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Obstinate Harper Fuels Pipeline Opposition

2012-02-03T00:44:48-05:00

The proposed Northern Gateway pipeline to transport oil from Alberta to a new port here on the B.C. coast is shaping up to be the political battle of the year, if not the decade. Prime Minister Stephen Harper, stung by U.S. President Barack Obama’s call to delay a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline in the face of a vocal protest movement, has already tried to blame foreign interests for opposition to the Northern Gateway pipeline. The truth is, the Harper government has only itself to blame for the breadth and depth of the opposition to new pipelines that would ferry crude from the oil sands in Alberta.

If the Harper government were not so consistently obstinate on federal climate policy, people like me (a climate scientist who has long been wary of the NIMBYism of environmental groups) might not become vociferous opponents of projects like Northern Gateway. We are forced to oppose individual carbon-intensive projects because the government refuses to listen to scientific or economic reason on climate change.

Since their days in opposition, the Harper Conservatives have failed to take real action to address greenhouse-gas emissions. They have been unwilling to negotiate with other countries, other political parties, or even the provinces, on emissions targets or carbon pricing. They have promised initiatives like a cap-and-trade system for large industrial emitters, but have never delivered. They even recently softened their own proposed emissions regulations for coal-fired power plants, which were already full of loopholes, because of lobbying by industry.

Related: Putting a Price on Carbon

It is a government’s refusal to address inequities or negotiate on issues of public concern that motivates and empowers protest movements. If the Harper government wants to quell the widespread national and international opposition to the Northern Gateway and Keystone XL pipelines, it needs to announce a comprehensive climate policy that includes a federal price on carbon.

A shift from taxing income to taxing carbon, demonized by the Conservatives during the 2008 election campaign, would be a traditionally conservative way to ensure that further development of the oil sands does not come at the expense of our other industries, our reputation, or the global climate.

A carbon-pricing system, like those of British Columbia and Australia, would not necessarily prevent pipeline construction. Rather, it could allow the market to decide whether the costs of a new pipeline outweigh the benefits, and ensure that any emissions from such new projects are more than compensated for by cuts elsewhere. This would also help Canada slowly transition towards a 21st-century economy, based on innovation and our plentiful renewable resources, without ignoring extractive industries of our past.

Related: The Height of Responsibility

Announcing a federal price on carbon might not end all opposition to Northern Gateway. A climate policy would, at minimum, provide the federal and Alberta government some room for negotiation with environmental groups. In a globalized world, opposition to local resource extraction or local resource flows without reducing overall demand for that resource can outsource environmental degradation to other countries. It is certainly easier for people to place local environmental sacrifices in a global perspective if the country is committed to addressing a global problem like climate change.

Under other circumstances, I would not oppose individual pipelines or power plants. Unfortunately, right now, opposing individual projects is the only option for controlling Canada’s carbon emissions.

Absent a federal effort to manage carbon emissions, there will be a pitched battle over every new pipeline and every new coal-burning power plant. Many of those seeming slam dunks, like Keystone XL, will clang off the rim.

We could keep fighting like this forever. Or we could work together on a federal climate policy.

Photo courtesy of Flickr.

Will Silent Films Resonate Once Again?

2012-02-02T07:58:50-05:00

On Jan. 24, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominated The Artist, a silent film, for 10 Oscars. Already a winner of multiple Golden Globes, among other awards, The Artist might just win Best Picture, too. It would be only the second silent film to do so.

A win like that would cap what has been, for silent-film fans like me, a terrific few years. The 2010 debut of the completely restored Metropolis (1927) was a theatrical event, and this year’s North American premiere of Napoléon (1927) will be, too. The availability of silent films on DVD and, increasingly, Blu-ray, has really grown – one can now build a library of hundreds of titles, many restored to pristine shape, courtesy of high-quality distributors like Flicker Alley, Kino, and Criterion. Now, Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist, a true silent film in the tradition of the old classics, has proven a critical success. And joining it in Oscar contention will be Hugo, a film not only about boys and girls and automatons, but also about Georges Méliès – the genius pioneer of silent film’s first two decades.

Related: Hugo, The Artist Lead in Oscar Nods

I’d like to think there’s a trend here, and perhaps there is one. However, anyone who believes this is the start of silent film’s return to the mainstream will likely be disappointed.

Despite near universal critical acclaim (including a 97-per-cent “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes – the highest of this year’s Best Picture nominees), The Artist hasn’t made much money. This can be blamed, for now, on a limited release prior to January 2012. But even if The Artist wins big on Feb. 26, it’ll remain a hard sell.

