almost no one consciously decides to subscribe to a feed of never-ending cute kitten memes. And almost no one "instinctively" posts links to long reads. Choosing to use an RSS feed is a choice to refuse to be manipulated by social media. 

Another thing to realize about actively subscribing to a blog through a RSS feed is that you are investing in a "relationship of trust" with the author. Part of the problem with fake news is that a lot of it appears to come from credible sources because the standardized format means that what you see is pretty much the same whether it comes from The New York Times or some teenagers in Macedonia. If you take the time to subscribe and read repeated posts, you have a much, much better chance of learning whether or not the blog can be trusted. This is exactly the same thing as when you find a good trades person and stick to them instead of just choosing the first guy who shows up when you search for "Guelph plumbers". If you get all your info based on what you see on FaceBook you might find the odd nugget of gold---but you are going to find a lot of gravel too. Why not subscribe to the vein of gold instead of hoping for another nugget to come along some time soon?

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Of course, I have a vested interest in getting people to start subscribing to various blogs instead of just cruising social media. I want you to subscribe to the "Back-Grounder". (I also want people to pay me through Patreon too.) But there is a bigger point. Companies like Google and FaceBook are driving the old newspapers into the dirt. If you won't support the Quixotic attempts to get some sort of quality local media off the ground, we won't have any local news coverage at all.

I was at a local get-together the other day and someone said "if delegates don't come to City Council, then the newspapers won't say that so many public presentations were in favour of the proposal". She knows that there are no real "newspapers" in Guelph, but she still made the point reflexively. But the fact is that besides Adam Donaldson and his live twitter feed, there is no good coverage of City Council. And besides "the Guelph Back-Grounder", there's no investigative journalism happening either. So it doesn't really matter how many folks show up at a Council meeting to push for a proposal---simply because almost no one has any way of knowing.

To be honest, this situation really concerns me. It's why I looked into if anyone was serious about replacing "The Mercury" when it was finally taken off life-support. And it's why I decided to start writing this blog when I realized that no, no one was working on a replacement. It's also why I keep asking for support on Patreon. No one is going to to work as a reporter giving Guelph good coverage of things like Council meetings unless we develop the culture of paying for news. And in any social movement there needs to be people who take the first steps. As little as a dollar a month makes a difference. It's a concrete statement that you think local news is important.