Urban Meltdown - The Blog

Mr Harper’s greatest fear

There’s only one thing that Stephen Harper fears and it’s not Stephane Dion, Jack Layton, Gilles Duceppe or Elizabeth May. He welcomes their opposition to ‘his’ government. The press doesn’t cause him much concern either. He’s the first federal leader in many a year who doesn’t much care about whether his name or photograph are in the press. This gives him a tremendous edge over all of his opponents and the press itself. He meets with both on his own time and his own terms. As his political opponents and the Ottawa press corps are learning, he makes the wily old MacKenzie-King (conscription if necessary but not necessarily conscription) look like a slow learner.

Mr. Harper’s greatest fear, the greatest threat to his hegemony, is electoral reform.

Otherwise Mr. Harper is close to invulnerable. The Prime Minister is invulnerable because he doesn’t need a majority of Canadian votes to rule as a majority. All he needs is 38 to 40 percent and this shouldn’t be hard to attain. Thirty-eight percent is close to the traditional, core Conservative base i.e. those folks who vote C because Dad did. The six out of ten Canadians opposing Mr. Harper are inconsequential because they are split between the other parties, so the more the merrier. Bring on the Greens, please.

A new election would offer Canadians the choice of a reconfigured but a similarly, divided minority Parliament or a slim Harper majority. The former is no more palatable to opposition leaders than the present one and the latter is infinitely less so. No surprise that another election is being quietly resisted by Messieurs Dion, Layton and Duceppe. The only exception is Elizabeth May and the Greens who have no seats in Parliament therefore nothing to lose – not that this matters to Mr. Harper either.

Electoral reform was part of the Tory platform in the last election. It was part of the Liberal and New Democrat platform. All the major parties agree Canadians should be able to elect parliaments that more fairly reflect their political preferences, yet mysteriously electoral reform as ‘an issue’ has evaporated.

But Mr. Harper has been at work. The venerable Law Reform Commission which spent two years preparing a multi-volume report on federal electoral reform and which received much favorable attention (it recommended a mixed system of proportional representation) has been disbanded by the Prime Minister. It doesn’t exist any longer. Now that’s thinking ahead of the curve. Without any federal champion, electoral reform has sunk back into the familiar bromides of reorganizing the House of Commons Committee structure (again) and the election of Senators by region (again), both of which Mr. Harper vigorously supports. Both distract from the issue and do nothing to correct the seat imbalance in the House between how people vote, and the government they get. If you’re Mr. Harper, this has to be a happy thought.

In the coming election, the opposing parties will try to expose ‘the hidden agenda’ of Mr. Harper, just as they did in the last election. This is a waste of time because Mr. Harper doesn’t have a ‘hidden agenda’. The PM is clear about what he stands for - ‘protecting’ the nation from terrorists through incarceration without public charges or trials (anyone who doesn’t is  ‘soft on terror’); tax cuts, reduced common services e.g. no national day care and a robust military. They were all in his platform and he delivered. What’s hidden?

The problem is not the transparency of the agenda. The problem is the majority of Canadians didn’t vote for it. Sixty per cent of Canadians voted for the kind of justice system that has made Canada renowned for fairness and judged to be a ‘positive’ international influence, not a negative one by our ‘tough on terror’ neighbours to the south. 

The best thing that Prime Minister Harper has done for Canadian public security hasn’t been to truck brave young men to Kaladar but to admit it was a mistake to have allowed Mr. Arar to be confined in a Syrian torture chamber, offer a public apology and confer a monetary settlement on him. This sent out a clarion call to all that Canada was a nation that was honest and unafraid to declare from the highest public podium that its police forces and government were not graced with papal infallibility; that we could make a mistake and had the courage to admit it. 

Curiously, Mr. Harper can’t see the connection between what happened to Mr Arar and his desire for ‘special laws’ to sequester possible terrorists without charge or public legal process. The one is a product of the other. Unfortunately, the disconnection isn’t restricted to the consequences of removing ancient, individual liberties that ‘special laws’ create for ‘special offenders’ create. The public-legal-political disconnect is rooted more generally and more profoundly in our present electoral system; which sustains governments that are based on who they exclude as much as who they include; and allows our judicial system to be manipulated for partisan political end.