A mass audience is needed to make any movie a mega-hit, and, in this regard, silent films are at a disadvantage: There will always be a majority unable to imagine how a silent film could entertain them, and thus unwilling to buy tickets. The praise silent films receive is chalked up to critics liking difficult art, and thus fails to persuade them otherwise.

I can relate. The second time I saw The Artist, I took a friend with me who had never seen a silent film before. She was open-minded, and enjoyed the experience. But she also articulated concerns. Appreciating silent film, she said, required a whole different way of viewing.

“I can immerse myself in a sound film without expending much energy considering the choices that went into making it,” she explained. “It almost enables me to see the world through another person’s eyes.”

For her, watching The Artist seemed more like reading poetry. It presented common things in an uncommon way, relying on symbolism to make up for the absence of sound. This demanded more of her as an audience member, just as reading a poem demands more of us, as analytical readers, than reading prose does.

Related: Is the Whitest Oscars in 10 Years Cause for Concern?

I’d add that watching a silent film is more taxing for first-timers because it requires them to constantly reconcile the image on screen with a melody. Silent-film music does not usually simulate sound – nor is it secondary to the action, as music often is in sound films. The music doesn’t just support what we see – it evokes it. The result is a sort of dance in the viewer’s mind. This can be intensely personal, even emotionally overwhelming, and the concentration it requires is hard to maintain at first. With practice, it becomes much easier. Remember that silent films were once popular, mainstream hits like any blockbuster film today, and humans haven’t changed that much in 80 years.

In my ideal world, The Artist proves a tipping point for modern silent film – a breakthrough that, having built upon the mainstream press generated by the Metropolis restoration, and even the popular “quiet” of films like WALL-E, goes on to clean up at awards shows, attracting curious audiences and changing minds. It becomes the first of many modern silent features, helping build a small but continuing niche for silent films in 21st-century cinema. If all this comes true, so much the better for the movies.

Photo courtesy of Reuters.

How the GOP Stokes Racism

2012-02-01T00:56:38-05:00

Republican presidential contenders Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich ramped up their racially bigoted rhetoric in their primary two weeks ago to convince white Euro-Americans that if they voted for them, their interests would always trump those of other racial groups. A day before the Iowa caucuses, Santorum, while denouncing state efforts to enroll poor citizens in the Medicaid program, implied that being black is synonymous with being poor and lazy: “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.” Days later, in South Carolina, Gingrich tapped into his bigoted repertoire to proclaim U.S. President Barack Obama “the greatest food-stamp president in American history.” In addition, during the Jan. 16 South Carolina debate, Gingrich lectured a member of the audience about the amount of federal handouts blacks receive, bringing into question African-Americans’ work ethic.

Though the allegations that Gingrich and Santorum have made are easily refutable, they nevertheless have their intended effect. Gingrich and Santorum use these tactics to exploit white Euro-Americans’ racial fears and animus for their own political gain. Despite Gingrich’s claim that he merely spoke factually about the outcome of Obama’s public-assistance policy, he surely knew, through political focus-group testing, that his racially coded discourse about Obama would resonate with many white Euro-American Republicans who view African-Americans as welfare cheats. Though racial prejudice and stereotypes among white Euro-Americans are less overt than in the past, studies consistently show that many Euro-Americans' perceptions of blacks as lazy and undependable lead them to cognitively associate African-Americans with welfare. This negative association, together with stereotypes about African-American work ethics, fuels Euro-American opposition to welfare policies.

Related: Far From a Post-Racial Utopia

Understanding this dynamic, white Euro-American politicians use racist discourse to engage in conversation with the white Euro-American electorate about public-assistance policies. This discourse is characterized by negative portrayals of African Americans in conjunction with a positive representation of white Euro-Americans as the deserving beneficiaries of public assistance. The objective of the discourse is to avoid and allay positive portrayals of African-Americans and harmful representations of white Euro-Americans.

This technique uses three main strategies. The first accentuates difference between African-Americans and white Euro-Americans. The difference is usually evaluated negatively, in that African-Americans are portrayed as less smart and hardworking than white Euro-Americans. The implication of this language is that African-Americans are all the same, while white Euro-Americans are all different. The second strategy is the “us versus them” division that is used to characterize African-Americans’ work habits as deviant, hence breaking white Euro-Americans’ normative perceptions regarding work ethic. However, when African-Americans do abide by white Euro-American work-ethic norms, they are still vilified as “the other,” as Santorum and Gingrich’s comments demonstrate. Third, by disparaging African-Americans as welfare recipients, it is possible to characterize them as taking hardworking American taxpayers’ (code for white Euro-Americans) money via public-assistance programs. This is the most prominent threat because, through everyday conversations, the media, and political discourse of various kinds, white Euro-Americans invariably see African-Americans’ efforts to make the government more responsive to their needs as extortion.

