Alvin Kaufman, Dorothea Palmer, Dr. William Hutton, the Parent's Information Bureau, and, "the Great Birth Control Trial"

Alvin Kaufman, from the Eugenics Archive.
Original photo from "Waterloo Hall of Fame".
Used under the "fair dealing" provision of
the copyright Act.

Alvin Kaufman (1888-1979) was a wealthy industrialist from Berlin (now Kitchener) Ontario who came from a family that owned various businesses including a significant one in the rubber business. People will most likely associate him with Kaufman Footwear which was founded by Alvin's father and which he took over in 1920.

He was very much a member of the "establishment" and held various important positions in the community including:

• chairman of the Kitchener Planning Board
• member of Kitchener Hospital Board
• member of University of Waterloo Board of Governors

For the purposes of this article, he was also famous for his support of access to birth control in Canada.

He founded and financed an organization called "The Parent's Information Bureau". This was quite a big project as it published fairly large library of pamphlets that advertised the idea of liberalizing access to birth control to Canadians of all classes. It also created a network of fifty visiting out-reach workers (mostly nurses) who would go to poorer homes across Canada to distribute information about birth control and sold birth control devices to poorer women "at cost".

Strictly speaking, this activity was illegal. The law against educating people about and selling birth control devices was generally ignored at pharmacies, however, because the customers tended to be upper-class men.

Dorothea Palmer.
Alas, I couldn't find an original
source citation.

One of the Bureau's out-reach workers, Dorothea Palmer, went from house to house in a predominately French-speaking, Roman Catholic, Ottawa suburb named Eastview. She was charged under the then current birth control law, which stated:

"Everyone is guilty of an indictable offense and liable to two years imprisonment who knowingly, without lawful excuse of justification, offers to sell, advertises, publishes an advertisement of or has for sale or disposal of any medicine, drug or article intended or represented as a means of preventing conception." (Section 179 of the 1892 Canadian Criminal Code)

However, instead of simply letting Palmer plead guilty, pay the fine, or, go to jail, Kaufman and the Parent's Information Bureau decided to hire some exceptionally groovy lawyers and put the law on trial instead of just the defendant. It's relatively hard to find information about things that happened this long ago without a great deal of time-consuming digging, but luckily there's an article by Bill Stephenson about the event in the Maclean's Magazine archive.

The key point at issue that the defense was arguing was sub-clause two of the law that stated that no one could be convicted of the crime if it could be shown that “the public good was served by the acts alleged”. With this in mind, among a great many other witnesses, Parker's legal team put Kaufman on the stand:

A. R. Kaufman, founder and head of the PIB [eg: the "Parent's Information Bureau"], was the next to testify. He told the court that he had first become interested in birth control as an aid to happier, healthier living when he noticed that in his own factory there was a direct relationship between absenteeism and large families. The less time between children, the more time the wage-earner lost through illness or other causes. In other words, those families which needed the most earned the least.

In a survey in 1929 to see how he could ease distress among such families, he discovered that many mothers had no idea how to space children. He therefore hired competent medical people and set up a clinic in his own factory, giving family-planning data to all who asked for it. So gratifying were the results that women all over Ontario began writing him for information. Thus the work had expanded. Some twenty-five thousand requests for boxes had been processed to date. (Stephenson, Maclean's, Nov 23 1957)

To make a long story short, the Parent's Information Bureau made their case, and charges were dropped against Dorothea Parker. Generally, most people (including myself) would consider this a very good thing for women's rights. But I do think it's important to understand what was motivating Kaufman in the work he was doing.

I think it's clear that Kaufman was a through-going Social Darwinist who was primarily concerned about keeping the genes of the human race "strong" rather than about making life easier for working class and poor. To understand this point, I'd draw reader's attention to a pamphlet that his organization published that was written by the Dr. William L. Hutton---who was at one time both the Medical Health Officer for Brantford and Director of the Brant County Health Unit, and, famous for his pioneering study of the effects of water fluoridation and tooth decay. (Hutton also was an occasional guest lecturer at the Macdonald Institute of the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph.)  He was also (along with Kaufman) a member of the Eugenics Society of Canada. The pamphlet he wrote was titled A Brief for the Sterilization of the Feeble-Minded, which was subtitled "Prepared at the Request of The Association of Ontario Mayors at their Annual Conference, Orillia, June 1936".

It starts out by assuming a social Darwinist framework, which can be seen from the first two subtitles: "Nature Eliminates the Defectives" and "These Same Laws Apply to Man". It then goes on to argue that modern society has inverted the natural order because more intelligent, upper class individuals use modern birth control techniques to limit their family size while "feeble-minded" lower classes don't.