Mr. Harper is easily the most adroit politician to grace the Canadian federal scene in a many a year, but Canada needs more than habile manipulators of ‘wedge politics’ and ‘the vote split’. We need a prime minister who is prepared to govern based on shared issues and true majorities which includes those who live in big cities, rural Canada and have green philosophies; but to do this we need an electoral system supple enough to respond to the complexities of the 21st century.

WOW! $40 bucks!

Ever since I heard the good news (federal budget surplus $13 billion – $750 million tax cut coming) I’ve been wondering what I’m going to do with my $40 federal tax rebate ($750M divided by 32M Canadians). To make it worthwhile, after all $40 will only go so far, it should be spent on something that I won’t be able to do easily in, say ten years from now.

How about parking under a city bridge with a good coffee and a little, deli lunch? Something really tasty- a slice of Roquefort, baguette, green salad, espresso. My rebate should cover this. Ottawa is a city of rivers, canals and creeks and it has a lot of bridges, more than 300. Given our current rate of repair, parking under them in 10 years is going to be a hazardous activity – so I should take advantage of it now.

I could choose the Dunbar Bridge where we have a makeshift, hip-hop park, some fabulous wall murals and an undulating, reflection of the bridge pillars on the water. Upstream there are dancing rapids and downstream royal swans sail. Then again, I could go right downtown and choose an urban ‘under the bridge’ experience where buskers and tourist boat traffic connect with the eccentric and the homeless make for interesting moments.

I know what you’re thinking - this city councillor is pathetic. There’s got to be a better way to spend my 40 dollars. But let’s face it; $40 is not going to get me a ship cruise across the Northwest Passage and why rush? The Arctic passage will be even more navigable in ten years, not less. There’s no need to check it off my ‘must do’ list today, although it sounds like polar bear sightings are going to get rarer.

Maybe I’ll buy a full colour photograph of a polar bear and have it framed for my office. Because there’s some question as to whether these old carnivores are still going to be paddling around the Arctic ten years from now. Yes, a really good, colour photograph of a polar bear sounds like a wise investment. Sadly, I discovered $40 will not buy me the photograph and the frame. Perhaps I could send the $40 back to the government to help them out with the ‘endangered species’ program that they recently cut, but it won’t go far there either. Protecting endangered species costs way more. Scratch that off my list.

Sending it back to the government is contrary to the spirit of the rebate. It’s about me; the government is returning the money for me to use, not save endangered species.  Nonetheless there’s nothing wrong with noble impulses if not for bears then for people. My daughter and son-in-law are spending thousands for child care, I’ll pass along my $40 to them. Forty dollars should almost cover one day for ‘le petit Felix’ who is the apple of my eye. Yes, that sounds like an excellent idea.   Although, it does make you wonder, the $40 the government is so generously re-distributing across Canada adds up to a cool $725 million or thereabouts. Surely that would have gone a long way to pay for a national day care program?

No, my daughter would recognize my $40 for what it is - another covert political statement from her father. No, I’ll have to think of something else. Felix’s second birthday is coming up. They want one of those push trikes, the ones with stick at the back that you can push along so the child feels he’s really pedaling but actually Mum or Dad is briskly doing the work from behind. Yes, that will do the trick. I went down to my local toy store to prospect for the purchase and found a brightly, coloured, very handsome trike, with a sticker price $145. Yupe, $145. Scratch the trike.

Books would be good. For $40, I could get Felix some books, but then again, he will be reading by himself in ten years and the idea behind my $40 purchase was to spend it on something that I or he won’t be able to do in ten years given climate change and the general deterioration of civic infrastructure – and the planet. What about skating? Skating is becoming an indoor activity as outdoor ice disappears. Forty dollars will rent me some ice time at a city arena, if I can convince some of my friends to pony up their share of the government rebate. I call around and find I’ve got the friends and dollars required. It’s a go! 

Unfortunately, the city has no ice time available. The young woman tells me the arenas are all booked up for 2007/2008. 

I guess its back to parking under the bridge.