Related: Talking Race in America

Contrary to popular belief, racial bigotry and discourse are the result of deeply rooted social and institutional processes referred to as systemic racism – a complex array of racially bigoted practices, ideologies, and attitudes justifying white Euro-Americans’ privilege and power. Because white Euro-Americans are so immersed in the propaganda of systemic racial conditioning, politicians like Santorum and Gingrich stir the pot of white Euro-American racial anxiety as a means to acquire their consent to terminate the nation’s social safety net in support of inhuman economic austerity policies.

Thanks to global and domestic protest movements against political machination and economic inequality, the power that racist political discourse holds over many white Euro-Americans, especially those in the middle class, is starting to wane. Despite the persistence of racism and racist discourse legitimizing doing nothing to help poor and working Americans escape their economic quagmire, many white Euro-Americans within and outside of the Republican party are starting to recognize that the politico-economic system as it is currently constituted, and not the African-American population, is the real source of their struggles.

Topp-ling the NDP's Hope for Victory

2012-01-31T11:38:53-05:00

Come on.

The NDP leadership race is really down to four front-runners at this point: Thomas Mulcair, Brian Topp, Paul Dewar, and Peggy Nash. Three of them are MPs, one (Topp) is not.

Topp attracted some initial support, most notably from former NDP leader Ed Broadbent, the powerful Steelworkers Union, and a handful of present and former NDP MPs. He’s a personable man, holds up well in debate, and has a long history with the NDP.

But it’s time to get serious.

Topp declined to present himself as a candidate in the upcoming by-election in the Toronto-Danforth riding left vacant by Jack Layton’s passing. Instead, he wants to run in Quebec after he wins the leadership.

Related: Charting a Path to Victory

There is so much wrong with this scenario that it’s difficult to list all the problems he’s creating for the party. I must declare interest as a Paul Dewar supporter, but my arguments could rightfully be made by the other front-runners and their supporters as well.

By the time the leadership convention takes place (in late March), the NDP will have been without a leader for more than half a year. Topp proposes to fight a by-election, which requires, first of all, that a Quebec MP resign in his favour.

Assuming that happens, it is up to Stephen Harper to call the date of that by-election. He has six months to do that after a seat becomes vacant, and the by-election can be scheduled any time within the next six. Even a person of a more winsome disposition than the current prime minister would see an opportunity there, and might take full advantage of it.

The leader of the Official Opposition, then, could remain outside the House of Commons until next fall – or even 2013. That’s well over a year after Layton passed away. More than a year before our leader can enter the political arena to focus and articulate the aspirations of ordinary working Canadians and their families. More than a year before he can rise in the House of Commons to take on the prime minister mano-a-mano.

We’ve already lost momentum with Jack’s untimely death. If a week is an eternity in politics, what is a year?

Topp supporters might argue that Layton himself only entered Parliament in 2004, after winning his leadership bid the year before. But there were no unknowns in that case. A federal election was looming, and Jack had stated from the outset that he would run in his home riding of Toronto-Danforth to unseat Liberal Dennis Mills. As a well-known, popular candidate with years of experience, he mounted an effective campaign, won convincingly, and held the seat thereafter.

Topp, on the other hand, doesn’t have a clue where he’s going to run, or when. The next general election is three years away, and the current prime minister is not the weak and vacillating Paul Martin: Every month, some new horror is visited upon us. The NDP needs someone to hit the ground running, and the sooner the better.

Related: What Wikipedia Can Tell us About the NDP Race

But wait – there’s more.

If Topp runs in Quebec, what if he loses?

Think that’s impossible? Think again. He’s had no direct electoral experience whatsoever. He’s been a solid backroom boy, but to be an actual candidate requires a different skill set, honed by hands-on experience that Topp has never had.

The new leader of the Bloc Québécois, Daniel Paillé, is a seasoned former MP who will almost certainly run against him. In the game of chess that is politics, why would the Conservatives run a strong candidate in that contest? Why would the Liberals?

If Topp goes down to defeat, just when does he get to play his active role as leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition? Sometime in 2013, perhaps, if a safe seat can be found for him – just a couple of years before the next federal election, halfway through Stephen Harper’s current mandate. Or would he step down, throwing the party into another leadership race?