At this point, Hutton defines "feeble-mindedness" in a way that modern readers should take pains to understand. He says:

Because of their normal physical appearance, they appear to the casual observer to be persons of usual capacity, but they require supervision, for they suffer from arrested development of the mind, and they are incapable of competing on equal terms with their fellows. In cities they tend to drift towards the slums. In times of economic crisis they are among the first to require public assistance. They often live in conditions of extreme squalor. 

I'd like to draw reader's attention to two points that I made in my first article on this subject. If you recall the graphic that I posted there, the definition that people used to identify the "feeble minded" was extremely broad.

It called anyone who was only able to do "complex manual work"---which I would assume includes being a plumber, pipe-fitter, machinist, blacksmith, etc---was a "moron". Only people who could do work "requiring reason and judgment"---which I can only assume would be things like being a doctor, lawyer, or, businessman---would be considered a "real human being".

The key point to pay attention to is in that phrase "they are incapable of competing on equal terms with their fellows". Remember that according to social Darwinism everything is supposed to be settled by competition---it's not a bug, but a feature of the system.

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Time for the blue print. If you think that what I do is worth reading, why wouldn't it be worth paying for? All I ask is that people subscribe at a dollar a month. It's easy to do through Patreon and Pay Pal.

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Hutton makes clear that he isn't concerned about what he calls "idiots" and "imbeciles", whom he says

"most frequently owe their defect to birth injuries, accident, or, disease. In other words, idiots and imbeciles frequently come from normal parents who have the prevalent one, two or three-child family. On the other hand, the high-grade defectives (the feeble-minded) frequently come from sub-normal families in which the birth rate is high and in which feeble-mindedness is prevalent and plainly inherited".  (p-4)

He then goes on to describe the feeble-minded as having the intellectual capacity of "ten or twelve years of age" and says of them:

"We would not think of permitting children of ten or twelve years of age, to assume the responsibility of providing for and training other children, and yet we permit the feeble-minded with the intelligence of such children to do this very thing. We misunderstand them to our own undoing, and fail to recognize that it is to their benefit as much as to our own for the intelligent electorate to control their reproduction." (p-4)     

Through a rhetorical "sleight of hand", Hutton then goes on to talk about the cost of housing people in mental hospitals in Ontario. This is intellectually dishonest, because he started off talking about what he labels "idiots" and "imbeciles", which he says actually cannot be prevented through sterilization because they are mostly the result of accidents and disease, and who's parents could not be identified as potential parents of these "defective" children. Secondly, it brings in a totally extra group of individuals---the mentally ill---who again couldn't be identified through their parents, and who often have problems clearly caused by abuse rather than genetics. Finally, the very framework that he uses to identify the "feeble-minded" is not one where they are incapable to caring for themselves, but rather that they cannot compete effectively against the normal population. Remember, earlier on in this document he said that one of their identifying characteristics is "In times of economic crisis they are among the first to require public assistance". This would imply that they are actually able to support themselves in times of full employment. Their problem isn't being able to take care of themselves, it is not being able to beat out other people when there simply isn't enough to go around. That is a totally different thing!

Raising a complete non-sequitor, Hutton starts quoting numbers from mental hospitals and suggests that the only alternative to sterilizing the "feeble-minded" is to put them in a mental hospital (a false dilemma). Then he quotes statistics from England and suggests that if Ontario put every feeble-minded person in a hospital bed, the result would be between a doubling and tripling of the mental hospital facilities in the province. He then says that this would result in an extra cost of $20 million/year to the taxpayer (that would be $380 million in today's money).

(Just for fun, let's do a comparison between Hutton's hypothetical numbers and our current situation. In 1936 Hutton wrote that Ontario had a population of 3.6 million, and now has a population of 14.6 million. He was proposing spending  $5.56/person/year [that's $103/year in today's dollars.] According to the Canadian Mental Health Association in 2017 the Ontario government spent $3.5 billion on mental health issues, that's $240/person/year [that's $13 in 1936 money]. As a means of comparison, the average bricklayer [ie: a job for a "moron"] in Toronto earned $1872/year in 1936.)

I think that what people should pay attention to, however, is the way Hutton is trying to use concern about fiscal policy to drive social policy. I've taken the time to "geek out" on the numbers in order to emphasize that financial arguments are often used to drive social policy that has a profoundly negative effect on individuals. A similar situation happened when the provincial government decided to "deinstitutionalize" mental patients in the 1970s. Originally, in that case the intent was to put most of these patients into group homes where they would be more integrated into the community, which would help them with their treatment. Unfortunately, governments of the day decided to shut down the expensive hospitals and largely pocketed the money saved instead of setting up just as expensive quality group homes to replace them. The result are the hordes of mentally ill individuals haunting our streets and warehoused in grotesquely expensive prison cells. Beware of social policy once it gets in the hands of the bean-counters!  

