I waited awhile to react to this news, as I wanted to see it from an official source before I got my hopes up, but I was thrilled to learn this morning that Dr. Henry Morgentaler will be receiving the Order of Canada. From the GG’s site:
Henry Morgentaler, C.M.Toronto, Ontario
Member of the Order of Canada
For his commitment to increased health care options for women, his determined efforts to influence Canadian public policy and his leadership in humanist and civil liberties organizations.
I’m not normally what you would call a “patriotic” person. It’s not that I’m unhappy to be in Canada by any means, but I find love of one’s country to too often range from mindless chauvinism (at best) to virulent bigotry (at worst). July 1 is for me - most times - an excuse for a holiday and an excuse to try to improve my night photography skills by taking pictures of fireworks and people watching fireworks. However, I’ll have another reason to be quietly celebrating tonight.
I’ll admit that part of the reason I like this is purely because it makes haters of women like Maurice Vellacott and Dan McTeague go absolutely nutzo. But also, I like the idea that the sort of accomplishment that merits the nation’s highest honour can include paving the way for reproductive freedom. (Something the absence of which, ten years ago, would have profoundly changed my life in a negative way.) The knowledge that our head of state will honour the fight to ensure that my bodily autonomy and agency is fully and practically equal under the law is reassuring and uplifting.
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Over at Worth the Fee to Read It is a thought-provoking post on our dwindling supply of energy. There you can read a run-down of the alternatives we’ll have to replace the dwindling supply of light, sweet crude and natural gas stocks. As an Albertan, I look at this challenge with both some measure of fear (a good portion of my extended family is employed in the oil industry) and hope (I feel an agriculturally based economy is healthier than an oil-based one).
Another couple of things I’d like to government encourage in order to prepare us for a carbon starvation diet: research into development of cold-hardy agriculture and support for local farmers. One of the consequences of peak oil is that our food will have to come from much closer sources than it has for the past 30-40 years.
The University of Saskatchewan has done some amazing work developing fruit trees that are hardy to the northern prairie - I have several of the cherry, plum and cranberry species first developed there in my front and back yards. However, this program isn’t as well funded as it should be in my opinion given the role it may fill regarding filling our nutritional needs in a society where trucking our fruit from California may not be affordable for the masses.
Similarly, the support for local, diversified farming (the type of agriculture typically carried out by small, family-based operators) is usually poorly carried-out and after the fact. Our federal agricultural institutions favour large, corporate operators with high overhead who are ill-suited to provide local communities with the variety of food products we need. The European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) typically has favoured large, monocrop producers as well, though there’s some encouraging movement towards moving the subsidization rewards away from simply mass production as at any cost.
Bruce over at Worth the Fee to Read It will likely disagree with me on the methods of “encouragement” a government should take - I, as a social democrat who aspires to the best of that ideology, will of course see a key, strategic role for the state in funding publically beneficial research directly (and generously!) and providing marketing infrastructure and services to small business*. Bruce expresses a more laissez-faire approach where the market can do this shift on its own as oil becomes more and more expensive. Where we meet (I believe) is in the idea that leaders (business and government) should be devoting considerable thought to softening what will be a hard, economic landing when the resource economy party dies off. In my view, the more tools people have to be self-sufficient, particularly in regards to provision of nutritionally dense, healthy food and other basic needs, the softer that landing will be.
This is something which is missing from the platforms of all the major federal parties, as far as I’ve seen. The NDP, my default party of choice, are concerned with consumer grief now at the gas pumps, but what of the strife working families will face when their food bills are creeping up as steadily as gas prices are now? Why is a reaction to the Liberal’s plan and not promotion of the NDP plan for a green economy the focus of recent mailings and press releases? The Liberal and Green plans, with their promises of revenue neutrality, cut income taxes in such a way that, assuming they’re successful in lowering carbon output and therefore reducing total tax paid, threatens to starve government of the capacity to play an active role in directing the economy in a publically beneficial manner. The Conservatives - well, do they even have any concern or understanding of peak oil at all? I haven’t yet seen any evidence of it.