Has no one yet grasped the seriousness of this? While commentators have talked at length about various candidates’ alleged Achilles' heels – personality quirks, fluency in French, and so on – Topp as party leader would be the Achilles' heel of the NDP itself.

As my kids would say: “Get real.” In May 2011, the NDP made a historic breakthrough, the greatest since the party was founded in 1961. We’re on a roll. This is no time to be talking of suicide.

The Dual Citizen: Loyal or Treacherous?

2012-01-31T12:17:28-05:00

Sometimes magical thinking pops up in the most unexpected places – like the recently revived complaints about dual citizenship that have arisen around the candidacy of Thomas Mulcair (a dual citizen of Canada and France) for the NDP leadership. On Mulcair’s account, he chose to acquire French citizenship by marriage in order to go through airport customs with his family more easily. Not the kind of decision you’d think would tell much about his character or suitability as a potential prime minister. But many people believe otherwise.

Last week, for instance, Post Media columnist Andrew Coyne criticized Mulcair in tones that left little room for uncertainty about a link between dual passports and perfidy. While “no one can force [Mulcair] to put Canada first,” Coyne harrumphs, Canadians have a right to expect that he should. That’s because choosing to adopt or renounce citizenship is a symbolic act demonstrating solidarity with fellow citizens in the project of building a just society together – and we cannot wholly commit to that project unless we’re prepared to jettison competing commitments. Hence Coyne is appalled at the thought of a prospective prime minister “who had the power to demand all sorts of sacrifices of his fellow citizens but who was not himself prepared to make the most elemental sacrifice in return – that he forswear all other allegiances, and cast his lot with them.”

This formulation closely echoes the traditional marriage vow to forsake all others and be faithful unto one’s spouse alone. And so it raises a question: Is citizenship renunciation an elemental enough sacrifice for a would-be prime minister? Wouldn’t forsaking spouse and family in order to cleave unto the Canadian populace alone be a more elemental, and hence more fitting, sacrifice to make? Taken to its logical conclusion, Coyne’s symbolism of sacrifice is an argument not for unitary citizenship but for priesthood. And his lofty demand that a prospective prime minister renounce other citizenships to show Canadians his undivided allegiance and solidarity is akin to my toddler’s rather more raucous demand that I show him my love by refusing to let his older brother share access to my lap at story time.

Related: Tiered Citizenship

None of this is to dispute the importance of the question Coyne poses: “What can we legitimately ask of each other in [Canada’s] name?” But the answers he arrives at show some fundamental errors of thinking inherent in a conception of citizenship that’s wrapped up with symbolic pieties about elemental sacrifices and exclusive allegiances.  To cast matters in a different light, here’s a familiar piety to consider: “By their deeds you shall know them.” That sentiment is one thing that the revised 2011 citizenship study guide, Discover Canada, gets right. It doesn’t tell new citizens to renounce their previous citizenships as a symbolic way of showing they’ve chosen Canada. Instead, it tells them to manifest the reality and meaning of this choice by contributing to Canada through political participation, employment, family rearing, and volunteering. There’s some deep political philosophizing going on in this prescription. It casts citizenship as something most fundamentally shown in one’s life actions, rather than in an inner disposition of the heart or on an official database.

What if we extended that understanding beyond the pool of new compatriots and applied it to all Canadians, including political leaders? What if we affirmed that the deepest and truest sense of Canadian citizenship lies in demonstrable service to the country, rather than a lack of formal legal ties to any other nation? Would anything be lost if we decided to presume (barring concrete reasons to think otherwise) that any credible candidate for high political office is as manifestly committed to Canada and its people as we could ask a citizen to be?

Related: Finding the Lost Canadians

Actually, something would be lost: the wishful belief that legal citizenship status enables us to divine our fellow citizens’ affections and intentions. Such magical-symbolic thinking underlies Coyne’s verdict that, “it is an odd sort of nation that would permit such an ambivalent status [as dual citizenship], not only with respect to private citizens, but in its highest public office.” It’s a lot easier to live with such ambivalence once we accept, as National Post columnist Chris Selley recently noted, that, “dual citizenship isn’t evidence of treachery any more than single citizenship is proof of loyalty.”

In reality, citizenship status isn’t proof of anything definitive beyond its legal implications. For some people, being a citizen of Canada or another country is a matter of deepest identity. For others, it’s a mere convenience or a nullity. If we want to know which the case is when it comes to our political leaders, all we can do is see how they’ve led their public lives thus far, and judge accordingly.

So perhaps Mulcair sings “La Marseillaise” in the shower each morning – but we can live with ambiguity on this score. Judging from his public actions, his affinities are solidly with Canada. Whatever the number of his passports, we can’t, and needn’t, know any more than that.