Indeed, I've been trying to point out the formal reasoning problems (eg: the "nonsequitor" and "false dilemma") and the failure of inductive reasoning (eg: the misuse of economic data) to show that according to the "steps" system of human classification, Dr. Hutton himself could be shown to be incapable of "work using reason and judgement". That would mean that he too could be called a "moron" and encouraged to not have any children. (What's sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander, no?)

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There's a scene in the movie No Country for Old Men where two career army sergeants are having lunch in a diner. They've gone to the woman's parents to introduce the man and announce their engagement. The couple is biracial and the man asks the woman if her dad had a problem with his race. She replies "No. He probably would, but he's just so happy that I'm not a lesbian that he doesn't mind you." The man replies "Isn't it great when one prejudice cancels out another---".

I think that that's really how we should understand how the laws against birth control unraveled in Canada. One prejudice canceled out another. It wasn't that people decided that women should have the right to control their own reproduction so much as that the wealthier classes were afraid that the "feeble-minded" were going to swamp the gene pool. Luckily it never came to the situation we saw in NAZI Germany, where the government forced sterilization on some people. Kaufman and Hutton were pragmatists and their own experience showed them that given their druthers poor women would gladly forgo extra pregnancies if they could. As a result, they never went completely "Herrenvolk" and advocated enforced sterilization.

The length on this post is "red-lining", so I'll save other comments for something in the future.

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Furthermore, I say onto you the climate emergency must be dealt with! 

Mike Schreiner, Part Five!

This will be the last of my articles based on my in-depth conversation with Mike Schreiner in January. It deals with a variety of subjects: the relationships between politics and activism, and, business and community; a short civics lesson, some talk about Parliamentary reform, and, what makes Guelph a special place.

Mike Schreiner, unattributed, c/o Wiki Commons.

A couple notes about how I've organized this interview.

I generally try to have a "light touch" in editing the actual interview in these sort of talks, but in this one I've had to do a little more than usual because Schreiner can sometimes have something of a "telegraphic" conversational delivery. I suspect that when he gets a chance to explain something that he is really engaged with but rarely gets a chance to talk about he hasn't developed an especially polished way to do it. But that's OK, most interviews you read anywhere are edited to make things clearer for readers, and I think that I've managed to retain what he meant to say.

One comment I've gotten about these sorts of interviews is that they are as much about me as the person interviewed. I thought something of an explanation might be useful.

When I interview someone I want to hear what they really think about a subject---at least as much as I can get them to say. To this end I never try to "cross exam" anyone. When I start an "on the record" interview I tell the people I won't try to play "gotcha" and make a fuss about an honest slip-up in regard to some basic fact or twist in language. I also tell people that if they say something by mistake that they don't want recorded to just say so and I'll make sure it doesn't end up in the blog.

I do this because I want to put the person I'm interviewing at ease and to really get close to what they really think---as opposed to just hearing what they think that I want to hear. This is a big problem with politicians who I feel sometimes have lost the ability to actually say what they believe because they spend so much time trying to package their "message" and avoid a "gotcha" quote.

The price that these people have to pay, however, is that when the final blog comes out I try to check their statements against the public record. That's why I put so much research into checking out the statements of interviewees, why my blog posts are so long, and, why I write so many long interjections into the conversation. Just because an important person says something it becomes newsworthy---but that doesn't make it factually true. It's an unfortunate problem that most journalists have lost track of this distinction between being "newsworthy" and "factually true". I'm trying to "push back" against that idea with this blog and I make no apologies for that.

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Hulet: Just because you are an American who has moved here, I'm interested in hearing what differences you've noticed between Canada and the US. In particular, what do you think we could learn from the Americans?

Schreiner: I'll answer as someone who came here, fell in love with Ontario, became a Canadian citizen, and, has no desire to ever leave---. 

If there's something we could learn from the US example it's related to why I chose the Green Party and became a green entrepreneur. I think I was inclined to do so because the US political culture and government often does such a horrible job of solving social problems that people are forced to figure out ways to do things on their own. So when it comes to activism and social change, there's a more entrepreneurial spirit of social change in the USA. 

In the 1960s in addition to the civil rights and anti-war movements there were groups of people addressing things like poverty, housing affordability, neighbourhood revitalization, etc. This kind of entrepreneurial, social activist tradition doesn't exist as much in Canada and that's probably one of the reasons I gravitated to the Green Party. I see the GPO as being an "entrepreneurial endeavour" for social change. 

Hulet: Sort of like Saul Alinsky's ideas about community organizing---.

Schreiner:  [He gets animated.]

Saul Alinsky, by Pierre869856,
c/o the Wiki Commons.

Alinsky is a great example.