On the federal scene there is a void when it comes to adequately preparing us for a reality where oil and petroleum based products are a luxury. Bruce went over the products we use for energy, and I’m focusing on the secondary effects that could have on food security, but there’s a number of other ramifications: plastics, ancillary oil products for the home, personal care products, road maintenance, etc, etc. It’s a huge adjustment and not just for consumers - our very way of economic organization will be affected. I can visualize a prosperous Alberta (and Canada) post peak oil. I just wish our leaders were willing to visualize past the oil economy as well.
Edited to add: though I didn’t reference it directly in the post, I’d be remiss not to credit Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down for contributing to my thoughts on this topic.
* I.e. that we proudly proclaim the state as a force for good, efficient direction of the economy and then govern in a way that proves the assertion, see Social Democratic Party of Finland and the Norwegian Labour Party for examples.
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Not very many Canadians get a chance to go to Ottawa, but quite a few enjoy culture and take as many chances to appreciate it as they can. An egalitarian approach would attempt to spread those opportunities to appreciate culture as widely as possible geographically. Canada is a large country and not all Canadians can afford to travel it as extensively as they may like to. Given the ecological footprint of flying, perhaps they shouldn’t.
At the same time there’s a feeling of alienation and antipathy between several regions and the federal government, as well as between the hinterlands and “central Canada”. (Or as those of us who can read a map and note that Winnipeg is the centre of Canada call it, “out east”.) A productive approach would be to address that gap by spreading the programming and the opportunities to participate in the national culture as freely and widely as possible.
Which is why putting every federally funded cultural institution in one area - namely Ottawa - is completely antithetical to any goals of equality and national unity. I was disappointed (though entirely not surprised) when a Liberal senator proposed a law preventing the National Portrait Gallery from being anywhere but the National Capital Region. It was both disappointing and surprising to see NDP MP Paul Dewar similarly trying to unfairly advance Ottawa’s bid in the House of Commons today. Yes, I understand that Dewar has responsibilities towards his constituents in Ottawa Centre, but I also expect NDP MPs to look at the larger picture rather than dishing out provincially segregated pork like the two establishment parties. We can be locally responsbile without resorting to being myopic.
This is not a dig against Ottawa. I lived there for a year in between degrees, made good friends there and generally enjoyed myself. However, coming from the prairies, it seemed an absolute farce that there’s a federally funded agricultural museum in Ottawa, but nothing of the same scope in any of the prairie provinces, the bread basket of Canada. Yes, there’s agriculture in Ontario. However, the culture centre of Canadian agriculture is the prairies. (Manitoba has an agriculture museum, but their web-page suggests a significantly lower budget than the national one.)
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I know someone, an ultra-libertarian Conservative who is arguably Danny Williams’ biggest fan, who says he likes Barack Obama because he’s “moderate” and “not big government”.
I know someone else, a post-modern lefty type who reluctantly votes NDP, who also says she likes Barack Obama because he’s “so progressive” and “will change things radically”.
I’m not yet sure what I think about the man. To be honest, I only have two certain reactions to the US primary race so far: 1. Why can’t John Edwards still be in? and 2. Why can’t people who oppose Hillary Clinton do so without employing disgustingly sexist narratives and language?
Yet, I’m fascinated by Obama’s ability to somehow embody whatever everyone wishes, symbolically if not necessarily in reality (to be certain, at least one of the Obama supporters described above is going to be severely disappointed). It could be indicative of how political speech is no longer issues or policy (I mourn this, by the way) but has instead jumped to the level of branding: pure symbolism. I worry, however, that brands tend to promise much more than they can deliver, precisely because they promise everything and nothing all at once.
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I already planted 10 trees in my yard! Hey Renner! Our entire home is lit with fluorescents! I also take the bus or bike to work every day, use a push-reel lawn mower, save rain-water from the roof in a barrel for watering the garden and take short showers.
Do I get a hero cookie? You all seem to expect one for doing much, much less.
I’ve discussed before here why individual act is great, but far, far from sufficient. Beyond that, though, a government that substitutes propaganda for real action is fundamentally just lazy. Communications campaigns are fun and cheap, but really solving the problem is going to take action and tough choices (like limited and perhaps even halting new oilsands development until a real, viable environmental plan to mitigate the extreme destruction these operations cause). Until then, Stelmach, no pat on the head for you!
