The Point

Thursday, November 30, 2006

Muddy waters

I considered wading into the trenches of the almost-heated debate over Québecois being granted nation status by the government, which seems like pure populism to me, but Colby Cosh did it much more coherently much faster.

I say almost-heated because the consciousness of this debate here in Alberta seems to be about near that of... Acadian nationalism? It's hard to find a parallel that makes sense. If I had to summarise the mood in Edmonton today, it would be 'How in the hell did it get this cold this quickly?' I think by last Christmas it was still so warm we were pretty sure climate change had the whole winter thing licked and everybody is having to go try to find their remote car starters again, which nobody is happy about.

Well, almost nobody. I always think of brown slush when I picture Edmonton in winter, but these days it's white white white. I'm going to try to crack open some Hafez and feel the universe the way I did when going to the John Janzen Nature Centre to see the bees was pretty much the coolest thing ever.
posted by Christopher at 12:35 a.m. | link | 0 comments

Sunday, November 26, 2006

Mailbag

OUT OF THE HUNDREDS OF COMMENTS AND EMAILS WE'VE BEEN RECEIVING every day here at The Point, I have decided to select a special few to answer here. It's the first in our 'Mailbag' series, so keep those letters coming in to .

Janet Gallant from Sherwood Park, Alberta writes
Hey Chris,
What the hell does queremos paz mean anyway?
Love your show, and bring back Alice Sebold! The Lovely Bones was the best book ever.
Hi Janet,
I think you must have been confusing reading this blog and watching Oprah. The Lovely Bones is, in fact, the worst book ever. Thanks for sharing!
Queremos Paz means 'we want peace' in Spanish. I titled this entry after the song of the same name by Gotan Project from their album La Revancha del Tango. My friend Jon introduced me to it because he thought I would like how weird it was that the vocals overtop of the crazy Buenos Aires beats were, in fact, a recording of Che Guevara delivering an address to the United Nations General Assembly in 1964. He was correct.


Pascal from Pickering, Ontario writes
how do you spell amir in farsi writing?
Hi Pascal,
It looks like it's spelt أمير in Arabic, so I think it's the same in Persian (aka Farsi), but they're both pretty crazy languages. What's up with that anyway?
I guess you were probably asking because you read The Kite Runner. Farsi and Dari--the language a lot of Afghanis speak in the book--are really closely related, but unless you're sneezing or asking me the time, we probably won't be able to have a very in-depth conversation yet. I feel like I sort of cheated when I talked about The Kite Runner because I only read most of these books a week or two before I write about them, but we actually did that one with my book club last year. I reread the whole thing beforehand though (a good idea, since I would have been totally lost otherwise) and now my old friend Bill Howe is telling me he thinks it might be an allegory for Sunni and Shia relationships.
Aiya. The closest I've gotten to Afghanistan is eating pomegranates in Alberta.


centavo from Córdoba, Argentina writes
I was reading your blog yesterday and I thought I would let you know about this website, which Audrey saw a show about on PBS: www.kiva.org. I haven't read all about it yet, but it seems like a cool idea. If you already know about this, sorry for being presumptuous.
Hi centavo!
No, I hadn't heard about kiva.org. Thanks for sharing, and now that you mention it, maybe I'll write an article about them (yes, my lazy dreams of becoming a freelance journalist might be becoming slightly less lazy).

That's all the time we have for today. Keep writing, friends! Stay warm.

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posted by Christopher at 10:40 a.m. | link | 0 comments

Saturday, November 25, 2006

Our proud generation

I hesitate to use today's book to make a point, given my newness to the man it is centred on and my feeling that I can't use it to talk about everything I want to say, but it is a good starting point for a hard discussion I think we should have. Chester Brown's Louis Riel, a loose biography told in comic strips, should certainly spark a few levels of debate. At the moment, I am experiencing several circles of shame, frustration, and still optimism about where I am from. Maybe you've heard of one of the reasons.

Rona Ambrose should be an embarassment to the Edmonton-Spruce Grove riding she represents for the federal Conservative Party, and yet she sums up nicely the attitude of... of deferred--or complete lack of--responsibility our whole province seems to be under the spell of. Her complete unwillingness to take responsibility as bloody Environment Minister for Canada's continuing failure to take any tangible action on our contributions to rapid anthopogenic climate change is... well, typical.