Bye-the-way, a lot of people may not know this but Barak Obama comes out of the Saul Alinsky movement. He was an Alinsky-inspired organizer in Chicago. I have both Rules for Radicals and Reveille for Radicals on my bookshelf. And they have tattered pages from being well-read.

We don't have as much of that community organizing effort in Canada. You were involved with that sort of organizing when you did your local currency project in Guelph.

Hulet: Quite a few things, actually.  

Schreiner: Walmart, OPIRG---you've been doing a ton of that work in Guelph. I would say that Guelph has more a culture that is supportive of that than any other place in Ontario. There're a lot of communities in Ontario that don't have the same sort of community organizing---I call it the "social entrepreneurial" approach. I am starting to see more of that here but we still don't have near the same degree of that type of activism happening here as in the 'States.

Hulet: Guelph is the exception that proves the rule because a lot of that activism came out of the Ontario Public Interest Research Group (OPIRG) at the U. of Guelph.

Schreiner: Absolutely, yeah.

Hulet: Created in the USA by Ralph Nader. 

Schreiner: So much of the great stuff that's happened in Guelph came out of OPIRG. That includes things like co-op housing, the campus Co-Op, some of the solar, green energy stuff. 

Hulet: The wet-dry.

Schreiner: Yeah, tons of stuff.

I would say Guelph's OPIRG chapter is one of the most vigorous and vibrant PIRGs in Ontario. Historically. Of course, over its history it has ebbed and flowed.

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Because Schreiner comes from out-of-town, I think he's mixed-up work that the Campus Co-Op and a couple other groups have done with OPIRG's legacy. That's perfectly understandable. But just to set the record straight the big "legacy items" from it are probably the Speed River Project and the Wet/Dry facility. The former project naturalized the parks on the sides of the Speed and Eramosa rivers, plus did some remediation work on the small creeks feeding into both. In the latter case, OPIRG basically sold the Wet/Dry to the city and convinced it to take that leap instead of buying either a solid waste incinerator or just opening another landfill.  Other projects included things like organizing an anti-Apartheid campaign and administering the first government program to retrofit homes for energy efficiency---but those tended to be issues with a more national or international focus.

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Hulet: I have noticed that a lot of people look at activism and say that it's not a good thing. I am kinda surprised by that. I had always seen the people leading these movements as being heroes---like Saul Alinsky.

Schreiner: [He laughs.]

It's much more accepted in the United States. It's something of a two-edged sword. I would rather have a caring enough government that provides healthcare for people and provides housing and more public goods and services than one which doesn't. But in the absence of one that does, there is a more fertile ground for activism.

Hulet: We got single-payer healthcare because of people like Tommy Douglas going around little villages and small towns giving talks in classrooms and church basements.

That history gets lost. Instead we get what I call "the small-'l' liberal fallacy": that the solution to every problem is education. That suggests that no one actually has to do anything that involves much effort or confrontation because future generations will know better than we do and all improvements will come naturally---like ripe fruit falling off a tree.

It would be helpful if there was some appreciation that politics doesn't begin and end with voting, or even buying a membership in a political party.

Schreiner: Oh yeah! I would say that my philosophy of politics is that voting is just one little act in a whole realm of political actions one can do. One of the things that used to drive me crazy was how dismissive some journalists were about me prior to being elected because "Oh! You don't even have a seat in the legislature. How can you make a difference?"

I'd rattle off issues and they'd respond "How does anyone even know?" and I'd say "It's a lot of hard on-the-ground organizing work inspiring people and putting on pressure". And the Liberals, Conservatives, or, NDP, or some other party that has more power eventually takes it up and it becomes law or a new policy, or a new line item in the budget---they may get the credit for it. But there were a whole host of political acts that had to take place before that ever happened. I think that that's not appreciated enough in our political culture.

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Hulet: As a business man and a politician, what do you think about the fiduciary obligation of a business? And the limited liability laws?

Schreiner: If I had my way we would rewrite corporate law in Canada and "B" corporations would be the norm, not the exception. 

Hulet: Could explain what a "B" corporation is?

Schreiner: The "B" stands for "benefit". We have more in Guelph per capita than any other community in Canada---that's another wonderful thing about this city.

So "B" corporations basically look at social, environmental, and, financial sustainability and integrate all of them into the decisions they make.

Hulet: The triple bottom line?

Schreiner: The triple bottom line.

Under Canadian corporation law you have to maximize shareholder value so everything is based on the fiduciary responsibility of management to shareholders.

The challenge of not having something like a responsibility to the community and the environment in official corporate law is that you have to find another way to work them into the business. And the "work around" we do now is to create a third-party certification system. This can cause problems, however, because individual shareholders and potential investors may find that they either are not interested in following a triple bottom line. 

To cite one local example, the Woolwich Arms is registered as a "B" corporation. (It's not just the one pub---the entire "Neighbourhood Group" of restaurants and pubs.) 