Books and Ideas

Books are like people in an airport. They come in all sizes, shapes and colours, arrive and depart by the thousands. Writers of books are frequently asked “now ‘which book influenced you the most?” Or “what is your favourite book?” The question is always irritating on many levels, not the least of it is the absurdity for it assumes it is possible to reduce the thousands of books that have traveled with you to one or two ‘essentials’ and that somehow the rest don’t quite count. Just as an airport would be an empty building without passengers, it is the same way with literature and books. Books, the whole raucous, pushing, howling, ugly, beautiful, whining, sniveling, laughing, smiling, romantic, historical, terrible astonishing pile of them are needed to give meaning to a reading life.

Each one has its own important, irreplaceable place and together form the library of life. I look down the bookcases of memory and remember the adventure of my childhood. They are adventure books about children being brave and resourceful without an adult in sight. Some of them even have the word ‘adventure’ in the title. Enid Blyton wrote a whole series with the word ‘adventure’ smack in the middle of the title, The Castle of Adventure, The Mountain of Adventure and so on. I loved them all and read them until my eyes grew sore and my body stiff from stillness.

Down another bookcase, there are the first books where I discovered Acadie. La Sagouine, (the Washerwoman) by Antonine Maillet, Mourrir a Scoudouc (Death at Scoudouc) by Hermeningilde Chiasson made me reflect on and understand the experiences and feelings of my grandfather and grandmother were not isolated but belonged to the history of a people. But these are only small corners of my airport of books.

Two of the books which preoccupy me right now are as different again as Enid Blyton is from Antonine Maillet. Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas and The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Both authors are gone. Lewis Thomas in 1993 and Jane Jacobs recently. Lives of a Cell was first published as a series of essays in the New England Journal of Medicine between 1971 and 1973; The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961.

I’ve been wondering why these two books have suddenly jumped out of the passing crowd to remind me that they exist. There’s always a reason. Reading doesn’t happen by accident and usually has as much to do with what’s happening in the world as what’s happening between the pages.

Lewis Thomas begins his book with this small, elegant statement about man’s exalted place in the natural world. “…it is an illusion to think there is anything fragile about the life of the earth, surely this is the toughest membrane imaginable in the universe, opaque to probability, impermeable to death. We are the delicate part, transient and vulnerable as cilia.”

The planetary paradigm shift which confronts us at the beginning of the 21st century is summed up in those few words. The great empires of human civilization, from Aztec to Soviet to American, have always behaved as if the natural world existed in one immutable place and the human existed in another. This has been the dominant view since someone penned the Genesis section of the Bible and remains so today in the halls of both the White House and the House of Commons.

Lewis Thomas, in the space of 148 pages, demolishes the idea without every exhibiting anything more violent than the Christian virtues of gentleness, tolerance and love. Jane Jacobs holds the same opinion on the intimate and irrevocable connections of the natural world to the human. Her perspective, however, is not from the mitochondria but from a much more familiar one, the lives of people and their greatest habitations, cities. Her thesis expressed in Death and Life... is the same as that of Thomas at the cellular level. Human beings, if they wish to continue, need to rethink how they live.

Unlike Thomas who died before the extent and power of the climate crisis presently upon us had been revealed. Jacobs died in full and complete awareness as her last book Dark Age Ahead makes clear. But what makes Lives of a Cell and Death and Life... so attractive is that they are not glum. They vibrate with confidence. Both are written with the calm and clear assurance of writers at the height of their physical and intellectual powers. Jacobs has a more pedestrian style and writes from a social science perspective rather than a physical but each constructs and deconstructs the world around them with the aplomb of a Charles Dickens taking dictation from God. 

It is this vast confidence that draws me to the books. So often today, books dealing with the biological and social consequences of humanity’s ‘me first’ approach to dealing with all other living species reek with the wail of Cassandra.  These books are graced with such intelligence, yet unflinching confrontation of reality that it is impossible not to feel, as Thomas and Jacobs must have when they first wrote them, that humans can overcome anything. They just need to think a little.

This is a good thing to feel at a time when great empires are fracturing and climate change headlines bark from the front pages of our newspapers.