Brown's Riel is more novel than biography, a method that allows him to draw something mysterious that speaks to us out of the Métis leader's life. His Riel is rational, devoted, and fiercely passionate about leading his people to stand up for themselves. Brown intentionally portrays figures like John A MacDonald and Gabriel Dumont with cartoonish zeal (Dumont reminds me a little of a surlier Captain Haddock) to clip out, enlarge, and sometimes sketch in aspects of Riel's life he wants to use to paint a portrait from a distance of a man who believed he was destined to lead God's new chosen people to their freedom.

What strikes me about this book is that when the Métis in the Red River settlement, and later in Saskatchewan, ask for Riel's help, the impetus for change, the sense of injustice, comes from the people themselves, not from Riel.

Last weekend I met a charming and slightly morose economist from the provincial government. We were at the Parkland Institute conference on energy and democracy in Alberta, so we were picking apart some of what John Ralston Saul had said at the keynote speech. Saul had tried to make the point that when economies became too based on being 'hewers of wood and drawers of water,' real, engaged debate among citizens suffers. He said simple economies based on one type of industry lead to simple governmental administration and consequently, oversimplification of issues. Explain, you say.

Here's a clip from an interview he did with a reporter from Gauntlet News when he spoke at the University of Calgary earlier this year:
G: With apathy becoming more prevalent in society, do you think it’s challenging for young people today to engage themselves in democracy?

JRS: Well I guess that Calgary’s the richest city in the country and the money’s really come out of the commodities. There’s a long tradition of places where commodities bring wealth and they also tend to bring a certain amount of apathy, partly because the engagement in the creation of the wealth is a lot less. Basically it’s there and it comes out of the ground, so obviously there’s some work to be done, but it’s not the same thing as manufacturing or service, or agriculture for that matter. There’s a risk, but it’s not that sort of one by one work. One always has to look when you’re in a commodities rich situation at what can happen. Argentina, in the 1920s and 1930s had a higher per capita income than Canada and as you know it’s been incredibly troubled for the last 30 years. But most of the explanations that have been written about this and a lot of it came from the sense of what’s ours is ours and a sort of sense of comfort that came from the fact that this money just kept appearing through the commodities. Out of that came a growing division between the rich and the poor and a growing sense of entitlement that those who could afford to should have better.
That sense of entitlement is palpable in Edmonton these days. So much money seems to be flowing around (for some, and I am one of the some) that our giddiness seems to be distracting us from planning beyond the next quarterly report. I'm talking mainly, I suppose, about the tar sands in our province. It's a dirty, expensive fuel to extract, but also one with a huge profit margin and a usefulness in our society that can't be ignored (although it is).

Money is flowing in from new construction projects. Every once in a while, we get $400 checks to convince us that our government is investing in our future. The international airports in Edmonton and Calgary are both seeing more demand and now you can fly direct from here to London again. But there's as little connection here between that economic wealth and where it comes from as there is between buying a banana here at IGA and the worker who picked it.

I listened (at this conference) to an elder named Harriet Janvier from a First Nation near Fort McMurray tell me her people were actually seeing more harm than good come from the Suncor and Syncrude projects near their reserve. The wealth supposedly flowing so freely around Fort Mac (and there's a lot of it) 'hasn't trickled down,' she said, and what's worse, those young people who manage to get jobs with the oil companies are expected to 'only stay for the first paycheck.' She said she believes the pollution from the oil sands developments is contributing to health problems like cancer and diabetes in her community (and she's not alone), and the water level in the Athabasca River, which they depend on, has gone sharply down in the past two decades.

Oil companies have been quick to jump on that last point, arguing that they're not a 'large user' of water in the province. But when elders are pointing out measurable declines in water levels caused by an industry that's using twice as much water as the city of Calgary at the moment, you have to wonder why there's been such a humiliating lack of planning on their part. You've heard of tailing ponds, right? Oil sands developments are not only in a practical way large consumers of water, they don't know what to do with the contaminated water after the extraction process use, so they're leaving it out in open (hopefully 'sealed') pits all over the northern half of the province. It's a good thing we don't have silly things like, oh, I don't know, geological instability anymore, and that all water systems have suddenly become separate and discrete, or else one could see that becoming a fairly large problem.