Hulet: Oh, so it's a corporation. I thought it was just a single owner or partnership.

Schreiner: No, it's owned by shareholders. 

Bob Desautels at the bar in the Woolwich Arms.
Image from the University of Guelph website.
Used under the "Fair Use" copyright provision.

So Bob Desautels [founder of the Neighbourhood Group] had to buy out a couple shareholders before the business could resister as a "B" corporation. I think he said that publicly---.

Hulet: [I checked with Desautels on my own to make sure he was happy with this part of the interview.]

Schreiner: Perhaps this will become a private member's bill for me. One of the things the Green Party of B.C. is pushing now is to change corporate law to be able to publicly incorporate as a "B" corporation. A number of American states have already passed laws that allow business to do that.

What's nice about that is if you incorporate from day one as a "B" corp according to the official law of the state, then as an investor or share-holder, you are required to to follow the triple bottom line approach and cannot simply change your mind at a later date---like you can when you just decide to register with a non-governmental third party, like the Woolie has. I would love to see "B" corps become the basic type of corporation in Ontario. But for now, making it even an option that has stronger legal standing would be nice.

[Schreiner laughs.] 

It would be BETTER if it was mandated that you HAVE to do it that way! But we are a long ways from that. I do think that at least having "B" law on the books here would at least allow the Woolie, Grosche, Lucky Iron Fish, and other "B" corps in Guelph to incorporate as "B" corps instead of just doing the "work around" of registering with a third party.

This would prevent potential share-holder disputes and help bring in additional investors because it can be hard to attract capital investment and if they do---because they are now only registering as a "B" corps. That means that at some future point investors can demand that they cancel their "B" corp registration and just focus on maximizing shareholder value. This means that on one hand some investors may put money in under false pretenses and intend to eventually get rid of the "B" Corp registration, or, someone could invest in good faith believing that they are buying into a "B" Corp, but then find out it changes to a normal corporation afterwards. If a company could incorporate as a "B" Corp from square one, all this ambiguity would be removed.

For these reasons alone most "B" corps are sole proprietorship or maybe two-person partnerships---not multiple investors, which limits the growth of these types of businesses. 

Hulet: I suppose it would be easier to find investors if they had standing under the corporate legal system.

Schreiner: Absolutely! The other challenge once you've found investors is the point where 51% of the shares decide that they want to maximize profit instead of thinking about social and environmental issues. 

Hulet: Are corporate charters a federal or provincial responsibility?

Schreiner: It can be both. You can incorporate by either the federal or provincial regulations.

Hulet: So presumably this is something you could write up into a private member's bill.

Schreiner: Oh yeah. I've already sketched-out what the bill would look like. I just chose to protect Guelph's water as my first priority. 

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I found a website called "B Corp Net" that goes into great detail about the whole "B" Corp movement. It has a directory that allows you to sort out registered businesses according to country and city. Looking at it, I could see that there are 260 "B" corps in Canada, and 10 in Guelph. Going through the entire list for the country the majority of the companies seemed to consist of things like consultants, natural foods distributors, credit unions, craft breweries, and, tech companies. Some of the ones that I use are the Neighbourhood Group (I have been known to have a pint at the Woolwich Arms), Beau's Brewery (I like their Lug Tread ale), the National Observer, and, Bullfrog Power.

I do have some concerns, though. It appears that Danone and Flow Water Inc are also listed as "B" corps. Most people have heard about Danone yogurt, but did you know that the company also owns the following bottled water companies?

• Mizone (China)
• Volvic (France)
• Aqua (Indonesia)
• Bonafont (Mexico)
• Font Vella (Spain) 
• Zywiec zdroj (Poland)
• Villacencio (Argentina)
• Villa del Sur (Argentina)
• Salus (Uruguay)
• Hayat (Turkey)
• Evian (all over the damn place)

Flow Water Inc just seems like one of the "little guys" in contrast to the Danone behemoth, but they have their own little charm. Here's what they say about themselves on their website. 

No more plastic water bottles. Our package is mostly made of sustainably sourced fibers with a plant-based cap. Flow packs are made from 100% recyclable and +68% renewable materials. We're also B-Corp certified and pretty awesome all around.

Personally, I find it extremely hard to call any company selling bottled water "environmentally friendly"---let alone "pretty awesome all around".

But having said that, I am of the opinion that most progressive policy comes about the way someone eats a salami---one slice at a time. The slices that Flow Water Inc are eating right now are the fact that they have to supply social and environmental accounting statements and then accept a "B" corp impact score.

A screenshot of the Impact score of Flow Water Inc from the "B" corp registry.

Each of the Area Scores also breaks down into different categories, for example here's Flow Water Inc's Environmental score break down:

Another screenshot from the Flow Water Inc site.