This article originally appeared atThe Centre for International Policy Studies.

A Way to Slow Climate Change?

2012-02-01T00:53:36-05:00

The Mark sat down with Drew Shindell, a NASA climate scientist and the lead researcher of a new study that proposes cuts to non-carbon emissions as the key to slowing global warming in the short term.

According to your study, we could eliminate half the climactic warming predicted to take place over the next 40 years, a stunning number. How?

To reduce the near-term warming, we would target emissions that lead to two of the most important near-term pollutants: ozone in the lower atmosphere, and black carbon, which is what most people think of as soot. While carbon dioxide lasts for decades to millennia in the atmosphere, these pollutants have lifetimes of a month or less. So if you reduce the emissions that lead to these pollutants, the effects are seen much faster.

How technologically difficult would the reduction of those two pollutants be?

The measures we look at all use proven, existing technologies that have been applied at large scale somewhere in the world already. That doesn’t mean it’s trivial – it requires some effort to actually implement them. But it doesn’t require us inventing anything new, or even learning how to apply anything at commercial scale. It’s all stuff we know how to do and have been doing – we just haven’t been doing it around the world.

Is this a shift away from current international strategy, which has been to mitigate climate change by targeting emissions of carbon dioxide?

I would not say that this should represent a shift away from that goal, but rather a second prong in our effort to limit the damage from climate change. We have a way to reduce the rate of climate change over the next several decades by targeting the fast-acting pollutants. That said, since they’re fast acting, these measures are not going to have much effect at all on climate in the longer term.

Carbon dioxide measures are the flipside of that: It takes a long time for carbon dioxide to respond, so anything we do now is unlikely to have much [immediate] impact, unless we see some wildly draconian change in carbon-dioxide emissions. Any plausible scenario for emissions reductions will really have almost no effect on climate over the next several decades. But what we do with carbon dioxide now will determine everything about what happens with climate change in the latter half of the century.

Since they act on different time scales, I think the most logical strategy is to pursue them as two largely independent parts of a more complicated way to deal with climate change: targeting both the near term and the long term.

What would the implications of targeting non-carbon emissions be for international climate policy, and for the post-Kyoto talks as they’re going on right now?

Some people worry that talking about near-term climate change could cause a distraction from dealing with long-term climate change. To me, that’s not a very realistic possibility, because it’s very clear that they are two separate issues. The current international negotiations are really trying to set up a comprehensive worldwide solution, which is very explicitly targeted at long-term climate. This strategy to deal with the near-term climate doesn’t really have a large direct bearing on what we do about long-term climate, since they’re about different activities leading to different emissions.

What it does have the potential to do, in my opinion, is influence how the negotiations might proceed. We’ve had decades of scientific studies documenting the need to reduce CO2, and politicians and countries around the world are committed to that already, at least in name. Yet, we keep setting CO2 emissions records every year. So we’re really not doing very well. If countries work together on some of these near-term climate measures, maybe there will be some confidence building and bridging of gaps between developed and developing nations, giving us some success to build on. It could be a way to encourage the development of successful methods to deal with long-term climate change.

Do we need a co-ordinated international effort for these measures your study targets, or are these things that countries or other sub-international actors could start doing immediately?

I think there’s a mixture of both. There are plenty of things that can be done at national, state, or local levels. Indeed, that’s why we have data on what measures there are, how well they work, and how they can be implemented – because they have already been done on smaller scales. For example, many of the measures to control soot emissions have already been taken in Europe and the United States, and they have certainly been taken with an eye towards improving public health. There’s no need for a global treaty to deal with these kinds of things.

But the fact is, these measures have not been put in place everywhere. In many of the developing nations where these emissions emerge, there are plenty of pressing needs. So while there is clearly recognition that soot is bad for peoples’ health, there hasn’t really been the recognition that it is also contributing to climate change. I hope the recognition that soot is both a public-health hazard and contributing to climate change will boost it at the national or sub-national levels.

If what the study has found is true, what are the implications for current adaptation strategies that have taken on quite a prominent role in international climate negotiations?

I think it’s very positive news as far as adaptation goes, because we can see that even with pretty aggressive measures to deal with the near term and long term, the temperature still keeps going up (not as fast, but it still keeps going up). So adaptation [to climate change] is going to have to happen. But if the next degree of warming happens within the next 40 years, it’s a lot harder to adapt to than if it happens in 90 years. By reducing that rate of change, we give a lot more time for the adaptation to take place, and for us to really learn how to adapt. The changes will develop more slowly and ecosystems will shift more slowly, and we’ll have more time to see what’s happening and realize what we have to adapt to.