The reigning attitude here is that it doesn't matter, it'll be solved later, technologies will eventually emerge to tackle these problems, that we're entitled to our massive consumption of resources (and more pointedly, massive waste of them too). And the same holds true for the attitude of 'it doesn't matter who's in office' about the political process here. What's happened to our province?

Every once in a while I hear hopeful NDP supporters talking about the seismic shifts in political allegiance that Alberta has gone through over the past 100 years with a glint of optimism in their eyes. True enough, the Social Credit party had huge support before being trounced by the Progressive Conservatives (PCs), and the United Farmers had similar majorities for over a decade before them. But we are so politically disengaged that I find it hard to believe any political party in office is going to responsibly represent the long-term interests of people in the province at the moment.

PC members voted today to replace Ralph Klein as party leader and, consequently, premier. It was a long, slow wave goodbye for a man who by his own admission had no plan to cope with the province's economic boom (which is not to say any of his possible successors do either). Either tonight or in a run-off next Saturday one of the eight candidates is going to be declared our next premier, and I've heard a lot of talk about the federal Liberals finally abandoning the absurd delegate system of leadership elections in favour of a direct vote for each member along the model of the Alberta PCs. What seems to be missing here is a recognition that today, less than 200 000 people are going to be very directly choosing the political leader of over 3 million Albertans. And I don't mean until the next election, since Kevin Taft has no chance of taking the Alberta Liberals to a win over the PCs and Preston Manning doesn't look like he's going to come flying out of the wings to start a new party for the forseeable future. I mean, on a practical level, whoever wins this vote is likely to win yet another majority for the PCs out of sheer electoral apathy.

There's simply no connection in our collective consciousness between the governing of this province and the people who live in it. Politicians and everyday citizens alike seem to be under the idea that those who sit in Legislature are the only people who have any say in the direction a society takes, and that we are all somehow helpless victims of history, with no power to make decisions or take responsibility for our actions and their implications. I must, of course, put myself among them. Bob Dylan said, 'People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent.'

Democracy isn't about getting along. It's about disagreement, discussion, arguments... a healthy society, with accountable representatives, doesn't admit it has no plan to handle the social, environmental, and economic impacts of this development. If it does, it gets resoundingly beaten out of office and representatives who do have a plan get voted in. And the citizens of said democracy don't stand by between elections and watch poverty and homelessness reach beyond the much reviled 'drunks and bums' into people they are forced to acknowledge because, well, they are a lot of them and hey, they're working too. Welcome to the way half of the world lives, my friends.

This all ties back to Louis Riel, it really does. You see, I was thinking of all this as I read Chester Brown's Métis react to the Canadian government swindling them out of the promises it had made in the Manitoba Act. When the Conservatives tried to appoint an anglophone, Protestant Lieutenant-Governor to represent all of the Red River parishes and all the good land in the south of the province started going to white settlers from Ontario, they didn't sit back and say 'Ah, somebody else is going to deal with it.' They organised a rebellion and demanded their rights. We are becoming a greater contributor to climate change with every new truck going up north and we're not recognising that wealth is more than a lot of cash for twenty years for those who can snatch some of it up. There is wealth in investing in children, in investing in infrastructure, in building sustainable societies our planet can support. They're not gods. They're our representatives.

South African politician Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert, delivering a lecture on the health of South Africa's democracy, praised his fellow citizens' engagement in civil society, and their ability to stand up and disagree, as an absolute necessity for true democracy. 'When the minister says "trust me on Selebi",' he said, 'we should ask why? Why should I trust you, what do you know that I don’t know?

'Why should we reduce ourselves to silent idiots?'

