The Point

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Why should the Greens be kept out?

What a strange thing to be envious of Americans for the drama and excitement of the presidential race down there this fall. Whether people will be voting on the basis of ideas, aspirations and values or just on pure personality politics is up for debate, but at least there's something feisty going on in the US. Up here there's such a dearth of inspiring, visionary candidates for the election on October 14th that it's easy to forget there's an election going on at all (is four days in too soon to say that?).

And when did former PM Joe Clark become so interesting? He's had more than a few very thoughtful, incisive things to say in the past little while, not least this current piece he's written about the old boys' club of the Bloc, the NDP, and the Conservatives blocking Elizabeth May from the televised leaders' debates on October 1st and 2nd. He astutely points out in an editorial this week:
Jason MacDonald, a spokesman for the network consortium [that hosts the debates], is quoted as saying that three parties - those led by Stephen Harper, Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe - all opposed the participation of Ms. May in the so-called leaders debate, "and it became clear that if the Green Party were included, there would be no leaders debates."

That's blackmail. If these three men want to boycott a genuine debate, let them have the courage to do so openly. Let them also explain why, in a year when U.S. party establishments could not shut out an Obama or a McCain, it is appropriate for the Canadian party establishments to muzzle a significant voice for change.
and more to the point, on the implications of this disservice to us as an electorate in making informed decisions about our federal government:
The tone of federal politics today is the worst I can remember in my 50 years in public life. Of course, there were angry partisan differences before, but they were tumultuous exceptions to a general rule of common public purpose, even civility. By contrast, the standard today has become consistently bitter and negative - personal invective routinely displaces any serious discussion of issues or differences.

This low standard helps corrode respect for the democratic institutions in which this mean drama plays out. It comes at a bad time, because there has been a general decline in the reputation of politicians, parties, legislatures and other institutions. Cynicism grows. Candidates are hard to attract. Citizens turn away from politics - especially young people, who see nothing to attract or inspire them. That constitutes a long-term threat to the authority of the pan-Canadian political institutions that have always been essential for citizens of this diverse democracy to act positively together.
I should mention that although I don't support any of the political parties in Canada, nor do I intend to ever be a member of one of them, I do endorse a lot of the ideas the Green Party has presented in their platform - a shift in overall tax collection to enforce a tax on carbon emissions (I'm willing to debate the desirability of this on a national level), emphasising preventing illness through what they call health promotion, protecting victims of discrimination on the basis of gender identity or expression. A lot of this sounds great to me, other things in their platform less so. 

But this is totally beside the point. We deserve to hear Elizabeth May debate the other federal leaders - and be rightly scrutinised in the same light as them. As has been pointed out many times in the past, the Bloc Québecois were allowed to debate in 1993 without a single MP, as was the Reform Party with only a single Member of Parliament, as the Greens have now. We are all owed the opportunity to make an informed decision based on articulation of all of these leaders' ideas, and on critical, incisive probing of them. TV, our great cultural junk food, is one of the most important venues for us to do this. Allow me to tuck this into the bullshit files.

Hat tip to daveberta on the Joe Clark piece. If you're not already, you should be reading Dave Cournoyer's blog for coverage of this election. Lord knows he'll update more in a day than I will this month.

Labels: , ,

posted by Christopher at 2:57 p.m. | link | 1 comments

Friday, December 21, 2007

B.S.F, Edition #1







Groooooss. Algae picture courtesy of the Lake Doctors Inc, apparently.

It seems like an appropriate moment to bring you the first edition of the B.S. Files on this blog. As an Albertan who was reluctantly-so for many years and has lived in a few different parts of our home on Native land (did I say that?), I try to have a generous heart when thinking about the things my fellow Canadians say and do. Sure, people from Toronto often seem incredulous to hear Edmonton's got a hip hop scene (or black people), but then again, we Edmontonians have a dim sense in general about things like, well, like the fact that in Toronto or Montreal, multiculturalism doesn't just mean having a black kid at the back of the class.

There must be something strange going on in Ontario since I've been away, though. A toxic bloom of algae on Lake Superior that went unnoticed for months, until it'd made some brains over there sufficiently addled to chuck reason or common sense completely off their mental bookshelves. How else to explain Harper's gushing, smirking, self-satisfied explanation in slow and small words to Peter Mansbridge last night that Canadians were going to be really, really upset when they started seeing that it was going to cost money in the short term to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions? Was it just my imagination, or did Nicholas Stern really publish a report last year that outlined very clearly and specifically the billions of dollars more in costs we would incur in the decades to come if we chose not to act on climate change immediately? I was under the impression that this was a fairly definitive statement that yes, doing things now are going to cost a lot of money, but a hell of a lot less than waiting until 2020 to achieve insultingly inambitious almost-reductions. Pretty sure that was all cleared up. Why are we still talking about this?

Also on the algae file: the Halton Catholic School Board, and their absurd decision to ban Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy from their libraries. As if it weren't humiliating enough that it took them about a decade to notice the books were on their shelves, one might imagine an organ of a body with such a long and storied history of banning and burning things like the Catholic Church might have realised by now that taking a book off your shelf won't make the ideas in it go away. The board said in its decision that the books are not in keeping with 'the Catholic values that we are trying to teach children.'

They're right, of course. Absolutely. The books quite definitively take aim against some of the most cherished and fundamental tenets of Christianity. But come on. Yes, it's an outrage that the school board has so little respect for the critical thinking skills of the kids in their schools that they seriously believe that students are a) incapable of making up their own minds about what's in the books and b) stupid enough to not realise the books exist or go find them if they're not on the shelf at school. But more outrageous is that the board is clinging to a belief that was long ago bludgeoned, bloodied, pepper-sprayed right in the eyes, and shattered into tiny pieces of intellectual shame: that hiding ideas makes them go away at all.

When really revolutionary thinkers go about challenging dangerous or deeply-held beliefs, they don't hide the old beliefs away or burn them, they come up with new and compelling ways of seeing things. To a small number of confused and terrified people's surprise, it works. Darwin didn't need to burn copies of the Torah to get people to believe our history stretches into unfathomable depths of time, times when our hairy little ancestors bore very little resemblance to Sun Yat-Sen or Shaq or Diana Ross at all. Apple didn't need to start locking up people's CD players to convince us that a pretty little mp3 player was a very, very useful thing. To really present a fierce challenge to an idea, you don't ban it. You argue about it, you refute it, you hold it up critically and show that what you're holding in the other hand is a whole lot better.

The failure to realise this is probably much better explained by Naomi Klein, of course, in The Shock Doctrine. But I haven't read enough of it to learn much more than the 8-minute Alfonso Cuaron movie they put out about it, so I'll come back another day to her thesis about modern capitalism's inability to seriously assert itself as a global ideology without banning or burning the ideas that oppose it - through state terror, international financial blackmail, you know. The usual.

Labels: , , , , ,

posted by Christopher at 4:57 a.m. | link | 0 comments
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.