Photo courtesy of Reuters.

The Pragmatic and the Desperate

2012-01-30T00:19:58-05:00

In the lead-up to the season of Republican presidential primaries, armchair and paid commentators worked hard to explain the huge fluctuations in candidates’ popularity. The standard answers look at the candidates themselves. Herman Cain’s unexpected success was undone by his personal life. Rick Perry looked like a sure front-runner until he was exposed by compellingly substandard debate performances. Michele Bachmann’s victory in the Iowa straw poll turned out to be her one high point. And so on. What get left out are the all-important hopes and psychologies of Republican primary voters. These factors provide three missing explanations about the rise and fall of so many candidates.

The Test Drive explanation is the most generous account of Republican voters. Faced with a large group of candidates, voters act rationally and pragmatically: They shift their support to different candidates in order to shine a brighter light on the personality and policies of each one. The failures of Cain and Perry, along with the low-ceiling support nationally that knocked out John Huntsman and will forever limit Ron Paul and Rick Santorum, are best established during primary season before taking on an incumbent Democratic president. All along, many have thought that Mitt Romney is probably the best candidate, but the Test Drive approach makes him work for his support, which he failed to secure in South Carolina in the face of a belligerent Newt Gingrich. Whatever the final outcome, voters undertake their due diligence and can be confident in their final choice. This is hardly new. It happened when John McCain beat out Romney and Mike Huckabee in 2008, when Bob Dole defeated Pat Buchanan in 1996, and when George H. W. Bush topped Dole in 1988.

If you’re more skeptical about the primary and caucus voters, you might favour the Disappointed Suitor explanation. On this account, supporters change their preferences because they find themselves repeatedly disappointed by each new object of their affection. Instead of pragmatically assessing all candidates, hopeful voters want nothing more than someone they can park themselves with so they can stop driving around the lot. But often the fit isn’t right. Voters turned from Gingrich to Bachmann to Perry to Cain to Santorum, and now back again to Gingrich, with Romney serving as the one consistent but underwhelming presence. There is still a good chance he will become the party’s nominee, but it will happen with a whimper rather than a bang.

Related: Herman Cain and Talking Race in America

Finally, there is the Desperate Search explanation. More and more, Republicans want to find a transcendent candidate who embodies all of the ideal characteristics of the American right: family values, faith, individual freedom, law and order, a strong military, low taxes, and sensible economic management. This search is motivated by popular narratives about how Washington is broken and the country isn’t living up to its billing as the world’s only superpower. To prove that the right person is out there involves elevating at least one figure from the past to God-like status. In this case, his name is Ronald Reagan. But even Reagan suffered through deeply unpopular periods and broke sacred Republican values by raising taxes. So, faced with the immediate need to turn their country around, voters fling their support in all directions without ever realizing that their pursuit of perfection is bound to fail. Like with Reagan, the Desperate Searchers only get their perfect candidate after he has left office.

The interesting thing about these explanations is that, over time, all three can come into play. Republicans will use the Test Drive theory to support their nominee, but that will stop if he loses the election to President Obama. Then the Disappointed Suitors will enter the room to make sense of the election failure. The story will be different if the Republicans win. In that case, the Test Drivers will be triumphant. And down the road, after the new Republican president has left office, the Desperate Searchers will begin their work to elevate that person alongside Reagan as an example of what the country lacks – even though such perfection is never around when it’s needed most.

Photo courtesy of Reuters.

Barack Obamic Part IV

2012-01-29T11:36:07-05:00

The Mark presents a selection of comics from Barack Obamic – the unofficial one-panel comic strip of U.S. President Barack Obama.

Photos courtesy of The White House Photostream on Flickr.

Je Speak Inuktitut

2012-01-28T09:38:30-05:00

While the United States and the social democracies of Europe tend to simplify matters by encouraging assimilation of new immigrants, Canada likes to complicate things. We offer plurality and multiculturalism – or, perhaps more accurately, interculturalism. Like an ever-expanding circle, we accommodate, incorporate, and amalgamate other cultures. But what we are less good at is accommodating – and, indeed, understanding – the foundational diversity that makes us unique.

Former prime minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau understood that French and English were more than just two languages spoken in a country – that they were two fundamental elements of a nation. His government’s Official Languages Act of 1969 – which officially made Canada a bilingual country – cemented a cultural reality that had been there all along.