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that I am not a big fan of Iris Evans. For one thing, she’s an Alberta Tory and for another, she reportedly enforces a “touchy-feely”-faux-”I feel your pain” style to ministerial correspondence that, quite frankly, would drive me up the wall were I to receive a letter back from her.
However, I’m even less a fan of the sort of sexist drivel exhibited by so-called “progressive” bloggers who feel that a woman’s personal appearance and gender is a source of mockery. Iris, like any other politician, deserves to stand or fall on her words and her actions. Not her appearance. Not her gender.
Unfortunately, as Alberta: Get Rich or Die Trying reports, sexist language is not just something left at the margins of random bloggers, but is sufficiently pervasive that even Alberta Liberal leader Kevin Taft feels he can get away with it. As the comment section of that blog post shows, several Liberal bloggers would rather crack jokes and stick their heads in the sand that acknowledge that their leader could possibly make a mistake, even unthinkingly.
Unfortunately, it seems that the “Hillary Sexism Watch” many American bloggers are leading could easily be replicated north of the 49th parallel. It makes montages such as this one depressing, but not at all surprising.
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Being the subject of an RCMP investigation for your video imagery. Oh Ujjal, can you sound any older or less cool right now?
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The Journal put it out first.
The CBC followed up.
As I’m writing, daveberta is the only blogger I’ve noticed responded.
But apparently Greenpeace and the NDP are “in cahoots” (to borrow the phrasing of a commenter at the Edmonton Journal) to do…. er…. um…. a flash-in-the-pan action that brought more earned media to Premier Stelmach than his boring fundraiser dinner otherwise would have garnered? And this is in the Alberta NDP’s interest how again?
However, that’s not the main subject of my post. The main subject is a bit more fundamental and it stems from the assumption that, because Denise Ogonoski wears the (paid) hat of NDP staffer, part-time, that she is - 24/7 - an agent of the NDP. Her other hats (Greenpeace activist, for one) evidently cannot be considered independently of her paid work. Her entire identity, from when she opens her eyes in the morning sunlight, until she rests her head in evening, is of a worker.
As someone who is professionally non-partisan, but personally endowed with my own independent opinions (something I’ve come to expect as a basic, democratic right), I find this assumption really bothersome and unfair. The commentary in the above linked articles calls for the NDP to discipline Ogonoski for something she did on her own time as an activist. She didn’t repel down wearing an NDP T-shirt. She didn’t yell, “NDP!” She was in plain black, and carried no messages or associations other than that of Greenpeace. So my question to the media is, do we want to live in a world where no worker may associate in any meaningful way without the consent of their boss? Do we want to live in a world where everything a worker has ever said or done can be considered the position of their employer unless said employer immediately fires them?
I certainly do not.
This is world where, for example, workers could be disciplined for publishing a work of poetry. For chairing a community action group. For volunteering on a riding association. For publishing a political blog. For having a mind of their own and expressing the thoughts of that mind on their own time.
If we can be disciplined for what we do on our own time, we essentially do not have our own time.
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I’m in the centre of a jurisdiction where politics pretty much do not exist except in the most narrow, Schumpeterian sense.
At the same time, a sneaky campaign again women’s autonomy and bodily integrity is merrily marching along while the non-voting masses continue along, largely unaware.
So, what is the point of writing? What’s the point of meeting, of keeping up the fiction that our actions have meaning in a world greased by money, where even one’s one survival and health is a struggle? And where even your own champions are compromised beyond your sad expectations?
I’m not seeing it right now, to be honest.
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There are a dozen more important things I could/should be blogging about. There are drafts of posts about the planned obscenity they’re going to put on my city, about plans to revise PIPA and about the effectiveness lack there-of of whistleblower protection versus the kind of good, robust citizen action that can take place with a functioning Access to Information regime. But lately all these posts are not making it to fruition. Because there should be light and energy and new things growing, but instead there’s grey skies, and snow to shovel and cat hair to clean.
Read Dave’s links on the new arena, anyway. Or, if you want to make sure that no taxpayer money funds this nose pimple on the face of Edmonton, this Facebook group has some good plans, as well as a media archive.
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