As in any sort of regulatory system, it's efficacy all comes down to the standards it chooses to enforce, and, the rigor with which it does that enforcement.

Again, I think that any system that allows for the existence of bottled water companies sets its standards far too low. As for the rigor with which the rules get enforced, I'd suggest that they don't really mean much as long as registered "B" corps can pull out whenever they want.

But when I consider what I've heard from the vast majority of small business people (and the folks who work for them), this "B" corp thing is pretty ambitious. People don't like being "marked". And even existing accounting regulations seem beyond a lot of small businesses---which regularly get into trouble because they find themselves incapable of setting aside enough money to pay their taxes. Any sort of accounting for the community and the environment is going to take a lot of getting used to---no matter how essential it is to the well-being of society.

So while I'd like to see more being done, it might be that the size of salami slice that the "B" corps are forcing their registered businesses to eat is all they can handle right now without choking. But that is the sort of discussion that we hire politicians to work through. All I can do is report it.

Andrew Weaver, leader of the Green Party of BC.
Original image from BC Greens Media Kit,
cropped by Bill Hulet

In May 16th of 2019 a bill titled "Business Corporations Amendment Act (No. 2), 2019" received Royal Assent and became part of the laws of British Columbia. It was sponsored as a private member's bill by Andrew Weaver, leader of the Green Party of British Columbia.

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I was at an event a couple nights ago where a bunch of "communication experts" were talking about how to talk more effectively to people about the climate emergency. Frankly, I was tremendously underwhelmed. The message I got was that it's necessary to pander like crazy to people and not piss them off by telling them something that they don't want to hear. When I commented that we need to build indie media in order to fill the gap left by the collapse of newspapers, one bright bean opined that nostalgia for journalism is misplaced. He saw the future of news as being in Instagram. When I asked him how you could possibly do any proper news stores on a site devoted to pictures, he asked me where I'd got this (obviously to him) bizarre fixation on hard news.

Well, that's one end of the continuum. (The end that gets the grants and advertising dollars---it seems, though.) If you disagree, why not subscribe to the Back-Grounder? (Thanks Al for being so awesome!) It doesn't require big bucks, and it's easy to do through Patreon or PayPal. In exchange, I promise never to "dumb down" what I write.   

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Hulet: It's always a question of allocating time---.

Schreiner: Yeah, yeah. And how the legislature works is I can introduce as many private member's bills as I want but I can only put one on the order table. Private member's bills are debated every Thursday---there're three every Thursday---and they are chosen by lottery. Everyone who's not a cabinet minister gets to present their private member's bill. So on average you get to bring forth one a year. 

Hulet: Presumably you'd want to lobby the other parties to increase the chances.

Schreiner: Yes. You want to bring forward something you think the other parties will support.

There're two different approaches to private member's bills. First you want to make a political statement and you don't care if you get support from other parties. The other approach is that you want to get the thing passed even though less than 5% ever pass. So you write on what you think will get all party support. 

So my first one is one that trying to do both---and I may fail at both. 

[Schreiner laughs.]

But you never know. So because I know water is such an important issue in Guelph, I'm trying to extend the same protections that currently apply to the Oak Ridges moraine to the Paris Galt moraine.

And because a previous Conservative government brought that legislation in, I'm making the case that I'm just trying to take good Conservative legislation and let it protect the Paris Galt moraine too. 

That got us off on a tangent---. 

Hulet: Yes. but it was a good tangent.

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As a matter of fact, Schreiner was successful in getting the Paris Galt moraine protected under the same legislation that protects the Oak Ridges one. His private member's bill passed and is now law of the land:  Bill 71, Paris Galt Moraine Conservation Act, 2019.

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Hulet: What got me started on the Guelph-Back-Grounder was a bit of disappointment about the general knowledge of people about things. One of the worst examples I can think of right now occurred years ago when Stephen Harper was elected with a plurality of the seats and there was talk of the other parties forming a coalition government. It seemed to me that he was consciously trying to confuse voters into thinking we have a presidential system. He was saying "voters voted for me, therefore this idea that the other parties could form a coalition and run the government---that's just lunacy, it would be a coup d'etat!" And a lot of people just bought it because they didn't know how a parliamentary system is supposed to work.

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[The actual words that I could find Harper saying---as cited in a Globe and Mail article---were "“Stéphane Dion does not have the right to take power without an election”. I did find a quote from Harper's Revenue Minister, Jean-Pierre Blackburn---in Canada.com---who used the phrase:

"We're realizing that no matter what we had come out with in the economic statement, their game plan was set. It's a kind of coup d'etat," Blackburn said."]

&&&&

What do you think about the general knowledge of voters? I understand that you aren't going to say that they're a bunch of ignoramuses, obviously.