In Ontario, we attempt to honour this reality by mandating French as a Second Language (FSL) in public education (until Grade 9) and offering French Immersion (FI) programs of varying intensity. Language, more than anything, provides access to, and appreciation for, a culture. For Canadians, learning French reinforces a sense that the French culture is part of who we are. It is thus sad when, as a country, Canada downplays the importance of the other non-Anglo foundation of our prosperous nation – Aboriginal Peoples and their cultures.

Related: A Healthy Distrust at First Nations-Crown Summit

In his 2008 book A Fair Country, John Ralston Saul wrote: “If we misrepresent what we are, we cannot think about ourselves in a useful way.” Saul was attempting to convince his fellow Canucks that our current idea of ourselves – which, in his mind, approximates a warped, post-Enlightenment, “northern” version of the U.S. – obfuscates our true Métis origins and renders us incapable of understanding ourselves and realizing our potential as an example for the world. Saul contends that, in addition to the English and the French, the array of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit that make up the Aboriginal Peoples of Canada are the third, and perhaps most important, foundational “pillar” of our country.

In terms of language, aboriginal tongues are an endangered species. The impact of the residential school system, forced assimilation, and hundreds of years of stigmatization have pushed even the most dominant aboriginal languages to the margins: Less than 100,000 people now claim to speak Cree, less than 40,000 claim to speak Ojibwe, and only six per cent of off-reserve First Nations youth (aged 14 and under) speak any aboriginal language. And while there has been a concerted effort to reinvigorate some of those languages (consider, for instance, the Official Languages Act that makes Nunavut a trilingual territory), aboriginal languages remain on the fringes of public education, and thus society.

Related: Is Nunavut Really a Failing State?

Cree educator Dr. Emily Faries writes:

A limited and misguided understanding of First Nations issues has prevented the achievement of reconciliation and a renewed relationship between non-Native and First Nations peoples in Canada. It has been expressed in government and First Nations reports that schools have a vital role in making monumental changes in these relationships. Through schools, society can become better informed about the richness and diversity of First Nations peoples. It is through school systems that the relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal societies can be fostered.

Provincial curricula typically opt for a safe, de-colonial approach to aboriginal languages. The Ontario Ministry of Education, for instance, holds that “the ultimate goal of [its] Native language program is to inspire Native students with pride in their ancestral language and to motivate them to use it to communicate in their daily lives – to use it, in other words, as a living language that is part of a living culture.”

Promoting aboriginal languages among aboriginal youth is extremely important, but in addressing just one side of the aboriginal/non-aboriginal equation, it will inevitably fall short of the kind of reconciliation that Dr. Faries calls for. A resurgence of aboriginal languages should certainly begin with Aboriginal Peoples and aboriginal communities, but if instruction is only available in certain communities, or is promoted exclusively for aboriginal students, then we will continue to obscure what those languages mean for Canada as a whole.

Related: Setting National Goals for First Nations

Aboriginal languages should be integrated into all public-school curricula so they are made available to all young Canadians, regardless of background. This may sound naïve (some may even think it misguided), but the groundwork is already being laid. Nunavut has created a bilingual education system – English and Inuktitut – and many communities have fully developed aboriginal-language curricula (although predominately on-reserve) and recruited teachers and support staff to implement them.

Given the variety of languages and regional dialects spoken by Aboriginal Peoples, the question will inevitably arise as to which one, or ones, deserve to be promoted. It is a fair question. But if the goal is to foster an understanding of the sociocultural foundations of our country and help Canadian children understand who they are and what is unique about this country, then the larger argument is that they ought to be exposed to an aboriginal language – the particular language of instruction matters less.

The purpose of teaching French in Canada has never been the same as the purpose of teaching Spanish in schools in the United States. We do not promote the French language to make a minority group feel more at home, or to woo the “Quebecois vote.” We teach French because it is an inexorable (and indispensable) part of being Canadian. Aboriginal languages are an equally important part of who we are, and, as such, deserve the same regard.

Photo courtesy of Reuters.

Why Conservatives Don't Do Foreign Policy

2012-01-27T07:22:45-05:00

News reports note that the Canadian government’s new foreign-policy memo to cabinet is awfully “slim.” This is not comforting, but neither is it surprising, since the government and conservative movement in Canada from which it arises have a track record for undervaluing, and hence underperforming in, the broader foreign-affairs arena. Conservatives of course challenge the notion that they lack foreign-policy expertise. But when asked to name a prominent Canadian academic, think tank, or former senior official who identifies as conservative and is expert in a foreign-policy area – other than relations with the U.S. and Israel, economics, or defence – they have trouble.