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posted by Christopher at 12:28 a.m. | link | 0 comments

Monday, November 13, 2006

Credit where credit is due


The face of microcredit today, quite rightly, seems to be Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and a man who certainly puts his money where his mouth is. It's pretty incredible that microcredit is getting attention in the mainstream media at all these days, and I think that is a testament to the strength of this idea and its ability to empower people living in poverty. The concept rests on giving small loans to the poorest of the poor by using community as collateral, and Yunus and the Grameen Bank won the Nobel Peace Prize this year in recognition of their work to empower millions.

Action, of course, brings us further than words, and in the 1970s Yunus, an economics professor at University of Chittagong, realised the credit and finance policies he was talking about in class had a direct impact on the people on the other side of that classroom door. He believed that inability to obtain credit and loans from major lending institutions was a major obstacle to people being able to raise themselves out of poverty - an 'unfreedom,' as Amartya Sen would say.

The way to overcome this, he believed, was to turn the traditional lending relationship on its head. Women were being regularly turned down for loans by big banks for lack of physical or monetary collateral. The only other option was to borrow from exploitative loan sharks, who often charged enormous interest rates that women were unable to pay back. The alternative, he suggested, was to see community support as a form of collateral in itself. How this plays out is that one can borrow a relatively small loan (an average of $75 US) on the condition that a group of about 4 other people in the community agree to pay it back if one is unable to or is late making payments. My good friend Wikipedia describes the advantages thusly:
Each group of five individuals are loaned money, but the whole group is denied further credit if one person defaults. This creates economic incentives for the group to act responsibly (such as other members then being able to receive additional loans), increasing Grameen's economic viability.
It keeps the borrowers accountable to the lender as well as to the community, and the relatively small amount of money available through microcredit ensures that they are manageable sums to pay back, although they may make a big difference. The Grameen Bank, or something approximating 'rurual bank' in Bangla, focusses specifically on providing loans to women at the bottom rungs of poverty; I have heard this criteria characterised as, essentially, if they have a bed to sleep on instead of a mat, or a well nearby instead of in the next village over, they're not poor enough to be eligible.

The emphasis on women is intended to be a means of empowerment in itself, and they are also considered to be more reliable borrowers than men, since their responsibilities to children are greater, making them less likely to squander the money and more likely to make higher return investments. As the Grameen Bank allows borrowers to gradually borrow more each time they repay a loan, it helps women running small businesses out of their homes expand in small, practical steps towards a future out of poverty. They also claim to have an incredible payback rate of between 97 and 100%, which is, well, unheard of in conventional lending relationships with major financial institutions. I should say, though, that this figure's reliability is often questioned.

I say all this out of what I have learned, the people I have talked to, the videos I have seen and the articles I've read. I haven't seen for myself how microfinance works on a community level, and I've heard some criticism of Yunus that although he founded the Grameen Bank 30 years ago out of that moment of connection between the classroom and the villages, Bangladesh continues to be one of the poorest countries in the world on a national level. A speaker from another microfinance organisation spoke to one of my development classes last year, and explained her organisation's methods of lending. She made it clear that they weren't a charity, and that loans were only available to women who were already running small businesses, whether this be selling eggs or ice out of a small freezer. In most of sub-Saharan Africa, she said, this was a moot point because almost every woman ran small businesses like this to make extra money for schooling, for medicine, for food.

We dug into her pretty viciously though, about why microcredit borrowers are required to pay interest at all and whether the loans worked toward goals of sustainable development on any meaningful level. Okay, that last part was mostly me, asking whether her organisation (which I won't name at the moment) was looking past simple economic sustainability to environmental considerations too - for example, looking at where the energy to power that freezer came from (and I should have brought up social sustainability as well). Her answer was basically that it was that the number of borrowers was so small and their impact so minimal on the environment that no, that didn't come into play.

In terms of interest... well, all microcredit organisations, from what I gather, charge interest at differing rates (the Grameen Bank's is about 20%), but those profits go right back into funding further microcredit operations and making more credit available. They are also generally much less than those at major financial institutions or the 50% or higher demanded by loan sharks. It could be seen then, as something of the poor helping the poor. An inverse Wal-Mart, almost.