[Schreiner chuckles]

But do you think we could do a better job of teaching civics? At public schools, for example.

Schreiner: I'm going to take advantage of this opportunity to put something out on the record. I received 10,000 more votes than Doug Ford did. So for everyone who said that they voted for Doug Ford---technically, technically---I received 10,000 more votes than he did. 

Hulet: There was a significant vote split in his riding?

Schreiner: There was, there was. 

He won by a lower percentage than I did---it was a much tighter race. I'll just put that out there.

&&&&

I'm afraid that Mike got his percentages wrong here. I did some quick research on line and it turns out that Doug Ford got 52% of the popular vote with 19,000 votes in Etobicoke North, whereas Mike Schreiner got 45% of the vote with 29,000 votes in Guelph.  This paradoxical-looking vote didn't come about because of the relative populations of the ridings: 111,000 in Etobicoke North versus 115,000 in Guelph. It was instead because of the relative size of the electorate: 62,000 in Ford's riding versus 86,000 in Schreiner's.

For those of you who don't know, the "electorate" are the people in a community who are allowed to vote. The only explanation for the 24,000 person disparity between Guelph and Etobicoke North that comes to mind is the fact that landed immigrants cannot vote in provincial elections. I looked at the statistics Canada census profile for Etobicoke-North and the latest numbers show that 58,000 people who live there call a non-First Nation, non-official, language their "mother tongue"---which presumably would mean that they are immigrants. So I think a fair extrapolation is that compared to Guelph a much large percentage of the population of Doug Ford's riding are immigrants who have not yet received Canadian citizenship, and that's why Schreiner got a lot more votes, yet received a smaller percentage than Ford.

I consider this an understandable mistake---no harm, no foul.

&&&&

Want to advertise a business or event? The Back-Grounder
has reasonable rates. Email thecloudwalkingowl@gmail.com for info.

&&&&

I think people are bombarded with so much info and so many things going on in their lives that they are incredibly informed but not everyone is going to be incredibly informed about everything all the time.

I don't know how to perform surgery but I know how our electoral system works. Actually there are a lot of doctors who can perform surgery but don't know how our electoral system works. It's a sign of the complexity of the society we live in. 

That being said, I do think we could do a much better job of teaching civics in schools---especially so of the basic mechanics of how government works. It makes you realize how much of our knowledge is driven by access to media because most people think our political system in Canada works much more like the US system than it does. 

A lot of people have a much better understanding of how a presidential system with three clearly and obviously different branches of government operates and they don't realize how a Parliamentary system works, or, that we really do have three separate branches of government in a Parliamentary system. 

Technically, cabinet is the executive branch of the government. So if right now you're a Conservative member of the legislature, and you're not a member of cabinet, you're part of the legislative branch that is there to hold the executive branch accountable. But unfortunately in our system---especially in Canada---there's so much party discipline that there's no accountability from back-bench MPs or MPPs for the governing party.

That's why during Question Period questions are allocated based on a roster of MPPs who are not in cabinet so that's why the Conservative party gets to ask themselves questions. That's because theoretically those back-bench MPPs---even if they are members of the ruling party---are not part of the government. They are part of the legislative branch that is supposed to hold the government accountable. 

People don't realize that because they see U.S. television where they see Congress, the House, the Courts. In other Parliamentarian systems---the United Kingdom in particular---you see a lot more back bench MPs asking "their own government" tough questions and/or voting against government policy. Much more than in Canada which has a much higher level of party discipline. 

Even basic mechanics like that people don't understand. And because of that lack of understanding they've forgotten that the Premier and Prime Minister hold that position based on the confidence of the legislature. So if that person has the confidence of the majority of members in that Parliament, it doesn't matter whether your party has a plurality or even a majority of seats or not. 

People don't realize that and in practice it's not how it works anymore. I think the country would benefit if it had more minority governments. Coalition governments have passed what I think are some of the best pieces of legislation in Canadian history: healthcare being one of them, the flag being another, social security, some of the better labour laws. But for some reason in Canadian political culture---it's not like this in Europe---people have an aversion to coalition government. 

Hulet: Well, traditionally we had one party that would never form a government  if there wasn't vote splitting.

Schreiner: Yes, that is true.

Hulet: If you want to get out into "the ozone layer" there are lots of different ways to reign in party discipline. I believe in Israel, for example, the Parliament has secret balloting.

Schreiner: Wow. That would really change things. 

I think that there are some easier things we could do. One would be to not require party leaders to sign off on nomination papers. It used to be that the riding association would make that decision. 

Hulet: That certainly would be an issue in Guelph's last provincial election.

Schreiner: Yeah! That's true.

[Schreiner laughs]

So that's created a lot of party discipline. 