Conservatives do understand that foreign policy is important. The problem is more structural: Without conservatives speaking to, and educating, other conservatives on foreign policy, the subject has become marginalized within their circles. This is especially true in the rise of the Reform/Alliance side of the conservative movement. The absence of conservative conversations on foreign policy has led to a negative feedback loop where party leadership views foreign policy as unimportant and is then reinforced in this belief by the conservative base. The fact that most foreign-policy discussions in Canada are thus (by default) conducted by groups seen as “left of centre” only reinforces this distance. And, to be fair, sitting in on a discussion of foreign policy on any Canadian university campus makes this point for conservatives.

Related: Canadian Public Diplomacy, Then and Now

The marginalization of foreign policy extends to the bureaucrats at the foreign ministry. The Conservatives arrived in power holding Ottawa bureaucrats, in general, in deep distrust, but reserved the lowest rung of Hades for the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT), as evidenced by the history of budget cuts, public comments about the department, and attacks on Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin. Without a source of foreign-policy guidance within the Conservative ranks or academia, and without trust in the experts at DFAIT, the incoming Conservative government was at a serious disadvantage. And this has continued, as it has not built up a staff with foreign-policy expertise. In fact, it has done the opposite: Early on, the leadership lost the few political staffers who had any serious foreign-policy experience, and it has since alienated the few key conservative luminaries with such expertise, such as former prime minister Joe Clark. The current staffers are learning on the job, which bodes well for the party in the future but leaves the present in question.

A review of the major parties’ platforms over the past few elections proves the point: In the 2011 election, the Liberal and New Democratic platforms each featured a distinct section on foreign policy, while the Conservative platform did not (nor have any of the Conservative platforms from the three most recent elections). The NDP and Liberal platforms both included a clear statement placing foreign policy in their broader agendas and articulating a vision for Canada in relation to the rest of the world. The Conservative platform included no such vision. It did feature a section entitled “Here to Stand on Guard for Canada,” where most of the foreign-policy issues discussed are to be found. Yet, the section is overwhelmed with purely domestic issues such as celebrating the War of 1812, creating domestic memorials, and deportations and domestic anti-terrorism legislation. One has to read through the platform to try and ferret out items related to foreign policy.

The U.S., for one, has been aware of this weakness in the Canadian government for some time, noting back in 2009 (according to WikiLeaks) that the Harper administration did not seem to have a real foreign-policy strategy, but instead appeared to be making it up as it went along.

A look at the history of the conservative movement in the U.S. proves that the Canadian Conservatives’ lack of expertise when it comes to foreign policy is a structural issue, rather than an ideological one. That is, while foreign-policy ideas are not currently a major focus for Canadian Conservatives, they have been a part of conservative frameworks in the past, and could be again. According to Lionel Trilling, until the 1950s, American conservatives did not have ideas, but rather had “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Yet, only a few decades later, under Ronald Reagan, conservatives came to dominate government and the world of ideas. How they did so is a study in positive feedback loops.

Related: Foreign Affairs Version 2.0

Conservatives rode into power on ideas originating from conservative-borne organizations, which were taken up in Washington, D.C., and, more importantly, by the conservative base. By directly disseminating their ideas to the base through conservative media and think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, conservatives speaking to conservatives were able to introduce more nuanced arguments and change the tenor, tone, and substance of the debate within the conservative movement. Rather than talking about punishing welfare cheats and food-stamp queens, the arguments turned toward the debilitating impacts of welfare dependency on marginalized populations. A positive feedback loop was created and the conversation between leadership and base became dynamic, proactive, and positive. These more polished ideas and conversations filtered into the mainstream media, where they were much better able to compete on substance.

Under Reagan, conservatives took power with ideas and initiatives that were realistic, and that were widely understood and even supported outside of conservative circles. Moreover, as they governed, the American conservatives had the organizations and people to craft new ideas and make adjustments as intellectual and policy equals, without having to rely on the professional bureaucracies. Because this structural capacity was in place, once the conservatives fell out of power, their academics, experts, and centres continued to influence the national debate, which is something left-of-centre institutions currently do in Canada.

Conservatives in Canada have not established this same structural capacity, and nowhere is it more lacking than in their approach to foreign policy. To this point, the government, and country, have gotten lucky in that they have not yet been faced with a major challenge outside of an area where the Conservatives have some expertise. But that will change. Again, it is not an ideological rejection of foreign-policy ideas that stands in the way, but rather the lack of systems and practices in place to foster such ideas. Until the government and conservative movement in Canada develop the capacity, and hopefully the expertise, to address issues of foreign policy, they, and the country as a whole, will continue to skate on thin ice abroad.

Photo courtesy of Reuters.