Personally, it seems that Yunus' goal of eradicating poverty through making credit universally available is unattainable. The mechanics of our global socio-economic system rely on the poverty and exploitation of some to provide the wealth and luxury others, including myself, have come to see themselves as their entitlements. As well, the Grameen Bank has been criticised for not being truly economically sustainable, since it relies on subsidies and grants to make up a significant amount of its finances. Perhaps I'm being too cynical. As I say, I have no direct experience with women who have benefitted from access to microcredit, so who am I to criticise?

And now this week, Canada's Foreign Minister, Peter MacKay, announced that Ottawa is committing $40 million to to microcredit operations in other countries. On the one hand, the Third World is right here in Canada too, and Ottawa should have allocated money for microfinance here at home as well. On the other hand, you have to give them credit for having the guts to support a concept as seemingly radical as this. Peter MacKay seems like an alright Foreign Minister to me, purported dog comments aside, and I really think the Conservatives ought to be commended on this occasion for supporting intitiatives that genuinely benefit those living in poverty beyond our borders. It's not a lot, but it's a step, and I think that's the idea.

One thing I am very interested in is the Chinese government's interest in allowing microcredit lenders to set up shop in their country. Apparently they've asked the Grameen Bank for help setting this up. Somewhat hilariously, I've read the that Grameen Bank specifically recommends that governments stay the hell out of the business of microlending and leave it to smaller institutions. Now, in case you hadn't heard, I'm headed to Chengdu in the spring. Does anybody happen to know someone I could um... hook up with while I'm there or even, I don't know, Muhammad Yunus?

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posted by Christopher at 1:05 a.m. | link | 0 comments

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Some bright ideas

I wonder where I'm going to end up in the next ten years. I made a list the other night of all of the half-way things I've been or aspired to be in the past year or so. They have included: a poll clerk, a tutor, a youth educator actor sort of person, an amateur journo, a poet, a support worker, a dreamer of places and ideas, and a recluse. Among other things.

One thing I have dreamed deeply about is my city. Being away from it for a while gave me some fresh perspective when I came back this year, and I have learned to love the place I'm from in all its slushy white and brown glory. I know cities are much maligned these days as alienating places, sometimes dangerous, sometimes incubators of poverty, sometimes cruel. These things are true. But there are also strange accidental beauties to this small place that I am from, and reading a bit of Jane Jacobs this fall has given me some hope.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities was published in 1961, while Jacobs was living and learning New York (and much before she became a Torontonian of the best kind in my favourite 416 neighbourhood, the Annex). Many of the ideas in the book seemed at once new and obvious to me, as if these were things I should have intuitively known about how big North American cities work if only I'd been more observant. And yes, while it is about American cities, every one of these ideas resonates with me here in Edmonton, land of the Mill Woods sprawl.

She talks about the conditions that create diversity, which she considers the great bringer of life and health to communities. Jacobs was a great admirer of spontaneity, of the casual meetings of neighbours and strangers on sidewalks and in cafes that lend great cities their ability to be hosts and midwives to the birth and growth of new ideas and fresh perspectives. For her, these things couldn't be planned, only allowed room to grow and to change and to fold over and into one another. I am learning, I guess, that the strength of a community cannot be legislated, although it can be legislated out of existence.

Walking through my now chilly south side neighbourhood, I walk past tall apartment towers mingled with low-rise condos and old, inviting homes with what my friends Norm and Joanne have called 'public rooms,' those kind of porches you can sit and have coffee on and say hello to your neighbours from, watch your kids play from, participate in the life of a street from, and I wonder how she could have known so much about what makes my neighbourhood great 45 years before this moment. She had great admiration for the role of streets in cultivating relationships, in allowing new and creative uses and experiences to emerge. I would truly have liked to have taken her around Strathcona and shown her our cafes, our restaurants, our sidewalks (and lack thereof, in places). What would she have said?

I guess it's immaterial. What makes this city great is not just the river valley, or the bridges, or the Listen birds, or the pyramids being put up and torn down. It is the people. And the people here are a strange wondrous bunch.

I'm going to get to know them better, friends.

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posted by Christopher at 1:28 a.m. | link | 0 comments

Chop the aids quick quick

Now this is how you get people to use condoms. Cheers to Pronto, a brilliant new South African brand.

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posted by Christopher at 1:03 a.m. | link | 0 comments
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