Things like committee chair appointments. In the legislature if committee chairs were appointed by secret ballot instead of now where the house leader---as ordered by the premier's office---does it. It's all centralized. 

Standing orders (the rules that govern the legislature) are done by majority party vote. If that was done by secret ballot that would help. If the allocation of questions was done by the Speaker (elected by all MPPs by secret ballot)---let's say---instead of the party leader's office, that would also help immensely. 

There's a whole host of reforms. Actually, Michael Chong has written some of the best work on those sort of reforms----obviously federally-focused, but provincially applicable. 

So there are things that could be done to weaken party discipline. I wouldn't want us to go completely to where the U.S. is---where there is no party discipline because the down side of that is that you have lobbies trying to buy off every member of the legislature. At least in our system the really strong party discipline prevents lobbies from buying up the individual MPPs. But I think if we were more like the British system it would help.

Hulet: So some of those tweaks you've mentioned would have some significant positive impact?

Schreiner: Oh, yeah. I think they would certainly reduce the power of the party Whip and the leader's office. 

One of the change to the public financing laws in Ontario that I though was significant---and I'll give Randy Hillier, a right-wing Conservative credit for suggesting this idea during my testimony at a committee hearing. As you know, prior to being elected I was engaged in pushing for public funding of political parties. When I was testifying before a committee Mr. Hillier mentioned that if all the per-vote funding went to the leader's office it would strengthen it and weaken the individual members in their Constituency Associations. 

That's why some of the money now goes to the Constituency Associations. So in addition to each party receiving funding based on the number of votes they receive, each riding association does as well. So there's a certain amount allocated to each riding. Then that is divided up based on the percentage of vote the party receives in that riding---and the local riding association gets the money. 

I thought that was a brilliant little tweak that does put more power into the hands of the local constituency association. 

There are multiple little tweaks that could reduce the iron grip of party discipline. 

Hulet: That's a good example.

Did you have anything else of a "burning interest" that you want to talk about?

&&&&

Schreiner: I'm surprised you haven't asked me about climate change or the clean economy.

Hulet: Well you're in the Green Party---. I think most people know where you're coming from for that.

Schreiner: Because the Back-Grounder is a Guelph-focused publication---. One of the things I find intriguing when I travel across the province and the country, almost every journalist asks me what makes Guelph special and I've thought a lot about that. I'm glad a lot of our conversation today touched on different points of that. I think that the history, the role that OPIRG has played here, the entrepreneurial spirit of this community. the willingness to try things differently, to be a leader instead of follower, the caring and connected nature of this community. The number of artists, people who work in arts and culture. 

There's a lot of indigenous history---the meeting of the two rivers. This was the place neutral peoples would meet. 

There's a lot of elements that have made this a special place. And it was willing to take a risk and elect a Green MPP.  

There's been a lot of committed people working at community organizing over a long period of time. It's certainly not a perfect place---but it's a pretty remarkable place. 

Hulet:  Guelph's a strange town. It has a very conservative streak and a very progressive one too. 

Schreiner: Exactly. 

Hulet: I was talking to Karen Farbridge about this with regard to the community energy plan---which in Guelph is kinda aspirational. We have the district energy system that's sort of moth-balled. She was saying that it is "typical Guelph"---we're the first and it stalled. Then the rest of the country is---

Schreiner:  Passing us now! 

[Schreiner chuckles.]

Hulet: But that's another story---.

&&&&

At this point a staffer intervened and it was obviously time to end the interview.

My take-away from all five of these articles is that Mike is a person who has spent a great deal of his life thinking about and working on a wide variety of issues. Greens often get tarred with the brush of being a "right wing party" because they do tend to try to see market-based solutions to many problems. But they are also very much engaged in expanding social services and aren't obsessed with keeping taxes to the absolute minimum.

More importantly, I think the discussion of "B" corporations really does open up a debate about what exactly does it mean to be "right wing". Is a "B" corp really "capitalist" in any meaningful sense of the word? Even under the most radical forms of communism and anarchism there has still been a need to create corporations and syndicates to undertake large scale projects. And again, there has always had to be some form of currency to keep track of the allocation of scarce resources to one project as opposed to another.

Could it be that the real fundamental difference between "progressive", "reactionary", and, "radical" are the goals you choose to pursue instead of the means that you use to pursue them? Decades back the Greens in Germany adopted the slogan "Neither Left, nor Right---just out in front, leading the way!" I'd say that this pretty much sums up what I've seen of our current MPP.

&&&&

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

People in the Know: Karen Farbridge, Part One

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Karen Farbridge: Yeah. 

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

Right?

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

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

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

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

&&&&

The Saga of Eastern Power

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Digital manipulation of images by GIMP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

&&&&

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Farbridge: Yes

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Karen breaks out laughing.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

&&&&

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

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